Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

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

Cover up that chimp

I blame creationism for everything I don't blame corporate media for in my ongoing attempts to come to terms with what is wrong with the world of the 21st Century.

But something I hadn't previously put on the creationist list was oppression of female women. Fundamentalist religious oppression of women, yes, of course, just a tautology, but here I'm focusing on the creationist and women.

If you really understood that humans, male and female humans, have equally evolved from male and female earlier humans, and they in turn equally from male and female great apes, then the idea of oppressing the female portion of Homo sapiens sapiens would strike you as both laughable and obscene, depending upon mood. But then I saw a creationist questioning the other day how the first "male dog" that evolved could have found a mate, so the depths of incomprehension are truly great.

These are people who believed that a "god" created woman, demanded that their bodies be totally covered (could have created them ready made with a covering, but hey, mysterious ways, right?) in order not to inflame the sexual desires of men which he had created to be totally uncontrollable, ready to be set off at the merest distant glimpse of female lock of hair, ankle, hand, eye (again, mysterious ways), I mean, yeah, you set out to create a sexually reproducing organism and that's the way you would do it.

But at what point in an evolutionary development from apes to humans does the need to cover up the possessors of two X chromosomes arise? And at what point in the social development from hunter-gatherers to early farmers to city states does human nature suddenly evolve from one that deals quite comfortably with near nudity (male and female) in Australia and Africa and South America to one that doesn't in the Middle East?

In Victorian times it was the Christian fashion to cover the legs of furniture with draped fabric in order not to excite the menfolk (LEGS, get it?) and I don't know how we drifted away from this very good procedure, which should certainly be reinstated, as a matter of urgency. But I would like to take it further. I think all the female great apes should be completely covered up with fabric. It will not only stop the uncontrollable impulses of the great ape males, but prevent any impure thoughts among the human males that see them.

God should have seen to this himself with an edict somewhere in the good book, but I guess he just forgot, a lot on his mind telling people not to use their god-given impulses in relation to sex and food, but to follow strict recipes in both. And equally unaccountably the fundamentalists, following so blindly the letter of the laws, have apparently not noticed the temptations of the female great apes.

So, ever helpful, I have taken it upon myself to make the suggestion. Don't thank me. Just doing my job of pointing out where creationism diverges from reality.

Everywhere.

But I converge on reality on The Watermelon Blog.

23 September 2009
Category Evolution
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Keep evolution out of schools

Look, like everyone else I have no trouble dismissing creationists as bat-shit crazy religious fundamentalists who wouldn't know a scientific fact if the ghost of Richard Feynman bit them on the backside. No trouble at all, and I am always happy to join in a little gentle poking of a stick through the bars on the megachurch windows and stirring things up a bit. But while that gives me a nice warm glow of mental superiority to go with my first cup of morning coffee, it really avoids the question of how the creationist/ID crowd find it so easy to convince these simple people that up is down, night is day.

And I guess the answer, reluctantly (as I drink my second cup of morning coffee), is that it is the fault of most of us who write about Darwinism. The mistake, the original sin, is that we have talked about species evolving when we have talked about evolution. An easy mistake to make, and you can see why we made it, but it has proved fatal.

As soon as you understand this you understand why the babble of creationists, as apparently as mindless as "speaking in tongues", is actually based on a fundamental educational failure, and a consequent fundamental misunderstanding.

The two commonest glossolallies are "where are the transitional fossils?" and "if humans evolved from apes why are apes still around?" They don't ask these questions merely to annoy (although it is a bonus), but because they genuinely think these are points to be considered. And the fact that they can ask such questions, 150 years after "The Origin of Species", 150 years of tens of thousands of biologists and paleontologists, and geologists, and chemists, and botanists studying every aspect of evolutionary theory, and after being schooled in scientifically advanced western countries, is a sign of our collective failure.

All of us, creationists and rational people alike, understand how the first organism evolved out of the primordial soup by a process of natural selection gradually producing a bundle of self-reproducing chemicals, no argument there. And it is a sign of Darwin's genius that he understood a process that could lead from inorganic chemicals to organic life forms without any need for an imaginary friend to send a lightning bolt from out-stretched finger. But it is what we say about what happens next that has left us still having to debate Robert Chambers one and a half centuries after his theories should have been buried without a vestige remaining.

If these people who start creation museums (yet another oxymoron) had as much intelligence as a neanderthal they would ask not why apes are still with us but why, if all life on Earth evolved from the very first bacterium swimming in the primordial ooze, do we still have bacteria today?

In a sense "natural selection" is the least important of Darwin's ideas. Oh sure, it's not bad, but it's so obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of it. But the far more vital part of evolutionary theory (or "Darwinism", as the evangelicals call it, if any creationists are still reading) is the idea of allopatric speciation. Never heard of it? No, and that is the problem.

Allopatric speciation is simply this - if one part of a species becomes separated by a geographic barrier (a mountain range forms, sea level rises, a desert comes into being, a river changes course, a landslide falls, a continent moves, a glacier extends), and stays separate long enough, then its members will no longer be able to breed with the other part of the population and it will therefore have become a different species.

Doesn't matter why it becomes different - just an accumulation of mutations might do the trick, hell Lamarckism would do the trick. But in fact Darwin had this one pegged - natural selection, acting on variation within the two populations, causes them to diverge. And the more different to the original environment is the place in which the second population lives, the more adaptation will occur, and the more the second species will differ from the first. And, in turn, as further changes in the land occur, these two species can in turn split, and so ad infinitum.

So this is the answer to the questions that so furrow the low brows of our primitive fundamentalist cousins. Both the original species and the separated species can (and often do) go on surviving side by side. The "human" population somehow got separated from the "chimpanzee" population, one took the high road and one took the low, but both made it all the way to 2009. Sometimes though, one or more of the subsequent species become extinct for all sorts of reasons, and if their fossils don't survive we may never know of their loss.

And astute readers (the creationists have all turned off the lights and left the building now) will have seen that this pattern of speciation makes the concept of "missing links" meaningless. You could, with a time machine, trace back through every chimpanzee generation to the chimpanzees of, say, 5 million years ago. And you could do the same with human generations. And replaying the process backwards you would see these two populations become gradually identical and then merge into one (and further back you would see that population merge with the orangutan one, and so on). There would be no gaps, no missing links, no opportunity for missing links. Play it back the two populations become one, play it forward they become two, play it as many times as you like, Sam, and the process of speciation remains the same.

And the process happens no matter how different or similar the resulting species are. Chimpanzees might well have become more bipedal more naked apes, humans might well have remained as hairier less bipedal ones. The reasons they, we, look like we do now is bound up in the climatic and geographic fluctuations of long ago Africa.

So if I was writing biology text books for use in Texas or Kentucky or Missouri schools I think I would join their education authorities in demanding that the word evolution not be mentioned. Instead I would put all of my effort into explaining speciation. Show how that original bacterium could become 2, 4, 8, 20, 30, 60 ... species. Could become, even after losing tens of thousands of species along the way, the tens of thousands of species, including humans, chimps, and bacteria, we see today. Explain about the movements of continents, and climate change, and its effects on both the origin and demise of species. You will find they will know about climate change in the past as a result of another misinformation campaign, but it will come in useful here.

And by teaching, over and over, the mind numbingly obvious process of speciation you will cut off the oxygen from the creationists who want to keep children ignorant of the origins of the astonishingly diverse plants and animals we see today. Give them the sense of grandeur in this view of life on this planet.

The Watermelon Blog, as those adapted to it know, has a certain grandeur all of its own.

16 September 2009
Category Evolution
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Not in Kansas

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 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/oklahoma-legislature-do-y_b_178022.html).

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?
"Richard Dawkins
26 March 2009
Category Evolution
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Chimp business

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.

3 March 2009
Category Evolution
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The bulldogs bulldog

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.

15 February 2009
Category Evolution
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Before Lincoln

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 http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/117653/Toad_Hall_restored.html, 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 http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/Evolution/ 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.

27 January 2009
Category Evolution
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And then god said, Let there ... oh, you already have life

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.

