Tag Archives: creationism

I believe

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by Climate Change, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some news items make me feel sceptical that the human race is ever going to be smart enough to walk and chew gum at the same time. Last week it was a serious interview with John Edwards, “world’s greatest psychic” in which he was asked how his “psychic powers” worked; and the news that London rioters would be thrown out of public housing and made homeless. This weekend it was the news that Michelle Bachmann had won the Ames Straw Poll. Well, not that she had won the bizarre (even by American political standards) ASP, but that she had won anything.

On the home front Tony Abbott was ridiculing the Prime Minister for persisting with the “carbon tax” – “What planet is she living on?” he wanted to know. Well, um, Tony, same planet as you, the one that is rapidly warming towards a future that is going to doom us all, with Australia among the countries being damaged first. That planet. Of course Mr Abbott, along with all except one of his colleagues, is a climate change denier, sorry sceptic.

He is also, famously, fundamentally religious, a once future priest turned future king’s first minister (also famously a fundamentalist monarchist, saying that there was something mystical about the monarchy that republicans couldn’t understand). Which once again illustrates a curious thing about self-described sceptics on climate change – they are sceptical about nothing else.

Not a hint of scepticism about any aspect of Catholicism as expounded by one cardinal seems to have ruffled Tony’s brow while he simultaneously denied the work of tens of thousands of scientists. The people who unaccountably tell pollsters that Mr Abbott would be a good prime minister (shades of the Iowans who can seriously propose Bachmann for president) have no scepticism about any of his publicity stunts. Have no scepticism about what the shock jocks, who they listen to religiously every day, tell them (can believe any number of impossible things before breakfast), nor about the headlines in the Murdoch Press.

No sceptical thought about WMDs troubled them as Iraq was shocked and awed. Scepticism isn’t a respectable intellectual position as they listen to the claims of the mining industry about a mining tax, clubs about poker machines, tobacco companies about packaging, the alcohol industry about closing hours, media companies about media enquiries, cattlemen about live exports.

There is no room, it seems, for scepticism about claims that there are plenty of fish in the sea, plenty of water in the rivers, plenty of trees in the forests. Nor about claims that reducing taxes on the rich benefits the poor. Ghosts, UFOs, toasted virgin Marys, virgin Virgin Marys, psychic powers, alternative medicines, Barnaby Joyce – all things that need the white hot heat of true scepticism, and all things that receive unquestioning belief from the people who attend anti carbon tax rallies.

No, the one thing, the only thing, that these modern day Galileos (revolving in his grave faster and faster each time his name is misused) point their telescopes of scepticism at is a single phenomenon known scientifically for 150 years and supported by hundreds of thousands of research results from tens of thousands of scientists.

No wonder I’m sceptical about their scepticism – and about the future of the human race.

Writing on the wall

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by Media • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The world is divided into two kinds of substances – medicines and non-medicines. You will notice this doesn’t leave room for the pseudo-category of “alternative medicines”, those are substances that don’t exist.

Yet there appear to be moves to regulate the “alternative medicine” industry, with things like registration, regulation of activities, training requirements and so on. There are already, apparently, organisations whose membership comprises the various branches of quackery.

At first sight such moves might be welcomed, making sure particularly bad operatives were removed, raising standards, providing a recourse for “patients” treated badly. But it’s a two-edged sword and the negative side is much sharper than the positive. Why the quacks want such a system is apparent respectability. They would be “government approved”, could add some letters after their name “member of …”. Certificates of registration and membership to put on otherwise bare office walls, mimicking those that actual medical doctors have.

But with so little qualification in the real world the alternative medicine industry has set up a kind of parallel universe where virtual qualifications can be obtained. “Colleges of this” and “Institutes of that” give courses about nothing (as Seinfeld might say) and issue degrees when they are passed (wonder if anyone has ever failed?) – “Diploma of this”, Certificate of that” on the wall looks good to the casual visitor. But even more disturbingly, just in the corner of my eye, I seem to sense that some real universities are now offering units of mumbo jumbo too. I guess this is like the media offering “balance”, “she said, he said”, between rational thought on climate change and the denial industry.

In all of this the homeopaths, naturopaths, chiropracters, chinese herbalists, iridologists, reflexologists, and all the rest of this medieval superstition passing as medicine, are following the same path as those other believers from medieval times the creationists and the neoconservative libertarians. Creationists establish bible based “universities” which in the free speech US of A are seen as valid, and “museums” with exhibits of human-dinosaur coexistence. Libertarians set up “think tanks” funded by those public-spirited people from industries like tobacco and oil. In both cases the motive is the same, to give people spouting garbage a platform and a piece of paper on the wall, a set of letters after the name, that will convince the gullible that they are talking real science, real economics.

