Showing posts with label Richard Dawkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Dawkins. Show all posts

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Nocturnal disturbance at Gamone

Once Fitzroy beds down for the night in his luxurious kennel, on a thick wad of sweet-smelling straw, he seems to sleep soundly. A couple of nights ago, exceptionally, he started to bark furiously around two o'clock in the morning. I opened the kitchen door so that Sophia could investigate. She has the advantage of seeing in the dark (I don't know how), whereas Fitzroy hasn't yet mastered that art. As for me, I looked around with a powerful flashlight, but I was unable to figure out what had woken up and disturbed Fitzroy.

The next morning, the two dogs were both in an aroused state, and barked frequently, as if a foreign presence were disturbing them.

I thought it might be the visiting pheasant, which I hadn't sighted for a couple of days. Or maybe it was a fox that had captured the pheasant. On the other hand, the direction of Sophia's muzzle suggested that the foreign presence might be located on the far side of Gamone Creek. Sure enough, I soon sighted a large roe deer. I even had time to race upstairs, fetch my Nikon, install a long-focus lens and take a couple of photos of the animal before it disappeared into the thicket.

For dogs, the scent of such an animal would seem to be both intense and alarming.

No sooner had I written the word "alarming" in the last sentence than I realized that it was quite stupid. But I won't remove it. My awareness of my mistaken use of this word illustrates the regular progress I'm making in becoming more and more naturally adapted to the evolutionary thinking of Richard Dawkins. The dogs are aroused by the scent of the deer for the simple reason that some of their archaic genes are screaming out (if genes can be thought of as capable of screaming) that the dogs should race out, attack this animal, kill it and eat its flesh. Wolves that reacted like that when they picked up the scent of deers ended up getting a good feed and surviving. On the other hand, wolves that didn't happen to get upset by the scent of deers were likely to starve, and die out instead of procreating. In other words, when little Fitzroy gets all adrenalized in the middle of the dark night, it's because his wolf genes are trying to persuade him that he should go out and capture a wild beast, to satisfy his hunger. But, insofar as Fitzroy's belly is already full of pasta and croquettes, his little dog's mind is puzzled about the logic of the signals being received from his muzzle and his archaic wolf genes. Ah, life is not necessarily easy when your closest ancestors were wild hungry wolves. It's easier for us humans because it's quite a long time since we dropped the habit of racing after deers in the middle of the night… if ever we behaved in such a way.

Once upon a time, I used to wonder how I might react if a glorious female creature were to sneak quietly into my bed while I was sound asleep, dreaming of Grecian nymphs. Would the powerful waves emitted by her presence react upon my archaic primate genes in such a way as to interrupt abruptly my snoring, and wake me up? Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't. To be perfectly honest, I've never had an opportunity of testing the experimental scenario I've just outlined. In any case, I'm sure as hell that I wouldn't start to bark or howl or race around crazily in the dark night. So, which of us males is better off, Fitzroy or me? It's hard to say...

BREAKING NEWS: Once again, at 2 o'clock in the middle of the night, Fitzroy spent half-an-hour barking. This morning, during our ritual walk up the road, the two dogs went out of their way to investigate scents in Gamone Creek up at the level of Bob's place, but without digging up anything. I've just been chatting with a hunter who strolled by with his dog, in the role of the advance scout (without a gun). He confirmed that there's a wild boar hiding in the creek up there, and that they plan to root him out later on in the day. So, we're promised a Wild West afternoon at Gamone, with gunshots, shouting and men and beasts scrambling down the slopes. I've often thought that what we need here at Choranche, particularly in the hunting season, is an elected sheriff. Meanwhile, with a wild boar in the neighborhood, the temporary winners are the roe deers and pheasants, which are considered by the hunters as relatively uninteresting small fry. Confronted by a terrified cornered boar, a hound can get its belly ripped open by the tusks of the beast. (Sophia and Fitzroy would scamper to safety before any such encounter.) The hunters no doubt appreciate this dimension of risk, and the aroma of blood. To my mind, it evokes bull-fighting accidents such as when a picador's horse is gored.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

There is a new wave of reason

I often think back with embarrassment to the rubbish I lapped up, as a child, in the way of Anglican hymns. I realize retrospectively that I was totally brainwashed—maybe "earwashed" is a better word—in that I found them quite pleasant to listen to, and even sing. The most appalling specimen of all, I think, was a vulgar military march entitled Onward Christian soldiers! Richard Dawkins alludes to another nonsensical hymn in The Greatest Show on Earth:

When children sing, 'He made their glowing colours / He made their tiny wings', they are uttering a childishly obvious falsehood. Whatever else God does, he certainly doesn't make glowing colours and tiny wings. If he did anything at all, it would be to supervise the embryonic development of things, for example by splicing together sequences of genes that direct a process of automated development. Wings are not made, they grow—progressively from limb buds inside an egg.

