Tag Archives: Evolution

Blowing in the wind

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

Science, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, these days, it seems.

If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that’s just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500 years, was as the one aspect of human endeavor that constantly advanced, constantly improved, built on previous work, earlier understanding, didn’t take a backward step. Each scientist stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said.

Up until the Renaissance humans had taken one step forward and two steps back in their understanding of the world around them. Some glimmering of understanding about the nature of the real world would be smashed down again by religion or war or cynical politicians or charlatans. But once the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, modified hypothesis, became established by people focussed on investigating the real world instead of accepting the imaginary world of wishful thinking, the human race never looked back. Or not for long anyway.

The age and structure of the universe was established; the form and relationships of different chemical elements; the development of life on earth (and the place of Homo sapiens in that development); the history and geology and climatology of the Earth; the anatomy and physiology and psychology of the human (and other animals) body. All of this was a long way from superstition, and folk medicine, and mythology, and religion, and the last vestiges of those early and primitive beliefs were gradually being swept away as the twentieth century came to an end. At last the human race was on the move into the twenty first century, after 500 years of steady advance, with a clear vision of reality unencumbered by the past detritus of failed human beliefs.

A scary prospect, it seems, for some people. Couldn’t be allowed to happen. And suddenly all the junk thought from past millenia (with some additions) was back in the mix, spurred on by politicians and religious leaders and the media. Suddenly there were miracles, and magic remedies (homeopathy just the most egregious), and prayer, and creationism, climate change denialism, belief in ghosts and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, and mysterious forces, and supernatural beings, and faith healing, and magnets and crystals, and human domination over nature, and witches, and spirituality, all flooding back into human society and culture like an oil leak flooding into the Gulf. Just as poisonous to the human condition as oil is to seabirds.

Need a big clean up effort, both of them. Need decent science education in schools again, free of the baneful influence of religious followers. And we need a media that again accepts the scientific method and its findings, and refuses to give air time or column inches or internet bandwidth to charlatans, and religious leaders, and the deliberate deceptions of the anti-science self-proclaimed mystics and healers, and the no-nothingism of those determined to let the corporations destroy the planet. Big task to clear all this rubbish out, but once it is gone science can again get on with the task of illuminating the real world. And after the damage that has been done by the charlatans and con men and crooks in the last few years we have lost time to make up, urgently. The answers have been blowing in the wind of nonsense and lies for a decade now.

You with me?

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Wind meet whirlwind

by Environment, Evolution • Tags: , ,

Much confusion in the media about the remarkable Craig Venter achievement of inserting laboratory-made DNA into a bacterial cell and telling it to go forth and multiply, which it did. All sorts of nonsense on one hand about how if Craig could intelligently design life so could god, and on the other that if Craig could create life it proved god didn’t. Also much nonsense about small bacteria growing into large Frankenstein monsters and grabbing nubile women off the Empire State building. On the other hand, I’m afraid, some misunderstanding from the good guys about how there was absolutely nothing to worry about here, just a tabloid beat up, what could possibly go wrong with new life forms artificially created in a commercial laboratory. And on yet another hand (it’s a many-handed monster), much nonsense about how a Brave New World was about to dawn where instead of waiting for robots created by Japanese electronic firms we could grow them in a test tube to do whatever humans wanted them to up to and including removing all the oil from the Gulf, ending world hunger, and stopping global warming. What are we to believe?

Well the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that primordial soup. The achievement has nothing to do with the origin of life (creating life now is considerably different to the origins of life 4 billion years ago), not is it relevant to intelligent design (but nor is anything else). It has some relevance to how we view life – life is just a bunch of chemical reactions, but we knew that already. And really, a wonderful new world isn’t coming (at least from this cause), the claims are as baseless as the similar ones for nuclear power and GM organisms and geoengineering and prescribed burning of forests. And no, a disastrous new world isn’t coming (at least from this cause), the Empire State building is safe from mutant monsters for a little longer.

But nor is everything as rosy as some of the all-knowledge-is-good, science-can-do-no-wrong, yaysayers for every scientific breakthrough. Trouble is, Craig Venter isn’t Charles Darwin. Organisms in nature have genes, and combinations of genes, honed into fitness by the white hot heat of natural selection. What is more, we forget, sometimes, what Alfred Wallace knew, that selection takes place not one species at a time in a kind of natural test tube – too hot, too cold, ah just right – but within ecosystems. Within enormously complex sets of organisms that have to inter-relate just so or the whole house of straw will come tumbling down, each species being vital for the whole structure.

