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.

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.

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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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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.