“Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex.”

As a way of adding my own contribution to the week of posts on “sex and marriage” over at Faith and Theology, here is a selection from a new article on bisexuality in animals:

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. . . .

Unlike most humans . . . individual animals generally cannot be classified as gay or straight: an animal that engages in a same-sex flirtation or partnership does not necessarily shun heterosexual encounters. Rather many species seem to have ingrained homosexual tendencies that are a regular part of their society. That is, there are probably no strictly gay critters, just bisexual ones. “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex,” says sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England.

Nevertheless, the study of homosexual activity in diverse species may elucidate the evolutionary origins of such behavior. Researchers are now revealing, for example, that animals may engage in same-sex couplings to diffuse social tensions, to better protect their young or to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable—or simply because it is fun. These observations suggest to some that bisexuality is a natural state among animals, perhaps Homo sapiens included, despite the sexual-orientation boundaries most people take for granted. “[In humans] the categories of gay and straight are socially constructed,” Anderson says.

What is more, homosexuality among some species, including penguins, appears to be far more common in captivity than in the wild. Captivity, scientists say, may bring out gay behaviors in part because of a scarcity of opposite-sex mates. In addition, an enclosed environment boosts an animal’s stress levels, leading to a greater urge to relieve the stress. Some of the same influences may encourage what some researchers call “situational homosexuality” in humans in same-sex settings such as prisons or sports teams.

—Emily V. Driscoll, Scientific American

English translation of “Gabriel’s Revelation” available

The good folks at the T & T Clark Blog have pointed out that Israel Knohl’s translation of “Gabriel’s Revelation”—the stone tablet text about which I wrote earlier—is now available online and as a PDF.

Music Meme

The music meme spreads. The meme is a bit different than your typical question-and-answer meme. In this meme, you pick your favorite album for every year in which you have been alive. It’s a creative idea, though terribly frustrating for those who have so many favorite albums! I was tagged by R. O. Flyer, after he was tagged by D. W. Horskoetter. (I was scandalized when Horskoetter said that the 1980s was a terrible decade. How could the decade of, inter alia, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, The Smiths, R.E.M., Paul Simon, Tom Waits, Beastie Boys, and U2 possibly be a terrible decade?!) In any case, here is my contribution. Since I’d rather avoid the trouble of trying to pick specific names of people to tag, if you are reading this and love to talk about music, consider yourself tagged.

1983: U2, War

1984: Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain

1985: Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

1986: Paul Simon, Graceland

1987: U2, The Joshua Tree

1988: N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton

1989: Pixies, Doolittle

1990: Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

1991: Nirvana, Nevermind

1992: Pavement, Slanted & Enchanted

1993: Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

1994: Weezer, Weezer

1995: Radiohead, The Bends

1996: Beck, Odelay

1997: Radiohead, OK Computer

1998: Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

1999: Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

2000: Modest Mouse, Moon and Antarctica

2001: Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun (released in Iceland in 1999, in the UK in 2000)

2002: Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2003: Sufjan Stevens, Greetings from Michigan

2004: Arcade Fire, Funeral

2005: Sufjan Stevens, Come on! Feel the Illinoise

2006: Girl Talk, Night Ripper

2007: The National, Boxer

2008 (so far): Currently a toss-up between Cut Copy (In Ghost Colours), Spiritualized (Songs in A&E), Girl Talk (Feed the Animals), and Fleet Foxes (Fleet Foxes), in that order.


There were some really close second place finishers, some of which probably deserve to be outright ties:

• R.E.M., Murmur (1983)
• Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1987)
  
• Pixies, Surfer Rosa (1988)
• Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville (1993)
  
• Magnolia: Music from the Motion Picture (1999)
• Interpol, Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)
  
• The Postal Service, Give Up (2003)
• Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans (2004)
• TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) and Love Is All, Nine Times the Same Song; these albums were #1 and #2 on my original list
  

Bonhoeffer Blog Conference: call for respondents

Halden has announced the line-up for his upcoming Bonhoeffer Blog Conference, scheduled for later this fall. Here is the tentative schedule:

• Day 1: Introduction by Halden
• Day 2: ‘Christ my Conscience’: Bonhoeffer on Identity, Moral Integrity, and Christian Community by Chris Green
• Day 3: ‘Being Made in Human Likeness’: ‘Ethics as Formation’ and Von Balthasar’s Concrete Universal by Eric Meyer
• Day 4: Salvation as Humanification: Bonhoeffer’s Ethical Soteriology by Adam McInturf
• Day 5: Bonhoeffer and Levinas (Title TBA) by Eric Roorback
• Day 6: The Ethics of Justification: Bonhoeffer and Jüngel on the Implications of the Doctrine of Justification for Christian Ethics by David W. Congdon
• Day 7: TBA

If you are interested in being an official respondent to one of these plenaries, please contact Halden. Responses need to be between 500-750 words in length. They should engage in thoughtful, critical dialogue with the plenary in question.

Materialism and free will: two views

1. From Stuart Derbyshire, in a review of Chris Frith, Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World:

At first glance, the fact that our brain filters and constrains what we can see is a challenge to the notions of reality and free will. After all, if our brain has already decided what we are going to perceive, then in what sense can we perceive the world as it truly is? And if our brain is making decisions for us, in what sense can we act on the world according to our own free will? Consequently [Chris] Frith argues that what we see is not the world as it truly is, but an illusion: ‘Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain.’

And he expresses considerable ambivalence regarding the nature of our conscious minds and the possibility of free will. ‘I am a materialist’, he writes. ‘But I admit that sometimes I sound like a dualist…. On the other hand I am firmly convinced that I am a product of my brain, as is the awareness that accompanies me.’ He also says, ‘My beliefs on free will are very ambivalent. What I do know is that I have a very strong experience of free will’.

2. From Robert Lee Hotz, in a science article published in the Wall Street Journal:

Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision—an eternity at the speed of thought.

Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.

“We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.”

Rotten Tomatoes Widget

Movies at RT

This is great, but unfortunately it’s too big for the sidebar.

Is the Ph.D. a “masochistic exercise”?

“For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.”

—Joseph Berger, New York Times