7 December 2008
Category Evolution
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Geology. Palinology

Sarah Palin continues to behave like one of those old computer programs which simulated the appearance of being intelligent by partly repeating the question and randomly selecting additional material to apparently "respond" to any question the computer user asked. Wouldn't pass the Turing test, our Sarah, the pre-programming is too transparent for anyone to be misled into thinking there was intelligent life on the other side of the screen.

One notable example is her belief that creationism should be taught in schools:
"Teach both. You know, don't be afraid of information. "Healthy debate is so important and it's so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both." "My dad did talk a lot about his theories of evolution," she said. "He would show us fossils and say, 'How old do you think these are?' "Asked for her personal views on evolution, Palin said, "I believe we have a creator." In her response of course Palin has simply been programmed by her various pastors, but is also following the Republican Party of Alaska platform which says, in its section on education: "We support giving Creation Science equal representation with other theories of the origin of life. If evolution is taught, it should be presented as only a theory."

Now there has been much outraged reaction to this, but all of it I have seen has been along the lines of the breech of the separation of church and state. I found an odd Palin supporter today, Debi Smith, who in an otherwise refreshing attack on Palin (for example on how she reconciles her religious beliefs with the invasion of Iraq) says "maybe there is such a thing as intelligent design AND evolution. And I might agree (though I haven't given it a ton of deliberation) that both evolution and creation could be taught. Why not? Why can't we show all sides, anyway? What exactly are we afraid of? A r-evolution of learning and ideas? Do we really need to compartmentalize learning, and our youth, by denying them the ability to debate the issue fully and openly (without undo influence or coercion from either camp)? And who knows, maybe by opening it all up, we'd evolve more quickly towards comprehending the grand theory of everything scientists are searching for (and which just might prove the existence of intelligent design and evolution)."

So this is an apparently more thoughtful version of Palin, and an appeal to reason and logic and fairness that has been the modus operandi of those evangelicals wanting to the creationism under the guise of "intelligent design". Who could argue eh? Let the two "theories" contend and let children make up their own minds ("without undo influence or coercion from either camp").

What nonsense, and based on a complete misunderstanding of how science works. Are Debi and Sarah proposing that we teach the geocentric theory of the solar system (or the universe) alongside the heliocentric one ("without undo influence or coercion from either camp")? Do medical students get taught about the humours as well as bacteria and viruses? Is witchcraft back on the agenda (um, well, yes, apparently)? Does spontaneous generation hold its own? Phlogiston? How about teaching psychology students about demonic possession (oh, hang on, Sarah would certainly want that one too)? Do genetic students learn about the role of blood in transmitting inheritance as well as DNA? Is there a place for crystal spheres. the homunculus in the sperm, the constant manufacture of blood by the liver, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the music of the spheres, unicorns? Does alchemy reappear in the chemistry class? Do Earth, Air, Fire and Water get equal time with the periodic table of elements? Do stones fall at different rates depending on their weight?

And the answer of course, is an emphatic NO. All of these topics (as well as creationism aka "intelligent design") are important in understanding the history of science. And that is all. They are dealt with early in a science course, as a means of understanding how we got from there to here, but the proposition that all of these once held, but now long discarded, beliefs would remain in any scheme of teaching ("without undo influence or coercion from either camp") is laughable. "Intelligent Design" isn't an equally tenable modern theory with evolution, it is the theory that was discarded as the reality of evolution was demonstrated. It is no different to any of the other discarded theories in the other sciences. Old theories don't run in some parallel universe where they remain equally valid, they are replaced, superceded, left behind.

And furthermore, while university students can happily deal with the idea that over the last few hundred years science has developed its understanding, we don't ask school children ("without undo influence or coercion from either camp") to decide for themselves whether alchemy is a valid approach to chemistry, or whether the Earth goes around the sun or vice versa, we simply teach them the facts. And if this is "coercion" from one side then so be it. Reality does have a coercive bias.

So next time you hear this innocent sounding, ever so reasonable, "teach both sides" proposition, whether from the intelligent Debi, or the not so much Sarah (did she really think her father had his own theories of evolution?), ask yourself where you would draw the line. Where would they draw the line? Either kids learn the results of the scientific understanding of the world, or we turn all schools into "madrassas", differing only in the brand of religion with which the students are being indoctrinated. And we head back to medieval times, the monks running the schools, needing a whole new scientific revolution to repeat history, and get us back to where we were before this religious insanity re-emerged in the late twentieth century.

Is the Watermelon Blog evolving or acquiring characteristics? A bit of both I think.
2 October 2008
Category Evolution
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Origin sins

The messenger is the message I suppose. Mindless promotion of religion by short-sleeved-nylon-shirted-sweaty-underarmed, tie-clasped, comb-overed, staring-eyed evangelical preachers is seen for what it is - ignorance and stupidity. The same sentiments expressed, in a more sophisticated way, by progressive writers on liberal blogs, are meant to be accepted, unquestioningly, by all of us intelligent secular atheists (it that is not a triple tautology), as ultimate truths.

Here is a recent example in which Chip Ward discusses "The Evolution of John McCain: Why He Picked Sarah Palin, Carbon Queen". It's a good article (I think so because I anticipated the argument several years ago) explaining why creationism is bad for the environment. But in passing Mr Ward remarks "Evolutionary theory does not preclude God. It uncovers the how of life, but leaves the why of it quite open. Many devout Jews and Christians, even evangelicals, believe in evolution, just not Biblical literalists."

This is nonsense. It became impossible for an intelligent and informed human being to be religious in 1859 - evolutionary theory obviously precludes god, how could it not? And it is simply wrong to say that evolutionary theory does not address the why of things happening. Of course it does, that was the whole point of Darwin's work. But even if it did not, what on Earth makes Mr Ward imagine that religion adequately addresses "why"? And evolutionary theory certainly explains how life can come into being as well as what happens after that.

And while I was still reeling from Chip's total misunderstanding of the theory of evolution, along comes Mark Lawson "Testing the heavens: Scientists may be trying to engage with believers, but experiments won't resolve the big questions". Here are two gems from Mr Lawson - "Many people, whatever happens, will remain "don't knows", and this is a smart group to belong to. Both the theories of evolution and quantum physics stumble over the question of first cause: the process by which nothingness became something" and "Religion speaks of the "sacred mysteries" - to which an explanation is promised after death - but it has always seemed vital to me that those who reject the sacred continue to respect the mysteries of how and why we are here." But a great deal of Quantum Physics over the last 100 years has addressed the process "by which nothingness became something" - is Mark totally unaware of the literature on this topic? What is the "mystery" and why should we "respect" it, whatever that means. Scientists have been gradually peeling back all the mysteries which were inexplicable at the time for hundreds of years, gradually leaving the religious with no mysteries at all to justify their weird beliefs.

Religious people (a nation of whiners) are always complaining about how us atheists keep insulting them. And, it is true, there have been occasions, some in this very post, when I have been known to be mildly critical of the deranged mindset that is religious belief. But fair do's, there are a lot of insulting remarks coming the other way too. These two articles by Ward and Lawson are cases in point. Do Chip and Mark seriously believe that physicists and biologists have failed to examine the questions about origins? That we have all had our noses to the bunsen burner for the last 100 years, working away at our childish little theories about how life and matter may or may not work in god's creation without considering how the universe began and life started on this tiny fragment of the universe? That we were all working away, waiting for Mark and Chip to speak up, and then with a chorus of anguished cries we would all say, oh, you are so right, how could we be so foolish, who forgot to consider origins? Richard, was it you? And then we would lay down our end-chewed pencils and acknowledge that any further questions about the origins of stuff would be best left to the televangelists.

How insulting. There has been scientific hypothesising and investigation of both questions for a long time. The twin approaches of astronomy and quantum physics has given us a very clear idea of conditions at the start of this universe and how they resulted in the formation of matter and energy. The new Large Hadron Collider experiment will give us our first detailed look at these conditions and help to refine the hypotheses about origins even further. Similarly the twin approaches of geology and chemistry result in experiments in recreating conditions at the time of the origin of life, and ideas about how those conditions can result in self-replicating chemicals (which is all that life is) are being refined all the time. There are new experiments in developing life forms starting from scratch, and constant geological discoveries of earlier and earlier life forms. To dismiss all this by pretending it doesn't exist is both insulting and ignorant.

