The past few weeks seem to have seen laments for the decline of journalism and obituaries for old media reaching a critical mass. BoraZ has kindly collected a few dozen so that I don’t have to.

Perhaps it’s just because I’ve been reading Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, and because Davies did the last Skeptics in the Pub, that I have been noticing that the decline of newspapers is reaching this critical stage. Davies is a Guardian investigative journalist, and he’s breaking the rules by telling us just what a state the media is in. Flat Earth News, written two years ago, before the American newspapers started going bankrupt, and British newspapers shed half their workforce, documents the many multiplicative flaws in the system of news gathering, reporting, and dissemination which cause journalists to churn out the crap the passes for newspapers these days.

Davies’ conclusion is that journalism — a noble profession of bright people — has, largely as a cost-cutting measure, been reduced tochurnalism . Instead of spending a week researching a story in great depth and telling us the important facts that we didn’t know, journalists have been reduced to rewriting a dozen wire stories and press releases each day. Journalists no longer have the time, the background knowledge, or the luxury of specialisation, required to find out whether the words they are writing bear any resemblance to reality. Nor do they have the time to establish what conflicts of interest of their sources have and whether they are hiding things — instead, the words can be reported as he-said/she-said, and the report can technically never be wrong.

Indeed, the media and public relationships industry have evolved a sophisticated mutualistic relationship. Newspapers could not fill their papers without press release writers doing all their research (and even choosing their words) for them, and in return, interested parties get their side of the story, or their product, prominently placed in the story.

M’colleague suggested that this thesis sounded a little like a conspiracy theory. I, however, am generally convinced. I am convinced because I have seen it work so many times in the field that I am familiar with — science and medicine. I have seen how the British tabloid (and even broadsheet) newspapers build their oncological ontological database from poorly written press releases. I have seen how interested parties both in industry and pressure groups place their doubt or certainty in news stories about the environment. I’ve seen the basic failure of fact-checking as elementary mistakes in press releases about newly published journal papers are faithfully replaced in all papers. I’ve even seen my own words from Wikipedia appear in The Metro‘s obituary of John Peel. And I’ve seen how successfully our own side has fought back on the media’s own terms, when Sense About Science press released their detox dossier in the slow news week after Christmas.

Flat Earth News provides the overarching explanatory theory for why so much of the news media is, to quote a comment on Friday’s Ryanair-toilets “news story” publicity stunt, “such a great lorry load of cock.” Science bloggers like a good whinge about a bad science or medicine story in the paper, but the problem is much greater than just a few humanities graduates trying to write about science. That skepticism you apply when reading the science stories needs to apply to the politics, foreign events, business, and everything else besides, because the authors of those items know no more about their subject than the humanities graduates covering science do about theirs.

Journalists can cry that democracy is not possible without them; but there’s nothing empowering about a media that churns back the press releases of government departments and military agencies. There is nothing empowering in the Daily Mail.

I caught the last couple of minutes of Extreme Pilgrim (BBC 2, Friday 9pm) and was intrigued, so fired up the iPlayer to watch the whole thing. It’s Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival, all done in the style of an American college student movie. The main character presenter is Peter Owen Jones, a Sussex parish priest who defies the law that Anglican priests may speak no louder than a whisper. His accent is very 1960s public-school, though it also reminded me a little of this Fry and Laurie sketch, which begins to make sense when you learn that before joining the priesthood he was in marketing. There is marvelous rhythm in the way he pronounces “Him-ah-lee-ahs”. It made for a slightly surreal programme when combined with the Alan Davies haircut and constant bewildered/stoned facial expressions.

Jones goes “seeking the spiritual enlightenment that Britain once had” in India. He joins some Sadus at the Kumbh Mela, the massive Hindu festival on the Ganges. The first half of the programme is given over to Jones getting stoned and staying up ’till five in the morning. I wonder what Stephen Green or Mary Whitehouse would make of nice Anglican vicars smoking weed on the BBC. After a wadge of notes has changed hands, the group sit around the camp fire talking of how we should not be seeking rewards in this life, and of how the modern world is too concerned with the economic at the expense of the spiritual. In a marvelous scene with a cross-legged old guru, subtitles pop up to say “give me a hundred rupees”; this is translated for Jones, however, as a stream of spiritual babble about giving up material possessions. Another marvelous scene shows Jones, having been fast-tracked into the job of a Sadu, dressed in the full orange robes and still looking rather spaced. He stands in silence for twenty seconds before wondering aloud “where am I?” When the festival is over Jones sets off for a cave in the mountains with the objective of “purifying your parts with austerity”. Fnarr fnarr.

