Tag Archives: Evolution

To be hanged with the bible

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

When the bible was written humans* didn’t know:
About bacteria and viruses and parasites
Blood circulation
Earth going around sun
More than 5 planets
About galaxies
There was a southern hemisphere
Earth round
What lightning is
That whales aren’t fish
What mental illness involves
About genes and inheritance
About Chinese, Aztecs, Zulus, Aborigines, Navaho, Japanese, Papuans, Bushmen, Mayans, Eskimo, Indonesians, West Africans, Britons
Composition of matter
Any history
Composition of moon
About fossils
There was a western hemisphere
The age of the Earth
About the great apes
About continental drift
About kangaroos, lemurs, opossums, emus, iguanas, alpacas, platypus, kiwi, gila lizards, sloths, tree frogs, humming birds, horseshoe crabs, peripatus, tasmanian tigers, rhinoceros

When bible written humans had never:
Flown
Travelled faster than a horse can run
Communicated except by speaking directly
Elected a government
Swum under the ocean
Read books
Looked through a telescope
Looked through a microscope
Warmed themselves by anything except wood fires
Been cured by antibiotics
Had a surgical operation
Seen a hospital, school or factory
Seen a town of more than few thousand people

When bible written humans were happy about:
Slavery
Women as chattels
Divine kings
Child marriage
War
Destruction of environment
Gods living on mountains
Child labour
Torture
Human sacrifice
Ghosts
Magic

And yet there are people in 2012 who believe everything written in the bible. There are people who use it to determine who to vote for, where to send their children to school, how they feel about burning environmental and social and economic and cultural issues. And if that wasn’t bad enough, incredible enough, we can’t just smile wisely and say “there there, one day you will grow up” as we might to a child who tries to live their life by, say, the Harry Potter books, because there are people who want to insist that the rest of the world obey these silly old books as well. There are people making all kinds of pronouncements about the environment, about bringing up children, about justice, about science, about art and literature, based not on some independent and rational analysis of an issue, but on what they think is said in the bible about it. And in turn appearing in the media, influencing politicians about it, indeed running for political office themselves. Some countries, notably Iran, Saudi Arabia, and America, are now theocracies run by people who know nothing except what someone has told them an old book says.

Angry? You betcha. The modern world is difficult enough, will become more difficult in the future, without the drag on political life from people living in the past. Can’t laugh at these people any more, this is serious.

*By “humans” in what follows I sometimes mean “the whole human race” and sometimes “the humans who wrote the bits and pieces of old manuscript that got collected together and called ‘the bible’”, which is which will be obvious and not of much importance anyway.

Kissing Cousins

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by Evolution • Tags: , , , ,

[Note this was written to follow on from discussions which began in comments on post "When you wish" below and continued into those of "Extraordinary". One of my most regular commenters on this blog, Eric, is trying to understand evolution. I, we, are trying to help him. This post arose from Eric's comment that "I don’t get the 'every generation' being a transition between the species at all." So, Eric, let's try it like this.*]

I don’t know if you are interested in your family history, but let’s assume you are. And let’s assume that you know all your ancestors, way way back (will come to how way back soon). And let’s imagine that not only do you have photographs of your ancestors going back 150 years (when the camera was actually invented) but there was a previously unknown mechanism which enabled photos of all your ancestors going way way back.

So you start to arrange the photos on your table. Parents first, then grandparents, great grandparents and so on, back through the generations. And let’s assume (last assumption, promise) that you have not only told your immediate family what you are doing, but have told your more distant family of cousins etc, your community, and, through the internet, the whole world.

OK, with me? Right. You are putting your great grandparent’s photos on the table, your children remarking how much you look like them and you not being sure if it is a compliment, when in walks your second cousin and says, hey, they are my great grandparents. You chat for a while and keep working. Down go the photos generation after generation.

Back to six generations and a previously unknown cousin from Germany drops in and points out you share a great great great great great grandparent. He still lives in the same village your ancestors migrated to America from (I have a real example of that, a sixth cousin living just a few miles from the village in England my six times removed grandparents lived in).

I don’t really know your background so I will switch to me now. I keep adding more and more generations (roughly 4 per hundred years). Back a thousand years. All those people, all 45 generations look much like me – variation in hair colour here, different height there, shorter nose over this way – all residents of the English Midlands.

About a thousand years ago a bit of a change – more men and women seem to be of strapping solid build with red or yellow hair. Just as I am putting their photos out, trying to keep track of which generations I am up to, there is a knock at the door and a couple of strapping red haired gentlemen tell me that I have just identified some common ancestors of their’s which means I now have Danish and Saxon distant cousins.