Given that no one can go back in time a few billion years to the origins of life on Earth, or many billions of years to the origin of this universe, we have two choices in understanding these questions. Either we can pretend that the mythology of one small group of nomads in one part of the planet a few thousand years ago has provided all the answers that the rest of us could ever need, or we could bring the scientific resources of the world to bear on it, building on a scientific tradition going back over two thousand years. Hmm, so hard to choose the right approach. I think I will just give up and accept that what Sarah Palin tells me is true. She would know.

24 September 2008
Category Evolution
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Animal crackers

I was re-reading a book (Steve Jones "In the blood") the other day that I first read a decade ago. I came to two sentences that I had obviously read then without really noticing, and did the same again, for a moment. Then something struck me, and I read again the sentences "Human genetics is done, more and more, on animals. We are, after all, related to other creatures." When I first read this, if I had thought about it at all, it would have been only to question why Jones had bothered to include the second sentence. "Dur" ("obvious, stupid father" a loose translation) as my daughter used to say when a teenager. Reading it then I would have confidently assumed that most of the world's population would also simply have read it as redundant, a tautology. That we all had this knowledge shared by common agreement, in the same way as we agree that the sun rises in the East, or that the date line runs through Greenwich. Reading it now, I do so in the knowledge that education and culture has regressed so much since 1996 that, to a large percentage of Americans, and smaller percentages in some other western countries, the second sentence would either be seen as blasphemous, or as an oxymoron (think military intelligence). As a result of the actions of evangelical christians, their influence in American politics, and the acquiescence of the media, there is no longer a shared world view between most Americans and the rest of the world. Any moment now the terminology for describing sunrise might be unilaterally changed in Kansas, as a result of new interpretations of the actions of Joshua at Jericho.

It came back to me this week when I read one of those "oh, I wish they hadn't told me that" posts, the first by Alison Kilkenny who notes - "A recent ABC poll reports that 16% of U.S. science teachers are Creationists, and worse, one in eight of them admit to teaching Creationism as a kind of valid science in their classrooms". One in six science teachers are creationists? They received, presumably, some kind of science education themselves, and remained creationists? Sounds like a test you could use for Democratic voter registration in West Virginia. And the second news item was about the Louisiana Science Education Act, which has the backing of Religious Right groups such as the Louisiana Family Forum and the Discovery Institute, and "allows public school teachers to use supplementary materials when teaching about evolution".

And I wondered about these teachers. I mean the humblest backwoodsman from the Appalachians knows, even without a college degree, that other mammals are rather similar to human beings. May even know that there are great apes which are very close to humans. Knows that birds are more different, reptiles even more different and frogs more different again. When he catches a fish he might not see much similarity beyond a backbone, but in seeing that would realize that it was more similar to humans than the worm he had put on his fishhook. This kind of classification is fundamental to the way we see the world around us, and, for the same reasons, as Jones points out, fundamental to how we test, say, human medicines (and indeed, how we train doctors in the early stages).

Science is based in large part on classifying the world around us, seeing patterns, similarities, differences, organizing observations into a coherent world view. Biologists see the same relationships your average backwoodsman sees, but take them even further into more detail. Recognize fine anatomical as well as functional similarities and differences, take into account tissues and genetic components, and biochemistry. How do these creationist science teachers do that? And how do they teach their students to make sense of the world around them?

All around the world when native peoples came into contact with western explorers they struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. In some cases they converted observations into their own world views. The Aztecs saw Cortes and his soldiers as gods, Australian Aborigines thought that James Cook and his sailors were dead men come back to life because of their white skins. In the case of sailing ships, some groups simply didn't acknowledge they were seeing them because they were so far outside their experience. Is it like this for the creationist teachers? Are they so blinded by evangelical ideology that they are incapable of seeing the real world? And if they are, then they are also teaching their students to cover their ears, close their eyes, in order not to see the inconvenient truths of the natural world. It is as if we had astrologers teaching astronomy, or crystal worshippers teaching physics, or witch doctors teaching medicine.

Teachers have to be qualified to teach. A teaching test for American science teachers should be  "When you read the sentence "We are, after all, related to other creatures" what do you think? Those who answer "Dur" get to teach. The others can work for the Mike Huckabee Vice-Presidential campaign.

And those who answer "Dur" get to visit the Watermelon Blog. Not suitable reading for the others.

23 May 2008
Category Evolution
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The shoulders of pygmies

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" said Isaac Newton, imitating Robert Burton and Bernard Chartres. Not true of course. Newton wasn't often wrong - except of course about the way the universe actually worked - but this time he was. It is often quoted though, as some kind of indication of the way science works.

But science doesn't work through the efforts of a series of giants, and Isaac has unwittingly played into the hands of those who neither understand science nor want it to play any part in the modern world except for developing large screen televisions. I'm reluctant to tackle Isaac, a giant himself in anyone's estimation, including his own, but having mildly contradicted Charles Darwin a while back I feel I'm on a roll.

So here goes - scientists, including Newton, don't stand on the shoulders of giants but on the shoulders of pygmies. Who on turn stood on other pygmies. Who in turn stood on other pygmies. And so ad infinitum. Or at least and so on back to Ancient Greece.

The point about scientific endeavor is that it almost always proceeds by small steps, each step having to be related to, rationalized with, the step that was taken just before. Oh, sure, there are occasional big breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, but they are rare, and even they have to take into account all that has preceded them and make sure that the jump is in accord with all the evidence and theory that is being cast aside.

Imagine it as a relay race, the baton being passed from one runner to the next, each examining it closely to make sure it is an actual baton before making minor changes to it and then passing it on in turn. A line of runners extending back through some two and a half thousand years. Occasionally a runner who is a better athlete than others, or who has sharper eyes, will realize that after all the changes the baton is no longer working properly, can't be held in the hand comfortably. and they will make major changes to its design and function before passing it on to the next runner as before.

This process, of having to not only satisfy yourself, but to be at the end of a chain of thousands of others who have also had to be satisfied, is what sets science apart. Yes the scientific method of testing hypotheses is somewhat more rigorous than the way our minds work in everyday life, but fundamentally science is different to, say, religion or politics, because no scientist operates in an a-historical vacuum. Unfortunately the media does, and it treats scientific progress as if it is a series of pronouncements coming out of the blue, just like the ranting of a televangelist or a candidate for president.

The average person in the street is confused by this treatment, and sees the scientist as just someone who has had a hunch or an opinion or has made a lucky guess. Joe Six Pack could do those things, might get a winning lottery ticket for example. The evangelical in the pew thinks that there is no reason to think that the average scientist is any more likely to be right than the average preacher. The school student thinks that the pieces of science they are being taught are no different to the items of undigested news they see on television. And politicians are quite happy to go along with the opinion of a single climate change denier, or a foolish creation scientist. There is no reason to take action on climate change - just the opinion of James Hansen. No reason not to teach intelligent design along side evolution in class - the opinion of Michael Behe is no worse than the opinion of Charles Darwin.

Next time you hear this kind of analysis picture the pygmies, a great chain of thousands of them, sitting on each other's shoulders. Then ask yourself who is seeing further.

5 April 2008
Category Evolution
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Only make believe

Let us just imagine, for a moment, that the intelligent design people were right (they're not, they're not, but just suppose, ok?), and that the flagellum of some bacteria couldn't have evolved. Picture yourself like a detective interviewing a burglar caught red-handed at the scene of a crime, who anyway keeps saying "I didn't do it". You wait patiently, knowing that before too long he has to agree that yes he did do it. OK - you are being patient. You say to the flagellum man - ok, ok, I believe you, that must have been designed (yet it does evolve, you think, fingers crossed behind your back) not evolved, now what?

You see these people have been picking away at the dozens of organs in all the 1.8 million or so species in the world for a long time now. They thought the human eye was too complex to have evolved, forgetting that Darwin himself had shown this not to be true 150 years ago. And so they get down to the bacterial flagellum. All of the other organs in all the other species are apparently ok as the outcomes of evolutionary processes, all except this one organ in one particular group of species.