It’s all very nice. We meet lots of amicable characters preaching peace and charity. But it’s the perfect advert for why peaceful, liberal, friendly, wishy-washy “spiritual” religion is not universally harmless. This is the eastern spiritual utopia that so many Westerners look to as the solution to the problems of our materialist lives in the West? A skeletal shaman runs back and forth across a busy road to kiss the tarmac: “he’s making the energy meet — that’s his philosophy.” In his mountain cave, Jones is visited by the village chief, who comes with offerings and a request for blessings of his daughter’s marriage. Jones is very upset one morning as he confesses to battering a scorpion with a saucepan: “I was a guest on his territory.” The programme closes with Jones observing that he is “a product of a society that values economic well-being as much as spiritual well-being.” Uhuh. And your society has running water, an absence of open-pit latrines in the street, and a distinct lack of amoebic dysentery. I would call that a good thing. And that is the problem with peaceful, liberal, friendly religion: to value “spiritual needs” means to value the next life and the invisible friend above the needs of real people in the one life that they get. A “philosophy” that values disease and starvation does not indicate a care for man’s real spiritual needs.

So while the programme ended up as Vicar of Dibley meets Ray Mears, deep down it was trying to combine the Jesus complex of the git-wizard David Blaine with the philosophical power of rocket scientologist Tom Cruise. The programme thinks that it is making a profound insight into society and nature (the same “profound insights” of stoned hippies everywhere), but utterly fails to make the case. Still, it makes for entertaining television.

I listened to a sermon^[1] by Ken Ham, creationist head of Answers in Genesis, the other day. I was erm … researching a role? Anyway, it was great fun. My knowledge of church services is limited to the Anglican tradition, and it was very educational to hear how things are done evangelical style. I won’t bother dissecting Ham’s argument bit by bit — though it’s worth mentioning the occasional bursts of outright Lying For Jesus, such as the claim that textbooks state that there are higher and lower races of man, or the conflation of species (of cats) with breeds (of dogs). You know, things so absurdly wrong and depressingly easy to fact-check. Rather, what really interested me was the way he wove two very different classes of (equally fallacious) arguments together. On the one had were his creative truth-claims in favour of biblical literacy and against the findings of science. On the other were arguments about perceived consequences that acceptance of evolution has for morality. Ham flickered back and forth between the two, ignoring the distinction. It’s an acceptable rhetorical technique, I suppose: mix claims about what is true with scare stories about what happens if you don’t believe it. I’m sure many of the arguments for atheism could even be charged with using this technique at times, and it’s a staple of politics and tabloid news. But I think that it says something very interesting about the motivation of creationists.

Ham’s argument from consequences comes down to this: if the bible is literally true, God determines morality. If evolution is true, morality is based on man’s fallible word. And you know what? He’s right. The bible is wrong about an awful lot of things (sometimes it’s just asking too much to believe that it was intended as allegory), and God does not determine morality. To paraphrase HectorAvalos : it is not sufficient to demonstrate that the bible gets one fact right in order to demonstrate that it is is useful, relevant, ethical, or the revealed word of God. But one inaccuracy is all that it takes to prove that it isfallible and questionable.^[2] Ham therefore believes that it is his duty to defend every word of the bible as the truth. Only that with “save their souls.” The end goal of promoting creationism is not to have everybody believe in creation, but to fight the rise of the “pagans.” (Lol.) Ham believes that if people are taught that it doesn’t really matter how God made the world, they will question whether he made it at all. If people are taught that it doesn’t really matter whether everything in the first book of the bible happened, they will question whether the events of the Gospels really happened. And you know what? I can’t argue against that. Our only difference is that Ham believes that this is a bad thing.