We can’t predict how an individual organism will fit into an ecosystem, how it will affect the running of that complicated machinery. We do know, from examples all over the world, that introducing species into new habitats which they did not evolve in is a process assured of disaster. Australia is rife with examples – rabbits, foxes, rats, mice, cane toads, starlings, sparrows, mynahs, carp, thistles, serrated tussock, each bringing its set of disastrous consequences – but every continent has seen similar misguided or accidental introductions. These introduced species bring no natural predators or diseases, and other species have not evolved into niches that allow for their presence.

So the idea that an invented species, alien to all environments, can be casually introduced in large numbers to, say, clean up an oil spill, or produce oil, without any unintended consequences, flies in the face of hundreds of years of experiments. Furthermore, once released, whatever is said in advance about the organism being designed for only one purpose and being unable to thrive in the wild, doesn’t carry any guarantees with it. Much the same was said of the cane toad. Once species are released from test tubes they will rapidly adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves, and it would be a brave geneticist who could predict what the end point of that process will be. Cleaning up a massive oil leak may turn out to be a doddle compared to putting genetics back in a bottle, getting rid of billions of organisms infesting a Gulf.

And there is still more to set the mind worrying. We know from the initial careless releases of genetically modified organisms that genes don’t stay neatly within their skins. Genes can leak out into related organisms. An obvious example is inserting genes for herbicide resistance into a crop, only to find that the gene can be picked up by weed species which, as a consequence, can no longer be killed with herbicide. Whatever chunks of DNA are carefully inserted into a bacterium to do some job apparently important for mankind may well leak out into other organisms who are not mankind’s friends. A similar process in geopolitics is called blowback, where funding the Taliban to beat the Russians results, twenty years later, in terrorists targeting you.

Look I think this is a great achievement. Along with cloning and stem cell work, creating artificial organisms is going to lead to huge advances in our understanding of how genes work in the body. But the hubris of thinking we know enough about ecology to start improving on natural selection has already got us into trouble, and could get us into a lot more.

Cross-posted at Huffington Post.

The lights are on, but nobody’s home

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by Evolution • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Easter again, and it got me thinking about holidays and celebrations in general. The United Nations alone has a list of 57 "days" (special days to do with women's rights, racism, water, press freedom, families, environment, refugees, population, literacy, peace, and so on), plus weeks, and months and years to emphasize some special issue. Every country also has its own set of important days. And finally, as a hangover from the Dark Ages when there were lots of "saint's days" and religious holidays ("Holy Days" of course, the only break the peasants got from lives that were nasty brutish and short), we still have some religious events on our calendar, and I'm writing this during one of them.

While UN Days sometimes get passing mention in the media, many of them seem to me to be events that could well be incorporated into our calendar of holidays, replacing, perhaps, Easter Friday and Monday. Or the Queens Birthday (one day Charles' birthday I suppose). Or Melbourne Cup Day in Victoria. Or the various state "foundation days". Fifty seven days is too many of course, but perhaps each year we could rotate half a dozen of the United Nations ones.

But there is another date that I would like to see as a permanent holiday in Australia, the 12 February. In America there is a petition to ask President Obama to establish the day as a public holiday, and I think we might do the same with Mr Rudd. Oh, 12 February – Charles Darwin's birthday (he would have been 201 this year). Why a permanent holiday for young Charles? Well to bring to the attention of the public the extraordinary attack on science that has been underway for the last few years. There are several notable areas – the climate change denial industry, the creationists with their eyes on schools, the muffling of public contributions from the universities and CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology and abuse of these organisations, the derogatory comments about science from certain politicians, the media support for all kinds of bogus nonsense about UFOs and alternative medicines, and miracles and the "paranormal", the advertising industry with its claims that face creams are "clinically proven". In Britain a science journalist has been hit with huge legal bills after being sued by chiropractors because he pointed out that their claims were not based on science, and this will undoubtedly be a tactic used more often (Tasmanian forestry is another recent case).