Hard to decide which of these three groups of charlatans is the most damaging. Possibly alternative medicine by a whisker (and the eye of a toad) if only because people can die horribly when they put their trust in the quack practitioners instead of real doctors. But the other two are damaging the minds of children on the one hand, and our society on the other.

Next time someone says to you “trust me I am from the college of libertarians” (or homeopaths or intelligent designers) look carefully at the fine print on the certificate on the wall. It’s probably a clause disclaiming all responsibility for your well-being. Treat it as an escape clause. Go and see a real economist, scientist or doctor.

Strange bedfellows

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by Atheism, Climate Change • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Well, yesterday’s post went down like an iron (not as fast as lead but fast enough) balloon. Oh, Horton on about politics eh, been there, done that, boring. Very demanding lot you Watermelon visitors, thrill seekers of the blogosphere, one day mentally bunji jumping, the next the intellectual equivalent of rowing the Pacific. Always seeking new mental thrills and spills as each new day dawns.

There are some blogs where the pleasure seems to be in the old familiar comfortable slippers of topics and writing with no surprises. Sometimes I envy them – turn out yet another post on Peak Oil or the NSW Labor Party and you can rest content. Whereas for me each new day leaves me searching feverishly for some brand new topic, some radically different approach to everyone else in the world. Groan, moan, whinge. Come on, get a grip Horton.

I know you will all have been following, as keenly as I was, the Miss USA beauty pageant whose winner was announced yesterday. This is a major competition of course, with stringent standards whose scope and breadth would make competitors at the Hawaii iron man, or the international science olympiads, quail.

Miss USA contestants had to excel in three, yes, three, disciplines. These were swimsuit, evening gown, and questions. God knows how they had the energy to answer questions after the first two disciplines, but answer they did. And this is where we come in. Faced with the question “Should evolution be taught in schools” (and just the fact that this question could be asked in 2011 should send shivers down all your spines) only 2 of the 51 (get ready to shudder) could bring themselves to say yes indeed. Although some said “teach both” evolution and creationism.

Of the two who did answer well one just said yes, teach it in schools. The other, and the eventual winner, came out with this convoluted answer – “I was taught evolution in high school. I do believe in it. I’m a huge science geek … I like to believe in the big bang theory and, you know, the evolution of humans throughout time.” See, she likes to believe in evolution, some people like to believe in a 6000 year old earth, all just a matter of taste. But at least she did say yes. Was brave enough.

So the really frightening thing is that 49 of the contestants, either because of their own beliefs, ignorance, or unwillingness to offend the voters, are too frightened to say “teach evolution in schools”. This is what America has come to after decades of battering away by evangelicals, intimidation of teachers, home-schooling. Here is a country, once the most scientifically and technologically advanced in the world, reduced to a state where most of its citizens have beliefs last popular in western countries in 1859. This is what you can achieve if a small bunch of wild-eyed fanatics keep bashing away at the education system.

Our contestants were grappling with the question of whether to teach the results of 150 years of science research or the mythology of a sheepherder in the middle east 2500 years ago at the same time as the story broke about climate scientists in Australia receiving death threats. Yes, death threats, moved on from the screams of abuse to actual promises of physical harm.

Slightly different tactic to the US creationists but the same intention – shut these people up. They are saying things I don’t want to hear. They are saying things that go against my beliefs. They are saying things that logically mean a reduction in profits for some big business. Shut them up, We don’t want them saying these things any more, don’t want them reporting their findings, we are sick of science, the shock jocks have told me everything I need to know about global warming. Why can’t these scientists listen to Alan Jones and then they wouldn’t keep saying these things I don’t want to hear. But in the mean time, death threats should make them go silent.

Beauty contestants and climate scientists – strange bedfellows eh, but both subject to the medieval forces now rampaging through our societies.

Over the cuckoo’s nest

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by Atheism, Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some 45 years ago, in my one-radio-station small rural town we university students used to avidly listen, with great amusement, to the broadcasts of an American evangelist, Garner Ted Armstrong. Quite mad, of course, in that American evangelical way, and he would rant and rave (what is the difference, I forget?) about sin and stuff and how everyone except those who sent money to his show were going straight to hell, not passing Go or collecting $200. We couldn’t get enough, exchanging, the next day, examples of his lunacy.