The tactic of mixing truth with consequences is something that has been inherited by the intelligent design movement. Take the Wedge document, the DiscoveryInstitute’s 1998 manifesto (leaked, and now subject to desperate attempts at distancing and damage control from the Disco Inst.). The document makes vague appeals to science here and promises research programmes there, but it is primarily concerned with the perceived effects of “scientific materialism”. Socialism is the preferred bogeyman of the Disco Institute, though the link between evolution and socialism never seems far from confused. Or, of course, we have Ben Stein in theater(s) (for one week only) rather offensively lying for Jesus about racism and playing games with the holocaust.^[3] School shootings, abortion, homosexuality, and all the other traditional demons are these days the responsibility of “evolutionization”.^[4]

Claims about the truth and claims about consequences are not the same thing, and I’d be rather offended if somebody gave a lecture or made a film mixing the two so thoroughly and expected me not to notice.

References

1. Available here
2. From his Minnesota atheists lecture, if I recall correctly
3. In Expelled
4. Attributed to Tom DeLay, 1999. “U.S. Republican politician blames the Columbine shootings on “evolutionization“.

So, BBC TWO’s Oceans: marine ecology’s answer to Time Team. I get as excited by marine biology as the next nerd, and you don’t have to remind me of the importance of conservation. Somehow, the BBC have even made me feel cynical about these.

In Zanzibar, the team meet Coconut Crabs, and in a typical race-against-the-clock encounter, they have to do some superhero act or other. Meanwhile, the voiceover explains to us that these land crabs are a “species in mid-evolution”. Chez Watt?

Of course, Coconut Crabs are “mid-evolution”. But, just as an advertisement pointing out that this product does X suggests that that product does not, a voiceover stating that this species is “mid-evolution” gives the impression that the species’ mid-evolutionary status somehow sets it apart from the crowd. What extant species is not “mid-evolution”?

Perhaps Coconut Crabs are described as “mid-evolution” because they exhibit a singular rapid observable change, or show diverging populations, or some other interesting phenomenon that I have not thought of? I don’t know. Curious to find out more, I looked on Wikipedia. I learnt that Coconut Crabs can not live in the water — their gills have gone, and in their place are branchiostegal lungs. According to Wikipedia, these organs “can be interpreted as a developmental stage between gills and lungs”. Chez Watt? Didn’t they even think to check their own article on “developmental stage” to check whether the sentence meant anything?

This nonsense is all caused by people assuming that they know what evolution is. To the BBC TWO voiceover writer, evolution is a progression — from microbe to sea dweller to land crawler to globalised post-industrial biped. The Wikipedia editor knows that in the great chain, gills evolve into branchiostegal lungs, and the next step must surely be lungs “proper” like our own. Thus, in a single paragraph one can explain that these crabs are a living transition between sea and land, and also explain that the crabs cannot live in the water, and not even notice that one is talking purest drivel.

<sigh>

How long have biologists been correcting this error, now?

I found on the iPlayer the latest in BBC2′s series of Darwin documentaries, Did Darwin Kill God? This is theologian Conor Cunningham’s attempt reconcile science and religion, and show that their differences are all just a misunderstanding deliberately promoted by 20th century American christian fundamentalists, and 21st century atheist fundamentalists.We could play count the mistakes, but I’ll try to keep it to the most illustrative examples. Firstly, Cunningham wants to show that Darwin himself has nothing to say on science versus religion. In correcting the simplistic idea that Darwin lost his religion entirely because of evolution, Cunningham suggests that Darwin instead lost his religion entirely because of the personal tragedy of his daughter’s death. Uh. I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than either of those. And it’s true that Darwin did, for various reasons, generally try to keep quiet about God and religion, but he knew his work did have a bearing on the field, and, for example, made quips about a loving creator god and the design of parasitic Ichneumonid wasps.

Worryingly, it is not just his history of science that is oversimplified so far as to be plain wrong: his characterisation of his own field looks no better. He seems to think that throughout history creationism was an obscure aberration, taken seriously only by the eccentric fringes of theology — you know, like James Ussher, mere Primate of All Ireland, or theologian William Paley. Real members of the One True Faith followed the “mainstream” teachings of Augustine, and took Genesis as allegory. I am not, and have no interest in being, a theologian. I don’t know enough about the subject to be able to say whose ideas have attracted the largest following throughout history. But I am slightly concerned. In my experience, a theologian placing an idea on the fringe means that modern European academic theologians don’t take it seriously, but that it has probably been the dominant dogma of their church and its laity for most of its history.