Now if I was a creation scientist (which god forbid) I think I would be tempted to say, at this point, if I was a swearing man and not a saint, WTF? Is this the best god can do - a FLAGELLUM? And why bother? If evolution has worked perfectly well to produce all the other features of all the other species on the planet, why on Earth would god even bother to stick his oar in (so to speak) to give this particular species a hand with getting a flagellum designed?

Are these bacteria particularly god-fearing creatures? Did they go to bacterial church every Sunday and pray for a flagellum which just couldn't get evolved? And as a creation scientist, do you deduce from the presence of one designed organ that all organs in all species were therefore designed even though there are perfectly good evolutionary explanations for their presence? Or do you, returning for a moment to rational thought, conclude that, yes indeed, as evolutionists have found, the flagellum does have a perfectly rational evolutionary pathway too?

I know, I know, Darwin himself said "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down ”, but he was wrong, really, wasn't he? What he was saying was this - given that so little biology (or physiology, or anatomy, or biochemistry, or ecology) is known in 1859, given that so few species have been described at all, let alone in detail, and given that huge areas of the world are virtually unexplored, it would be premature to think that in 1859 I am providing the last word on evolution. It is quite possible, he may well have thought, that somewhere in the Amazon basin, for example, are hundreds of species which give clear evidence of having been designed, not evolved, and if that happens then we will need to do some rethinking. What he was emphatically not saying was, if, in 150 years time, after tens of thousands of biologists have studied hundreds of thousands of species in great detail from all parts of the planet, and some fundamentalist religious person says ah ha, I think this organ in this species couldn't have evolved, we toss the whole thing in and admit that god did it all.

Conversely, since only one example is purported to exist, it might be incumbent on the creationists to suspect that THEY might have got this wrong. Or do they really believe in an imaginary being who would go to the trouble of allowing evolution to bring into being everything we see today except the bacterial flagellum?



The Watermelon Blog was designed to evolve to become better and better every day in every way.

15 March 2008
Category Evolution
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The Birds and the Huckabees

I imagine Mike Huckabee, relaxing after giving up on his dream of ruling America under Christian law (and having Chuck as VP, how cool would that have been?), listening to a little Christian rock music, and reading a newspaper in which there is an article on the new Encyclopedia of Life free online project to catalog all 1.8 million species that make up life on Earth.

Now I know this is not a question that ever occurs to fundamentalists like Mr Huckabee, but the obvious question is why? Not why make an online Encyclopedia, but why are there 1.8 million species? Keep that question in mind.

Just as every article on global warming will generate a response that mentions ice caps on Mars, or ice age theory from the 1970s, so every one on evolution will generate an utterly predictable response. Some fundamentalist will write in, with the air of someone who has discovered something that no one else in the world knows, to tell us that of course everybody knows that species change over time but no one has ever seen one species change into another. "A dog is still a dog" they will say. I've even seen this proposition taken to the bizarre lengths as to suggest that Darwin, poor deluded fool, was only writing about change within a species, and that's what the title "Origin of Species" means.

In different guises, this confusion, indeed complete ignorance, about the difference between, but also relation between, evolution and speciation, seems to me to be at the heart of the creationism nonsense. And you have to ask, given this confusion, how on Earth are children being taught biology these days? What was young Mike taught? Never mind, I'm here with a free make-up lesson for him.

"Just imagine you are god" I say to him "it isn't hard to do. There you are on what, day 5? If it's day five you should be creating the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, or however the saying will go. Only one more day and you have to create the first two members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens, who will then proceed, with unthinkable genetic consequences, to populate the world with 6 billion descendants. Busy busy busy, now, what are this pair of naked apes going to need?"

So god gets on with it, some tree species for shade, fruit, wood; some plants for fruits or seeds, or edible leaves or roots (and some for medicine, although surely it would have been simpler to create a better immune system); and some animals to provide meat, milk, eggs, furs (although why you just wouldn't make the naked apes hairier ... oh well, no-one ever said god was perfect, did they?), transport, protection. There, that's pretty much it, isn't it? Maybe some bees as an afterthought to fertilize the flowers and provide honey. There end of day 5, finished. What have we got - twenty, say 30 at the most, plant species; ten, say 20 at the most animal species.

I don't know what Mr Huckabee's math is like, but I make it about 1,799,950 excess species. What are they for? Is it just like god was a wood carver who just couldn't stop whittling once he got started? And do note, yes Mike, I can see your hand up, I know what you are going to say, god moves in mysterious ways, and all that, do note what I am not saying. I am not saying that god thought of all kinds of things that I haven't mentioned - such as how delicious oysters and lobster would be, oh, sorry, that's right, people weren't allowed to eat them. Oh well, whatever. I'm not saying that you might not need a whole lot of extra species to provide other things, or to interact with each other in essential ways to keep the system going (though why you wouldn't just create a system that didn't need ...). So if god thought humans might need a beetle, or a slug, or a rattlesnake, hell, who am I to argue?

No, the problem is why so many beetle species? So many species of slug? So many snake or bird or fish species? And differing by so little in so many cases. Differing indeed so little that they can't be told apart by eye in many cases, or only with great difficulty (a different colored feather here, a different arrangement of scales there)? Why in fact, so many species on the Galapagos islands, or Australia, or the Amazon forest? Why so many birds, ants, gum trees, grasses, bacteria? What on Earth are 99% of the 1.8 million for?

Well, they're not for anything of course. They came into existence because they had individual variation and because god, or continental drift, saw fit to separate continents, have deserts and rivers, ice caps, mountain ranges. Given individual variation, species have to evolve and change. No choice. Given a varied geography, species have to separate to form new species, no choice. If god wanted to create Mike Huckabee's world he would have to have made sure that every individual of every species was identical, and that the whole of the Earth was covered by a uniform garden of Eden (and even then ...). So no choice, in the real world - it was evolution and speciation, or, well, evolution and speciation. Can't argue with facts. It's like, oh, I don't know, running for president when you believe in creation - the voters won't buy it Mike, it's just inevitable that you and Chuck were going to evolve into extinct candidates. Couldn't be helped.

variable species+varied landscape = evolution+speciation

Didn't your teacher explain any of this to you Mike?



Not yet 1.8 million posts on the Watermelon Blog, but plenty of variety.

8 March 2008
Category Evolution
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Are you there Mr Darwin?

You all know about my belief in the supernatural, and this week I have been communicating with Charles Darwin in a seance. He doesn't have access to a computer in the part of heaven he is in (no computers, no rap music, no reality TV - heaven), and he has a couple of gripes he wants me to pass on to the Watermelon audience.

First of all he wants me to tell you that he didn't invent the theory of evolution. No one did. There isn't a theory of evolution. "But, but, but" ... I said, wondering what it was I had spent time studying in all my years as a biologist. So he explained, in simple terms, as great men do. "Point one", he said "every individual in a species is different". "Well, yes, of course" I said (I would have said "D'Oh" but he wouldn't have picked up the cultural reference). "Point two", he continued, "members of a species that have the ability to have more offspring will leave more offspring - fact or theory?" "Well, fact of course, just a tautology". "Good" he said "and if some members of a species leave more offspring than others then the species will change, one way or another, fact or theory?" "Well, yes, fact, another tautology," I said "perhaps you could call it something catchy though, like 'natural selection' by analogy with 'artificial selection'". "I'll think about it" he chuckled, "might attract media attention that way". And then he said, with the air of a magician, "Point four, if two populations of a species are separated so they can't interbreed, and both continue to change, separately, then eventually they will become so different they will no longer be able to breed if they do meet again". I was ready for him this time "Another tautology" I said.

"So that's it" he said. I looked puzzled. "Look", he said patiently, "everyone knew that species changed over time, all I did was to point out that given those four facts species had no CHOICE but to change over time. No one else except Alfred Wallace had put two and two together to make four. No theory of evolution, just observation and tautology." "But then why do they keep talking about the theory of evolution?" "It should be THEORIES of evolution", he growled, "and all that came later. Other people, thousands of other people, began researching how the different parts of the evolutionary process worked in practice. Long after I was dead, Mendel discovered that genes were the way variation got inherited, and later still Franklin, Watson and Crick discovered that DNA was what genes were made of. There was work on the mechanism of mutations, including the new-fangled radiation. Others worked out how populations got isolated and why they stopped interbreeding, others still produced population biology theories, or looked at whether change occurred in a steady way or abruptly."