A footnote by Dawkins amuses me, suggesting that we were members of similar congregations:

I have been warned that 'All things bright and beautiful' will not necessarily strike my readers as nostalgically as it does me.

Today, I quite like the sound of this new kind of hymn, where the great Dawkins has been transformed into a disco choirboy… by a process called auto-tuning.



I was pleased to see and hear Bertrand Russell appearing at the beginning and the end of this fine composition.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Devil in the clubhouse

A few years ago, I was saddened to hear that one of my favorite singers, the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, had apparently been fleeced financially by a female associate while he was playing around at being a Buddhist monk in a California retreat. [I say "apparently", and I refrain from quoting names, because there still seems to be some wrangling going on in this sordid domain.] For me, it's difficult to imagine that anyone would set out deliberately to injure, by betrayal, such a fine individual. But I guess I'm naive. Maybe Cohen, too.

I have similar sad feelings when I learn that the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is suing an employee named Josh Timonen for reasons that include fraud and embezzlement.

Click the photo to access a website that provides details on this affair.

The main reason I mention this unexpected matter is to explain why I decided to remove the red A (for atheism) banner from my blog. Apart from displaying that A banner, I've never had any contacts with the foundation or the people who appear to gravitate around Richard Dawkins. I'm in no way a member of the Dawkins "club". Personally, I would be far happier if my scientific hero were a more reserved and inconspicuous individual, avoiding the limelight. In my humble opinion, he should limit himself to what he's really good at: writing or maybe documentary movies. I can't understand why he wanted to start his foundation, create a website, get into public debates with idiots, etc. I have the impression that it's through this flamboyant worldly dimension of his existence that Dawkins has ended up getting screwed, apparently, by one of his closest friends: in fact, a highly-paid collaborator.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Man gave names to all the animals

For a year at the University of Sydney, I attended the classes of John Anderson [1893-1962] in Greek philosophy. It wasn't very exciting stuff—a little like entering a fine-looking restaurant in Paris and being served a ham sandwich—for the obvious reason that philosophical thinking, like everything else, has evolved considerably during the two millennia since the ancient Greeks. Listening to the Scottish gentleman rambling on about Plato and Aristotle was equivalent to sitting in on mathematics lectures presenting the elements of Euclidean geometry, or attending a year-long course on the astronomy of Isaac Newton. I've already said that it was grotesque to be teaching a university course in Aristotelian logic at a time when this domain had been totally dominated for decades by so-called symbolic (mathematical) logic. As for delving into the complicated reasons why Socrates was made to drink hemlock for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens, that was a pure waste of time for students in the middle of the 20th century.

On the other hand, in the midst of all this antiquated mumbo-jumbo, I did appreciate one small but non-trivial item of philosophical culture: Plato's theory that things in the real world are mere imperfect instances of so-called universals, which are ideal models of a purely abstract nature, existing only in the mind of God. Funnily enough, my familiarity with Plato's so-called theory of ideas made it easy for me, many years later, to grasp the avant-garde approach to computer programming known as object-oriented programming. Here you start with an abstract class, which is then used to create effective instances of that class, referred to as objects.

For Plato, the countless dogs that we meet up with in the everyday world are merely instances of the divine concept of dog-ness, while cats are instances of cat-ness. And Bob Dylan seemed to be perspicacious when he pointed out that Man, in the beginning, had been obliged to give names to all the animals. This is exactly what a computer programmer does when he starts to invent the classes for an object-oriented project.

The only annoying aspect of Plato's theory is that, while it may be helpful for somebody who needs to master object-oriented computer programming, it is totally and unequivocally wrong as a philosophical explanation of our real world.