Meanwhile, Cunningham’s idea that American creationism was invented during the Scopes trial as a reaction to eugenics is an entirely new one to me, along with the ideas that American creationism was all old-earth creationism until the 1960s, and that young-earth creationism was invented as a reaction to sixties liberalisation of values. Biblicalliteralists are indeed motivated by perceived threats to their moral systems, but I think you’ll find that the history of the movement is a bit more complicated than that — to the extent that Cunningham’s version of history is just plain wrong.

The best part of the programme though, is Cunningham’s attempt to characterise the state of current thinking in evolutionary biology, and show how “ultra-Darwinists” are discredited. Perhaps if I knew as much history and theology as I do biology my jaw would have dropped as far in those sections as it did in this one. The dropped jaw soon turned to laughing out loud, though, when I realised that the work was merely one of incompetence rather than deliberate misinformation. I’ll skip over his bizarre attempt to introduce the selfish gene theory and how the human genome project has disproved it (!), and move on to the part that really had me rolling on the floor: one of the most fantastically absurd non-sequiturs I’ve ever heard.

The topic was memetics: the idea that ideas are replicating units that evolve as they spread from one mind to another. Memetics was originally just a thought experiment about hypothetical units of evolution analogous to genes, but was fleshed out, for example by Daniel Dennett and Sue Blackmore. Now, Sue Blackmore is great, but if Cunningham really knew the state of evolutionary thinking, he would know that she does not really represent even “ultra-Darwinists”. But Cunningham drags her to Salisbury so that they can do an interview in the station car park. Brilliantly, he discovers a fatal flaw in the theory of memes — one that he seems to think somehow has important consequences for the credibility of Richard Dawkins and the God hypothesis: if memes are true, evolution is itself a meme!

… so what?

Well, think about it. If evolution is a meme, it’s just a parasite in our mind, and not true! Memes destroy the truth of evolution!

Uhm. But-

Ultra-Darwinists have never been able to answer this problem!

Oh … kay.

Cunningham clearly really does truly believe that his brain has just done something brilliant. I suspect he is correct in stating that “ultra-Darwinists” have never been able to answer the “problem”, since I have difficulty believing that anyone would ever before have managed to think of it and say it out loud before noticing what an utterly and humiliatingly ridiculous thing it would be to say.

As an aside, it is interesting to consider truth and memes. Under the theory of memetics, the idea that truth is of value would itself be a meme (and a very meritorious one). In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins talks about the need for genes to cooperate, or to put it another way, selfish genes have to be able to survive in an environment that contains many other selfish genes. Analogously, memes have to survive in an environment of other memes. Scientists, for example, host a series of memes for methods of filtering the non-true memes that might be trying to infect them. Skepticism, rationalism, logic, reason, and empiricism are memes that are also meme filters. But many people do not host them. Others fail to recognise the truth in a meme because it conflicts with false memes that they are already hosting. Some people do not even host the truth-valuing meme.

–

Cunningham’s thesis — and, it would appear from the website, the thesis of the executive producer of the BBC2 Darwin season — is that creationists and “ultra-Darwinists” are extremists: two different kinds of fundamentalists abusing Darwin to promote their sinister agenda. Richard Dawkins, for example is an extremist because he believes that there is no need for God. (Not because he believes that religion is a bad thing: merely believing that there is no need for God is enough to get you branded an extremist.)

Cunningham is showing us the two unreasonable, frightening, even dangerous extremes, and telling us that the truth lies in the middle — bang on the spot where Darwin and the Bible are both right, in their own ways. This is apparently the reasonable position. Life on earth evolves, and Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. That’s the reasonable, moderate, non-extremist middle ground position to hold.

Perhaps next the Beeb could help us reach a nice reasonable and moderate middle-ground position between those extremists who either demand that pi is ~3.14159 or that it is exactly 3.

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Comments on the original post:

Wow, a slow news day, eh? The BBC, shunning predictable Chinese military aggression, another turn of the tides in Iraq, and yet more boring news about the economy, lead with “Brown criticised over embryo bill“. Somebody at BBC News is clearly a fan of Cardinal Keith O’Brien. ‘Keith who?’ I hear you ask. What do you mean you’ve never heard of the leader of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland? The big news is that O’Brien is making a fuss over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. The bill, currently in parliament, will, amongst other things, make it easier for researchers to develop methods of growing tissues and organs that are genetically identical to those who require transplants or grafts, and is likely to help solve the problem of transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppressive drugs after transplants. Then there’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, blah, blah. This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a terrible thing. I couldn’t put it better than O’Brien himself:

“This Bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.”

