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?

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/soft-targets/ http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/2010/05/soft-targets/#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 22:48:19 +0000 Joe http://joe.dunckley.me.uk/?p=87 Continue reading →]]> Christina Odone reviewed Bill Maher’s film Religulous on Radio 4′s Front Row (start: 9m).

“He gets some very good replies from some terribly soft targets.” She’s thinking particularly of creationist-sympathising US Senator Mark Pryor (D-AK).

She goes on, “… but the most revealing moment is when Maher faces down a priest at the Vatican and says, ‘what about hell, what about sin, what about, you know, the evils of temptation?’, and the priest says: ‘yeah, what about them?’ and kinda shrugs off this simplistic attitude that Mayer has.”

And that’s the problem with the film: Maher is attacking “the wrong target.” What on earth attracts Maher to the simplistic belief of Mark Pryor, a mere everyday US Senator over the sophisticated religion of everyone’s favourite heavyweight Latinist Father Reginald Foster? What has Pryor got to offer the world? What influence does he have over anything? Who cares if some boring politician in the upper chamber of the legislature of some great world superpower might be sympathetic towards ridiculous religious views? What matters is that Vatican astronomer Father GeorgeCoyne softly dismisses those ridiculous religious views as being no longer relevant to the modern church. I mean, do try to keep up, atheists.

And I mean, so what if some soft target like The Pope makes some sort of batshit insane remark about condoms that defies basic anatomy and psychology, spits in the face of everyone who gives a crap about basic standards of truth-telling, and adds further insult the injury of millions of devastated lives? Why attack a soft target like him? What harm could his remarks possibly do?

This is a repost for archival of an item first published on the old blog a year ago.

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 Journalology…

It’s a right good science fest on Radio 4 at the moment. If you missed it, you must listen to Physics Rocks (available until 17/9). It’s Brian Cox talking to comedians about their enthusiasm for science. It’s a great antidote to some of the neurocidal drivel written by proudly illiterate twats (Brian Cox’s word, not mine) in the less reputable members of our gutter press.

They managed to get several of our favourite themes in the programme, and seemed to be channeling the spirit of Carl Sagan. In a conversation with Alan Alda, the question “what’s the point of the LHC?” was addressed—if the beauty of the universe isn’t enough for you:

We can drive a car without knowing how to take it apart and put it together again. But somebody better know how to put a car together, otherwise we’ll all be back on foot again. Every time we have figured out something basic about nature—discovering the electron, figuring out how radio waves work — we got an advance that has improved life on the planet immeasurably.

In a conversation with Eddie Izzard, the fascinating topic of multiverses came up. Cox suggested that there is a good chance that, while it may not be multiverses, the results of the LHC’s experiments will cast light on something revolutionary—of Copernican proportions. I can see the next chapter in the shrinking-pains of the God-of-the-gaps on the horizon…

In a conversation with Dara O’Brien, the topic somehow turned to CAM:

O’Brien: … cos unlike Deepak Chopra, I know what “quantum” means… it does actually mean something. It doesn’t mean like … ‘I’m not sure where my life is going’.

Cox: Ancient wisdom! It would help me build a better mobile phone!

O’Brien: Oooh. Ancient wisdom, my arse. Stop it, it’s awful… Ancient herbal medicines: we tested them! The ones that worked became just “medicine”. The rest is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri… CERN isn’t going to help that either. It’s not like you’re going to find some neat way that it [homeopathy] will — there’s no bow that goes on top of 120 particles to make it all just, you know…

There were two more quotes I just had to share:

• Cox: The LHC will be a candle in the dark, lighting the way to a new and more profound understanding of the universe.
• O’Brien: Physics does not rock. Physics does not have to rock. Physics underpins the very nature of the universe and our understanding of where we are. Just tiny bits of flotsam floating in a much bigger picture

But, really, listen to the whole thing.

