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The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Irreducible stupidity

The fundies keep coming at me - here's another one of the crowd of angry bees that descends every time I mention evolution: "You don't even address the concept of irreducible complexity. Darwin himself said that if it could be demonstrated that an organism could not have formed through small, successive changes that his theory would break down. Irreducible complexity attempts to show that certain biological machines could not have formed by small, successive changes. The bacterial flagellum is the classic example given by Behe. It would seem that you could silence the argument by giving a detailed, biological explanation for how this biological machine could have evolved through small, successive changes over long periods of time. Is there such an explanation?"

Not sure the 'bacterial flagellum' is the first classic example, thought that was originally the human eye - too easy to show all the steps in that one I guess (so easy that Darwin himself did it for interest), but it has since become one. In fact I guess you would choose examples like bacteria because of the virtual absence of the fossil record for such species - groups with good fossil records (because they have hard parts which preserve well), like vertebrates and shellfish show all too clearly the evolutionary steps for the most complex systems.

But before I have a go at the 'bacterial flagellum' (and this is not my field of expertise), let me reverse the question to all the creationists out there. Just imagine that one of your creationist gurus (I was searching for a word there, these people are not scientists, and even 'gurus' flatters them, but I don't like being rude even about such creatures of the primeval slime, oops, sorry) has finally, in triumph, managed to come up with a structure of some kind whose evolutionary origin for the time being baffles the experts on the species concerned. What do you think that would mean?

Do you imagine that god, after the long lunch that he took after sending a lightning bolt through the primeval ooze thus getting evolution started, would get back to the office and say, 'oh...my...self, I forgot about bacterial flagellae, no way they are going to get evolved through natural selection, I'd better just whip (yes, a pun) one up, then I can go and have a long dinner because everything else can get taken care of by natural selection'? Or does he pop in every so often and have a bit of a fiddle to keep his hand in so to speak? Or do you imagine that if you found one example this would mean that everything else got done by god too? But why would you think that, when natural selection was working perfectly well? I ask in all seriousness, because I have a lot of trouble understanding the minds that can believe this stuff.

Now back to flagellae. Several things the creationists forget to tell you fundies about evolution. First natural selection works on function not structure. Second a structure that is doing a particular job in one organism may not have come into being through stages in which it was doing the same job - this is perhaps the fundamental (yes, another pun) flaw in irreducible complexity. That is each stage may fill a particular function, and therefore be selected for, and then be subject to quite a different selection pressure later on to take it in a different direction. And finally, genes and structures and functions rarely have one to one correspondence - a change in one gene that is responsible for a particular protein may have effects throughout the muscular and skeletal and nervous and circulatory systems for example, and therefore produce an effect out of all proportion to the minor mutation. Conversely it is possible to occasionally get major mutations that are not lethal and cause a decided shift in function.

With all that in mind, take a look at: www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html. This is one possible solution (part of an ongoing debate - that is how science works) and introduces a whole lot of literature on the subject. It illustrates the proposition that the stages along the way can each be functional (for different functions) and unrelated to the final structure (and function). And that this, the classic case of intelligent designers, fails the test of irreducible complexity because the flagellum demonstrably contains at least one sub unit (actually more, but just one is enough to destroy the argument) which has a different function.

But there is something broader that is puzzling me about all this. Even in the bad old days of 20 years ago it was quite possible to go into a library, look up Biological Abstracts, and start finding literature relevant to the flagellum. Now, and I know this will come as a shock to many people, it is possible to use, on something called the 'internet', something called Google. A search on 'Bacteria - flagellum - evolution' brings up, in half a second, 190,000 references. The one I pulled out above is just one of the more recent ones, and a very detailed scientific look at the evolutionary pathways which were probably involved. On that very first search page we also find - http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html, a detailed 2004 scientific debunking of irreducible complexity, both in general and specifically related to the flagellum, and of intelligent design which rests on the idea of irreducible complexity. No one reading even this article (and Dr Miller is a religious man it seems, as well as an evolutionist) would have a moment's doubt that Behe and Dombski have been deliberately misleading and that there is no such thing as 'irreducible complexity' in nature.

Given that, why would a poster raise the 'flagellum question' yet again and pretend that it was an unsolved mystery? Now I am just a simple country boy, but I suspect there may be one or two cynical peple who might think that a fundy behaving in such a way might be deliberately attempting to mislead his fellow fundies. He might for example (and I shudder to be so cynical on the behalf of others) have his own blog where he would refer to my article and pretend that irreducible complexity was alive and well and rebutted what I was saying. Such a blog, aimed at uneducated and trusting fundies would be quite immoral of course, so I wouldn't suggest that anyone would behave like that. Still, the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae.
It is possible to reduce irreducible ignorance, but the leaders of the ignorant have to want that to happen.

Irreducible stupidity
evolution

24 May 2006
Category Evolution
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"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)

"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)