The reason, of course, is that this bill enables the use of hybrid embryos. Putting little bits of reprogrammed adult human DNA into animal zygote cells. This presents all sorts of obvious problems for the Roman Catholic Church. It suggests the clearly impossible: that humans are animals, evolved like all other animals, and following the same developmental rules as our neighbours. The Cardinal is, I am sure, confident that hybrid embryos will never work, because of the obvious fact that cows, pigs and mice are not created in God’s image. That’s elementary stuff. Comes right at the beginning, in Genesis 1:27. It’s almost embarrassing that these biologists don’t know that.

Then there is the problem that this bill mentions embryology. The Roman Catholic church has, for the past few decades, tried to convince the world that it knows all about embryology. And don’t they just. Is it not the case that human embryos are human beings? Is it not so that fertilised eggs can think and feel, recite their twelve times tables, and lead missions into pagan lands? O’Brien is privileged with an intimate knowledge of God’s colossal mind, and he knows that God loves zygotes. So of course the Roman Catholic church must oppose a bill that makes such absurd claims as development being mind bogglingly complicated, life having fuzzy boundaries, or that you are infinitely more valuable and important than the half dozen skin cells that have fallen off your right index finger during your current browsing session.

Of course, it’s not just the mind of God that O’Brien knows intimately. God knows what you and I think, and he has spilled the beans to O’Brien:

“I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.”

Yes of course. Who is better placed to judge the beliefs, feelings and fears of the public on this matter than Cardinal Keith O’Brien? And he’s the perfect candidate to head this “single permanent national bioethics commission” that he proposes, too, what with his deep knowledge of developmental biology and reproductive medicine, and his profound understanding of the national mood. Not to mention that direct line to God. You couldn’t find a more representative candidate in the land.

Indeed, people were talking of nothing but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill on the crowded train home yesterday, and I can tell you, they’re not too happy about the army of monsters that are coming our way. “Haven’t these scientists ever heard of zombies,” one of them asked? Another was concerned that the convergence of reprogrammed human nuclear DNA with bovine mitochondrial DNA within the same cell membrane could just be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back and leads God to break his promise never again to commit genocide by flooding the earth. One gabbling mouthbreather even pointed out that such an untested and unprecedented confluence of incompatible nucleotide sequences could, for all he knew, flip the earth’s magnetic poles and precipitate the fiery conclusion of the universe.

Oh wait, have I got that right? Now I think about it, perhaps Britain is not the reactionary backwater that O’Brien thinks it is. Perhaps the senile and simple individuals who pray for the souls of cells do not make more than an entertaining but tiny minority of people in this country. Perhaps, just maybe, O’Brien’s series of non-sequiturs have led him to a confused and offensively hyperbolic fantasy about morality that he is pretending is representative of a universal hallucination of the British public. Sure, this bill does not have widespread popular support. But that is because parliamentary bills get only widespread popular obliviousness and apathy. The cardinal is dreaming if he believes that there is widespread popular opposition to it.

How about a front page science story that doesn’t give 99% of the coverage to absurd ideas?

Not in the television programme — well, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet due to pesky tennis fans capturing the remote control — but in the Simon Mayo interview (page liable to expire, but I guess everyone has heard the podcast). The statement to which I refer, made by David Attenborough on Radio 5 on Friday, concerns that old question of whether human evolution has “stopped”. A lot of people like to comment on this issue, and I can see why. It’s a quirky question that does not appear to be of great consequence, but which appeals to our collective ego; and it’s a question that has an obvious answer. Obviously evolution has stopped: advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology mean that we are no longer subject to natural selection pressures. As Sir D puts it, “the Darwinian survival of the fittest has now been largely negated.”