Another 500 years back and a knock at the door tells me those dark haired olive skin ancestors are the reason I have Italian cousins. And so on, back thousands of years. Little differences between generations, but all recognisably the same group. Tens of thousands of years, still the same, and if you put any of them in modern clothes they could drink in my local bar unnoticed.

Oh there are changes, as you [that is me, "I" became awkward!] realise when you look back to your recent ancestors, and when you hear knocks on the door from people from Germany, Hungary, Turkey. But still, generation to generation, no obvious change. And then as more tens of thousands of years tick over you get vists from Australian Aborigines, Asians, South Americans, and finally Africans. Still no obvious change from generation to generation, but your ancestors are now recognisably different – shorter in stature, with curly hair and darker skin – from those ten or twenty thousand years later or those today. You realise if you put the photos in a bundle and flicked them like those old children’s moving picture books, you would see a gradual change over time to the present day.

And still you go back, ancestor after ancestor. You’ve lost all sense of time. What is it, a million years maybe, gosh, that’s, um, 2500 generations. Curious, you hadn’t noticed change, but these G G G G …. Grandfathers of yours are much heavier built, more muscly, bigger jaws, bigger brow ridges. Other cousins drop by from Indonesia, far east Russia. Similar but a bit different again.

And still we go on, another 2500 generations and another. Is it your imagination or do these ancestors seem shorter, darker, more, well, hairy? No it’s not. You look along the table, can’t see the change, until you jump forward a couple of million years (big table this) and compare. And then you get a phone call from zoo, chimpanzee there wants to tell you that you and he are 10,000th cousins, sharing a 9999 great grandparent. Seems odd, he looks quite different to you when you arrive at the zoo, but on a table he has arranged all his ancesors going back same number of generations as yours. You look at his photos and notice the same pattern. The later ones all look just like him, “typical chimpanzees”, but as you get further back you notice small changes – slightly shorter arms perhaps, jaws a little larger, hair colour a little different, slightly more upright. He points at another slightly different looking chimpanzee, and you discover that when your friend got back to about a million years ago he got a visit from a Bonobo chimp who said he was his long lost cousin, just like the calls you had along the way. By the time you look at his ancestors and yours from about, say, 9000 generations ago, there’s not much difference at all, and when you get back to the shared ancestor they are of course identical.

Seeing that you are a bit puzzled your Chimpanzee cousin points at you and points at the ground, then points at himself and then at a tree outside. Light dawns – your common 9999 great grandparents were mainly ground dwellers, but around 4 million years ago his direct ancestors were in a group that became separated from yours, and while your ancestors adapted more and more strongly to ground living, his were in an area where tree living was all the go. Adaptation proceeded in the two directions in different parts of Africa, and by the time conditions changed and the two groups were in contact again they had become different enough not to interbreed.

You go home, pleased to have discovered more long lost cousins, and keep working through your photos. Back to 7 million years, 17500 generations and another zoo call, this time the gorilla wants to say hullo to his cousin. Same thing. A line of photos on a table, call from a distant gorilla cousin (separated in east Africa), not much change from one photo to next, but change over longer time. Seems quite different to Humans and Chimps initially, but doesn’t look that much different to the common human-chimp grandparent perhaps 5 million years ago, and as you get further and further back they converge in appearance (and genetics of course) until they look more and more like a kind of generalised ape – Australopithecus (again with various cousins).

And… Well, you get the idea. You can continue generation after generation through the other apes, then back through the early mammals, the reptiles, the amphibians and so on. Not much evident change from one generation to next but over immense time substantial change. No modern species the direct ancestor of any other modern species, just like your cousins are not your grandparents, but all are cousins to some degree.

There you are Eric, evolution over four billion years in a short post – gradual adaptive change, and equally importantly, geographic separation of different populations forming new species. What a wonderful world that has such potential in it.

* I’d love to claim the credit for this idea of how to present evolutionary change, but saw it (in the marvelous illustrations by Dave McKean) and read it originally in Richard Dawkins 2011 “The Magic of Reality” Random House, London. However I have added the calls from cousins, and the zoo, as my own piece of originality.

When you wish

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

Once upon a time the question about life elsewhere in the universe was complicated by lack of basic information. From the time we knew that we lived in a galaxy and there were 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and that there were 200 billion other galaxies (so that’s, um, 80,000 billion billion stars as far as the telescope eye can see), it seemed likely that there would be many possibilities of life elsewhere.

But the unknown part of the equation was the number of stars which had planets. Then, recently, we began finding planets around other stars, but they were all uninhabitable gas giants, like our Jupiter and Saturn. Then smaller planets began to be seen as observations improved. Then smaller planets at right distance (the Goldilocks Zone – not too hot, not too cold) from stars. Now calculations show that on average every star has one or more planets. Billions of billions of stars – billions of billions of planets.

