Spring holidays 2017, part 4

Yesterday and today we continued to explore Myall Lakes National Park and its surroundings.

The village of Hawks Nest is very touristic, and so it is perhaps not a surprise that it has a spring flower walk that is recommended to tourists. And indeed there are masses of flannel flowers, but also other interesting plants.

At the other end of the National Park we today visited the lighthouse at Sugarloaf Point. Shown here is the view towards Seal Rocks, which unfortunately wrecked many ships even after the lighthouse was built, apparently due to prevailing wind conditions during one part of the year.

Botanically today's topic is climbers. Our first one is Kennedia rubicunda (Fabaceae), with surprisingly large red flowers.

I am reasonably certain that this would have to be Geitonoplesium cymosum (Smilaceae), a climbing monocot. The field guide calls it 'scrambling lily'.

Finally, the native passionflower Passiflora herbertiana (Passifloraceae) had been teasing us for a few days now, always there but never in flower. Today we finally found it in bloom, and that made my day!

Oops. Upon examination of the Flora of NSW key to Passiflora it turns out that this is introduced Passiflora subpeltata from Brazil, as it has large, leafy stipules. Also the Flora says that native P. herbertiana is red, which is really interesting because Fairley & Moore's Native Plants of the Sydney Region, which serves as my quick reference in the field during this trip, shows it as white.

Either way the one we saw is not native. Still, passionflowers are just something else, and they remind me of past field work in the Andes.

Spring holidays 2017, part 3

We spent half the day at the beach and then the rest exploring Myall Lakes National Park. We saw lots of plants, but as I haven't had the time to check many identifications I will only post two. They are nice ones though:

Actinotus helianthi (Apiaceae) is the famous flannel-flower. The petaloid bracts around the flower-heads are felt-like, thus the English name. Many people wrongly believe it to be a member of the daisy family, but it belongs to the family of parsley and fennel.

The second one makes me very happy indeed. I had heard of the flying duck orchid (Caleana major, Orchidaceae) and seen photos, but now I have seen it in the flesh, as it were. Surely one of the weirdest-looking orchids on a continent that has many weird-looking ones.

Spring holidays 2017, part 2

Well look at that, holiday parks have free Wifi now...

Today we arrived at the place where we planned to pitch our tent, Hawks Nest just at the south end of Myall Lakes National Park. On the way we spent a bit of time in Brisbane Water National Park, which of course is nowhere near Brisbane but instead just out of Sydney.

But first we had to get out of Sydney, and here it seems to me that the road engineers there might want to look into the concept of a city highway that moves travelers through the area with a minimum amount of fuss. Think a straight road with a turn-off every few kilometers instead of a winding nightmare leading right past houses and shops and interrupted by traffic lights every few meters.

Ah well, think of the flowers.

The first decent stop out of Sydney was at Moonie Moonie Creek, which I think actually deserves a promotion to "river" here.

And our last longer stop was at Girrakool, a resting area with several great walks. This photo above shows a place where one can get down to the pools and creeks, but there are also lookouts across the valley and longer loop walks.

Now for the plants. Myoporum acuminatum (Scrophulariaceae maybe? It changes), a shrub at the edge of a swamp near Moonie Moonie Creek.

There were lots of interesting plants on the shallower soils at Girrakool. Here what I take to be Kunzea capitata (Myrtaceae). It is not the plant's fault that it reminds me of Otto Kuntze, but unfortunately it does.

Right next to it we saw Grevillea speciosa (Proteaceae). There are of course lots of Proteaceae here, but there are few where I am as sure about the identification as with these characteristic leaves.

Finally, Mirbelia rubiifolia (Fabaceae), a very cute little pea-flowered legume.

Spring holidays 2017, part 1

Family camping trip over the spring school holidays! Having previously camped in what is parochially called the "South Coast" (in New South Wales Sydney is the navel of the world, so it does not matter that the coast is on the east of the landmass) and visited the New England area further north we decided to go for the area just north of Sydney this time.

Today, however, we only made it as far as the south of Sydney, taking it slow and seeing things on the way. The main attraction here is Royal National Park, which my wife had seen fifteen years ago but my daughter and I have now seen for the first time.

The above is the view from Bald Hill lookout, as we were coming into Royal National Park from the south, via Wollongong.