Richard Dawkins explains Plato's error brilliantly in the opening pages of his latest masterpiece, The Greatest Show on Earth, which I mentioned briefly a year ago [display]. Truly, if you plan to buy and read only one book in the immediate future, make sure it's this one, since this book proposes knowledge that is an absolute must for all informed and cultivated citizens of our day and age. The author asks a simple rhetorical question: Why has it taken so long for humanity to grasp Darwin's "luminously simple idea"? Dawkins replies that the fault lies with Plato. To understand evolution, you have to abandon your naive Platonic trust in concepts such as dog-ness, cat-ness or anything-else-ness. We exist in a perpetually evolving universe in which a single creature could well combine simultaneously a bit of dog-ness and bit of cat-ness. Or maybe this creature seems to exhibit a lot of dog-ness today, whereas his remote ancestors were better described as apparent instances of wolf-ness. In any case, there's an amazing aspect of Darwinian evolution that demolishes Plato's universals, not only in theory, but at a real-life practical level. This is the fact that the planet Earth has actually witnessed—at one moment or another, and for a lapse of time that allowed for procreation—a living specimen of every imaginable creature on the scale that separates pure dog-ness from pure cat-ness. To see why this apparently exotic claim can be made, you only have to envisage (if you have sufficient imagination) the last common ancestor of dogs and cats, which may or may not have looked physically like something in between a typical dog and a typical cat. (The chances are that it looked like neither.) Between that strange creature and a dog, evolution gave rise to a big series of intermediate animals that ended up looking more and more like dogs. The same can be said for the path from that archaic creature to a cat. So, we only need to imagine these two series of animals laid end-to-end (with their common ancestor in the middle), and we have obtained the real-life metamorphosis of a dog into a cat, or vice-versa. But, if Man had to find names for every member of this gigantic set of specimens, Dylan would be singing for centuries.

Long ago, when I first heard Professor Anderson describing Plato's theory of ideas, I was truly charmed by the image of our watching shadows cast by a camp-fire on the wall at the far end of a cave. It was a romantic Boy Scout metaphor, and I'm sad today, in a way, to realize that Plato's fire has gone out forever. Happily, though, Darwin has led us out of the obscure cave and into the light and warmth of the Sun.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Ratzinger is an enemy of education


Watching this amateur video of Richard Dawkins standing up in a London crowd and speaking out against the pope, I was immediately reminded of the great Bertrand Russell, back in the Cold War days, addressing the throngs at Trafalgar Square on the dangers of nuclear weapons.



A major scientist such as Russell or Dawkins, speaking his mind publicly and brilliantly on fundamental issues, demonstrates a marvelous British tradition of outdoor oratory. It's the Speaker's Corner at Hyde Park, but with beautifully simple and powerful words worthy of Winston Churchill in wartime London. In decades to come, I'm sure that people will be using the Internet (or whatever system has replaced it) to hear and admire the Dawkins anti-papist speech of Saturday, September 18, 2010.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Hard to watch (continued)

This Irishman, John May, is a lunatic, but his accent is cute.



I don't know what he might have said after the first minute or so, because his words were starting to give me nausea, and I had to terminate the video.

This is the visible part of a dull little iceberg described in the Pharyngula blog [display]. It would appear that the hard-working godless Minnesota biologist PZ Myers has played a significant role in dissuading the Irish pollie Conor Lenihan from attending a book launch of John May's latest anti-Darwinian tripe.

If so, then this suggests that bloggers such as Myers (whom I read regularly) are not necessarily crying out futilely in the wilderness.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Roadside objects

I stumbled upon this intriguing photo on the web, in the context of the wonderful site of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science [access]:

It's a fabulous photo… with or without explanations. At first sight, the plastic bags look like rubbish, but that's the fault of our Western regard. They're certainly not rubbish. Indeed, the bag on the right would appear to contain a human being… maybe an adult female. As for the other bags, maybe they're personal belongings (associated within the hypothetical individual on the right), rather than trash (as western observers might imagine). In any case, it's a pretty trashy roadside photo, to say the least.

Is it thinkable that human beings might be mistaken for roadside objects, for trash? Yes, alas. That's why we must remain, not only vigilant, but active combatants (with possible loss of life) in the constant ongoing fight against the Taliban disease in Afghanistan.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Cousins of all kinds

In 1987, when I was lecturing in computing out at the Curtin University in Perth, I once told my students (who knew I'd been living in France for most of my adult life) that I'd never knowingly met up with a genuine Tasmanian… let alone visited that southern island. I imagined that certain members of my audience would be surprised by this declaration… but not at all. Just like me, apparently, none of those young people had ever been in contact with that out-of-the-way place.

