Why would a headline writer, having glanced at a boring but reasonable article about saving money, think to write “driving’s never cost more”?  Where did they get that idea from?

Continue reading at At War With The Motorist…

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“.

People love a good argument with Richard Dawkins. So many people are so desperately seeking reassurance that he is wrong, and book shop shelves groan under the output of writers who are happy to provide that reassurance, in big words and glossy covers, with referenciness aplenty and a friendly review from an Oxbridge theologian. Dawkins calls them his fleas: the hastily bashed out “Dawkins Delusions” and “God Solutions” that claim to refute Dawkins’ writings on God, while presenting the same old pitiful arguments for His existence. Parasites on his name, contributing nothing, and not even worth the effort to crush.

Continue reading at Lay Science…

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.

This is an archival re-post of something written last summer on the old blog.

Any Questions, one half of BBC Radio 4′s weekly foray into the realm of mindless US-style talk radio bigotry, this week invited a panel of historians, novelists, and journalists to share their poorly considered thoughts on current affairs with the nation. A question regarding the situation in Iran was asked, and after ten minutes of the panelists tediously repeating what they had read that week from real foreign affairs experts, somebody mentioned twitter. I’ll pass on wordsmith Will Self’s clumsy attempt at a joke (“the only circumstances in which I would twitter is if a songbird flew into my mouth”), which somehow prompted screeches of delight from the audience of children and mental subnormals, and go straight to the comments of Rod Liddle.

Rod Liddle, left-of-centre columnist for right-of-centre newsmagazine Spectator and former editor of Radio 4′s flagship Today Programme, joked about the use of twitter by celebrities and politicians being all about what they ate in the restaurant last night (oh, by the way, Rod, I’ve got 2008 on the phone — they said something about wanting their joke back?). Even if that were true, so what? I’ve never read the Spectator, but I learn from their website that if it were my wish to do so, I could enjoy such features and columns as boring woman has lunch — sorry, splendid lunch; some guy gets his hair cut; and painfully arsenumbingly pointless woman pours her heart out over the uniquely middle class problem of “how to start a letter to your sponsored child”. My God, Spectator, don’t you realise? I don’t care. I don’t care about these irksome morons, I don’t care about their lunch, their haircut, or their sponsored child, and I don’t know why you’re telling us about them. You have taken three retards, stapled them together, and are asking people to pay £3 to read this crap.

For God’s sake, traditional media, take a step back and look at what you’re doing. You look ridiculous. Radio 4 is broadcasting Anne Widdecombe’s considered views on designer shoes, and you wonder why we’re all off reading the science minister’s twitter feed? You don’t see the connection between the Spectator‘s bizarre dogmatic belief that the raving troll Melanie Philips somehow has something worth printing, and our mass defection to the blogs of professors? Channel 4 broadcasts Rod Liddle’s spectacularly moronic comments on atheism and eugenics, and you still don’t get why we’ve all gone to watch YouTube and TED talks?

Of course there are some tedious twitterers. Of course there are plenty of people who couldn’t give a crap about my thoughts, or the thoughts of those bloggers and twitterers that I follow religiously. And of course there are plenty of people who, like me, could not care less what Rod Liddle thinks about anything, let alone the catalogue of topics that he mistakenly thinks he is qualified to comment on. This is the nature of broadcast media, and it always has been. And that is not a problem. It doesn’t matter if I am not interested in somebody’s restaurant-related tweets, because I can ignore them. It doesn’t matter if somebody blogs on a topic that I do not care for, because I can scroll on past. It doesn’t matter if Channel 4 makes poorly-researched documentaries , because I can switch channel. It doesn’t matter if my newspaper prints columns on haircuts and sponsored children, because I don’t have to read those if I don’t want to. Just because something is published in a broadcast medium, does not mean that you are the target audience, and the author is seeking your approval. The difference, as I’m sure you will have noticed, is that if nobody wants to read my tweet or blog post, I will have wasted the few seconds or minutes I put into crafting it. If nobody reads your column or listens to your radio programme, your publisher goes bankrupt and you loose your house.