Trouble is, the obvious answer is wrong. It would be correct if we redefined evolution to fit a definition of “fittest” as being adaptation to a pre -agrarian culture. But that is not what evolution means. Lets take the oft-quoted definition of evolution as “change in allele frequencies over time” — that is, gene variants becoming more or less common in a population. Now think about it: humans have been taken from their previous hunter-gatherer niche — where evolution would be stabilising good hunter-gatherer adaptations in the population — and put into a whole different niche, where many hunter-gatherer adaptations are superfluous, or even unhelpful. Under such circumstances, you can bet that some allele frequencies are changing. Stabilising selection has been lifted, and now genetic drift and mutation of those genes can occur freely, eroding the now superfluous adaptations.

There are several reasons why this error is so attractive. I suppose it comes from viewing evolution as a progressive process striving for perfection. Evolution and natural selection are seen as being about creating new adaptations, and one forgets the roles of genetic drift, and stabilising selection. Certainly, if one can’t see the creation of something new and interesting and obviously adaptive, it’s easy to overlook the fact that evolution is happening all the same. If an improvement to a body part becomes more common in a population, we instantly recognise evolution; but we don’t recognise evolution in the loss of such a feature, or the gain of a genetic disorder. I’m sure Sir David is aware of all of this, but it’s easy to lapse into popular but wrong ways of thinking — we’ve all done it.

But on the question of whether humans are evolving, there’s a second reason why the error is not easily forgiven. It is always asserted that the reason for human evolution having stopped is that technological, agricultural, and medical advances have put an end to famine, pestilence, infant mortality, and the other natural selection pressures. And, however many times I have heard the claim, I still haven’t gotten over the astonishment that such a bad argument can be made by such great intellects. If the claim were true, what conclusions can we draw about evolution in the population of Zimbabwe, where famine is setting in, HIV/AIDS has halved life expectancy to the early thirties, and infant mortality is one in ten? The simple fact is that the human species does not have advanced agriculture, technology, and medicine.

I’ve been following CBC’s How To Think About Science series, and caught the Evelyn Fox Keller episode the other day. It was interesting, but there were a couple of issues that I just can’t let pass. Keller talks about the hype of genomics ten years ago — during the human (and other) genome projects, when huge amounts of a new kind of raw data were piling up, and everyone was speculating about the interesting things we could do with it. Leaving aside the fact that many of the claims about genomics have and are coming true (albeit, over a longer time-frame than mainstream media imagined it would), I have a problem with Keller’s own bit of hype.

It’s epigenetics, of course — reversible and heritable changes (both between generations of cells and generations of individuals) in gene expression patterns which do not alter the DNA sequence itself. Epigenetics is where all the hype is in biology at the moment. Don’t get me wrong: I think the field is interesting and exciting. But as the hottest newest branch of biology, everybody knows the name, and few know the details. It’s cited as the mechanism of faith healing, mind reading, and homeopathy. In Keller’s case, epigenetics is cited as a problem for theneo-Darwinian view of evolution. By “neo-Darwinism”, Keller particularly means the gene-centered view of evolution. The name “Dawkins” may have arisen once or twice. The problem that Keller thinks that epigenetics has for mainstream modern evolutionary biology is that organisms may be able to control their mutation rates in response to changes in environmental conditions, and thus alter the rate of evolution.

Keller is referring, I suppose, to the checkpoints and DNA repair mechanisms that spot and fix errors in DNA replication during gametogenesis (the production of sperm and eggs). It’s difficult to make a copy of three billion base pairs without making a few mistakes, and too many mistakes in too many important genes add up to a miscarriage. So there are some molecular machines which follow the copiers around, checking that they got it right. The machines do their best to fix the typos, and in extreme circumstances, will kill the cell if the mistakes are too big. Where epigenetics comes in is in the regulation of those molecular machines. Epigenetics hires and fires the copyeditors. Specifically, there are epigenetic mechanisms which pack away genes — wrap them around proteins called histones, to form structures called chromatin. Locked away in these packages, the genes can not be switched on, and no new copyediting machines can be produced.