In an article entitled Tasmanians [display], I evoked Truganina, the queen of the Tasmanian Aborigines. In another article, entitled Ray of hope for our devils [display], I mentioned the terrible cancer epidemic that could possibly wipe out these exotic creatures.

Over the last few years, because of my non-stop intellectual diet of the extraordinary words of Richard Dawkins, I realize that my entire attitude towards Life (with a capital L) has been changing—evolving, you might say—in an unexpected but colossal manner. As a "born-again atheist" with the pretentious conviction that I understand vaguely, at last, what Existence is all about (at least the parts that a human brain can tackle), I'm aware that I've become a totally changed individual over the last few years. The aspect of life that amazes me most is the idea that all creatures—animals, plants, bacteria, etc—can be thought of as "cousins" of varying degrees of remoteness. For any pair of specific creatures—say Truganina and me… or even a Tasmanian Devil and me—we can imagine that we once shared a specific couple of N-great-grandparents, where N represents the number of times you would need to repeat the term "great" in order to ascend to this ancestral couple. In the case of Truganina and me, this couple would have surely looked a little bit like Truganina, a little bit like me, and a big bit like countless folk who were still living over in Africa some 50 millennia ago. On the other hand, in the case of the Tasmanian Devil and me, it would be vastly more difficult to imagine seriously what our last common ancestors might have looked like.

Talking of Tasmanian cousins, I'm particularly fond of this pretty fellow, some ten centimeters long, who apparently still exists today:

Known as a handfish, and located in the waters of Hobart, it uses its fins, not to swim, but to stroll around on the ocean floor. Concerning our common ancestors, I would imagine that, one day long ago, they happened to walk up onto an African beach or river bank, where they were totally charmed by the new environment. So, hand over hand (maybe hand in hand, if we wished to give this tale a romantic touch), they just kept on walking…

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Barriers to my zeal

Readers of the Antipodes blog will have noticed that my enthusiasm for the ideas of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins is such that I have a tendency towards evangelism: a constant wish to spread the Good Word. Well, at times, I've run into problems. Recently, in the course of an impromptu lunch-table conversation with Natacha and Alain, I drifted unthinkingly into a spontaneous presentation of the basic facts of Darwinian evolution. I chose an unlikely creature as the hero of my demonstration: the parasitic tick that attaches itself to mammals such as dogs and humans, and sucks blood.

A friend once told me about tick behavior. Since then, I've remained fascinated by the strange lifestyle of this creature, whose destiny appears to be invested in the tick equivalent of a perpetual grand lottery of a Zen Buddhist variety. More precisely, a young tick has a one-track mind, and that track leads to the tip of a branch of weed where the creature sets up its residence. There, it hangs upside-down, motionless, day and night, with its outstretched claws facing the heavens, like a religious hermit in a trance, waiting for a godsend: namely, the chance arrival of a warm-blooded mammal to which it can immediately attach itself, to suck blood. If such an animal arrives on the scene, then the tick can survive, indeed thrive. If not, it dies. Now, from a Darwinian point of view, that sounds like a good story. But Natacha (whom I had imagined naively as a Darwinian) turned out to be reluctant to allow me to pursue joyfully my storyteller's role.

NATACHA: "William, have you ever actually been in close contact with a tick, in the kind of situation you're describing?"

WILLIAM: "Well, not exactly, because the ticks are out there in the open fields, perched on their weed stems, waiting for a beast to pass by. But we can't necessarily see them."

NATACHA: "You seem to be describing a horde of goblins…"

The bottom fell out of my didactic presentation of a tick-oriented Darwinian case study. It never took off. The ticks are still waiting there, patiently…

Later, I was under the charm of the Dawkins presentation of dam-building beavers, which constitute a spectacular case study in The Extended Phenotype (which the author seems to think of as his major scientific publication). Basically, the general idea is that a beaver's genes result in the existence of dams in exactly the same way that my friend's genes, say, produced her blue eyes. There's an obvious difference, one might object. The blue eyes are actually an intimate part of my friend, whereas nobody would seriously suggest that the gigantic log constructions are bodily appendages of their beaver builders. Dawkins astounds us by saying no, there's no essential difference. The beaver's determination to build dams and my friend's blue eyes can both be considered as phenotypes of the individual's genetic heritage. The fact that the color of my friend's eyes is inside (her body), as it were, while the presence of the beavers' dam is outside (their bodies), changes nothing. The blueness and the "damness" are perfectly comparable consequences of the phenotypical effects of genes.