It all seems a long way from Yass I guess, as we all go about our day to day business. But that business has been built on science – on communications, on medicines, on agricultural advances, on meteorology, on energy, and building, and environmental protection, on safe food and water, on mineral resources. Our understanding of the world around us also contributes to our enjoyment of it, and to our intellectual development. And we really don't want our schoolchildren being stunted intellectually by being told that one particular primitive creation mythology from one small part of the world from one particular time around 3000 years ago replaces all the scientific advances of the last 2500 years in biology, geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, genetics and all the rest of the science that underpins our civilisation. Nor do we want them unaware that in their lifetimes the planet is in big trouble as the climate changes.

Conservative politicians (from both sides of politics) don't like science because it gets in the way of ideology with pesky things called facts. Big corporations don't like science because it can document the way they are ravaging the planet and might reduce their profits if it came to the notice of the public. Religious fundamentalists don't like science because it disproves that primitive creation mythology. Much of that came together the other day when a group of conservative politicians in Adelaide pretended to celebrate a "Human Achievement Day" in competition with Earth Day. The latter is an attempt, in a symbolic way, to make people more aware of climate change and the need to both conserve energy and find renewable energy sources. These politicians don't want that message getting out there, and so their HA Day involved encouraging people to use as much energy as possible. Supporters obliged. Conservatives know the symbolic importance of awareness days. ''Don't be stuck in the dark with the communists. Turn your lights on!'' their web site said.

Write to Kevin Rudd. See if we can get a Darwin Day. See if we can become a science based society living in the real world again.

Don't be stuck in the dark ages with the conservatives. Turn your minds on.

Not in Kansas

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by Atheism • Tags: , , ,

Why can't I be banned in Oklahoma? Look, I know I haven't actually been invited to give a talk there, but that's not the point.

I've tried to get banned, tried so hard – insulted the religious believers here, insulted creationists there, insulted climate change denialists another day, said that I would rather have a monkey as a grandfather than an evangelist, suggested that children be vaccinated against the disease of religion at a young age, said that believers in Noah's Ark should be forced to sail on one to Australia. How much ruder can I be? But do they pass resolutions in the Oklahoma legislature condemning me and asking that my books be burnt, my blog be wiped from the server's hard disc, my identity expunged from Huffington Post? No they don't. But they do try to ban Richard Dawkins.

Is Richard a better atheist than me? A truer unbeliever? Someone with less faith in invisible friends in the sky? Someone more convinced than I that from May 1859, the origin of the Origin of Species, it was impossible for an intelligent person to be religious? I think not. Are not all atheists evolved equally? So this must be just prejudice, and I demand my right to have my freedom of speech trampled on too.

If China can put blocks on words like freedom and Tianamin, and fundamentalists put bans on words like sex and condom, then why can't Oklahoma put a total block on words like evolution and chimpanzee and speciation and Dawkins and Horton? Just block it all from crossing the electronic border into the land of tall corn and short elephants.

My "published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory" are just as "contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma" as those of the good Professor Dawkins. So come on Oklahoma legislators, this is not the time for wimps, demand that every computer in Oklahoma has a block on The Watermelon Blog. And hurry up, or next thing you know young Oklahomans will start thinking for themselves, and then where will you be? Kansas?

Chimp business

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by Evolution • Tags: , , , ,

In this year of twin Darwin anniversaries, I find myself thinking of the great man (one of the few historical figures I would invite to a dinner party, but would he come, would he come?) even more often than in a normal year. I turn again to the Galapagos Islands, the place where, in a sense, all of the observations and ideas he had previously made on the voyage suddenly fell into place.

And I marvel again at the creationists and their stupidity which has such strong foundations in infinite ignorance. Here is a quote from a recent evolutionary thread – "I'm happy with the evolution of species within species, I'm convinced about mutation across kinds. Dog-Wolf I can cope with even if one is lupus and one canis since these words are our man-made nomenclature, Beetle-Man I find a bit too much of a leap." Leaving aside the originality of the "Beetle-Man" evolutionary link (I saw another that had Yeast-Human – whatever happened to good old primeval ooze?) this kind of sentiment erupts on every evolution post I have ever written or read. "It's all very well talking about antibiotic resistance in bacteria", someone will write, with that wonderful way they have of making a point made a million times before seem shiny and new (like Republicans and tax cuts), "but you show me where one species has ever become a different species". And they retire, having shown that Darwin fellow a thing or two about the real world.