The hypothesis that mutation rates may be under control by some mechanism which recognises changes in the environmental conditions and responds by altering the expression levels of the copyeditors is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a fascinating one. But a problem for the neo-Darwinian picture of evolution? I’m not sure I see the connection, there. Here is how I imagine such a mechanism working: in the cells producing sperm and eggs, a set of receptors monitor environmental conditions; when environmental conditions change, those receptors pass the message on to the nucleus, where a set of machines make the appropriate changes to gene expression. Why do I propose such a mechanism? Because just such mechanisms coordinate development, transmit the messages of hormones, detect pain smell light taste, determine the activity of drugs, and do a-hundred-and-one other things in the cell. They are the default way of getting a cellular response to an external stimulus. And it has already been empirically determined that such a mechanism exists in the case of DNAcopyeditors. The DNA copyeditors are not switched on 24/7 — after all, they are needed primarily during cell division. The mechanism which switches them on was discovered by researchers interested in cancers, who found that this mechanism is often damaged in tumours, leaving thecopyeditors in a permanent ‘off’ state.

Perhaps it doesn’t work this way. Whatever. My point is that it is very easy to imagine a mechanism by which environmental changes lead to heritable changes in mutation rates — a mechanism which can be created by the simple modification of another very similar mechanism. That modification? Orthodox neo-Darwinian evolution. The receptors and signals, the gene expression machinery and the chromatin re-modellers are all the product of orthodox neo-Darwinian evolution. And the system no doubt remains at the whim of natural selection. The idea that evolution itself evolves is fascinating, but it does not appear problematic or revolutionary to me.

–

I said I had a second issue with the programme, didn’t I? Ah, yes, still on the topic of Dawkins and the idea of the selfish gene. Keller suggests that the ideas expressed by Dawkins have been surpassed and overturned by the modern developments of molecular biologists. Developments such as the fact that genes have complicated networks of interactions with each other. Gosh. It’s almost as though Keller hasn’t read The Selfish Gene. In TSG (Or was it The Extended Phenotype?), Dawkins is very careful to point out the fact that the “genes” of population geneticists — Mendelian particles of inheritance, and the “genes” for which the word “gene” was coined a century ago — are not quite the same thing as the “genes” of molecular and developmental biologists. Dawkins’ selfish genes need not be defined by start and stop codons, upstream promoters, or discreet messenger RNA products. Which makes Keller’s criticism largely irrelevant.

Whatever. Who cares? Somebody slightly mischaracterised an obscure academic problem, buried in an obscure podcast. Well, the main reason I care is that Keller is herself telling us that we should be more precise when talking about genes. When first used, the term “gene” was just a placeholder for a phenomenon we understood little about, she reminds us. Over time, we’ve filled in the details. The problem is, the population geneticists and evolutionary biologists have filled in different details to the molecular geneticists and developmental biologists. They’ve all continued to use the term “gene”, but they’re now using it to mean different things to each other. Oh, wait, haven’t I heard this somewhere before?

I guess it’s just that Richard Dawkins is so shrill and screechy that it’s impossible to read him carefully.

Filipe V. Jacinto and Manel Esteller, 2007. Mutator pathways unleashed by epigenetic silencing in human cancer. Mutagenesis 22(4):247-253; Free full text

What is it with Channel 4 and the examination of excretions? During How Toxic Are Your Kids (C4, Thurs 8pm) I had to check the television guide to make sure that Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brass Eye) wasn’t the producer. Apparently, this is episode two of two, and I’m so disappointed that I missed the first episode. The programme opens with presenter, Sarah Beeny, telling us that “on an average day alone, I’m exposed to over a thousand chemicals.” This is episode two: we’re onto the advanced level stuff. A token ounce of sense — “… natural chemicals (some good and some bad)” — is voice-overed in at one point, but mostly, “chemical” is a synonym for “toxin” and “natural” is a synonym for “healthy”. Indeed, the disclaimer comes after telling us that “prior to the 1950s, we only used natural chemicals.” There’s no evidence for this obviously nonsensical statement, but it’s a fact.

As is standard for mid-evening television “journalism”, we meet some wonderful characters. It’s so much easier to talk to some ordinary people — who are all very willing to play along, in return for their fifteen minutes — than to do some research, or find out some facts. There is the Scottish woman whose interior decoration mimics a neoclassical museum, and who has a selection of air fresheners in every room. “Some people might think it’s a bit excessive,” she tells us. The voice-over comes in with the fact that people who use air fresheners are more likely to suffer regularly from headaches, but the science behind this fact is never explained: do the chemicals in the air fresheners cause the headaches, or are headaches another symptom of the psychoses that these people are clearly suffering from? Journalists these days are so thorough in their investigating that they conduct studies and experiments. The data point in this experiment is a teenage girl who has her make-up and shampoo taken away, in return for some “natural” products. “Everyone’s looking at me like, ‘she’s so ugly’.” No, dear, they’re looking at you like, “look at that girl being exploited by that film crew.” This is a scientific experiment, remember, and so an objective measure for results is required, and since it’s Channel 4, it has to involve analysing waste. But this crew is amateur: they stop at urine, rather going the whole Gillian McKeith. Then there’s the family that won’t eat any cooked food. “Don’t you ever just think, ‘oh, I really want some soup right now’?” Wow, yeah, soup. That’s exactly what I’d miss most if I gave up cooked food.