About 35 years ago, in the slightly bigger rural town I had then moved to, there was a chap who used to stand preaching in the central town square at lunchtime. Well, when I say “preaching” that doesn’t quite give the feel of it. He was a small neat man, but dressed, some 20,000km from Glasgow, in full Scottish kilt, long tartan socks, ruffled shirt and so on. And he didn’t preach so much as read inaudibly from something I presume was the bible (possibly John Knox’s personal copy) totally inaudibly, with absolutely no concern for, or eye contact with, the passing parade of secular Australians. He just read on and on in a whispering monotone, would be reading when you went to buy lunch, would still be reading when you came back half an hour later. I presume he had set himself the task of reading the book to Australia at the end of which the heavens would open or something and he would be raptured away to Brigadoon.

Incidentally I was delighted to read the other day that when another of those American millennial madmen was predicting the end of the world in May (presumably trying to beat the Mayans to the punch) that some American atheists (yes, I know, a precious few) were offering to take care of the pets of the rapturees. You know, afterwards – would be a comfort to know your cat and dog were being cared for while you were off lolling around in heaven. I suppose.

Before I became (very briefly, and ironically, I hasten to add, before you get the wrong idea here) a Garner Ted fanboy I remember going to one of those outdoor speaker’s corner locations. Forget where it was in Perth, the Esplanade perhaps? Years later I went to the equivalent one in Melbourne, but its location escapes me, one of my knowledgeable readers will help I am sure. I think they were in all Australian capital cities (was Sydney the Domain?) in the old days B.I. (Before Internet). There were people standing on soap boxes (probably literally in many cases) preaching to and/or shouting at the crowd who were, as part of the entertainment, shouting back. It was all based on the original Speaker’s Corner in London.

The speakers were self-elected prophets, political and religious, crying in the wilderness (well, crying in well-manicured parks actually, but wilderness is in the eye of the beholder), and they acted like so many pressure valves, letting off steam from the pressure cooker in which political, economic and social changes and issues were fermenting away. Each soap box, its occupant working up a sweat, was, metaphorically and in reality, letting off puffs of steam to prevent the community at large becoming overheated. Everyone accepted this function, and so the most outrageous, indeed lunatic, things could be said, often shouted, and the pairs of police, assigned to the easy duty of a stroll in the park, would smile complacently as they were accused of being the running dog hounds of world-wide capitalism, or communism, or fiends from hell. Then stroll on, hands behind backs, as if rehearsing for the old titles of The Bill, to the next eruption of fire and brimstone.

In my university vacation days I had a boss who was a young earth creationist and would attempt to gain the scalp of a young Darwinist without success. Later, as an archaeologist, I would spend time in country pubs (not much time, obviously, what did you think?) being harassed by elderly, educated in the school of hard knocks, and rather red-faced men who had seen a UFO, or knew what should be done to solve the Aboriginal problem, or were outraged that the government was poisoning us all with fluoride, or had proof that the moon landing was a fake, and by the way I did know that there was a CIA man on the grassy knoll, didn’t I? Would talk at you until the cows came home or the pub ran out of beer.

So these guys (almost always, something to do with the Y chromosome I expect) have been around a long time, even longer than me, probably back to the first human societies. If you didn’t have a village idiot it was because you had just lost one and were waiting for the new one to arrive. But in all these villages, these societies, the village idiots were recognised as being just that, a kind of tax on rational discourse. If you had freedom of speech then that included the freedom to hold ideas that a chimpanzee society wouldn’t have entertained for a moment. These little safety valves, letting off steam in pubs, or parks, or even workplaces if their delusions didn’t prevent them working, lived their own virtual lives while the rest of us got on with real life. You knew where they would be, could avoid soap box country on the street corner or pub corner. Nobody would have considered for a moment allowing, indeed encouraging, these nutters (I was searching for a word, but you don’t have to search far) to have some kind of a role in the governing of the country.

And yet here we are, in the internet age, and these fellows are clogging up every thread on climate change, ensuring that the Labor government is too frightened to undertake action on global warming, and the Liberals don’t want to. They are screaming about refugees, and Aborigines (still), and unwed mothers, and gay marriage, and guns, and “greenies”. Screaming loudly, but their voices no longer restricted to the back bar of the Black Stump Pub, instead on blogs from anywhere in the world, having an influence, their importance magnified not by the echoes of the pub toilet wall but by the world-wide web. The kind of people once represented by my lonely and inaudible Scots evangelist or my creationist boss, are now determining policies on drugs, social welfare, law and order, and, the biggie, education. My old boss would be delighted to discover that instead of his lonely path clutching a tattered book imported from America, being cheeked by a young biologist, he and his kind would now be running schools, demanding creationism be taught.