We also saw some tall sklerophyll forests, but like most of south-eastern Australia this area has seen too little rain this year, and much of the vegetation was too dry. The heath looked much better. This species is Isopogon anemonifolius (Proteaceae).

Another Proteaceae, we think it is probably Grevillea oleoides given its very long and slender flowers and likewise long and slender leaves.

Again we are not entirely sure, but this may be Lasiopetalum parvifolium (Sterculiaceae); the field guide is not entirely clear but it looks as if the other species of that genus that are in the area and have similar leaves may differ in having hairs also on the inside of the sepals. It is a small shrub that I photographed in a very dark spot using the tripod.

And this is where we got out of Royal National Park, Bungoona lookout at its northern end.

As we are going camping I will presumably not be able to post anything else until Friday at the earliest, but then I hope to be able to upload a bunch more plant and landscape photographs.

Three plants near Wollongong

After a work meeting in Wollongong we made a short stop on the way back, just enough time to have a look at some plants that are flowering.

Starting with the least interesting, because invasive: Ageratina adenophora (Asteraceae), an introduced weed that was doing very well indeed all along the roadsides.

According to colleagues this is Eriostemon (Philotheca?) australasius (Rutaceae). The flowers are white; books usually show them as pink, but maybe the difference has something to do with this plant growing in shade. Very pretty, at any rate.

And finally we saw this even prettier orchid. After consulting Native Plants of the Sydney Region I presume it is Thelymitra ixioides, but orchids are not really my specialty.

Some quick, handy references

I just read that an Australian Senator called Fierravanti-Wells said the following:

I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman ... coming together in one unique union. That is what it has been for every culture, in every ethnicity, in every faith in every corner of the world for thousands and thousands of years.

Suggested reading:

• Wikipedia entry on polygamy
• Wikipedia entry on polyandry
• Wikipedia entry on the history of same-sex unions

The primary literature is cited in those entries. Also:

• Skeptic's Annotated Bible entry on what the Bible says about polygamy

It would appear that the premise of this particular argument is demonstrably false. It would further appear that it is also not a logically valid argument, regardless of the truth or falseness of its premise:

• Logical Fallacies > Fallacies of Relevance > Irrelevant Appeals > Appeal to Antiquity / Tradition

Botany picture #253: Coronidium waddelliae

Coronidium waddelliae (Asteraceae), Blue Mountains, 2016. This is very pretty perennial everlasting paper daisy that likes a bit of elevation. It can, for example, also be found in the lower parts of the Australian Alps.

Although only created in 2008 as part of the dismantling of the formerly polyphyletic Helichrysum, the genus Coronidium is unfortunately polyphyletic itself; the species that can be seen in an earlier post is a representative of the group that makes it so. What is more, even if that group were kicked out, the rest (to which C. waddelliae belongs) would still be paraphyletic to the well known golden everlasting genus Xerochrysum.

We are working on it.

What exactly is new about New Atheism?

On Sunday I went back to the book fair with my family, and of course I bought another few books. One of them is a collection of essays written by Bertrand Russell. As its title is Why I am not a Christian it is unsurprising that its first chapter is his talk of the same title, which he originally gave in 1927.

Summarising in order, the talk makes the following points:

He starts by giving his definition of Christian. For Russell this requires at a minimum belief in the existence of a god, in immortality, and that Jesus Christ was "the best and wisest of men".

Next, Russell disposes of several common arguments for the existence of God, observing along the way that the most frequently used arguments have become less respectable over time. The first cause argument falls flat the moment somebody asks "who made God?", because if God is allowed not to have an explanation then one could just as well allow the universe not to have an explanation.

The natural law argument does not work because it conflates human laws, which are prescriptive and indeed have law-givers, with natural laws, which are merely descriptive, merely scientific descriptions of what happens instead of prescriptions of what should happen. As such they do not need a law-giver. Russell also points out that science has shown them to be largely "statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was." Finally he adds a Euthyphro style argument, that laws are not really laws if God just made them up, but that God is not required if they are truly laws of nature.

The argument from design was destroyed by Charles Darwin, and in that context Russell also introduces the argument from evil to show that the world does not look as if it was created by a benevolent, omnipotent being.

The moral argument is quickly disposed of by applying the Euthyphro dilemma.