Pick a light-factual television programme from the archives and it should be possible to date it to within five years of its production merely by looking at the graphics. Graphics go through fashions, influenced by the latest technology. This one makes wonderful use of the virtual studio to create an amusing series of split screen scenes, for example. Either they just had so much to say and so little time that they had to resort to having two streams of information running at the same time, or it was simply the case that the presenter (left) was just so bored by what the scientist (right) was telling us that she had given up and was putting on her make-up instead. Another ubiquitous gimmick is to deliberately make the picture look bad. Bad picture quality is a way of immediately telling us “this is an informal ‘diary’ scene”: they’re the quality you’d get from cheap cameras of the variety one would use for home videos, or outside broadcasts from a cash strapped production company. Except they’re not. Cheap cameras have moved on since the early 1990s, but apparently, our expectations of picture quality haven’t kept up.

Everyone knows that alongside spectroscopic analysis of bodily productions, the way to do research is to conduct surveys. To the street! We get a montage of the people, who, after telling us that they never read the shampoo ingredients label (no shit, really?), all tell us that what they really want is more “natural”, “pure”, “essential oils” and “organic”. “It says 100% pure, therefore I know everything in there is going to be beneficial to me.” The presenter tells us: “nature is powerful stuff.” Yeah. As powerfully capable of harming us as synthetic chemicals. Still, it’s no good just telling us how bad chemicals are, clearly there is a demand for alternatives! “Although the levels of these chemicals aren’t considered dangerous, I’m going to see if I can reduce them.” And so, we get Aloe Vera for breakfast, and salt & lemon juice toothpaste. This is not science, it’s not journalism, and it’s not consumer advocacy. It’s classic infotainment. If Channel Four News is The Guardian of the television medium, the mid-evening slot is the Daily Mail. It’s not just health scares; it’s health scares with “kids” in the headline.

I’m watching Peter Owen Jones’ Around The World In Eighty Faiths. You might recall Owen Jones as the public school hippy ex-ad man anglican vicar from Extreme Pilgrimage.

This time ’round, Owen Jones is on a world tour, looking at the beliefs and rituals of eighty different faiths. It’s fascinating. The beliefs held by these eighty faiths are not in any way compatible with each other, and Owen Jones acknowledges this by not attempting to conjure those pitiful explanations for why they are, in-fact, all the same belief. He’s very respectful of the beliefs as they are described to him. For much of the series, he whispers as though it is an Attenborough documentary, and he must not disturb the wildlife in its natural habitat. He stands at a short distance watching in awe of the rituals. Clearly profound things are up.

But when he goes to Moscow to meet the Russian Orthodox Christians, a brief and sudden angry streak displays itself. He is disgusted with what atheism — not communism, atheism — did to the Russian Orthodox religion under the Soviet regime. But, to tick off another of his eighty faiths, he goes to observe some atheists performing their ritual in a dusty old meeting room. He wants to know “what contemporary atheism has to offer.” What a fascinating way to approach the issue. Not whether an idea is right or wrong; what it has to offer.

Later he visits Damanhur, a “spiritualist” commune in northern Italy. Here he learns about spherocells and environmental transformers, and concludes that there is much creative energy in the vicinity. Hey, in Damanhur, you don’t even need to be sentient to get creative: “Plants can modulate sounds. By making them listen to classical music, they learn to use it better. There is an interaction between our thoughts and the vegetable’s.” To prove the point, Owen Jones strokes a leaf to help the plant with its latest composition.

“Most religions have some wacky stuff in them. We’ve just become socialised into believing that ‘there are some people who believe this, and that’s OK.’ Is that OK? I mean, I think that’s OK.”

Sure, Pete. If you think that truth doesn’t matter.