"You see there has been massive work in biology since my time" he added, wistfully "I would love to have been part of working out theories about how it all fitted together, but I am only remembered for spotting tautologies". And that's where the seance ended. No more words from the great man. I would have told him that tautologies they might be, but only he and Alfred had been smart enough to spot them. And I might have told him that the abysmal "intelligent design" had reared its ugly head again, just as it did in 1800 through the foolish and religious William Paley. A man whose work had been so thoroughly discredited by Darwin that it didn't emerge again until it suited the career prospects of some evangelicals in America 200 years later.

And I might, or might not, have told him that those same evangelicals were so ignorant of biology that they asked questions like "Who would you rather believe, God or Darwin", and used the word Darwinism both as a curse and as a synonym for evolution. They really believe that one man, Charles Darwin, dared to challenge god, and that's all there is to it. He would be angry about that, might have smashed the table. "No, no" he would have said "Evolution is a fact, not a theory. And theories about the way evolution works in detail have been developed by tens of thousands of biologists in the last 150 years. These evangelicals must be as ignorant now as they were in my day."

"More ignorant, Charles" I would have said "more ignorant I am afraid, the world has gone backwards in scientific understanding since 1859." But I'm glad he wasn't there to hear me say those things.



Charles Darwin said, before he died, "The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology". "Of course it is Charles", we say in the Evolution category of The Watermelon Blog.
16 February 2008
Category Evolution
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The eight-legged god

The god of the gaps argument keeps reasserting itself (just like the climate change denial argument) in odd ways. With the discovery of the Big Bang, people who want to believe in the god who is interested in the outcome of football games, or in which sexual organs consenting adults rub together, or how the Huckabees celebrate Christmas, claim that the thing which "caused" the big bang 15 billion years ago is that god. Another variant of this is to suggest that because the conditions in the universe are "just right" for the existence of life on Earth, this means that the same god who smites the residents of New Orleans was also the one who, 15 billion years ago, set up the universe for the purpose of, eventually, having residents in New Orleans who could be smited (smote?).

Their arguments imply that there is some essence of humanness, or, to go further back, life itself, that is a given. And for THAT life to exist the universe has to have certain properties. You could respond to this proposition in two non god-given ways. One is some concept of multiverse - that is there is an infinite number of universes corresponding to every possible combination of physical properties of matter, and this is the one we are in. But this isn't my understanding of the true "anthropic principle". I think that humans themselves, life itself, only exists in the form it does, this particular form, because of the way the universe is. Had some of the physical properties been different then a different universe would exist which may or may not have evolved some different manifestation of self-reproducing things, and even more remotely, might have evolved some self aware part of that manifestation that might have tried to answer the question "why are we here?". So the multiverse isn't a set of parallel universes, but a set of potentialities, none of which were, by chance, in fact taken, except the one which led to the kind of "life" that we think of as life. The fact that we are here to ask the question is the answer to the question. Or, perhaps, on a cosmic scale, we think therefore we are.

And, as a footnote, evolutionary processes would operate in any possible version of the universe, both in the non-living precursors to life and in whatever turned up as "life" itself. There is inevitability in the process, but none in the outcomes, just as, even within our version of the universe, there was absolutely no inevitability in the process that eventually split off one of the great apes into a creature that would contribute to this blog. I, you, could have been, say, an octopus, or a large amphibian, or a brainy dinosaur, or a pig or a bear. We would then be arguing about why the universe had been just right for the evolution of the octopus, and what this meant about the great eight-legged god in the sky who had been looking out for our interests.
24 January 2008
Category Evolution
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Memories

Remember the Downing Street Memo and its "revelation" that on Iraq "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"? Seen as outrageous both as it concerned the lead up to the war, and as a more general inditement of the Bush Administration code of practice in relation to climate change, education, health and so on. The old media have been rightly condemned for not more actively seeking to reveal the manipulation of evidence, as a result of their being in lock step, Rove the Music Man, with the White House.

True, no doubt, but I wonder if the rot goes even deeper into the fabric of journalism in 2007. That the media couldn't see what was going on because they operated in the same way themselves. Every story these days seems to me to involve the intelligence and facts being fixed around the policy, the policy being that of the media proprietor.

Here is an example. You all saw the story last week about chimps beating humans in memory/number tests. I saw the ABC America coverage. There were chimps doing amazing things after the briefest of looks at a number sequence. I couldn't have done it and nor could the human test subjects who tried. Really interesting, I thought. Here is one of those cases where it is possible to put our closest relatives on a level playing field in a test, and the chimps do better. What, I wondered, are the evolutionary reasons for this extraordinary difference in ability, what does it tell us about differences in brain function and memory, and how would this be related to the habitats occupied by human and chimp ancestors around 4 million years ago? I hadn't finished pondering on this really interesting story when the voice over from the ABC reporter jangled my nerves. The reason for the difference, he said, was that Chimpanzees liked peanuts (which were given to the chimps as a reward for correct answers) more than humans. The news bulletin presenter smiled as this nonsensical sentence came out - ah, this was just a funny animal story to end the bulletin after all. She had wondered what kind of a story it was, but now she knew, and it was ok to smile.

Cross to the BBC web site (and I assume BBC tv in Britain) and you find detailed conclusions along the lines I had been pondering - short term memory skills were probably more important in early humans (and chimps) than in modern humans. Why is this so?

And why did ABC (and therefore those channels around the world who picked up the ABC package) choose to fix the facts of chimp intelligence around a funny animal story, with no mention of evolution or relationships? Well, just the same day came the results of one of those profoundly depressing polls (Harris Online). 82 per cent of adult Americans believe in God and  79 per cent believe in miracles. More than 70 per cent of the 2,455 adults surveyed between November 7 and 13 said they believed in heaven and angels, while more than 60 per cent said they believed in hell and the devil. Roughly equal numbers believe evolution (42 per cent) and creationism (39 per cent). Seventy per cent of Americans said they were religious, while about one-third also said they believe in UFOs, witches and astrology.

Now, given that astonishing level of ignorance and superstition, what is a tv executive to do? Present stories that might help to make those 39% creationists think, or defang the stories, so as not to challenge those beliefs? Just like the intelligence agencies faced with an administration hell bent on war with Iraq fixed the facts, so the tv executives fix the stories. And a remarkable piece of research which could have helped open a few minds was trashed.

And journalists, being part of this approach to news coverage, observing government manipulation of reality, may well think, "Yes, so, that's just the way things work, isn't it?" And Mencken and Murrow (remember them?) turn over in their graves, yet again.


Like Thomas Huxley, on The Watermelon Blog I "would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth".
11 December 2007
Category Evolution
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Fixing intelligence

There are times when religious moderates, as well as praying for me, will try to argue their case for religion on what they think are logical and rational grounds. They understand that Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and I are opposed to religion on a scientific basis, and they understand that the evangelicals don't argue but simply shout more loudly (rather as an English speaker in a foreign country will shout more and more loudly, thinking that the French shopkeeper will finally understand if they can just reach the right volume), but they think that they can argue the case for moderate religious belief on a scientific basis. And that if they speak more and more softly and reasonably, unlike the evangelicals, that Richard and I will finally fall to our knees, the scales lifted from our eyes, and shout "Hallelujah, evolution proves the existence of god".

But the "moderate religious" have as big a mote in their eye as the evangelicals - because they believe in a god as a fundamental proposition, all "proofs" are simply tautologies. They will say, for example, that because all known societies through history believe in a god (or gods, one of the facts ignored in this kind of pseudo-anthropology, as is the lack of a god in many hunter-gatherer societies such as Australian Aborigines) then god (or gods) must be real. It proves, of course, nothing of the kind, just as other beliefs, held by many societies over long periods about, say, witchcraft, or the movement of the sun around the Earth, or the value of the sacrifice of bulls or virgins, were unreal. There are powerful social forces which retain irrational beliefs in society (the role of Iraq in 9/11 for example), which have nothing to do with the truth of those beliefs.