Tina Beattie was on Start The Week this morning, talking about the New Atheism^TM. I only caught little bits of it, but I’ve managed to find the time to flick through the podcast. You can guess the angle taken just from the use of the ridiculous term “New Atheists”, but you probably won’t guess the argument that Beattie was out to make. Really, it deserves an award of some kind. Most creative non-sequitur of the week, perhaps. The New Atheism, we learn, is a “smokescreen for a withering of democracy,” and we are engaging in a “projection onto religion of the failures of society and democracy since 9/11.”

Things don’t start too well. Beattie struggles out of the starting blocks with this essentially meaningless stream of babble*:

TB: Demonisation of religion that is perpetuated by a certain very dull kind of Anglo-American atheist materialism allows us to escape our own responsibilities for a burgeoning global climate of violent confrontation.

More so than having a cup of tea, going to the gym, spending Sunday in church? All sorts of things take up time that could be spent doing other things. So what? Andrew Marr, the host, does his best to steer the conversation back into the realms of reality. Beattie continues:

TB: But I think that just as we are very aware that the rhetoric of militant religiosity can produce acts of violence, we should not sever the connection between the very real acts of violence which we are carrying out in the world in the name of democracy, in the name of the anti-religious rhetoric produced by some of our influential members of the intellectual classes to fuel that violence.

Oh. Right. It sounds awfully like you’re making a jaw-droppingly silly argument there. Could you clarify that for us?

AM: So it’s as much Western intellectual smugness that you’re going on at as atheism pure and simple?

TB: Yes… well… atheism pure and simple is as complex as religion.

Oh. OK. “Atheism (n). Western intellectual smugness. Product of democracy, and therefore sibling of violence.” (Bizarro English Dictionary. Bizarro University Press, 2008). Gotcha.

Edward Lucas, another guest on the programme chips in, starting with the necessary swipes at our dear leader, Richard Dawkins, in order to establish his credentials:

EL: … they’re using science for questions that it isn’t suited for …

Yawn.

EL: … they also display quite spectacular ignorance sometimes in their attack of religion.

Boring. It’s almost as if you haven’t actually read any of the work that you describe. Almost like a quite spectacular display of ignorance of your subject, one could say. But, anyway, petty back-and-forth attacks aside, what does Lucas have to say about Beattie’s thesis? Well, even with his sympathies, he’s struggling to follow her unique logic. A bit more clarification, might be in order.

TB: When we support a rhetoric which condemns probably the vast majority of the world’s people as uniformly ignorant, irrational, dangerous, and immoral — which is what new atheism does — at the same time as we are fighting a sort of war on terror … we are involved in military struggles that real human beings with a different belief to our own are being killed.

Gosh. An Islamicist act of mass murder, and an illegal invasion initiated by the most religious Western leaders of their time — born-again Bush and recently-baptised Blair. Now I see that it was all the fault of us bloody atheists for being so damned talkative. It’s all so clear now. Poly Toynbee should have just told us all to follow the Pope, and shut up about the UN. And what on Earth did Richard Dawkins think he was doing preaching peace, when he knows very well that such ideas are far to sophisticated for those who have a different belief to our own, and will only make them violent as they struggle to understand.

Since we New Atheists, alongside Western Democracy^TM, are fighting a sort-of-war-on-terror here, isn’t it about time we incorporated it into our holy book? It’s awfully embarrassing to have our most prominent spokespeople constantly rambling off-message, spouting nonsense about peace, international law, and perhaps just, you know, like getting along with each other. We’re militants, for God’s sake. Well, not for God’s sake. Cthulhu’s perhaps.

TB: Now I know, there’s enormous political effort goes into saying that this is not a war of the west against Islam, but at the same time, it’s not coincidental that when there’s a very popular movement of antagonism to religion, there’s also a lot of political violence against communities often identified as being religious.

Of course. What the new atheists have to do is just shut up and let everyone else get on with it, because, you know, the proles are simple minded, and will get lairy. What do you expect when you go and say that somebody else believes something that isn’t true? Isn’t it obvious that unnamed persons will then go and rough them up? It’s our fault that other people get violent when we criticise ideas that are untrue and undesirable. The idea is too dangerous for the common man.