Well, in much the same way that I had wished to transmit my Darwinian enthusiasm to Natacha, I found myself obsessed by the challenge of telling my son François about the wonders of beaver dam-builders, as explained by Dawkins.

WILLIAM: "François, imagine a young beaver who gives the impression that he's about to decide what he's going to do with his life. Is it imaginable that he might be in a position to choose between a traditional dam-building existence and some other lifestyle that has nothing to do with building dams?"

Retrospectively, I realize that the wording of my rhetorical question was silly, falsely naive, indeed awkward and wrong to the point of offering my son an invitation to produce the following delightful scenario, entitled The Emancipated Adolescent Beaver, which annihilated instantly my zealous didactic pretensions:

FRANCOIS: "Yeah, man, I'm a young beaver, and I decided I don't have no time for all that old shit from my parents about buildin' dams. They been doin' it for ages, but it don't get them nowhere. Ain't no sense in it, believe me. They been doin' that out in the wild country. Me, I moved into the city. Shit, man, on a Saturday night, do you see me tellin' the brothers and sisters that I ain't gonna stay with them, coz I got a mother-fucken dam to build? Fuck that, man. I'm an emancipated beaver…"

Obviously, I'm in need of better Darwinian/Dawkinsian examples.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Morals

I know this is going to sound silly, but I'll say it all the same. Ever since my youth, I've been intrigued by the philosophy of morals. A child's first introduction to the notions of right and wrong is based largely upon punishment. It's wrong to poke your tongue out at an old man, even though he looks like a scarecrow. So, if the child does so, it's normal that he's likely to be spanked by his mother or father. It's also wrong to play with safety matches, but the punishment is of a different kind. Instead of a spanking, your fingers get burned. Although both actions—making fun of old folk, and playing with dangerous devices—are things that a child "should not do", the child soon starts to feel that there's a difference between these two categories of bad deeds. In the first case, the wrongness consists, as it were, of doing unto another something that you maybe wouldn't wish to be done unto yourself. In the second case, it's simply a matter of not accepting sound advice from experienced oldies who've already made those same mistakes and paid the price in pain.

Within the territory of right and wrong, good and bad, there are a striking number of loopholes, or rather patches of no-man's-land, particularly when other partners step into the picture: social customs, the influence of peer groups, the law of the land and, above all, religions. The territory is transformed into a vast muddy field, where youthful adventurers soon get bogged down… particularly when sex raises its naughty head. For example, young people generally feel that fornicating is good stuff, even when they haven't yet reached the so-called 'legal age" for acts that were referred to, in Australian law, by a delightfully exotic and erotic expression capable of giving a young man an erection: carnal knowledge. Screwing was not explicitly forbidden in the Ten Commandments (except in the form of adultery). Admittedly, if the partners in such a timid crime happened to forget about contraception (often because they didn't know what it was all about), then it could resemble the case of innocent children playing with safety matches.

For all these reasons (and many more), I signed up for a course in moral philosophy at the University of Sydney, in the context of my science studies. There, the naive 16-year-old country boy from Grafton was confronted immediately and inspired immensely by a wise old man from the past named Socrates.

After asserting that "the unexamined life is not worth living", he was put to death for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens. Clearly, there were diabolical dimensions in the quest for the truth about morals… if such a truth existed. This became more and more obvious to me when I finally had a chance of looking at what had happened in Auschwitz… which had never been a noteworthy event, curiously, back in my hometown circles.

The classes of an obscure professor of moral philosophy named Alain Ker Stout [1900-1983] were an intellectual catastrophe, because he didn't have much to say, and his way of saying it was sadly comical. Funnily, though, I've retained, not only most of the little he told us, but also three of the books upon which his teachings were based.

They still carry my antiseptic ex libris, which looks as if it were written by a lad fresh out of Sunday school… which was in fact the case.

The philosophy of so-called utilitarianism is even dumber than the term used to designate it. Apparently, we should strive to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of good people. (I'm simplifying.) What does that have to do with utility? Today, only somebody with a mind like that of George W Bush, say, would find this idea "philosophical". To be truthful, I don't know whether or not Bush ever studied John Stuart Mill [1806-1873].