Similarly the proposition that because religious beliefs and beliefs in god are so common they must have an evolutionary advantage, and therefore it is wrong to criticize or try to get rid of religion from modern society, is based on nothing more than wishful thinking. For one thing it confuses religion and god. We don't know when beliefs in god(s) entered some human societies, although the frequent lack of a belief in god, especially among hunter gatherers, suggests that it was very late, quite probably not until the development of agricultural societies. Far too late to have any evolutionary meaning. And while "religious" practices (ceremonial burial of dead, fertility ceremonies, rituals for success in hunting, rituals to get rid of ghosts) are probably quite old, all they tell you is that people have always tried to cope with the unknown as best they can. In 2007 there is so little unknown, scientifically, that there really is no excuse for continuing to behave like Neanderthal man.

And the final cruncher, very similar in form to the previous two, but pretending to be even more scientific, is the proposition that because human beings have "spirituality" this proves the existence of the supernatural, and therefore, god, in some form or other (not necessarily with a white beard, the more enlightened ones would argue). And readers who have followed the argument so far will quickly spot that this is another tautology. Not only is there no evidence for the supernatural (and there has been no lack of research), but there is no evidence for anything which you could label as spirituality.

All that is actually being said is - I believe in spirituality; because I believe in spirituality it is real; because it is real so is god; god causes my spirituality. See, the chain of logic breaks down with the second step. Whatever you think "spirituality" consists of (presumably a belief that there "must" be some brain activity that doesn't relate to brain function), is no different to your belief that there "must" be something beyond the natural world.

A belief in something is not a proof of something, and the moderates might as well go back to shouting loudly about "faith" (faith is just belief shouted loudly). The problem is that because there actually is no god (or gods) all attempts at proof that there is one must end in tautology.

A bit like fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy.
5 September 2007
Category Evolution
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Brave old world

Let us imagine, you and I, gentle reader, that the evangelicals have triumphed, and that the teaching of evolution is banned in schools, and all books that mention the word have been burnt in a jolly bonfire in town squares across the country. Dawkins and Dennett and Horton have been sent to a gulag for re-education in intelligent design ('Yes, yes, I see it now, bacterial flagellum, irreducible complexity, please, please, not the waterboard again'), and any medical or biological research which depends on evolution for its interpretation has been shut down. I know, I know, but be brave, there is method in my madness.

In this brave new world atheists would walk outside, and the scales would fall from their eyes, and they would see the glorious vestiges of creation, all around them. 'What would they see?' you ask, unable to wait any longer for this new millennium, the rapture that would surely be just moments away.

Well, Virginia, in order to answer that, you would have to set aside everything you know about the real world, and, brain washed to a clean slate, look around you at Evangelical World.

It is a world without radioactive elements, and one in which the atom has not been split (I like this world). There are no sedimentary rocks, but when you dig down a few inches into the soil, anywhere in the world, you will find a single layer obviously deposited by a flood. Your mouth feels a bit odd, and running your finger along the tooth row you discover you no longer have canine teeth. That appendicitis scar has gone, you never had an appendix (this is good stuff!). When your DNA is analyzed you will find that it is absolutely unique, as different to the DNA of chimpanzees as to mice or mussels.

There are dogs barking in your street, as always, but you suddenly sense that something is different, and when you see the dogs, out on the side walk, they are all identical, all look like tame wolves, all the same color. As are the cats on the fences, all tabby, all the same. And everywhere you look, you realize that all the sparrows are identical, and all the elms, and the roses (all with small, pink, single flowers, Evangelical World is a boring world).

And there are other people out on the sidewalk, and you realize to your horror that the men all look like you, and the women are all identical too. The men have one less rib, but you can't see that. All of the men and women are so alike that they seem to come from the same family, as indeed they did, all descended from one original pair of humans. Amazing what 300 generations of inbreeding can do, is it not?

You walk down to the zoo, anxious to see the new arrivals, a pair of Stegosaurus. Everyone had thought that people had killed off almost all the dinosaurs, just before the Flood, and the Flood had finished the rest. Of course plesiosaurs have always been an attraction in the marine aquarium, jumping through hoops, but nobody thought any terrestrial dinosaurs were left - must have clung to floating branches you suppose. Phew, those Stegosaurus are big and well armored - hard to believe people could kill them with spears, but you know they did, having seen it in the Creation Museum.

You walk on, this is such a nice day. But it is a worry, this global warming. As the preacher said on Sunday, there has never been weather as hot as this in the last 6000 years - no mention of it in the bible, or any history books, so it must be connected to the industrial revolution and all that coal being burnt. As the preacher said, we are only 6000 years from God resting after creating all this lovely world, and here we are destroying it. 'Must stop' he thundered (I like this world). I was a bit puzzled about coal - why did god make it all if he didn't want us to burn it? Just another of his mysterious ways I thought.

On to the museum. I wanted to check out an exhibition of animals from the Galapagos Islands. Some man called Darwin, nice fellow, became a preacher I believe, had collected them on a boat trip. Very interesting it was, but so few animals - just one kind of tortoise, and one kind of bird, and some funny water lizards. Still, no point in god making a whole lot of different kinds of animal on a tiny group of islands like that. That's what Mr Darwin said too.

Outside there is a big old oak tree someone has cut down. Interesting how they have all those rings in the stump. Wonder what they were for. Wonder how old the tree was.

Off again, time to go home. I passed the hospital. Hadn't been there for a long time. In fact they were thinking of closing it all down except for the part that fixed up broken bones. Used to be diseases around of course, in the bad old days. But pretty quickly everyone had become immune to the Cold, and the Measles, and that was that of course. Good old god, he didn't want us to be sick, just as well those diseases couldn't find a way to change. And just as well we couldn't catch any animal diseases - well, we are so different that we couldn't could we, the animal diseases would have had to change a lot to bother us.

The hospital was never much use anyway - they couldn't figure out how the human body worked (just as well god could, eh?). The veterinary school knew how animals functioned, but that didn't help much - no comparison really, and why would there be? They developed medicines for animals too, but they couldn't do the same for humans, nobody wanted to be the one to have a new medicine tested on them, and no use testing on animals, that told you nothing about how they would work on us. Pity really.

Getting late, the Sun has set. Good planning to have it go round the Earth every 24 hours, everyone gets a turn that way. And there are the stars. Some so big and some so small, almost hard to believe that they are all stuck on to the sky, all the same distance away. And heaven just behind them - good old god up there, watching down on us. Hope no one ever tries to fly up to the stars - god would get a shock, wouldn't he?

One of the children has lost a tooth. We all wonder, once again, if tonight will be the night we see the tooth fairy, but we never have yet.

Tomorrow to hear Mr Falwell speak. He is getting old. More than three score years and ten, which is odd because no one is supposed to live longer than that. Guess god thinks it is good that his world has such people in it.

And so to bed.



Like George Bernard Shaw 'I am the messenger boy of the new age. If you piece the various messages together, you will find an astonishing unity of endeavor, often, I admit, disguised and embroidered'. Piece them together by browsing through The Watermelon Blog
Brave old world
22 May 2007
Category Evolution
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Fickle finger

Three hundred years ago, a country with oil was generally a poor country. Oil was of little or no use - rich countries were those with fertile farms, or gold, or spices, or forests, or metal ores, or even coal. But the oil countries were as poor as, well, I was going to say church mice, but they are rich these days; I know, as poor as climate scientists. But the oil was sitting there, under the surface, or perhaps oozing out of the rocks, and it would one day make countries like Saudi Arabia as rich as televangelists.

Bit like that with humans too. Winning money in a lottery, or discovering a long-lost rich uncle, or stumbling across a gold nugget or a marketable invention, is the difference between the rich and the poor. Or being tall and skinny may not be a lot of fun when you are being teased as a child, but when you grow up it may lead to riches on a basketball court. Having sickle cell anemia genes doesn't do a lot for you except in malaria country, where it stops you dying from malaria.

So many different chance events and properties influence the fate of people and countries, - 'there but for the fickle finger of fate go I' can work in both directions. The bum on the park bench and the bum in the executive suite are often separated only by luck.

