Fellow passenger
Anyone who has tried to ride on the wing of an aeroplane — & I have entirely avoided the experience — will empathize with the scrub python who attempted this feat on a flight from Cairns, Queensland, to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. An account is provided by the Sydney Morning Herald, under the inevitable headline, “Qantas python’s flying circus.”
The scrub python, or by his more elegant Latin name, Morelia amethistina, is a handsome beast, the pearly sheen of whose scales would provide a temptation to vanity in any creature. Specimens grow up to twenty feet, longer in rare cases, & they are quite svelte compared with other pythons. (People who find shed skins think many snakes must have been much bigger, for the scale folds stretch in the course of moulting, producing a turned out “sock” often doubled in length.)
These “amethyst pythons” (as I prefer to think of them) are found both sides of the Torres Strait, through eastern Indonesia, & to the outermost islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. There are no subspecies, so if gentle reader will not suspect me of Darwinism, I’ll venture they often cadge a lift. They are not venomous, constricting their prey in the python way; often dropping upon them, but sometimes just waiting quietly & invisibly by a riverbank for when dinner comes to drink. They eat rats & rodents of all sorts, & are partial to fruitbats when they can catch them, & other small animals including baby wallabies, which is probably bad for their P.R.
The one in question, whose sex was not specified, selected what seemed a plausible perch up the landing gear to the flap assembly while the plane was on the ground. But he or she was soon airborne, in a very high wind at a very low temperature against a nastily vibrating smooth metal surface. Some people, including several ladies of my acquaintance, dislike snakes generally, but as one might guess all the passengers watching the drama from inside the cabin were rooting for the snake, as he clung on. And it was a good fight, for he held through the shakedown of landing, & was seen still moving when the plane came to port. But he’s an ex-snake now.
They are not philosophical animals, the snakes, & this one didn’t know when he was beaten. But he did know that he wanted to live, & through all the technology of flight, found that place in the human heart where we could understand him.
Mr. Warren,
No comment on this essay, but I just wanted to say that I am delighted to have found you again! The first time I had heard of you was when you wrote this article on Toronto’s World Youth Day for the National Post. [Links disallowed in Comments. The article was entitled: "John Paul II and World Youth Day in Toronto: an Anglican perspective."]
I was one of the “papal youth looking beyond their parents for guidance.” I was used to being regarded with suspicion or slammed for remaining a Catholic. I’m one of the last hold-outs in my large extended family. I felt you said more about me than I could even express about myself — me being a person who thinks and feels deeply, but generally says little.
I followed your column in the Citizen for a long time. I recently went back there looking for something deep to read, but I might as well have opened the pantry door and read some food labels. I am so glad you started this blog. I have bookmarked it and will be back often. Many thanks!
David, you should write more articles like this. No punditry, no judgement. Nor religion. No politics. Just a nice sweet story.
Acartia didn’t smoak the mischievous, “pro-life” subtext. … To say nothing of the insinuated “intelligent design” of pythons, that can hold on under really quite impressive stresses. …
Thank you, Melanie!
Arcartia, this has nothing to do with this thread but I wanted to pick up on an earlier post of yours that I saw only after the thread had ceased. (Otiosus kills all argument when he posts too quickly his next mumbling!) Anyway, your statement about the faulty design of the human creature (sore backs, appendix, etc., not to mention that thing called death) wins acceptance from all Christians. We believe it. Except that the faulty design comes not from the Creator, but from the creature who decided to design things for himself. We know this as Original Sin. What God created was good. The design was perfect. Man defaced the design. And so, on one Good Friday, God made it good again.
Like the intelligent design that provided them with vestigial leg bones? And I didn’t mention anything about the serpent in the garden.
But the snake’s survival had more to do with airplane design than “intelligent design.” It was caught up in the mechanics of the flaps. It couldn’t have fallen off if it wanted to.
Acartia is demonstrating that one must work very hard to miss the point and insist on reducing everything to the random collision of atoms. Not that randomly colliding atoms are capable of insisting on anything, but you get my point, I’m sure.
Floating around out there somewhere is an old VCR recording of me and my best chum from high school singing the entire Monty Python “Lumberjack” song. Blackmail risks like this are one of the things that has kept me out of politics all these years.
Have been holding fire on your vestigials, Acartia. They are actually one of the clinchers when it comes to “specified complexity” (my preferred label for “intelligent design”). For vestigial limbs & organs point to the existence of universal body plans, & therefore suggest provision for sudden, encoded, drastic alterations & even restorations, which would be required to transform one species into another.
Hypothetical example: a bit of shuffling in the genomic deck, & the snake sprouts legs again, & becomes a new kind of lizard, “overnight” as it were. This in turn would help to explain the absence from the fossil record of gradually cumulative hit-&-missing links. It offers some potential insight into how Nature, persistently, “turns on a dime,” to fill freshly appearing niches with multiple interdependent species; yet can also preserve a species like the paddlefish in a suitable environment without alteration for tens of millions of years — all of that time carrying the same “junk DNA” employed in the limb development of much later animals, in what we now realize is a paralogical or duplicated genomic structure.