We tend, I think, generous and empathetic to a fault, those of us on the reality-based side of the superstition curtain, to think that creationists have actually studied evolutionary theory, carefully considered it and then, having found what they believe to be one or two flaws, reluctantly and regretfully rejected it until such time as research resolves those questions. Just like the attitude of denialists to global warming.

But that sarcasm was unworthy of me, I know. Hard to resist though, when these people, whose brains scream maladaptation with every word they write, know, in fact, nothing of the evolutionary theories they are rejecting. When Darwin called his book "Origin of Species" he meant just that, an explanation of how new species came into being. His genius was to see, for the first time, that to answer this question you need to put together two apparently separate pieces of information. One everybody knew – species change over time. The second no one had previously spotted – if two populations of a species are separated geographically from each other both will continue to change over time and will eventually become so different that they will be unable to interbreed even if brought back together. This lack of reproductive potential between the two is how species are defined (they may still look very similar, and often do, a strange quirk for a "creator"), and it is important because once they can no longer breed with each other, the mutations that are accumulating in each, and the consequent natural selection processes, will continue quite independently. Each in turn can then give rise, in the right geographic circumstances, to two or more new species, and so ad infinitum.

The reason no one had spotted this obvious fact before is that on a large land mass subsequent movement of species, following their development, can obscure the fact that they were once separated (for example by the movements of glaciers, the rise and fall of sea level, the change of course of rivers, the rise of mountain ranges). What was needed was a world in microcosm, and that's what Darwin, the first naturalist to visit, found in the Galapagos group of islands. Here the development of species had occurred as populations became separated on islands too far apart for regular contact by small bird species (the famous finches). So here was a series of evolutionary events frozen in time (in a sense) and clearly visible. I have never, in the last 170 years, yet seen a creationist answer Darwin's very obvious question – why would a god go about creating a different species of finch on each island of a small group of islands? Incidentally the ability to see the process of speciation clearly in a group of islands was the reason why Alfred Wallace, working on islands in south east Asia, was also able to see how speciation worked, and went close to pipping Charles at the post.

So I suppose my question is how can creationists not be aware of this? How can they go on believing that "evolution" is merely the change within a species and not the origin of species? Do they really not know? Have they never had the wit to understand the simple proposition? Have they been deliberately misled by fundamentalist parents and teachers and preachers? Or are they refusing, dishonestly, to admit the obvious? They will grant change within a species, because changes in influenza (and other illnesses) alone make this hard to deny, but pretend that the question of separation of species has never been addressed (not just by Darwin and Wallace, but in the tens of thousands of cases of geographic speciation studied since by thousands of scientists). Because, and it is a very slippery slope indeed, once you admit that species originate in geographic separation, and then keep going their separate ways to become more or less different while maintaining clear evidence of their common origin, you have to come face to face with our Chimpanzee cousins. Once part of the same population as our ancestors but becoming separated by some chance geographic (perhaps climatic) event. And once you accept that relationship, that sense of a road not taken, can you really continue to say of the Chimpanzee "there but for the grace of god go I?" And can you really continue to talk nonsense about humans descending from beetles, or yeast, or primeval slime?

Many more attempts to reach across the curtain of superstition, bring the fundamentalists out into the light of reason, on The Watermelon Blog .

The bulldog’s bulldog

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by Evolution • Tags: , , , ,

I try, from time to time, satisfying idle  curiosity, to fathom the mind of the creationists, rather in the way that I might try to understand the thought processes of a tribe from deepest Amazon, or the art of a Pleistocene hunter.

And here is something that came to me, unbidden, as I watched a documentary on Darwin's voyage. You know how creationists always refer to "Darwinism", and ask the, to them, rhetorical question as to who would you rather believe, god or Darwin?  I had thought this was just pure ignorance, a not unreasonable guess given their total failure to understand the simplest thing about the world they live in (it evolves). But now I wonder if the problem goes even deeper than this. I wonder, and it is like confessing a murder, whether they believe that had Darwin never lived, never voyaged on the Beagle, that the people of the world would have gone on, happily, accepting the truth of the biblical accounts of Genesis?