Russell calls the argument for the remedying of injustice, i.e. the idea that god must exist or else there would be no ultimate justice in the world, very "curious", and I can only agree. I have only once seen it used in seriousness, and it is such blatant wishful thinking that it hardly needs refutation.

Having dealt with the existence of God, Russell transitions to the character of Christ. He calls "excellent" several of Jesus' teachings that I would consider unrealistic, for example 'turn the other cheek', but sarcastically points out that Christians do not actually follow those teachings. ("I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.")

As an aside, Russell mentions that "historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all".

More importantly, Russell says that there are "defects" in the teachings of Jesus the character of the gospels, most prominently that he mistakenly believed that the end of the world was imminent and that he believed in and took "a certain pleasure" in hell, i.e. eternal torture. The undeserved killing of a fig tree also gets a mention.

At this point Russell has explained why he is not a Christian. He now deals with the idea that even if religion is wrong it should still be promoted because it makes people behave morally by pointing out that it does the exact opposite. "You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organised Churches of the world."

The talk ends by arguing that fear of the unknown and of death is the foundation of religion, and that it is time to dispose of it and build a good world on a new foundation: "Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations."

-----

Russell was certainly an excellent writer, at least to my taste. He was concise, clear, and to the point. But really what struck me most when I read this talk / essay is that there really is no New to what has been called New Atheism these past fifteen years or so, i.e. the movement often considered personified by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.

Because what really is its claim to novelty? Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is the claim that religion is not just wrong but harmful, and that its influence should be reduced. But go back a few paragraphs and you will see that Russell said the same in 1927.

Another idea is that its novelty might be in the view that science in particular has made belief in gods untenable, a position that is often derided as 'scientism' by philosophers who believe that they have a monopoly on refuting religious beliefs. Again, nothing new: where today some New Atheist might argue from evolution, astrophysics and neuroscience, a hundred years ago an atheist like Russell argued from evolution and astrophysics. And to be honest, neuroscience has found nothing in the last thirty years that refutes the concept of an immaterial soul more thoroughly than what people could already observe in the bronze age, for example that a strike to the head or drinking alcohol confuses our thinking.

Even rather specific side-issues have remained surprisingly unchanged. Richard Carrier et al. have in recent years made a lot of waves with the argument that Jesus never existed, and would you not know it, ninety years ago Russell mentioned this idea in a tone that suggests it was fairly widely accepted among educated people.

Really I don't think that arguments for or against gods have made much progress since 1859, and if somebody wanted a short but reasonably thorough introduction to atheist thought they would even today be well served with reading Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian.

Book fair o'clock

It is the time of the Lifeline charity book fair again. Unfortunately I had to go alone today, but tomorrow we hope to get the whole family there. The loot so far:

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Fantasy alternate history, as in the Napoleonic times with magic. I have read good things about this book, so I'm happy to give it a try.

Bertrand Russell's Best, edited by Rogert Egner

Terry Jones, Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic. If I understand correctly this is a book after a computer game with which I am not familiar.

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight. First novel of the Dragonriders of Pern series. The series has lots of volumes, and I could have bought more of them, but who knows how they are?

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonquest. Second novel in that series.

Kirk Mitchell, Cry Republic. As a teenager I read the trilogy of which this is the third novel in German translation. It is an alternate history story in which the Roman Empire never collapsed and has discovered electricity, steam and flight. Just noticed that the praise blurb on the front cover quotes Anne McCaffrey.

Great Dialogues of Plato, translated by W.H.D. Rouse. Continuing my education in classics, which perhaps should have happened in late high school but didn't.

Sean Williams, The Stone Mage and the Sea. I am afraid part of the reason I bought it is that I got confused and thought the author was Tad Williams. Ah well.

And for work:

H.T. Clifford & Gwen Ludlow, Keys to the Families and Genera of Queensland Flowering Plants. From the 1970s, but will still be useful.

Nicholas Gotelli, A Primer of Ecology. Having been trained as a systematist I am hoping to get a bit more insight into ecological modeling, and it includes a chapter on island biogeography that looks promising.

Andrew Young & Geoffrey Clarke, Genetics, Demography and Viability of Fragmented Populations. Because of a project I am currently involved with.

