As clear a definition of a miracle as I've encountered, and one that the various partisans of Science and Religion simply fail to grasp, either from sloppy thinking or from a perverse desire to see these old friends come to blows:

The concept of miracle which is permissible from the historical approach can be defined at its starting point as an abiding astonishment. The philosophizing and the religious person both wonder at the phenomenon, but the one neutralizes his wonder in ideal knowledge, while the other abides in that wonder; no knowledge, no cognition, can weaken his astonishment. Any causal explanation only deepens the wonder for him. The great turning-points in religious history are based on the fact that again and ever again an individual and a group attached to him wonder and keep on wondering; at a natural phenomenon, at a historical event, or at both together; always at something which intervenes fatefully in the life of this individual and this group. They sense and experience it as a wonder. This to be sure, is only the starting-point of the historical concept of wonder, but it cannot be explained away. Miracle is not something "supernatural" or "superhistorical", but an incident, an event which can be fully included in the objective, scientific nexus of nature and history; the vital meaning of which, however, for the person to whom it occurs, destroys the security of the whole nexus of knowledge for him, and explodes the fixity of the fields of experience named "Nature" and "History". Miracle is simply what happens; in so far as it meets people who are capable of receiving it, or prepared to receive it, as miracle. The extraordinary element favors this coming together, but it is not characteristic of it; the normal and ordinary can also undergo a transfiguration into miracle in the light of the suitable hour. -- Moses (1946)

In other words, miracles have to do with meaning and symbol, which is a higher level of organization than that of physical causes. To attempt to explain them as natural or supernatural is a reductionist fallacy, on the same order as trying explain biology only in terms of its chemistry (or, less frequently, in terms of some supraphysical 'vitalism'). As Konrad Lorenz argues, the rules of biology encompass the rules governing inanimate matter, without violating them but nonetheless introducing an element that is simply not present in the less organized structures. Life, in some senses, is a more restricted form of existence, but it is precisely these additional constraints that make possible its incredible diversity.

I am reminded of Tolstoy's observation of the paradox in military and political hierarchies, that it is the elements at the top, the generals and marshals, who are the most constrained.

Someone dug up a 1922 article about vehicle-caused injuries in Chicago. I'm reposting the graphic because I love the idea of plotting the bad stuff as negative numbers.

Every animal's nature places it in relationship to other animals of its own and of different species. These relationships, by virtue of being with other animals, are necessarily dynamic. The animal is always responding, not only to a fixed environment (or one that changes independently), but also to entities capable of response and of forcing response. Dynamic relationships inevitably result in dynamic behavior by their totality. The system may be cyclical or chaotic, but under no conditions (short of extinction) can it reach a steady state or uncontrolled growth.

For some reason we are rarely aware of this fact as it pertains to our own species, or to the multiplicity of smaller systems we belong to. All the intelligence and rational planning in the world cannot change the basic fact of our dependence and effects on other individuals. If anything, intelligence multiplies relationships and accelerates the propagation of those low-level perceptions of intent and danger that drive unconscious choice. Crowds do not converge on solutions because they do not converge. The flock can only go in one direction once the internal dynamics have reached their maximum tension, at which point it is the most susceptible to change.

This is as much an argument against central planning as it against individualist theories of human nature. We are not going to avoid the cycles and unpredictabilities amply manifest in human history by denying the relational aspects of human nature or by attempting to force relationships into an appearance of unity or rationality. We are not going to avoid the cycles of nature at all, but we will weather them a lot better if we focus on fulfilling our nature rather than avoiding it.

A lake is to the naturalist a chapter out of the history of a primeval time, for the conditions of life there are primitive, the forms of life are, as a whole, relatively low and ancient, and the system of organic interactions by which they influence and control each other has remained substantially unchanged from a remote geological period.

The animals of such a body of water are, as a whole, remarkably isolated--closely related among themselves in all their interests, but so far independent of the land about them that if every terrestrial animal were suddenly annihilated it would doubtless be long before the general multitude of the inhabitants of the lake would feel the effects of this event in any important way.

-- Stephen A. Forbes, "The Lake as a Microcosm" (1887)

It's a little hard to believe I've already been here four days. I haven't had much time to write anything down: after making recordings, rushing back to my laptop to analyze the spectrograms, and going on game drives, I've had little time to reflect. At least to reflect on non-scientific matters. The superb starling songs look incredibly interesting. Like European starlings, there's a superficial similarity to the vocalizations, but a few days of careful listening combined with analysis of the spectrograms leaves me in little doubt that there's a lot of complexity and probably quite a bit of individual variation. Unfortunately I've only been able to record the birds from the territory around the center, as Dustin's car is being used to finish up another project at present, so some of these hypotheses may need to be modified once I start sampling from other groups. I also have yet to really get the hang of reading the bands off the birds' legs, which is a fairly essential part of the project since this is the only way to really establish individual variation, and whether it correlates with any aspect of the birds' social organization, breeding quality, or kinship. Still, I've got over two weeks left and I am fairly confident I can get a good data set.

The diversity of life here is completely overwhelming. The people here know so much about it, too.

Sharp eyes may notice a new link in the sidebar, which points to a new location where I am collecting snippets of code from python and R that I use to do neuroscience stuff, including making nice plots. Useful for me, since I manage to remember that I've solved some problem, but never how. Potentially useful for other people who struggle with this crap, too.

A good friend of mine once said, while writing a book, that it's difficult to soar when all you seem to be doing is picking up laundry. I am not writing a book, but I do seem to be picking up an awful lot of laundry. Much of this laundry takes the form of trying to produce graphs and figures that are clear, informative, and as much as possible, beautiful. I fiddle with little bits of code in python and R that produce these graphs, and it often seems like 90% of the effort goes into the last 10% of the final output. Things that ought to be incredibly simple, like aligning one graph with another, or making sure the axis ticks point in the right direction, usually require the frustrated perusal of undocumented source code, endless attempts to come up with the right set of keywords for a web search that might pull up someone else's solution to the problem, and the use of ugly, gimmicky hacks that will probably break whenever the next version of the plotting software comes out.

Of course, in most cases it would be easier to just produce the plots the software was written to produce, and then fiddle with the tick marks and colors in Illustrator. This is usually what I wind up doing for things like posters and talks, where I'm almost always working with limited amounts of time, and no one is actually going to look all that closely at the graphs. But a paper will go through many rounds of revision, and it saves a world of grief to have the mechanism for producing the figures be as automatic as possible.

I'm relieved to be at this stage of the writing, though. Last week the data were still formless and void, and I saw only hints of order. Much of that order was artificial, imposed by my hypotheses and less-than-hypotheses about how this system is working. All of that false order has to be discarded in order to approach the true order of nature. Indeed, the only way we can approach nature is through the process of discarding our false ideas about it.

It irritates me to no end to hear otherwise intelligent people call the failure to confront one's cherished assumptions "faith". If it is faith, it's bad faith. But it seems more to me like plain ol' laziness.