And further, not only are these people having individual influence in backroom chats with premiers or prime ministers, but they are getting elected to parliaments themselves, by hordes of their peers, suddenly seeing each other through a glass darkly, recognising the power in coordinated action. Suddenly there they are on the front bench of the federal opposition, waiting impatiently to take over the country. And there they are, with even more power, behind their own microphones in shock jock radio stations, writing opinion columns, and appearing on television.

Rational policies to deal with greenhouse gases, refugees, taxation, drugs, guns, land clearing, resources, social support, housing, terrorism, public education, health and all the rest of the conundrums facing modern governments, can no longer be reached because of the cacophony from the once soap box orators, now released, beyond the wildest dreams of their forebears, to run the country directly or by proxy.

Brave new world.

You say culture, I say religion

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by Atheism • Tags: , ,

Whenever I hear the word “culture” I reach for a big rhetorical stick.

You will have heard the argument as often as I have – whenever some faint criticism is voiced of the way that, oh just to pluck an example out of the air, women are treated in a particular country as a result of religious rulings, the chorus responds instantly. “How dare you criticise us? This is just a matter of our culture, don’t you dare criticise the way our women choose to dress, it’s just our culture you western imperialist”. That of course is the end of the argument.

Or is meant to be. Let’s see now. If what we are talking about is “culture” then there have been thousands, probably tens of thousands, of “cultures” since records were kept that enabled us to recognise the attributes of such cultures. Culture covers all sorts of attributes in a society – status of women, clothing, art, music, treatment of animals, technology, literature, politics, parenthood, education, censorship, distribution of wealth, housing, transport, marriage, and so on. If religion was merely an attribute of culture, then we would expect a pretty random (that is even) distribution of cultural manifestations of religion. We would expect, for example that, since women make up a little over half of the population that in over half the religions, women would be the dominant force. In some churches perhaps women would speak and men be commanded to keep silent; women would sit up the front in the main part of the church, men be restricted to standing in an inferior part at the back.

If culture is the prime determinant of behaviour then we would expect in many religions men would be obliged to totally cover up their heads and bodies and legs and arms in heavy black clothing no matter the climate, and be allowed, perhaps, to have their eyes showing, or have even the eyes covered with a net. Women in such cultures would be free to dress in any way they chose. They would also of course own all the wealth in a marriage, no matter what the man had brought to it. Men would fling themselves on to the funeral pyre of their wife. In mythology men would be the guilty parties in displeasing “god”; there would be times of the month when they were considered to be unclean because of their secretions. There would be cultures where all the holy books were written by women, and all the main characters were female. Others where young virgin males were sacrificed to please the gods.

Oh, we would have cultures where women, but not men, were permitted to drive cars. Where women firebombed boy’s schools because it wasn’t right for a boy to have an education. There would be cultures where women could have as many husbands as they chose; where young boy children could be married to old women; where a man could not refuse to have sex with his wife; where boys could be raped by women if they were considered to be improperly dressed, and if they reported it could be stoned; or have acid flung in their faces if they spoke to a woman who wasn’t their wife. Whatever political processes took place in the culture men would not be permitted to vote (since their vote would have to be the same as the wife) or stand for election (since that might involve them governing women which would be unnatural). There would be cultures where religion could not be taught to children under the age of 21. There would be cultures where animals were valued as being related to us, and treated compassionately and gently.

There wouldn’t be cultures though where music and art and literature were banned, because that would make no sense since they are an integral part of culture. Nor would there be cultures which encouraged the destruction of the environment, because all cultures ultimately depend on ecology for survival. Impossible to imagine cultures where great disparities of wealth were approved by religious leaders, where indeed merely being religious attracted great financial benefits. Also impossible to imagine cultures where religious leaders of one type had the right to determine what everyone in the community could read or see or hear. Don’t want to get into the realm of fantasy here.

And since it is all fantasy, there is no such variation, don’t talk to me about “culture”. Just admit that religion is encoding misogyny, often extreme misogyny, as well as facilitating animal cruelty, encouraging the rape of the environment, and supporting repressive regimes, wealth disparities, and the failure to properly educate children.

Culture isn’t an alibi for religion.

Flashman in the pulpit

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by Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Use of the human body (and illness) as metaphor isn’t new. Probably dates back to the moment when the first proto-hominid jumped out of a tree on the edge of the savannah, landed in the grass and said “That was one giant leap for mankind”.

Still, at the risk of seeming even more of a valetudinarian than I do already, I think there will be a lot more mining of medical metaphors on the old Watermelon blog before we extract the cannula and give them a rest.