G E Moore [1873-1958] was a brighter analyst… whom I respect for his associations with my two greatest philosophical heroes: Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] and Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]. But he, too, seems to end up telling us that he doesn't really have anything more profound than common sense to tell us about right and wrong, good and evil, and that stuff.

The well-written little book by Patrick Nowell-Smith [1914-2006] has been a primer for countless readers (Penguin sold more than 100,000 copies) who were intrigued by the idea of a logic-based approach to the philosophy of morals. (It would be more correct to speak of logical positivism rather than logic in a broad traditional sense.) But the interest of this book, today, is mainly historical.

So, what are we left with? Well, unfortunately, we're left with a widespread opinion that, somehow, you need to believe in religion before you even have the right to talk about morals. The antiquated enemies of secular thinking attempt to spread the notion that society would disintegrate into a vast anarchic cesspool of savage depravity if ever the little gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were to be removed from the current scene. It goes without saying that these rumormongers are stupid liars, who seek to bully innocent folk into accepting religion in order to save society from barbarian turmoil. But it's the evil liars who are the New Barbarians.

Basically, thinkers such as Richard Dawkins remind us constantly that human nature is what it is, for the better and for the worse, and that the alleged existence of a deity is a totally irrelevant speculation. It's not because the god Jupiter went out of fashion that assassination attempts upon mothers-in-law, say, suddenly spiked. On the contrary, people are starting to believe, these days, that if the gods were finally stacked away in wardrobes with all the other skeletons of human history, there would surely be a drop in crime statistics ranging from raped schoolkids up to kamikaze operations.

In this general context, the brilliant US atheist Sam Harris has succeeded in surprising many of his friends by suggesting that there might indeed be objective links between science and morals. In February 2010, he spoke on this subject at the prestigious conference known as TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design].



In the face of many reactions, Sam Harris has just clarified his thinking in an article entitled Toward a Science of Morality [display]. I like to think that Harris might be onto a good goal: the idea that, somewhere deep down inside our inherited structure of thought, there are inbuilt neuronal circuits (or something like that) that work nonstop at promoting the principle that Auschwitz and countless other barbarian acts were wrong, and that helping little old ladies to cross the busy street in bad weather is a morally good act, for which you deserve to win brownie points. [Remind me to tell you the joke about a pub artist who plays a miniature piano.] For the moment, I would conclude that Harris is not necessarily wrong, but that he nevertheless doesn't need to be right in order for societies to evolve morally in a "well-behaved" fashion.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Absolute morality

It's impossible to trap Richard Dawkins with a fuzzy loaded question about so-called "absolute morality".



He was speaking in Australia on 8 March 2010.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Likely victory of science and the Internet

It's a fabulous idea, which is so simple and obvious that I'm surprised to think that I never became famous through shouting it out on the rooftops. Sure, I started to shout out exotic things (both scientific and environmental) on Paris rooftops back in the early 1970s, when I was making documentary stuff for French TV. But they weren't necessarily the right things, or the right rooftops, or I wasn't really shouting loud enough. So, I have no claims to fame. Merely retrospective pride in my quiet evaluations and judgments.

Together, science and the Internet are surely about to conquer religious obscurantism, lies and crimes committed in the name of horrible and groundless belief systems such as Judaism, Christianism and Islam.

[Click the image to view a Thunderfoot video.]

Within the context of the Internet web, countless active nodes handle the veracity of science. But religion can participate merely as a passive object of historical interest, not as a current player. Like the Eskimo boy at MIT:

QUESTION: What's he studying?

ANSWER: No, he's being studied.

Concerning this beautifully limpid video, Richard Dawkins wrote:

This is brilliant. Many congratulations to Thunderfoot. This deserves to go viral in a big way. Please spread it around as widely as possible.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Necessary rebuttal

In my article of 8 February 2010 entitled Mystery as philosophy [display], I deplored the announcement of a book (which I'm not at all keen to read) entitled What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in which they apparently contend that Darwin's idea of natural selection is illogical and unsupported by empirical evidence.

Like countless Darwinists, I was shocked that distinguished academics would dare to write such stuff today. I was aware, though, that their arguments were technically complex, and would require some serious unraveling. Fodor (professor of philosophy at Rutgers) and Piattelli-Palmarini (professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona) are far removed from the arena of crackpot creationists. One had the impression that they were thoughtless renegades rather than declared enemies. In any case, it was clear that it would take a talented heavyweight scholar to bring these deserters to their senses.