One comment made on twitter is not going to change the situation in Iran. Nor is a comment made by a novelist on Any Questions. The difference is that the twitterers are aware of these facts. ]]> http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/06/broadcast/feed/ 0 http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/05/a-short-note-on-sweatshops/ http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/05/a-short-note-on-sweatshops/#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 16:21:11 +0000 Joe http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/?p=80 Continue reading →]]>

I want to take a short diversion from normal service to add to the occasional series “arguments so bad my jaw literally drops.”  I have forgotten exactly what radio programme I heard it on, but it was probably one of those vacuous pseudo-intellectual radio four programmes staffed by Daily Mail and Guardian columnists — The Moral Maze, most likely.  The argument was that boycotting sweatshops increases the problem of poverty — obviously, without the peanuts sweatshop workers are paid for long hours in unsafe conditions, their poverty will be exacerbated.

What do you think we do when we boycott sweatshops?  Go naked?  Knowing very little economics, I can not comment on the claims that increasing wages causes inflation related problems, but I don’t think an education in economics is required for me to know that if I buy my clothes from the sweatshops to keep them in their peanuts, the fair wage producers are going to loose out.  Could any of you economists confirm for me that increasing sales of fair wage clothing might just have the effect of creating jobs in that sector?  I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Originally posted on the old blog in 2007.

Continue reading at Lay Science…

Skepticism — the movement and the everyday scientific method — is about vetting the new ideas that want to take up residence in our minds. It’s a critical thinking toolkit that is there to prevent us getting fooled. It’s not cynicism or stubborn disbelief, just a cautious and questioning approach to the claims of others. It’s knowing the fallibility of the human mind; it’s the opposite of gullibility.

The gold standard that a skeptic seeks in an argument is to be able to see and evaluate and understand the original science and data and statistical analyses that supposedly support the claims of that argument’s proponents. But one doesn’t always have the time or expertise to go around making such rigorous examinations of complicated arguments. In those situations it’s common to tentatively accept the conclusions of experts in the field who you believe to have made those rigorous examinations themselves and who you trust to have got those examinations right. Accepting the consensus of the experts without having rigorously examined their evidence yourself is an argument from authority — a “trick”, if you like, but one that is not entirely unacceptable.

But for an issue as important as climate change, where we’re talking about big risks and being asked to make big sacrifices, one wants to make a more rigorous examination of the arguments and evidence and to be more confident about the science than one would for matters of less consequence. But proponents and opponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) both claim to have the science and the data and the statistics on their side — they both claim to have applied skepticism and the scientific method — and the lay person perhaps doesn’t have the dozens of hours required to learn the maths and chemistry and physics behind the arguments. All they’re left with is picking the side with the most PhDs in climate-related sciences, right?

But the AGW proponents have one other important thing going for them: even if the skeptical lay person can’t independently evaluate the claims of the proponents, they can easily see the absurdity of the claims of the opponents.

For example, on this week’s Little Atoms, Johnny Ball embarrassed himself with this series of arguments:

1. According to Ball, there is a scientific controversy because: “would you consider a qualified engineer to be a scientist? I think I would, and the majority of engineers don’t believe that we’re changing the climate.^{[citation needed]}” Well, no, engineers are not scientists. Some engineers — a small minority — happen to also be scientists, but engineering is not a science, at least, not in the sense that matters. Many engineers know much about how physics and chemistry work, and most probably know more mathematics than the average scientist. They can apply some scientific facts about the way the world works. But they are not doing science. Science is a body of facts and theories about the way the world works, but far more importantly, it is a way of studying the world. Science is a process and a tool, a method of empiricism, critical thinking and skepticism. Engineering and science share facts about the world, but they are very different processes and very different tools. The two professions think in different ways, and are rarely taught anything about each-other’s way of working.
2. Climate scientists are “cooking the books for grant money”. Yeah. It’s the scam of the century in which tens of thousands of individuals have abandoned their scientific principles to cooperate in successfully defrauding all the governments and funding agencies of the world. Also, did I mention that they are Reptilians? Dudes, have you still not realised how absurd you look making this claim?
3. Ball points out that climate scientists ignore the sun-spots — we keep shouting “sun-spots” and they keep ignoring us! Uh. Except, he forgets that somebody went and invented Google. We can all now google about sun-spots and climate change, see just how climate scientists have ignored them by, er, studying them and incorporating them into their theories and models and papers and reports, and we can read the lay summaries of climatologists and astronomers explaining why sun-spots aren’t — and can’t be — more than a minor detail in climate.
4. Finally, Ball compares climate change “sceptics” to Darwin and Faraday and Copernicus, while climate scientists are like eugenicists: when Darwin proposed evolution, the scientific consensus was against him, and it took a few decades for the rest of the scientific community to catch up. Ball seems to be proposing that, er, climate change scepticism is, uhm, a new science that the rest of the scientific community will catch up with over time. Did he somehow miss the last thirty years of climate scientists slowly convincing the scientific community into consensus?

