The bird-nest problem

 I can see how a gene can express itself in a physical trait. But I have trouble understanding instinct — how patterns of behavior can be transmitted genetically.

I did some reading on “fixed-action patterns.” The cloud of unknowing did not lift for me.

Identity isn’t just a matter of physical expressions of genes. The identity of being a bird involves having feathers, but it also involves building nests.

Within the identity of nest-building creatures there are architects (hummingbirds and orioles) and those that barely bother (yellow-billed cuckoos and mourning doves).

The way birds behave in building nests is consistent by species. This is not learned behavior. Birds raised in captivity by humans build nests that are true to species.

I have no problem imagining that a mad biologist with access to a gene-editing lab could change the color of an oriole’s feathers. That’s just a change in the physical expression of a gene. But I can’t imagine the mad scientist changing its nest-building behavior with some genetic editing. That seems to me to be more of a change of the bird’s history, its evolution.

It seems like a claim that we have a technology that could change the past.

A marker species

 The wheel bug is a marker species for organic gardens and farms.

Arilus cristatus is the apex predator among the insects in our garden, the lion on our little Serengeti. If you use pesticides, you kill too many insects to support a population of these predators. If you are in a garden and see wheel bugs, that’s strong evidence that you are in a place where poisons aren’t allowed.

I’m no entomologist, but the wheel bug is unmistakable. It has an appendage that looks like someone buried a toothed wheel or cog about halfway into its back.

We have enough of them to require occasional evictions from the greenhouse. I am called upon to do the evicting. The Wise Woman is the gardener, and she knows they are beneficial insects. She wants them moved, not killed.

She’s right to be cautious.

Wheel bugs don’t bite — they stab. Their proboscis is part spear, part hypodermic needle. The bug injects a toxin into its prey that dissolves animal tissue. Wheel bugs don’t attack humans, but they’ll stab you if you try to catch them. People who have been stabbed say it’s worse than getting stung by a hornet. I couldn’t say. I’ve been lucky so far.

    • Note: If you don’t know this bug, there are some photographs and a short video clip at Professor Michael J. Raupp’s blog:

https://bugoftheweek.com/blog/2025/7/2/7zjt0gwtr40ro10qo8meibvhmuhhhz

Philosophy, while reading the news

 Imagine this: You tell your wife that the important financial papers are in an envelope. She’s worried until you explain that the envelope is in the safe deposit box. If you know the usual language game that involves the word in, you know the papers are safe in the bank.

But that’s not the only way we use the word in. Imagine that you are in pain. Your wife asks where it hurts, and you explain the pain is in your foot. If you put your foot in your shoe, is the pain now in the shoe? Do we need to run the shoe to the emergency room?

That’s an old story, the kind told by ordinary language philosophers in 1950s.

I thought of it because I read yet another baffling article on this strange and wonderful thing we unfortunately call “artificial intelligence.” I would love to know exactly what this technology is and how it can and can’t be used. But I don’t think “intelligence” is going to be a useful way to talk about it.

I don’t think the intelligence is in the machine. But I don’t think the pain is in the shoe either.

Marking the day: Eric Hoffer

July 25 is marked on my calendar. Eric Hoffer claimed it was his birthday. But almost everything he said about his own life was a myth or teaching story, rather than literal truth. He said:

 

 We can remember minutely and precisely only the things which never really happened to us.  

 

Hoffer helped me understand what a life that included some thinking and writing could be. Although I know him only through his writing, he was one of my teachers.

If you’d like a sense of his voice, here’s a sample:

 

It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations — past and present — are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual’s hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia. Thus, we are up against the paradox that the individual who is more complex, unpredictable, and mysterious than any communal entity is the one nearest to our understanding; so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If in some manner the voice of the individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.

 

• Source: Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition; New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, pp. 96 and 97.

Elections in Georgia

 Georgia is a swing state. Friends keep asking about the election, and particularly about U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who faces Republican challenger Mike Collins.

Generic Democrats have an 8-point advantage, 51-43, in the latest poll, but that figure has an asterisk. Polls in Georgia tend to have a blue bias, and this one has a bias estimated at 8 points. The usual explanation is that pollsters have trouble finding people in the rural parts of the state, which are heavily Republican.