Meanwhile, we do not know what function the “vestigial” part may serve in the interim, until we find out. The human appendix, for instance, useless today for digesting cellulose to enable us to eat grass (as it does in other primates), turns out to have a role in generating cells for the gastrointestinal immune system: in research that is only starting.
This is where current biology gets very interesting, & the old Darwinian assumptions merely get in the way, rather as old Aristotelian assumptions were put in the way of Galileo. Worse, Darwinism offers a “just so” story that can explain anything, & thus explains nothing. This makes it stupefying.
On your “caught in the flaps” theory, I considered then rejected that myself after trawling for pictures of the event on the Internet. The python is repeatedly at the point of flying, & then manages somehow to pull himself back in.
Not sure I find all the parts in Lord Jowls’s Comment above to unpack his theological assertion, but there is one statement I can positively correct, to wit:
“Otiosus kills all argument when he posts too quickly his next mumbling!”
All the old Comment threads are open, to my knowledge. In fact, I am being driven crazy “moderating” new Comments arriving to several of them!
(And that’s not to mention the current Spam count, at 5,394. Anyone’s valid Comment got in there, & he can bet his bottom bippy that I will not find it.)
Here’s the problem with intelligent design: it requires a designer, but one has not been demonstrated to (materially) exist. So, it purports to explain material phenomena through immaterial causation.
It’s kinda like saying: “Look! The train is running very fast down the track. The engineer must be very clever to drive it so fast.” When, in fact, it may just be a runaway train.
Yes, just a runaway train. … And here we were thinking the train must have had a designer, when obviously, it was just the result of previous runaway trains, colliding with each other in a lucky way. … But how did the first runaway train come do be? … It was descended from a runaway shopping cart. …
In Vedantic philosophy (or metaphysics), the “background” or swarupa (Sanskrit) of the material world (or all phenomena, including mind) is said to be Sat-Chit-Ananda. This is translated variously as Existence-Consciousness-Bliss or Being-Knowledge-Bliss. According to this philosophy, the sense that the material world is “real” is the “result” of Maya, or illusion — which stems from ignorance of reality, which is (to come full circle) Sat-Chit-Ananda.
I wonder what a traditional Vedantic sage would say about the concept of Intelligent Design? (They do still exist, I posit, though far from the madding crowd.) Chit could also mean Intelligence. Vedanta poses the notion that the material world is Lila, or “Divine Play.” That is, the Reality or God (Hindus are generally not uncomfortable using the Western term), has seemingly “created” the world through a (seeming) sense of joyful play — and all that happens whether “good” or “bad” is neither. This outlook is “religious” (positive) because all persons have as their true being (Atma) the Reality, or Sat-Chit-Ananda. The body and mind are part of the phenomenal world, and thus, “unreal.”
Perhaps the Vedantic sage would nod in agreement to both Intelligent Design and “chance” at the same time. Interesting thought, at least to me.
David, I wonder have you come across Sir Karl Poppers definition of the truth or otherwise of scientific theory, in which he states, that ‘A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.’ Darwinism is a perfect example of an untestable and irrefutable theory, and any theory that explains all possible situations, as Darwinism has a tendency to do, should be considered a very weak scientific theory. It is not valid to launch this same criticism at Christian views of Creation, as Christianity is not a science, nor has She ever claimed to be, nor ever offered any ‘theory’, but has based her Knowledge on Divine Revelation. As regards Intelligent Design, I believe it, but not that God necessarily intervenes along the way (although He has, at least once); I believe He set it up from the very beginning, with every unit of energy and matter perfectly prearranged such that things would develop according to His plan, not discounting chance, because He, being omnipotent, could ‘beat the odds’. Popper’s views are to be found in ‘Conjectures and Refutations’ (1963), by Karl R. Popper.
In Pedantic philosophy, in these parts known as Darwinism, the “background” of the material world is a disembodied spirit, an anthropomorphism of the first order known as nature. It has decided that living is better than dying and has gone about determining which organisms are best suited to staying alive and to disco dancing.
Before that, long before, it had managed to turn matter into that which it could not be on pains of no longer being matter.
And then it painstakingly put together the pieces that would eventually allow for such miracles as pythons that, first having clung to the wings of pterodactyls, are now evolving toward becoming capable of hijacking airplanes.
The train analogy comments on the mental activity of the observer, who infers the existence of an engineer based upon the train’s travel. There’s an unwarranted leap of imagination, a/k/a a fantasy.
A mental observer in a runaway train. I love it. Sign me up some stars.
Seems CTC allows only for the motion train, then chides those who do not so limit themselves when arriving at the reasonable conclusion of an engineer who constructed the train.