The Catholic Church, similarly perturbed by Galileo, forced him to recant his belief in the anti-biblical heliocentrism of this particular solar system. The Pope of the day and his cardinals seem to have thought that they need only silence this fool who, asked whether he would rather believe his own eyes or the bible, chose, temporarily, his eyes, that the Sun would keep happily circling the Earth as it had done for the preceding 6000 years or so.

Educationally challenged evangelicals seem similarly to believe that Darwinism was simply a quirk in the eye of the man who Lincoln must have been proud to share a birthday with, and that, if silenced, species would go back to being placed in position by divine intervention, as they had always been before 1859.

But in one sense Darwin was just (!) the right man in the right places at the right time. Had he not discovered the mechanisms by which species both changed over time and separated from each other then someone else would have done so. Either sooner (Alfred Wallace was so close that he pushed Darwin into publication), or a little later (could Huxley have failed to come up with the process if he was not needed as Darwin's bulldog, might he have needed his own bulldog?). It might have taken a bit more time to see the full sweep that Darwin's genius (not "just" anything) saw, but there were hundred of biologists playing around with ideas who would have recognised the truth within a few years of 1859. Great men speed up the recognition of great truths, but they don't create the truths. The world is there, in all its complexity and beauty, whether we accept it or not. A tree falls in the forest whether or not it is observed.

You want to keep believing in the Sun circling the Earth, or creationism, go right ahead, but your belief system, in this as in all else, exists in a parallel universe to the real one. And that would be true whether I had discovered it or not.

On The Watermelon Blog we try to keep evolving whether anyone notices or not.

Before Lincoln

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by Evolution • Tags: , ,

I picture one of Obama's staff as a kind of ye olde town crier, with one of those ancient rolled up scrolls, a huge one, which is slowly unrolling across the floor as he reads out item after item from a list headed "Bad things done by the Bush administration that must be reversed, and good things not done by the Bush administration that must be done urgently", and after he reads out each item Barack Obama scribbles a note and hands it to another aide who rushes out of the Oval Office to take action.

Look I know it is a very big scroll, and there are so many urgent things on it that I bet Mr Obama already thinks he should legislate to double the number of hours in a day. And I bet he is getting constant buzzes on his Blackberry from people wanting their own pet item moved up to the top of the list. So I hesitate to make a special plea for mine, and anyway, for some unaccountable reason, I don't appear to be on the list of people who get issued with his Blackberry number.

But, just in case he is dropping in to check out my posts from time to time after hearing I had compared his gang to the gang from Wind in the Willows, here goes. I'd like him to sign an Executive Order forbidding the teaching of creationism (aka "Intelligent Design") in any American educational institutions. Look I know the people who have been teaching this ancient mythology are slow thinkers and have needed time to adjust. But the President could point out that this year marks the end of a changeover period of 150 years since the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and 150 years is enough of a phase in time for even the slowest of thinkers among our fundamentalist brethren. He could also point out, as an admirer of Lincoln, that it has not been possible for an intelligent person to believe in creationism since a year and a half before Lincoln's inauguration. So enough is enough, time to move on.

Does it matter? Of course it matters. As a result of both shilly shallying, and active encouragement, from the conservatives, the number of Americans who don't understand evolution is growing in the 21st century. The fundamental basis of all the biological sciences is not accepted by large chunks of the population. Children are being taught that ancient middle eastern mythology has equal, if not greater weight, than the scientific studies of the last 150 years. Their understanding of the world around them, at a time of growing devastation of the biosphere, is hopelessly corrupted. No chance of encouraging conservation, or of fighting global warming, if large parts of the population think that god created the world in 6 days 6000 years ago.

And finally, I'm sure you are a man of your word, and when you said "We will restore science to its rightful place", you meant it. Hard to think of an action both symbolic and practical that would more clearly confirm your intention than of clearing out the ancient rubbish of creationism from American education. And would be another way of leading the world, since under Mr Bush's watch the insidious mental disease of creationism has been creeping into schools around the world.

Oh, and if you want some background reading Mr President, you will find plenty more on The Watermelon Blog to justify this bold and enlightened and courageous move. But (spoiler alert) you will find I am occasionally rude about creationists. You could be more gentle if you want to keep reaching out to these people even more than you have done by having Rick Warren at your party.

Oh, almost forgot, good work so far Mr President, an A+ I reckon on your first week's assignments. Keep up the good work.