Occurred to me that having what I have and receiving the treatment I am receiving is like being bullied. The old lymph cells have been bullying my body and now the nasty chemical cocktail I sit down to imbibe every 3 weeks is bullying me too. The latter though with the best possible intentions, rather in the way that a boy receiving a caning would be told that it was hurting the headmaster more than it did him.

Lot of bullying about these days. Bob Brown called the Press on bullying the Greens the other day, and immediately the other journalists all began bullying him even more for daring to suggest they were bullies. The radio and print shock jocks are of course nothing but a pack of bullies roaming at will. Heard one of them on a breakfast TV show the other day bullying Rob Oakeshott (not to his face of course) outraged, still, that the independents had supported, continued to support, in spite of all the shock jock bullying, the Trotskyite government led by Gillard. Shock jock-style bullies infest opinion threads on blogs everywhere, bullying the rest of us to ensure the planet warms up by at least 6 degrees.

There are bullies roaming school playgrounds, corporations bully their workers, mining companies and tobacco companies bully the government, police bully demonstrators, agnostics bully atheists, politicians bully refugees, creationists bully evolutionists, game show hosts bully contestants, gun owners bully non-gun owners, monarchists bully republicans, bloggers bully other bloggers, libertarians bully everybody.

Terrorists are the ultimate bullies with bombs. The IRA were at it again the other day – c’mon guys, really? – but there seem to be mad bombers everywhere determined to use terror to bully their way towards making the rest of the world agree with whatever it is they think they think. Using a wide definition indeed of “think”.

Which brings me naturally to religion. Natural home for bullies it seems. You join a religion and it comes with a kind of bully pulpit, a bully pass which not only allows, no encourages, you to bully anyone who isn’t religious, but all those who don’t belong to whatever splinter group of whatever religious myth you follow. If you can’t bully everyone else into doing what you think they should be doing you can at least bully them into not doing things you don’t want to do and don’t want them to do either. Especially women.

The other day, end of the world as it happened, some madman, with media echo chamber in tow, was bullying his followers so that they gave up jobs, gave him money, got rid of possessions, slaughtered pets, in some cases apparently tried to suicide and kill children, bullied them into believing that whatever madness was going on in his brain was real.

There are politicians too who seem determined to bully the real world into shape (Barnaby, Nick, looking at you). Bully the scientists first, especially climate scientists, taking a big stick the other day to Flannery and Steffen who had once again apparently failed to come up with the correct answer for how the real world works (c’mon guys, how many times does it take till we make you understand that the planet isn’t waming and if it was who cares). Some cardinal adopts the same approach. Apparently if you speak loud enough, carry a big enough sick, the conservative politicians, and their friends in high corporate places, believe, you can force the world to do your bidding. CO2 will stop being a greenhouse gas, the ice caps will cease to melt, the storms will turn into gentle breezes. But all the conservative politicians (on both “sides”of the mainstream political fence), adopt a bullying tone and manner towards any aspect of modern life with which they disagree. Poor people, schools, hospitals, refugees, workers, women, Aborigines are all bullied these days. No discussion of issues, just a hectoring of anyone who holds a contrary view on anything.

Which brings us, inevitably, to that Flashman-in-chief Rupert Murdoch. Story the other day, alongside ones about the Pope being a catholic, swallows flying south, and Queen Anne being dead, that “Rupert Murdoch has let it be known within his organisation that Australia needs change in Canberra and his editors were simply doing his bidding”. So all 21 million of us are going to be bullied by one man until we do what he wants and vote for Tony Abbott. Perhaps just enthrone him in a secret News Limited conclave, white smoke announcing that the new PM has been chosen. America has also been well and truly bullied by Murdoch and his Fox bully boys, which gave us George W Bush and the Iraq war, and, of course, no action on climate change. We were bullied into John Howard (himself a very able deputy bullier) and bullied into keeping him there for 100 years until Kevin Rudd dropped in on Flashman in New York in 2007 and handed over his lunch money, no argument.

They say that if you stand up to bullies they eventually see the error of their ways, take off the headlock, and hand back your lunch money with interest. Only, I think, if you have a current affairs camera team and bullying reporter in tow. Quite how you stop someone who owns 70% of the media outlets in a country bullying us all into submission I don’t know. All together now.

Peter Principle

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by Atheism • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

This post was inspired by this latest piece of offensive nonsense from Australia’s Pope-in-waiting, the awe-full Cardinal P-ll. It compares the pathways to the top of their professions followed by scientists and religious leaders.