If the argument were not so transparently batty, it would be offensive. If the argument of the New Atheists is that clinging to irrational ideas can cause one to become violent (actually, the argument of atheists goes “God: probably not real.” An elementary mistake, that one, but we’ll let it go.), then the argument of Beattie seems to be that questioning irrational ideas can cause those who cling to them to become violent. Somehow, I just can’t see how the atheist fits the role of bad-guy in that situation.

* Apologies for incomplete or badly transcribed quotes: these are taken from my shorthand notes as there is no official transcript. Listen to the podcast for the full quotes.

Many people in Britain have been campaigning for a repeal of the blasphemy laws, which have had a bit of bad PR since they were used in an attempt to censor Jerry Springer: The Opera a few years ago, and since we saw how other countries use their blasphemy laws. The issue has come to the fore this morning because it will be discussed in parliament today and may be included in the current criminal justice bill. On Today (go to Weds 07:53), Don Horrocks of the Evangelical Alliance attempted to argue against the repeal of these laws:

We shouldn’t be doing it at this time and this place … everybody knows that it will never be successfully used again … setting new legislation or repealing existing legislation sends out a signal to society about what is important … [this has been] part of the culture and the history of our country for many hundreds of years.

Oh yes. The culture and history card. I’m not aware of anybody — certainly no atheist or secularist — arguing for a ban on the innocuous features of our history and culture; indeed, you’ll find plenty of atheists admiring religious art or singing Christmas carols. But culture and history are not a good enough argument alone. Tuberculosis , capital punishment and death in childbirth are very much part of history and, thanks to Dickens and the heritage industry, our culture. That executing people for rebelling against the Church of England is part of history and culture does not convince me that it is something worth preserving. Horrocks went on to play the “Jesus is a very real friend to many people” card.

How about the claim that repealing the blasphemy laws would send out a signal to society about what we consider to be important values in Britain today? I hope so. It would say that British people value freedom of speech and put individuals before religious authorities. It would set a precedent which says that imaginary invisible friends do not have greater rights than real living people. The signal would say that organisations can not consolidate their power by intimidating dissenters into silence: a signal that seems rather timely, given the current trend of Western governments to restrict freedoms, and of Islamicist movements to intimidate individuals.

But what of the claim that this law itself is harmless? Horrocks claims (unless I have misunderstood him) that the last successful prosecution of the law was in 1922, but so far as I can tell, that is wrong. On Monday evening (Jan 6), Tom Robinson presented a brief history of the British gay liberation movement, in The Sex Lives Of Us, and talked about one of the few invocations of the law which have made it to court since the previous successful prosecution in 1921. Mary Whitehouse sued the Gay Times for “vilifying” Christ by publishing a poem about a gay and promiscuous Jesus. This was a case that was raised more than fifty years after the previous successful prosecution and long after Lord Denning had described the law as a “dead letter” that would never be successfully used again. It was a case which had nothing to do with defending a “very real friend” and everything to do with prejudice and homophobia. And that is the threat that this law poses today: the court may have rejected the case brought against Jerry Springer: The Opera, but the time and money that was lost means that it will be difficult for artists to fund even remotely controversial productions in future. The blasphemy law is a license to intimidate and discriminate, whether it can be prosecuted or not.

Fortunately, this law is in its last days. I have no doubt that only a tiny minority in this country are even remotely opposed to its repeal, and a lot more are in favour. Parliament seems to like modernising things when government gives it the chance, just so long as it remembers that it is not the US congress and does not need to pander to the extremists. You can read more about this at MediaWatch.

I’ve just been listening to this evening’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4. The programme was titled “The Infidelity Gene”, and the panelists tried to deduce morality and the answer to the question “does free will exist” from a single piece of behavioural genetics research that they’d been given third hand from a newspaper which reported an overheard conversation about a genetics book. Needless to say, it wasn’t very good. The main reason it wasn’t very good is the presence of a Daily Mail journalist named Melanie Phillips on the panel, who clearly wasn’t qualified to be participating in the discussion.