So now, almost overnight it seems, we know there are essentially infinite numbers of planets. What percentage could life have evolved on? Half? Quarter? Even if only 1% had the kinds of conditions that enabled life to emerge here we are still talking billions of occupied planets. And once you have life the Darwinian equations – variation + selection = adaptation; adaptation + isolation = evolution – mean that all kinds of interesting organisms are out there. Chances of high intelligence evolving? Very good, it has evolved many different times here.

It’s all just a matter of very high numbers and chance. Always was, but we didn’t know how high the numbers were before. Now we do there is no question but that there is a lot of life out there, and a lot of intelligent beings.

So, where are they? Well, a long way away. And unless physics is a lot odder than we think there aren’t going to be student exchanges or tourism between here and there and right over there. Certainly not before the dominant intelligent people here wreck this habitable planet (a long long way from the next one) by being unable to control their own CO2 emissions. I’m guessing there are other beings in the universe (Dolphin beings, or Octopus beings, or Crow beings, or Pig beings) who consider getting CO2 levels down as a definition of intelligence.

But hey – looking up at all the stars and thinking it’s a big lonely universe? So 2011. Now look up and picture all shapes and sizes of intelligent beings looking back at you from all directions. There, that feels better doesn’t it? But I wish there was more intelligence here too.

Sure and certain knowledge

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

It’s an odd little misunderstanding, just a minor difference in the way of looking at the world, but it has played a disproportionately huge part in making seven billion people content to allow a few energy companies turn off the world’s support systems and let them all die.

So, what is it, this misunderstanding that has the people who know what’s happening talking past the people who need to know what’s happening? Well it is just a different use of words like certainty and probability – a scientific use and a common use.

The general public thinks that things for which they have little or no evidence, just anecdote or faith, are certainties. Scientists think that nothing is certain, that all we have is the probability that something is true based on amount of evidence.

The public will use all kinds of language based on nothing but gut feeling and personal ideology to express their belief that something is true “exactly right” “certainly true” “absolutely no doubt” “no doubt” “probably” “possibly” “don’t think so” “nah, don’t believe that” “c’mon, pull the other one, that one has bells on it”.

Scientists, recognising that the presence or absence of bells is a bit hard to define precisely have by contrast developed an exact measurement for the likelihood of truth based on assessment of number of observations. It is a mathematical concept in which you can approach (by repeating an experiment over and over) more and more closely to 100% certainty but never quite reach it. For practical purposes though a probability somewhere in the 90% plus level is thought of as being a pretty sure thing (although it depends on the discipline and particular kind of experiment, physics for example demands much higher certainty than, say, the social sciences).

As well as the mathematical component though, the idea of scientific probability represents the scientific mindset – no result can be certain because the very next experiment may overturn it in whole or in part. If a writer is only as good as his last novel, then a scientific theory is, in a sense, only as good as its last experiment.

For the public though lots of things are certain, have to be otherwise you wouldn’t get up in the morning. These certainties are based on religion, ideology, common sense, authority, repetitive observations. Sun rises in East, there is a “god” or two, capitalism is the end of history, some people have psychic powers, the Liberal Party is there for the battlers, vitamin C cures colds. Then there are uncertainties where the outcome is merely probable – will my football team win next week, am I having a drink with friends on Friday night, are UFOs real, can acupuncture cure cancer, is Kevin Rudd challenging for leadership or is it a media invention.

So, the stage is set. When scientists are asked about climate change in general or particular aspects of it, they reply, as good scientists do “well there is a high probability that X is the case”. When asked “are you certain?” they reply “well, no nothing in science is ‘certain’”. They mean by this that certainty can never, mathematically, reach 100%, and they are obliged to repeat this fundamental tenet of science endlessly, thinking to themselves “well, of course there is no such thing as 100% certainty in science, don’t these idiots know anything?” Or they formalise this the way the IPCC does, saying that the chances of Y event happening in Z time have a probability of “90%” or “95%”.

Now in both cases the scientists are also thinking, and assuming the listeners are familiar with the concept, that for all practical purposes the projected outcome is certain. Will almost certainly in fact (because the scientists are sick of being called alarmist) be much more likely than the probability being quoted which will have been deliberately set on the low side.

The scientist leans back and relaxes at this point, happy in the conviction that he has merely restated the bleeding obvious about the scientific method and that everyone will totally understand what he means – and get on with saving the planet which he knows with absolute certainty is under its greatest threat in millions of years.