To get promotion
Religious leaders – on the way up show absolute willingness to obey, follow, believe, totally accept authority. Are fearful. Reach top by being able to demonstrate more than your rivals that you completely accept dogmatically every piece of dogma, that you are in fact holier than the pope. Remain unchanged as the world changes, in fact go backwards where possible. Apply old conclusions to new issues.


Leading scientists – on the way up show an ability to question, investigate, and an inability to accept authority, even the highest authority and the most popularly accepted theories. Lack fear. Reach top by overturning old theories, ideas, authorities. Change as data changes, ideas shift, debates are won or lost. Apply new hypotheses to old problems.

Increasingly I find, as I age (as gracefully as a belly-flop from a diving board), that I do all my best writing when I have no access to a keyboard or even a pencil. Driving down the highway, or drifting fitfully into sleep, blog posts spring unbidden, fully-formed – metaphors, clever titles, literary allusions, and all – into my head. Only to disappear almost entirely, leaving only a lingering taste like a madeleine, when I reach my destination, or shake my sleepy head, and put fingers to keyboard ready to reconstruct the masterpiece.

The above post was one of those. I have put back together what I can, but it is a mere ghost of a post, a shadow of its former bedtime glory. Perhaps next time I sleep, perchance to blog, more of it will return to beguile you. Or perhaps my more wide-awake readers, keyboards at the ready, can add to my lists.

The evolution of chocolate

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by Evolution, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

There used to be, and still may be, a computer facility that allows you to program particular function keys on the keyboard to produce a whole phrase with one keystroke. Particularly useful for politicians (“there is only one poll that matters”, “I can’t comment on this because it is now the subject of legal proceedings”, “the leader has my full and complete support”, “this study was based on figures from last year/last month/yesterday and things have now changed”) but also useful when reporting science matters (“chocolate good for you scientific study shows”) or social ones (“Discovery of artefact rewrites history books”). In particular there is one that is used over and over again “New find rewrites evolutionary theory” which is more inaccurate than even the political ones. There was another example the other day where a discovery of a minor detail of the eye structure of a very ancient fossil might result in a minor change to our ideas about the exact sequence by which the two main groups of animals respectively developed eyes by using more of one cell type than another (the eyes of octopus and humans, for example, are based on different cell types). Yes, that’s all. Last year there was the find of a fossil primate which far from “rewriting evolution” (or “rewriting human evolution”) as headlines around the world trumpeted, merely filled in a small detail in one minor branch of the early primate evolutionary tree.

Every time you see a headline “rewrites evolutionary theory” mentally substitute “may result in minor change to some minor aspect of a hypothesis about evolutionary sequence in one minor group of species” – yes, I know that is longer, but it will be much more accurate. You see the time to “rewrite evolutionary theory” was in the first few decades after 1859, and only one discovery, that of genes, has ever done that. Not because it proved anything wrong about Darwin’s work, but because it provided a clearer understanding of the mechanism of genetic inheritance, something that was still unclear before Gregor Mendel started growing pea plants in a monastery garden in the 1850s (his work remained unknown for decades).

That’s it, nothing else in the last 150 years has “rewritten” evolutionary theory, and it is quite clear that nothing will now. That is because the fundamental mechanisms proposed by Darwin – variation, natural selection, adaptation, geographic separation, are as fundamental as the axioms of any mathematical theorem. His supporting observations, of different distributions of different plants and animals across the surface of the planet, and of fossils buried in the ground that showed the stages of evolution of life on Earth, are also so fundamental that they can’t be altered. All that does change, occasionally, is the finding of a new fossil that more clearly illustrates the exact sequence of the evolution of say, whales, or snakes, or birds, or indeed primates including that species particularly dear to our hearts, Homo sapiens.

So why does the media do it? Well, to sell newspapers and tv programs obviously – here is something new and exciting and revolutionary. But in the case of evolution I think there is another factor involved. The journalists appear to believe that there is a significant part of the Australian population that doesn’t believe in evolution (and writing that seems as silly as “doesn’t believe in gravity”) and that if they put up a headline suggesting that evolution has been challenged in some way people will rush to have their prejudices reinforced. If you were an American journalist this assumption might well be correct, but I think the Australian public is still a bit more scientifically savvy than that. However there are religious forces beavering away to have “creation science” (an oxymoron much worse than “military intelligence”) taught in Australian schools, and they are making inroads in some schools, especially in Queensland (“smart state one day, dumbed down the next”). The constant headlines in the media about “rewriting evolution” can only reinforce that campaign and take us down the slippery American anti-science slope.

It’s only a little thing I know, but it does matter. Next time you see or hear a headline like this let the media outlet concerned know you are not happy about it. Unless of course you believe that Gillard and Abbott really never look at polls, and that they are both fully supported by Rudd and Turnbull.