People argue Trump’s influence both ways. His approval rating is 41 percent — a figure that’s been solid for a decade. It’s solid but not a majority: 56 percent disapprove.

The Georgia economy has been hurt by the war and by tariffs. It’s part of the Make America Great America doctrine that you have to say that the economy is better under Trump. But while four in 10 Georgians support Trump, only 28 percent say that the economy is better this year.

Ossoff v. Collins is not a contest between Democratic and Republican bases. Jewish groups that traditionally supported Democrats worked hard to elect Ossoff, the first Jewish senator from Georgia. Some of the people who supported him were so hurt by his criticism of Israel that they vowed to support anyone but Ossoff. Progressive groups are so angry about Ossoff’s vote to continue support for Israel despite the genocide that they vowed to support anyone but Ossoff.

Republicans are criticizing Ossoff too. But in terms of venom, I’d place them a distant third.

Collins is not distinguishable from other Trump supporters, at least not to me. Some Democrats have criticized him for prejudice against minorities. Typically, the complaints involve social media posts. One is that he posted a photograph of a Black man on the ground at a protest being hit by a law enforcement officer armed with a Taser. Collins’s comment suggested that’s the way to handle protesters.

The greater concern is about Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who has 1.5 million followers on several platforms. His messaging is white supremacist, white nationalist and antisemitic. A recent poll asked followers why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.

News reports say Collins has “distanced himself” from his son-in-law. The Collins campaign uses the same language — “distance.”

Collins and his wife live in one house on the family property, while their daughter and son-in-law live in another house on the same property. I’m not sure that kind of distance means anything.

That kind of deity

 It was just a line in a Mexican newspaper about a festival in Oaxaca: Centéotl was not just the deity of maize but also of resistance.

It struck me as something we might need in this country.

The case of the missing caterpillars

 I hear yellow-billed cuckoos more than I see them. They like the edge of the forest — where the undergrowth is thickest. They are often hard to see in the dense brush, though their call is unmistakable and loud.

I stop working in the garden to listen to that crazy call.

It’s finally dawning on me that I haven’t seen any tent caterpillars since the cuckoos moved into the neighborhood.

The larval stages of moths in genus Malcosoma build silk tents in trees in the spring. They eat a lot of foliage, and an infested tree looks battered.

It was a mystery to me why songbirds don’t eat the caterpillars. Songbirds need protein when they are producing eggs and feeding babies. Insects are full of protein. But most birds leave tent caterpillars alone.

The problem is that tent caterpillars are hairy — and the spiky hairs interfere with a bird’s digestive system. Eating a tent caterpillar must be like eating a handful of cactus spines.

The yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, has adapted. The hairs or spikes of the caterpillar stick in the bird’s stomach lining. But the bird occasionally casts off the lining — a bit like an owl regurgitating a pellet.

The yellow-billed cuckoo can eat tent caterpillars like popcorn.

• For a recording of the yellow-billed cuckoo:
https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+billed+cuckoo+call&client=safari&hs=WIHq&sca_esv=b754fa5c8f084eb3&hl=en-us&ei=hddaasKmIsG1wN4P4-XXqAY&biw=312&bih=516&oq=yellow+billed+cuckoo%C2%A0&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIhZ5ZWxsb3cgYmlsbGVkIGN1Y2tvb8KgKgIIADIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIKEAAYgAQYQxiKBTIFEC4YgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgARI_yZQsxRYsxRwA3gBkAEAmAFeoAFeqgEBMbgBAcgBAPgBAZgCBKACb8ICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAg0QABiABBiwAxhDGIoFwgIXEC4YsAMYuAYY2AIYyAMY2gYY3AbYAQHCAhcQLhiwAxjYAhi4BhjIAxjaBhjcBtgBAZgDAIgGAZAGD7oGBAgBGBmSBwMzLjGgB4IHsgcDMC4xuAdlwgcFMC4yLjLIBw6ACAA&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:4d2d34dc,vid:UqZ43a-Wrxo,st:0