Two observations. First, as always I come home with loads of books but could only bring myself to donating two. Some day we will have to expand our book shelves, and I have no idea where. Second, it is astonishing how there are numerous copies of some books (e.g. McCaffrey's Nerilka's Story) but none whatsoever of other, one would think, equivalent books (e.g. the third volume of the same series).

Also, are the frequent ones frequent because they were so much more popular when they were published, or because nobody wants them now? On that note, it was interesting to see that the most frequent book in the "all faiths" section was The God Delusion. It was all the rage a decade ago, and I assume now lots of people think they don't need it anymore.

Botany picture #252: Stapelia

With spring in the air we bought some plants lately, including some succulents, and that brought my mind back to some of the plants I had in Europe but gave away when moving to Australia. This is a Stapelia, presumably S. grandiflora (Apocynaceae), in the Old Botanic Garden of Göttingen, Germany, 2016. I had a plant of the same species but of course much smaller.

Unfortunately they seem to be hard to get in Australia. The closest I saw were online stores that had them in the catalogue in theory but not actually in stock.

What is so amazing about these cactus-like plants that are not cacti at all is, of course, their flower morphology, and that morphology is dictated by their pollination ecology. The flowers mimic rotting meat in colour, scent and sometimes even hairiness and are pollinated by confused carrion flies. Some people wonder why one would want to have a stinking flower, but I believe that is an indispensable part of its wonderful weirdness.

Having fun with biodiversity databases

If you have ever professionally used a biodiversity database you will soon have noticed that we still have a long way to go before they are as reliable as we would like them to be.

Today I looked into the Atlas of Living Australia records for Senecio australis (Asteraceae). Except for a rather odd specimen from South Africa the distribution records look like this:

What do we have here? First, the four Australian mainland records all appear to be misapplications of the name. The Flora of New South Wales, for example, does not even mention the species, so I think we can safely assume it does not occur in Australia at all.

Second, the record in the middle of the top of the map is right in the ocean, no matter how closely we zoom in. If we look into its details, we see that it was collected on Norfolk Island, which is the cluster of red dots to its right, so somebody must have got the coordinates rather wrong.

Third, there is a cluster around Auckland, on New Zealand's North Island. I am not sure if Norfolk Island and North Island is a plausible area of distribution for this species, but it may well be. Zooming in closer to Norfolk Island, however, ...

... it looks as if somebody had played darts after having had a few too many beers. ALA informs us dryly under the section data quality tests, "habitat incorrect for species". No kidding. Or as my wife joked, unwilling to believe that the coordinates would be so badly off for such a large percentage of the specimens, "is there a fish that is also called Senecio australis?"

These are the problems that we are dealing with, more generally.

• Whenever we do a study using data from biodiversity databases, as we increasingly do, we have to be very careful about cleaning the data. The main issues are outdated taxonomy, misidentifications, spatial data entry errors (which are particularly easy to recognise if an outlier record is exactly ten degrees away from a known occurrence), and imprecise spatial data. Just think of what it would do to species distribution modeling if we uncritically accepted all the records for Senecio australis.

• While we can identify obvious mistakes while using a database, the data are "ground-truthed" in the actual specimens in some herbarium or museum, and the policy is usually (and quite sensibly) that the database won't update until a correction is made to that specimen in its home institution and then filters through from there. But many institutions do not have the resources to update data just because somebody sent them an eMail pointing out that their specimen is misidentified or that they made a data entry error; many herbaria on the planet are so understaffed that even the word understaffed is a euphemism. What is more, even if a database allows a registered user to annotate a record with corrections, the information may not necessarily flow back to the institution holding it, depending on whether somebody thought to set up such procedures or not.

• Overall, Australia actually has excellent data quality, the Atlas of Living Australia actually allows annotations to be made, and several important Australian herbaria actually have the staffing to update their data. What I am saying is that this is as good as you can have it at the moment. It is much more difficult in many other parts of the world, and of course it would be good if we could have the same or better data quality for those areas.

Also, perhaps it is best not think too much about records that are not specimen-based but "human observations" or photos submitted by random people. There are, obviously, non-taxonomists whose knowledge of the flora is extensive, and citizen science can be awesome, but I have also seen several cases one the lines of "aaargh ... this is so misidentified it is not even the right tribe of the family, and now the database is using it as the profile picture of this nationally significant weed species!"