Or that chocolate really is good for you.

Tell them they’re dreaming

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by Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The other day I found myself, for the second time in three years, unexpectedly facing an operating theatre. This time arriving downstairs at the Holding Pen (I may have the name wrong) was a relief after a very long, and fluid and food-free day being mucked around in spite of masses of paperwork, but that’s another story. Being put into the hands of a surgical team gave me some more general thoughts (or it did after I eventually had my first cup of coffee in 24 hours). The first was that if you can put together a good team of people and have them cooperatively working for a common cause then the sky is the limit to what you can achieve. Well, even the sky isn’t the limit when you think about the team that put humans on the Moon, and good teams have also rescued people in Christchurch and Grantham, landed troops in Normandy, built Stonehenge and Chartres cathedral, fought bushfires, climbed Everest and so on. Contrary to conservative belief, humans have been good team players probably since the first mob got down from a comfortable tree, wandered across the savannah, and decided it was near dark and they better organise food, shelter, and protection against lions.

The second thought was that I was putting my complete trust, my life in their hands in fact, in a bunch of strangers. I had met only the surgeon briefly before the event, and a couple of others a few minutes before I was wheeled into the bright lights, yet here I was, about to be be made totally unconscious, relying on some of them to keep me breathing, keep my heart beating, while others poked at me with very sharp objects. I had, in the few moments before someone turned the light off in my brain, absolute confidence in these strangers. Again, it doesn’t really fit with the conservative idea of human nature that we are really all just out for number one and the market take the hindmost.

And my final thought, as I was eagerly drinking my first coffee, was that as well as putting my trust in a team of strangers, I had also put my trust in science and medicine. The anaesthetic was excellent with no side effects during or after, the operating technique superb, with the minimum amount of cutting and little pain afterwards, the analysis of the tissues removed conducted by pathologists using all the latest staining and other investigative techniques. Medical researchers and other scientists have been toiling away behind the scenes over the last few hundred years, constantly improving the outcomes of operations and the post-operative treatments.

My confidence in all three things makes me, it seems, increasingly at odds with the part of the population that takes its information and ideas and values from, is anaesthetised by, the ever louder voices of the shock jocks (you know, the ones who are busier than the prime minister). The barrage of anti-science (and most particularly anti-global warming) and anti-community rhetoric coming from these sources, and being endlessly repeated in blogs, newspaper editorials, and parliamentary committees, is sending us back to mediaeval times.

Perhaps all these people need a hospital visit to understand the importance of science and scientists, and the importance of all of us working together.

Otherwise none of us are going to come out of the anaesthetic too well.

Life is a lottery

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by Atheism, Climate Change, Education, Evolution, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

There is a media ritual when there is a big lottery prize looming that involves an interview with a “number expert” who can tell you what the “lucky” numbers are, ie those which have come up most often. The number expert can protest until blue in the face that every number, every time, is equally likely or unlikely, by chance, to appear. Makes no difference. “What are the lucky numbers?” will be asked, over and over. When the winner is announced comes the trip to the “lucky” outlet that sold the ticket. This outlet, is the suggestion, will be worth buying from again. But it won’t be of course, every outlet is equally likely, or unlikely to sell the next winning ticket. But the use of “luck” and the suggestion that some people are “lucky” is encouraging belief in the paranormal on the one hand, and belief in people being “rewarded” by a god on the other. There is no luck, there is only chance.

Whenever someone reaches a milestone like 100 years another narrative comes into play – “to what do you attribute your long life?” Well, in reality their long life can only be attributed to a chance allocation of pretty good DNA and a lot of luck through the decades, they have reached an advanced age by chance, just the far tail of a normal distribution of age at death – a few die very young, a few die very old, most die in between. Life’s a lottery and then you die.

Road accidents too. The media (and politicians) tend to react to an individual accident by blaming someone or something for it. But for a given number of cars on the roads, and therefore for a given number of chances of them coming into contact with each other or some object beside the road, there will be, by chance, a given number of accidents, and you, by chance, may be one of them. And those accidents will range, by chance, from those where a car and its occupants are scarcely dented, to major pile-ups and death and everything in between.

The inability to recognise or accept chance events has led to the idea of “miracles” raising its ugly and misleading head again. In any major accident or catastrophic natural event involving many people, there will be, by chance, quite often, survivors, perhaps only one survivor, perhaps two or three. Whether it is plane crash or train crash, tsunami or earthquake, the fact that many people die and one or more don’t is always headlined and described as a “miracle”. People don’t want to believe in chance, want to believe that good things happen to those who deserve them, that there is a “reason” for a survival (other than a reason involving a chance sequence of events or spatial relationships), and that if they, I suppose, were involved in such a disaster then they would be the ones walking out of the cloud of smoke, the wall of water. If only they knew what the secret was. And there will be plenty of people to tell them – money up front.