The programme started with a few sound bytes by each member of the panel of Melanie Phillips, Claire Fox, Michael Gove and the biologist Steve Rose. Phillips began by making some noise about determinism as though genes having an influence over behaviour was somehow more deterministic than environmental and cultural determinism. Rose was very good and pointed out that genes and environment can not be separated and rather work together, that we know genes influence behaviour but that doesn’t mean culture doesn’t. Unfortunately, either by free will or some determining factor, Rose managed to forget all this for the rest of the programme, and went accusing all the guest scientists of being extreme nativists.

The first guest was Prof Tim Spector who talked a bit of dummed down behavioural genetics. Spector didn’t appear to be used to talking about behavioural genetics to people who aren’t familiar with the field because he didn’t really explain things very well, especially heritability. Spector was talking about studies which show a high heritability for things like racism and religiosity, which means that a large proportion of the variation in such traits can be attributed to variation in genotype. Heritability has very limited use, and is complex and easy to misunderstand. Spector set himself up for attacks by Melanie Phillips who thought Spector was saying that Racism is entirely genetically determined. It’s obvious that society has a big effect on whether you are racist, says Phillips, and Spector agrees, he never said it didn’t. Phillips is confused, she clearly didn’t understand Rose when he demolished Nature vs Nurture in his opening speech. Rose, however, knows exactly what Heritability means and how useful it is. Rose surely knows that Spector isn’t Phillip’s straw man? Nope. Rose plays along with it. Why?

The next guest is a Christian ethicist Dr Elaine Storkey. It’s a programme about morals and whether free will exists, she might have something relevant to say. No, she opens by talking about how genes play a big role in physiology, but none in behaviour, that genetics has nothing to contribute to psychology, that behavioural geneticists are fantasists and have no scientific evidence. She shows right from the beginning that she has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. She makes all of the mistakes of Phillips and more. Nature and nurture are separate, genes are deterministic (but not culture?), the “hypothetical” genes limit freedom not give freedom. But even better: REDUCTIONISM! Genetics is reductionistic, and what can reductionism tell us? But remember, she opened her segment by praising the application of genetics to physiology and medicine. So, genetics is useful when applied to the body but not the mind? The reductionism cry is one of the worst of the collection of crap arguments reserved for political arguments against good science.

Prof Nicholas Humphrey is next. Here we have an evolutionary psychologist who does know what he’s talking about, and does so quite well. Humphrey opens by showing that genes do not determine our behaviour at all, they give us possibilities, a powerful brain, capable of learning and absorbing culture, but also built with innate desires and talents. Humphrey and Rose discuss heritability and finally actually explain what it means, hinting at how genes and environment interact by saying that heritability changes depending on circumstance, but unfortunately not discussing it further. Rose agrees that genes and environment interact to produce the mind, but objects to Humphrey’s extension into Evolutionary Psychology, by once again attacking a straw man of evolutionary psychology. Phillips doesn’t have anything to add, but tries to anyway. People’s religious beliefs change during their lifetimes, so genes can’t have anything to do with religiosity. Phillips appears to think that genes can only act deterministically, that genes can only act in the growing brain, that they do not continue to act throughout life, and that genes react to the environment and even culture.

Next up is a philosopher of science, who talks about free will, something I’ll avoid comment on, due to my own ignorance of the subject. Phillips should also have avoided comment, she knew even less.

The programme ends with some 24 carrot fashionable nonsense from Phillips. Genetics and evolutionary psychology are pseudoscience, not science. Genes are a concept. The proteins in DNA exist (I’d jesteringly suggest that she means histones), but that genes produce phenotypes are just a concept thought up by scientists. A fantasy. The concept gene is derived from the fact that we behave in different ways and scientists make assumptions from different groups with no evidence. Fox thinks man is perfectible, and we can overcome our biology, which limits us. Rose finishes with another one of those statements he keeps making that show that he accepts entirely that genes play a very important role in behaviour, which is why it’s so confusing that he attacks a determinist straw man of evolutionary psychology: genes give us freedom.