Same with animal species, like, oh, I don't know, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. I suppose you have all been following what seemed to be a rash of news items about chimpanzees making and using tools - stone tools and wooden spears - and proof that this has been going on for thousands of years at least, back to a time when H. sapiens also used only stone and wood tools. Also more investigations into the evolutionary sequence, with evidence the split between the two species occurred about 4 million years ago and took only about 400,000 years to complete.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, a finding that humans evolved one unique trait just one million years ago. Up until that time H. sapiens and P.troglodytes must have seemed, to any observer from another planet, very similar species indeed. But then a mutation occurred in the H.sapiens species, and this gave them a longer life span, a longer childhood, and a late reaching of sexual maturity compared to other animals. Presumably it also caused the relative hairlessness (reflecting the immaturity of the H. sapiens body).

You can imagine Pan troglodytes members looking at these new naked chimps with horror. 'What the hell is that?' you  can hear them saying. 'Naked, yuk' might be the response of a female Pan. And the male Chimps could be seen nodding wisely and saying 'well, that lot will never survive. They take too long to mature, the offspring are helpless and need looking after. And their females seem to have taken an oath of chastity until they are twelve or thirteen - they wear silver rings or something. It will never take off. Poor things. There but for the grace of god go I.'

But, just like oil, the mutation for extended childhood and longer life was to prove a hidden boon to the species that happened to get it. The rich uncle came good, because looking after your young for longer meant they bonded more, learnt more, and the longer life gave more opportunity to accumulate knowledge, and then pass it on to the young in turn.

Both groups of chimps went on in parallel making stone and wood tools for a while, but soon the revenues from the mutation began to come in for humans, and the rest, as they say, is history. The fickle finger of evolution turned us into a dominant and domineering species, and our cousins, once the dominant ape, will probably become extinct before much longer.

Funny how things turn out.
Fickle finger
3 April 2007
Category Evolution
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Seven degrees of separation

Remember the old 'Six degrees of separation' game? As dated now as hula hoops and the Da Vinci Code, but very big in its prime, the author appearing on talk shows and everything, so it must have been true. See he reckoned that any person anywhere on the planet could be linked to any other person anywhere else on the planet in just six relationships. You know someone who once appeared in a movie with someone else, who once went on a trip to Africa, and met someone who had once travelled in the Congo, and there met a nun who had once worked with pigmys.

Complete nonsense of course, just like so many of these popular beliefs that sound so right at the time - flat earth, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear energy. But people fell over themselves at parties trying to make impossible seeming chains of connection (often just to try to get some girl to have sex with them) and convincing themselves that they had accomplished a mission, rather like seeing a statue being pulled down in the streets of Iraq.

So, six degrees, so yesterday. I have a new game for you - how many degrees of separation between an evangelical from Kansas (but choose your own state, don't just copy me) and the primeval slime? Easy - one degree to the great apes, two degrees to the reptiles, three degrees to the amphibians, four degrees to the fish, five degrees to the invertebrates, six degrees to the single-celled organisms, seven degrees to the primeval slime.

There, that's easy isn't it? Six degrees to link Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, or George Bush to Jack Abramoff, or Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden (come on, you remember them don't you?), and just one more to link evangelicals to the Slime from the Green Lagoon.

But that isn't right, I hear them cry, our preacher told us that that evil Darwin fellow said we came straight from the slime. And I knew that wasn't right because I knew my mammy and pappy, and they weren't slime (well, some people thought my pappy was a bit slimy, but he was really a good old boy christian), they were just regular republican-voting, church-going, gun-toting, pickup-driving, gay-hating folks like everyone else in the country (except them San Francisco commie traitor liberals of course). And also in the Bible they sort of moulded people out of clay or something didn't they, and clay isn't slime, is it? Now this fellow Horton is saying it took a long time and many different evolutionary stages to get from the original life forms on the planet to human beings. I mean, that almost sounds reasonable, doesn't it? And if it is reasonable then all of my ethics are out of the window and I might as well move to San Francisco (I bet that Pelosi woman is only SIX degrees from Slime) and practice gay marriage and abortion and burn the flag and everything.

So there you go, try it in your own home, use your own religious starting point, your own evolutionary steps, I bet it won't take any of you more than seven links.

Oh, and I am available for the talk circuit, this idea should be a sensation.
Seven degrees of separation
26 January 2007
Category Evolution
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Voting for creation

I have written at length, elsewhere on this blog, about the damage that fundamentalist religious beliefs about evolution do to attempts to save the environment, and indeed do to democracy itself. It seems to me, the more I think about it, that a belief in the biblical account(s) of creation, and an age of the world of 6000 years, reveal such a failure of intellect that people with such beliefs should not be able to vote in a democracy. This goes beyond merely odd beliefs, or casual eccentricities, into an area where the mental processes are so flawed as to render believers incapable of forming rational judgements in the real world.

And not just flawed, but voting in a way that is so irrational as to distort the democratic process. These are people who can be whipped into a frenzy by two words 'gay marriage', or just one word 'evolution'. They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses. The thought of abortion will send them to the polling booths. Candidates who carry a bible under the arm and walk through the doors of a church will be worshipped in turn. A single preacher can prevent his flock voting one way and demand they vote another way.

It is said that the economy functions best when consumers acting with perfect information in their best interests combine in millions of individual decisions to refine supply and demand, select the best goods, respond rationally to advertising. The same could be said of a democracy - ideally voters have perfect information and then vote in their best interests. A combination of people with concerns about health, education, security, pensions, the environment, who know what the policies of the candidates on those issues are, result in a vote that expresses the will and concerns of all the people. This is not what the religious fundamentalists are doing, these one issue religious voters, and the more of them who are voting, for irrational reasons, the more distorted an election will become.

Hard to stop all fundamentalists voting of course, more's the pity. Hard in practice to draw the line. But if people with other serious mental problems can't vote, and if there is a constant push to disqualify former as well as current criminals from electoral roles, then creationism is a far more important reason for disenfranchisement. Perhaps we should add another question at the polling booth - do you believe the world was created 6000 years ago? You do? Sorry, you won't be voting in this election. Come back when you are prepared to join real electors in the real world.
Voting for creation
9 January 2007
Category Evolution
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The god of screwdrivers

The Right are fond of simple and simplistic explanations for complex events and social and environmental conditions. Whether it is pretending that sun spots cause global warming, or thinking that a gun in every house is an answer to crime, or that you can go to war against drugs and terrorism, the glib answers come rolling out, losing, it seems, none of their freshness for being endlessly repeated and endlessly rebutted.

And the glib answers are there when it comes to 'intelligent design'. The kind of people who don't want to believe they evolved from primeval slime by way of monkeys (no joke, I'm afraid) have a vision of god as the great mechanic in the sky.

It goes like this. Imagine you have a car. And the car has a radio. The bits of the radio don't do anything by themselves, so the radio must have been installed all in one piece, by a bearded fellow with a screwdriver. And if your neighbor's car doesn't have a radio, but instead has a 10 stack CD player, then this is because that same bearded fellow, still with screwdriver, removed the radio and installed the CD player. And if the engine is driven by a rubber band wrapped around a flagellum, then god must have installed the flagellum.

All of the argument about this bizarre notion has come from evolutionists, including me, pointing out that in fact the parts of the 'radio' do have other functions, and evolution works to put them together into new combinations for new functions. But just as with the climate deniers, I think we have greatly over-estimated the knowledge and mental processes of the evolution deniers. In this particular example we have assumed a knowledge of population genetics that they simply don't have.

I promise I will dump the car metaphor soon, but bear with me a little longer. In the real world of cars, away from me pretending that they are driven by a flagellum, there isn't just a difference between radio-bearing and CD-bearing cars. Instead there is an almost infinite variety of size and type and function of radios, and a similar variety of CD players. In addition the cars themselves vary enormously in color, style, engine performance and so on. That is a very busy screwdriver!

Okay, end of car metaphor. Think about animal species, including, of course, us. We all vary, even more than cars do, in every aspect of our being. Not simply the obvious things like hair and eye color and height and fingerprints, but subtle things like brain size and function, metabolic rate, digestive functions, sexuality, strength, allergies, growth, reaction to drugs and religion, and so on. Some of these things may vary geographically in a clear cut way, others vary across the whole species. In many, in fact nearly all, cases, these apparently individual characteristics are not independent but linked to each other in unpredictable ways. Having a higher metabolic rate might arbitrarily let you run faster but result in allergies.