The listener or reader however, Joe Public, hears something quite different. They hear that things aren’t certain, just probable, and they interpret the “probable” as their own version of that prediction. Climate change becomes, in their own minds, no more likely than, say, the reality of UFOs. And you wouldn’t want to spend billions of dollars defending against UFOs now, would you.

This continues on to the details. Is this particular massive storm; record-breaking drought; record high temperature; record flood, the result of climate change? “Oh, we couldn’t say that with certainty”, says the scientist. Joe Public hears this as “No”.

Now while the scientists are maintaining scientific purity on the questions of certainty and probability, there are people, with vested interests in the short-term outcome (we all have a vested interest in the long term outcome, but most of us don’t know that), who have absolutely no scruples in pretending that scientific “uncertainty” is real uncertainty and therefore no one would want to do anything when everything is uncertain. So they add in bits and pieces of questions and comments on the siting of thermometers, melting of glaciers, troposphere temperatures, mediaeval warming periods, the north west passage, deep sea temperatures, climate sensitivity, snowfall in Chicago, cosmic rays and the like. None of them mean anything much in themselves, none of them have the slightest relevance in general to the overall pattern of rising CO2 levels causing global warming and consequent climate change.

The scientific community, realising (in some cases very belatedly) the con trick being played on them and on the community at large, and seeing the consequent failure of politicians to take any meaningful action to pull back on CO2 production, have at last begun to fight back a little. Oh they still talk about uncertainty and probability, but a few brave souls have begun to say “the science is settled”.

To see what they mean by this it is worth exploring an analogy. The theory that explains how evolution occurs (involving variation, natural selection, and geographic isolation) was extensively debated in the years after 1859 (when it had been simultaneously proposed by Darwin and Wallace after they arrived at it from different data). Some scientists (like Thomas Huxley “why didn’t I think of that”) instantly recognised its validity. Others were more cautious, looking for contradictions, wondering about mechanisms for the variation (in the years before either genes or DNA were discovered), debating the religious implications and so on. But over the next few decades the science became settled. That is the truth of the theory was clear, and now research was mopping up the details (again genes and DNA in particular) relating to the exact mechanisms. And also investigating both the comparisons and relationships between living species and their fossil records with new eyes that greatly fleshed out the actual path that the evolution of living organisms had taken on this planet.

The science of evolution is settled. There remain arguments over details of particular evolutionary sequences, whether there are other speciation mechanisms apart from the dominant allopatric one, exactly how genes interact during development and so on. But the science is settled and forms the basis, directly or indirectly, of all the sciences to do with life on the planet, and conversely is supported by all the other sciences (notably geology, chemistry, physics). Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by religion, who purport to believe that there is evidence for god in bacterial flagellae. But their argument (that some feature is too complex to have evolved) was one that Darwin was familiar with, and has been demolished thousands of times in the subsequent 150 years. It is amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by religion.

In exactly the same way the science of climate change is settled. The fundamental elements (Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, sun activity, geography) have been known for decades (in the case of greenhouse gas not much less than evolution). The science forms the basis for all the other sciences to do with the surface and atmosphere of this planet, and in turn is supported by all the other relevant sciences. Scientists argue over details of exact time frames, precisely how some mechanisms interact, likely impacts on ecology, historical sequences, and so on, but none of that has any effect on the fundamental science. Oh there are one or two scientists, brains addled by libertarian and neocon ideology, who purport to believe that climate sensitivity is a bit lower, or that clouds are going to roll in to our rescue, or that there is nothing new in the astonishing warming of the planet over the last 3 decades, but their arguments have been demolished thousands of times. Amazing how otherwise apparently smart people can have their brains addled by libertarian and neoconservative nonsense.

Look I am a scientist, OK? I understand the need to maintain the fundamental core of the scientific process, that nothing is ever 100% certain. I get that, ok? And I know that scientists are naturally shy and reticent (me too) and reluctant to involve themselves in public slanging matches and political debates, wanting to remain pure and above all that. But listen, this is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the planet. Cast aside your Clark Kent clothes in a handy phone box. Start speaking out. There will be death threats. The last thing the ideologues and the energy companies want is for scientists to discover they have a voice – they have already been trying to discredit science as a whole in case you ever did start to speak out, but you are still just in time if you hurry. Make it clear that the science is, sadly, settled, the data in, the planet in really big trouble. You wouldn’t say “oh, nothing certain about evolution” so don’t do it about climate change. Whatever the fine details that remain to be sorted it is absolutely irrefutable that adding more and more CO to the atmosphere is warming the planet rapidly, changing the climate, buggering up the ecology, causing damaging weather events, and it is going to get so bad that we are, not to put too fine a point on it, stuffed as a species. Nothing more certain.

Say so.

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.

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.

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.