I suppose Intelligent Design (ID) notions are a response to the work of materialist scientists. The old Thomists would do battle with — and win against — their opponents on the terms set by the opponents. It seems to me the ID crowd has tried something like that, but lacking the mental muscle of the Thomists they end up ceding too much and get sidelined before they make much progress. I think they’d be better off if they stayed with the point that many modern scientists are materialists who bake their philosophical assumptions into their methodologies and so skew their results — i.e. their materialist perspective colors the way they approach science and precludes certain conclusions.
My own philosophy being gnomish wisdom for the most part; to the extent I’ve made a formal assessment, moderate realism. I haven’t heard that any snake but one ever had a philosophy — and that one also attempted to preclude the Deity.
CTC, it is also a fantasy to imagine that an observer can observe an object without the existence of something that they both have in common and which is not material.
Christianity actually is scientific. St. Thomas Aquinas put forward why belief in the First Mover is rational in all respects and cannot be refuted.
Arguing about Darwinism and Intelligent Design is a parlour game for people who should really try to make better use of their time. Atheists and agnostics can sit around all day declaring that they do not exist, but then in the end, they have to go to the toilet or eat or go to bed.
The observer is not IN the train. He has just walked out of church and is standing on the sidewalk. (Guess I didn’t make that clear.)
And to Sean, I’m not commenting on the construction of the train; instead, only on the observer’s assumption the train must have a driver.
So Sean, apparently, in Texas, you don’t just assume the train has a driver. It must be sort of like Quebec, where you don’t just assume the cars have drivers. (Around here in Parkdale, you don’t assume the pedestrians have drivers, either. Even the cats are on autopilot sometimes.)
Please people, go easy on my CTC.
If we are just (or as the devotees of scientism describe us, nothing but) a runaway train, it is extraordinary how long we have avoided derailment.
CTC, thank you for the clarification. It seems, then, you envision a runaway train that set itself in motion? Strikes me as miraculous.
DeGaulle, perhaps we’ve avoided derailment because the tracks that built themselves have kept us on the winding and narrow.
Otiosus, I am in fact having fun with CTC, though I wish him no harm, or even discomfort. If this Georgia boy were in Texas he’d offer to buy the next round and raise a glass to the Alamo.
The whole point is being missed about the train. Who created the train? Who created the rails it runs on and the gravel bed the rails sit on? Who created the earth that the gravel bed rests on? Who created the universe in which the earth spins?
One shouldn’t talk about mere trains while ignoring the periphery.
Thanks for the thought, DW, but your protection is unnecessary. No one has scored a point yet (including you). I seem to be completely misunderstood. Here, just above, we have DeGaulle espousing the notion I’m comparing my runaway train (the CTC Express) to biota. I am not. The point of the analogy is that people tend to assume an “intelligent” causative force without any material basis for that assumption.
As I stated previously, the fallacy of intelligent design – or special complexity – or whatever you want to call it – is that it imputes immaterial causation to material phenomena. I admit to bias against the immaterial.
How did a sweet little story turn into a debate about evolution?
The thread evolved.
An idea is immaterial. A universal like the color is yellow is immaterial. No bias against the immaterial is necessary, or even defensible.
The point CTC is missing is that people analyze what the senses present, and then discern the work of the immaterial or universal at work through the material. Thus, we haven’t assumed an intelligent immaterial cause, we’ve determined its existence based on the evidence. All very reasonable.
CTC, you have ignored my point. A completely material world cannot exist.
Acartia, “sweet little story”? Dear God (pardon the expression) please save us from sweet little stories.
Good answer CTC – yes the thread changed. But before it could change/evolve it had to be something – a tiny thread perhaps – maybe a bit of fluff – hey maybe just an idea floating in the ether – an idea all by itself.
CTC, pardon my plodding, but can you tell me exactly what material produces love?
Love has its origin in the brain, which of course is material.
It is immaterial (in the other sense) whether a completely material world can exist. The issue is whether the immaterial can produce the material.
Um sorry to disagree CTC (& in doing so keep extending this thread) but Love has its origin with God. God is love — the source and summit of all love — that “love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Dante).
CTC, what is the material? If I look at my living room wall, it seems quite solid, but science tells me it is composed mostly of empty space, filled in by rapidly-moving molecules. The molecules consist mostly of empty space, filled in by rapidly-moving atoms. Ah, but these must be solid? No, they are mostly empty space, filled in by rapidly-moving protons, neutrons and electrons. Now we have actually found the solid stuff. Ah, but there’s these quarks, mesons and so on. Where’s the actual solid stuff? It just seems like layers of an onion, and all we ever seem to find is mathematics. Maybe matter is immaterial!
Material is that which causes pain when one’s toe catches a bed post in the middle of the night.
Immaterial is the subsequent thought that prevents one from not catching one’s toe on the bedpost again.
CTC, you have just described your (non-material) state of consciousness when you catch your toe, but it doesn’t answer my questions about the consistency of matter. Where or what is it exactly?
More, more and more stories like this pleeeeeeease!
Charles, I refer you to Google. Just plug “matter definition” into the search engine for 330 million results. I assume this will be sufficient to satisfy your curiosity.
(Surely, you don’t mean to suggest that matter is an illusion.)