It is this variation, this population genetics, that natural selection works on, without fear or favor, depending on circumstances. Being large or small, having a tail or not, being addicted to alcohol, having dark hair, are neither positive nor negative in themselves, but only in relation to the outside world in which the population finds itself. Conditions at one time and in one place may favor larger individuals, or smaller individuals, depending.

So forget about all the other obvious demonstrations that living species evolved and weren't intelligently designed - the fossils, and the linkages between living species, and vestigial organs, and biogeography - the variability within our own and pretty much every other living species, extant or extinct, demonstrates the failure of creationists to deal with the real world outside the first few verses of Genesis. Perhaps this failure also reflects their refusal to recognise that genetic variation in our own species has more to do with the social and economic questions of the day than any morality derived from later in the Bible or from the economic rationalist's play book.
The god of screwdrivers
29 September 2006
Category Evolution
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Homo sapiens 2.0

Did you see the study the other day that found up to 20,000 different species of bacteria in a litre of sea water (see for example this report http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=10978)? Impossible to see with the naked eye, hard to imagine, like so much of science to the average person.

Made me think about two things. First, what the sea was like when life first evolved from dissolved chemicals about 4 billion years ago. It gave me an image of sea water (and fresh water) teeming with microscopic structures that had evolved the capacity to reproduce and then had evolved into the early simple bacteria and algae and similar organisms. A vast soup, teeming with all kinds of early life that would one day lead to us, and whales, and eagles, and kangaroos, and alligators, and toads, not to mention Redwood trees and rose bushes. What an exciting potential, brewing away - imagine looking out over that original sea and trying to picture all that was to come over the next four billion years.

Incidentally there is an excellent account of the evolution of life itself at http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/lab/2948/orgel.html by that American genius Leslie Orgel. Not quite up to date but near enough. It also shows the way science is slowly investigating the question - what if this, no the experiment shows that, oh, well that tells us something, what if we try that now, and so on. So different to the approach of the closed mind sureties of the evangelicals reading from ancient manuscripts. Incidentally I also note that one of these same evangelicals from a southern 'university' uses the fact that there is as yet no definitive answer to the precise series of chemical reactions 4 billion years ago (and doesn't it give you a shiver of pride that there are human beings able to investigate such a question?) to claim that 'therefore god did it'. I know evangelicals, by definition, don't think, but for the rest of you, think about that for a moment. The claim is that god decided to create human beings 4 billion years later by stirring around some salty water and clay in order to get a particular chemical reaction happening more often than another one. Say what?

But the other thought that this bacteria rich sea gives me is that as we stare out across it now we can imagine the end point of global warming, perhaps at the end of the century, where all that is left are just a few of these bacteria species, the ones adapted to high temperature, and high acidity, starting all over again to evolve and create a new range of life on Earth.

Boy, you'd think that since it took 4 billion years the first time we could be a bit more careful with all the end products, including us, wouldn't you?

Tell you what though, its unlikely that the remaining bacteria will finish up evolving another human like species (version 2.0). But if they did, I am betting that the psychological makeup of that species wouldn't include a belief in a mythical god, that belief having caused the extinction of Homo sapiens version 1.0.
Homo sapiens 2.0
14 August 2006
Category Evolution
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Going ape over history

A lot of us researching our family history these days, one of the great gifts of the internet to human beings. An odd thing, to be bitten by the family history bug, but it is certainly a powerful bite. I guess because you can't really lose - either you find some amazingly impressive ancestor, in which case you can claim that he or she is the reason for your own particular genius or talent, or you find that your ancestors are distinguished only by their complete ordinariness, in which case you can claim all the credit for your own unique qualities.

But just occasionally of course you find an ancestor you really don't want to claim (inevitable when just 6 generations back you have 64 ancestors). Fought on the wrong side in some war perhaps, or ran away with the milk man, or deserted his children, or had some particularly unpleasant occupation, or, was, not to put too fine a point on it, physically ugly. You might tend to downplay these, or perhaps pretend they were someone else's ancestor, nothing to do with you.

Is this where it comes from, this hatred of evolution? Is it that awful feeling that somewhere in your ancestry there are skeletons in the closet, ape skeletons, and that there is more than one black sheep (sorry, monkey) if you dig deep enough? Not respectable, not people like us?

If so it is an odd piece of psychology. Go back far enough and all your ancestors are apes. All of the tens of thousands of ancestors whose DNA from a few million years ago combined to make a housewife in Kansas were apes. All of them, no point in closing your eyes and putting your hands over your ears, and voting for people on school boards who will prevent your children learning this terrible disgraceful family history. All apes.

And isn't that a magnificent thought? This really is a win-win discovery. On the one hand we humans have evolved, on our own merits, brains that were able to visit the moon, discover evolution, invent ipods, create literature. No boost from some outside force (hard to imagine an outside force in a troupe of apes roaming the plains of Africa, I would have thought, but maybe that is my lack of imagination), just plain hard work to get us where we are today.

But on the other hand, those apes whose evolution led to us must have been really special, really outstanding individuals among the general run of apehood. So really special ancestors to be proud of, and our own efforts too, what more could a human family historian ask for?

I'm proud of my human ancestors, all of them, and of my ape ancestors too. How about you?
Going ape over history
8 August 2006
Category Evolution
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Pin the tail on the monkey

Here is a question from a frustrated Alabama teacher (a tautology?)- 'But but but...if men are descended from monkeys, why don't men have tails? Get me from point A to point B on that one and I can begin to work on these inbred mountain people I live and work with in Alabama.'

I was just going to do the usual routine on this - We are descended from apes, not monkeys, and apes don't have tails either. But there is evidence that a human (and ape) ancestor had a tail because we have a vestigial tail (Yes, Virginia, it is vestigial, though it has some vestigial musculature).

But that hardly raises a sweat, so let's do better than that. And, in addition, the question itself reveals a great deal about the questioners.

There is no doubt that the ancestors of apes and monkeys had tails, as do the modern representatives of those ancient insectivores (for example tree shrews). But not all monkeys have tails, and the reason why is of great interest. The other big division between apes and monkeys is that apes are (mostly) ground dwelling species and monkeys are (mainly) tree dwelling species.

But adapting to life on the ground has happened a number of times in different groups, and each time it does, those species lack tails or have very reduced tails (for example the 'pigtail' monkey and the 'stumptail' monkey). On the other hand one group of apes, the gibbons, have readapted to life in trees, and while they didn't manage to redevelop a prehensile tail (presumably because it was so vestigial as to be beyond the reach of selection pressure), they developed, instead, much longer arms for movement from branch to branch.

Selection pressure for a prehensile tail for life in trees is obvious - it makes falling less likely, and allows feeding or holding babies while being firmly anchored to a branch. On the other hand (so to speak) a tail is of little use on the ground, and may indeed cause negative selection (for example making predation more likely, or causing injuries when moving through thick undergrowth). The evolutionary process to reduce or discard tails has happened a number of times, as it did with the ancestor of the apes and the ground dwelling early human line.

But the questioner knows nothing of this. The questioner has seen, perhaps in a zoo or a picture book a monkey (quite likely a South American species, very distantly related to African monkeys and even more distant from apes) with a tail. 'Daddy, that monkey has a tail, we don't, how could we be descended from that monkey?'

'Well, sonny, there are hundred of other ways in which we can show the relationship between humans, apes, early monkeys and insectivores. Let me show you their skeletons, and their teeth, and their brains and eyes, let me show you their digestive sytems, and their biochemistry, and ultimately, let me show you their chromosomes and their DNA. The tail is perhaps the least important feature, although it does tell us interesting things about the way the early primates adapted and branched'. The lack of any sense of nature's variety (and the ecological and evolutionary reasons for it) along with any sense of time and space, are what makes the creationist's task easy among the children of Alabama. Perhaps my dear reader from Alabama could take his/her students to Africa and show them the continent where primates evolved, and early humans, and where many of their living cousins are still to be found.

No, sadly not likely, I know.
Pin the tail on the monkey
6 June 2006
Category Evolution
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