The constant reiteration of the “miracle survival” nonsense by television reporters encourages this sort of irrational thinking and comes full circle when they almost always, as the punch line to the survivor story, say to them “You should buy a lottery ticket”, taking the failure of logic full circle. The suggestion, of course is that having walked away from a plane crash the person has been blessed with good luck, and that while the “effect” lasts the person should take advantage of the residual glow of good vibrations and have them influence the way that lottery balls tumble, chaotically, randomly, in a big glass ball, in order to create a sequence of numbers that match, miraculously, with those on a piece of paper that the lucky person has bought. Does the reporter really believe this? Does the audience?

The alternative narrative is that some people are subject to “bad luck”, or, in the religious narrative, have behaved or believed (or failed to believe) in such a way that they will be magically propelled into path of speeding car or train, will be crushed by landslide, eaten by shark, have a roof tile land on their head, catch, at the last moment (perhaps by an exchange of places with another, lucky, person), a plane that then crashes. In these cases the event is deemed to be so rare that being killed by it must have a cause, an explanation, people “doomed” by some unexplained mechanism of heavenly forces. But all such events become possible given 7 billion people on a planet as small as ours. And all of these bad luck narratives, the “what were the chances” scenario, depend on a misunderstanding of the nature of chance. What are the chances that “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” so that Humphrey and Ingrid meet? Pretty good actually. I mean if you multiplied the number of gin joints by the number of people in the world at the time (3 billion?) the odds look astronomical. But only because Rick has decided after the event which has already taken place that this was a significant meeting. If you were to ask what is the chance of any man and any woman meeting in a gin joint somewhere the odds are, well, 100%, any night of the week. Since Rick was in the bar every night, it was the most popular bar in Casablanca, and there were few American women in the city, the chances of the lovely Ms Bergman walking into his gin joint were also very very good.

So there are many things that people, with the guidance of the media and religious leaders, think are not chance events which are in fact sheer chance. On the other hand people think some things are chance which are not. The creationists among us are constantly asking how you can “assemble a 747″ by chance in a “junkyard”, how “random mutations” could give rise to human beings from “primordial ooze”. But evolution works much as Bergman found Bogart, the odds aren’t some multiplication of the remote chances of single events with those of other single events, but a gradual refinement over time. Imagine that in Rick’s bar gambling was going on (you’d be shocked, shocked, I know). And they were playing a kind of poker in which each player kept one good card and discarded four and picked up a new four, and then kept the best of those and discarded three, and picked up three new ones and so on. You would eventually finish up with some very good hands, all round the table. Small chance on any one card, but chances improved as you discard and pick up, discard and pick up.

Drive by shootings are presented by the media as if they are totally random events, that at any moment your house, chosen at random by gangsters, will be peppered with bullets. What are the odds? Number of houses in Sydney, say, divided into the number of shootings? But rarely, it turns out, is the shooting actually random as distinct from being aimed at a rival bike gang, rival drug dealer, loan defaulter, love triangle rival. Not random, targeted. Chances of a small number of people being shot at, very high; chances of the rest of Sydney houses getting bullets through their front wall, virtually nil. Shark attacks, same treatment in media, reality that the number of attacks is tiny, the great bulk of them not “attacks” but accidents, and the result of risky behaviour by the swimmer or surfer, not random moments of doom.

When there are stories of unethical behaviour by a corporation – declaring bankruptcy with no money left for worker’s entitlements; dumping pollutants into a creek; moving overseas to evade tax; selling goods known to be harmful; funding political parties to obtain favourable treatment; sacking workers and outsourcing overseas; cutting prices to farmers – they are always treated as if these are singular events, a bad apple, no historical context, no implications for regulation or political action. In fact such behaviour is not random but is a direct consequence of laissez faire unregulated capitalism as practised in the last 20 years or so.

Finally climate is portrayed by deniers as being just a sequence of random fluctuations with no meaning or implication for action now or disaster in the future. The reality is that the ever rising trend line of temperatures, and the ever increasing consequences seen in melting ice, acidifying oceans, moving species, is what tells us we are in trouble.

James Randi said “To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage”. Takes a lot of courage actually, more than politicians or religious leaders possess. Now, if only we could give the media courage to call random events for what they are and talk about the causes of non-random events. They have been getting this precisely back to front.