And then god said, Let there … oh, you already have life

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by Evolution • Tags: , ,

It has been a failure of all us atheistical Darwinists intent on dragging the world, kicking and screaming, into the 1860s, and out of the clutches of the religion-be-deviled proudly ignorant dark-age-living creationists. A failure of nerve or conviction perhaps, a kind of naive apolitical strictly scientific honest-to-a-fault response to people who have been made brain dead by one of the most ruthless and dishonest brain-washing operations ever seen.

You will all be familiar with the sequence, indeed it is the kind of ritualised blog ballet that has developed over a whole range of questions in the last few years (climate change and Iraq being just two of the other most obvious). One of us who regularly writes about evolution will mention some new fossil discovery, or explain a particular aspect of evolution, or a new hypothesis about some evolutionary mechanism, or some outrage about teaching children creationism instead of science, or will simply pour scorn on some ignorant man with staring eyes and odd sexual tastes who loves guns and war and hates gays and who is ranting that the problem with the world today is Darwinism. We will calmly and rationally outline the scientific proposition, and then at some point a poster will say, well, it's all very well talking about how viruses mutate, or bird beaks in the Galapagos, but you have to admit that evolution has nothing to say about the ORIGIN OF LIFE.

Now at this point I tend to be very rude. Many years since I have suffered fools gladly (well, to be honest I have never suffered fools gladly, but I used to be a lot more patient than I am now). But many of my colleagues on the creationbusters team do tend to be polite, and they will metaphorically shuffle their feet at this point and write a response along the lines of, "yes, you are quite right, evolutionary theory doesn't address the origins of life, just everything that has happened since". And then, in a gotcha moment equivalent to the response Hannity might make to Obama saying "yes, yes, I am a socialist", the fundamentalist fool at the keyboard will say that this means god created life. And, as the first night follows the first day, if god created life, it logically follows that he could have chosen to create man as a separate event, and for other species could have been dabbling in DNA ever since.

No, I don't know why they do it. Well, some of it is the natural politeness which us Darwinists have evolved as a defense mechanism against idiots. But the rest of it I think is a case of not understanding the rough beast we are up against. It is a kind of scientific good manners, in which those of us who work on say reptile evolution, or demonstrating that chimpanzees are the closest thing we have to a living long lost brother, defer questions about origins to those who actually look at ancient rocks, or investigate exobiology, or who carry out experiments in abiogenesis and so on. That is their field, and if they want to write about it they can, but those of us in other biological specialities would be treading on toes if we tried to comment.

I guess in practical terms there is some kind of division between those who work on origins and those of us who study the fact of evolution that followed, but there is no theoretical division at all. Natural selection works just as well on non-biological materials as on living organisms. In fact I would argue that you couldn't evolve life without the process of natural selection operating to gradually favor collections of chemicals with a structure that could survive more than a short time, and then favor the structures that could reproduce themselves. The point at which this process produces things we might call "life" is a matter for academic debate, but is irrelevant to the reality of the process. Structures that last longer than other structures will become more numerous, structures which can reproduce themselves will become more numerous than those that can't. It is impossible to visualize life emerging without a process of natural selection to act as midwife. And that truism, incidentally, means that any planet that has water could potentially produce, could potentially have produced, life. It need not necessarily have done so, many a slip twixt the complex chemical and the primeval slime, but the chances are that not just all over the universe, but even just all over the galaxy, there are creatures who have their own Darwins replacing primitive mythologies about their origins.

So no more Mr Nice Biologist – natural selection doesn't just help life evolve, it creates life in the first place. Not to insist on that, at every possible opportunity, would have been like Killer Kowalski letting his opponents up from the mat, dusting them down, and giving them a free shot at him. Life evolved on this planet by a mechanism that is simply a tautology, and the planet having burst into life, its subsequent history was a matter of carefully refining its characteristics by that same tautology, and multiplying its forms by geographic separation. There is no mystery here, no outstretched finger breathing life, nothing to puzzle over except the minor details of when and where and precisely how the chemicals changed from inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry. Life evolved. In both senses of that term.

My post suggesting a vaccine against religion, to be used on children, was picked up by blogs all over the world, and visitors came flooding in to see what other rude things were said about religion on the Watermelon Blog. Now they can check out all the other rude things I say about creationists too.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here