{"id":99,"date":"2007-12-09T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2007\/12\/09\/99\/"},"modified":"2015-05-25T15:39:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T20:39:44","slug":"99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"Cardinal at Sunset — Is Beauty Real?"},"content":{"rendered":"
 
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Time for a pic. Here\u2019s a distinguished member of the local wildlife scene, a male cardinal. He\u2019s just hanging around in the bushes, awaiting an early sunset in December. It looks as if he\u2019s filled his belly for the day and is just taking in the scene. In a few minutes he will be heading back to the nest for the night with his mate.<\/p>\n

The cardinal brings up some interesting questions about the process of evolution. The male cardinal evolved it\u2019s delightfully colorful plumage so as to better attract females for mating. The red color gave some members of the early cardinal species a reproduction advantage, so the color was “selected” into the male genes. But once the process was completed and every male cardinal was red, was the overall cardinal species any better off? Arguably it was worse off; the female retains its camouflage brown, but the males became sitting ducks for those animals that attack birds for a living. And yet, despite this evolutionary dead-end, the cardinals somehow survived, and lived on to delight us humans (especially on those drab winter days when everything is all brown and gray). <\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m as Darwinian as any legitimate scientist. I don\u2019t like those \u201cintelligent design\u201d theories that the Bible-thumping creationists are trying to sneak into the school curricula. I think that those folk should go find better ways to save souls and spread the word of salvation than to corrupt our scientific and educational institutions (like maybe helping the poor and the needy). I know that there’s a good scientific reason that explains why red cardinals still get by in certain environments. BUT. I do have to wonder if there is a deeper layer of reality behind what physics studies, a layer that does allow for things such as beauty and virtue (you know, the Kantian categorical imperatives and such). And also the mental consciousness that allows us to appreciate those things. Perhaps the little evolutionary dead-end that gave our world the cardinal\u2019s beautiful plumage, and the consciousness to enjoy it, are reflections of something more than our science can now (or should now) attest to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Time for a pic. Here\u2019s a distinguished member of the local wildlife scene, a male cardinal. He\u2019s just hanging around in the bushes, awaiting an early sunset in December. It looks as if he\u2019s filled his belly for the day and is just taking in the scene. In a few minutes he will be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5442,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions\/5442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}