The lay person can have some confidence that the climate scientists are right about AGW not merely by weighing PhDs and picking the authoritative argument. They just need to look at the sheer amount of money and effort poured into the argument by the denialists, and snigger at how embarrassingly piss-poor are the claims that effort buys. Zombie arguments and absurd conspiracies. The climate scientists might be giving us data and graphs and theories that we couldn’t possibly independently verify, but when the best the denialists can buy is a “rah rah rah look at the sun-spots” and a “help help, we’re being oppressed, like Copernicus”, I know which argument my skeptical mind is more persuaded by.

And this is also why Greenpeace need to shut up and let the grown-ups put the case for AGW.

Catching up on the week’s feeds, and the CiF piece from Edinburgh climate scientist Thomas Crowley caught my eye. Perhaps it’s the headline editor’s fault, but really — “Science can’t explain the big bang – there is still scope for a creator”?

Crowley is responding to a poll, and associated commentary, showing that a worryingly large number of British science teachers think that creationism is an appropriate topic for the classroom. He thinks that the science teachers’ position might be acceptable, because they might be thinking of “soft creationism” — simply the idea that the almighty had a hand in creation — and not the “hard” creationism of the 6,000 year old earth.

Leaving aside the fact that nobody uses the term “creationism” in this way (and it has been around long enough to be pretty well defined and understood), lets consider the circumstances in which it would be acceptable to discuss such “soft creationism” in a science class. Well, the headline writer has given us a clue: the “cause” of the big bang.

It’s an obvious place to start: a gap in our knowledge. God has always occupied the gaps. Crowley thinks it’s unacceptable to discuss creation in the context of the origin and age of the earth, because the evidence in that case is overwhelming. That particular gap has been filled in, already. So his god sits in the next available gap. He says as much himself!

“This yawning logical [sic] gap leaves open the possibility that something else may be going on.”

So, Crowley has proposed that his god hypothesis be discussed in this gap. (I almost had difficulty using the ‘g’ word myself, since Crowley so cleverly avoids it in his piece.) But hypotheses of any kind are rarely discussed even at undergraduate level courses, let alone in high schools. Still, perhaps it would be worth doing for a question like that of the origin of the universe. It could be a good lesson in how we go about doing science. How would such a lesson plan out?

Well, what I know about the origin of the universe hypotheses could be written on the back of a blog post, but I guess that the various hypotheses of the cosmologists would have to be discussed. The variations on multiverses, and spontaneous fluctuations of matter and energy. Though I couldn’t even begin to explain them myself, I know that the physicists have good reasons for proposing such hypotheses, and the class could discuss these. They would look at the ways in which the ideas are consistent (or inconsistent) with how the world appears. One could also discuss the predictions those hypotheses make, and the ways in which we might test those predictions.

And then the lesson would get to Crowley’s intelligent designer hypothesis. There probably won’t be enough time to discuss Crowley’s god specifically, but it would be included in the category of supernatural beings. Like with the natural hypotheses, the class could discuss why the supernatural hypothesis is being proposed — i.e. because it is a gap, and people have always put gods in gaps. Indeed, the class could discuss other gaps, such as the origin and evolution of life, for which the same god hypothesis has failed. The class would go on to discuss the ways in which the supernatural hypotheses are consistent, or inconsistent, with how the world appears. They could also get practical, describing how they would expect the world to look were the hypotheses true, and coming up with potential ways to test whether the world really does look that way. They might even be able to perform some of the tests themselves.

And then the teacher can sum up, and ask the class which hypothesis they think has stamina.

Oh, wait. Was this not what you were hoping for?