Fortunately, Jerry Coyne (professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago) has set himself the task of cleaning up the mess. Click the banner to read his excellent article in The Nation entitled The Improbability Pump. Before his rebuttal of the groundless ideas put forward by the philosopher and the cognitive scientist, there's a bonus: a beautiful review of The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Please allow me to quote Coyne quoting Dawkins quoting the DNA of a tiger:

Dawkins describes selection as an "improbability pump," for over time the competition among genes can yield amazingly complex and extraordinary species. Here's how he describes the evolution of tigers:

A tiger's DNA is also a "duplicate me" program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger's DNA says: "Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first."

Only Dawkins could describe a tiger as just one way DNA has devised to make more of itself. And that is why he is famous: absolute scientific accuracy expressed with the wonder of a child—a very smart child.

Tiger building! What a splendidly imaginative way to produce new stocks of a chemical product known as deoxyribonucleic acid...

Saturday, April 17, 2010

King-sized Jesus in Oklahoma

I found this funny story in the excellent Pharyngula blog by PZ Myers [access].

The history of Catholicism is filled with magic happenings. In the case of St Francis of Assisi (the fellow who preached to birds), we encounter the phenomenon of a talking cross, shown here:

In the church of San Damiano, the image of Jesus on the cross said to Francis: "Repair my church. As you see, it is falling into a state of total ruin." Francis immediately set about repairing the actual building, but he soon realized that the words of the cross of San Damiano were to be interpreted as a metaphorical order, meaning that it was rather the ecclesiastical institution and its members that were in need of repair. So Francis finally started work on that much bigger task.

Over the centuries, the San Damiano Cross has inspired countless reproductions. The latest copy, some three meters in height, has been hung above the altar of a church in Oklahoma. And the least that can be said is that it's well hung.

This copy was executed by a local artist named Janet Jaime. She has highlighted the abdominal muscles of Jesus to such an extent that a naive observer might imagine that the King of Glory is exhibiting a king-sized erection. Needless to say, this copy has given rise to controversy among Catholic parishioners in the Oklahoma town of Warr Acres, where the church is located. The artist, though, gives the impression that she doesn't understand what the fuss is all about.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the illicit sexual behavior of certain Catholic prelates and priests. The last thing the Church needed was yet another much-publicized sex-oriented incident, particularly when it takes the form of a giant phallus emerging from the crucified body of the Lord. One can't help wondering whether this Oklahoma painting is in fact yet another element of an international conspiracy, orchestrated by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, aimed at screwing Joseph Ratzinger. And, talking about screwing, that awesome Oklahoma apparatus elicits an exclamation of admiration. In a word, as Mary Magdalene might have gasped: Jesus!

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

No black holes yet

The world has learned that the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] was revved up to cruising speed yesterday.

My home in France is not far away from the Franco-Swiss border where the subterranean device of the European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN] is located. If ever the physicists happened to start creating tiny black holes, it's not unthinkable that some of them might stream through the ground and finally burst out into the air through the limestone cliffs of Choranche. And, if they emerged here, these black holes would surely start to gobble up various elements of the landscape, with greater or lesser effects, depending on the volume of the disappearances. If a black hole from the suburbs of Geneva were to hit one of my donkeys, say, then it's likely that the disturbance would only be noticed by me, the remaining donkey and, of course, my dog Sophia... who would no doubt smell the nasty odor of an approaching black hole, and start barking. On the other hand, if a black hole were to take out the entire Cournouze mountain, then this modification of the landscape would surely be noticed by many observers (including me, the inhabitants of Choranche and Châtelus, and countless skiers from the Drôme, driving past on their way up to Villard-de-Lans.

There's a down-to-earth question that puzzles me constantly. What would it feel like if you stepped inadvertently, while out walking, on a microscopic black hole that had just fallen onto the ground after being catapulted here from the CERN? Would you suddenly see your foot disappear mysteriously into thin air? Would you have time to jump aside before losing an entire leg? Would this kind of amputation be painful? I imagine naively that this would be a particularly "clean" kind of surgery, since any excess blood or dangling flesh would no doubt disappear into the hole, leaving the patient/victim with a nice smooth germ-free wound, which would no doubt be heal rapidly.

Enough silly joking about black holes. Let me be serious. The BBC website has produced a few excellent pages that explain the basic principles of the LHC. The stuff concerning the computing aspect of this affair, based upon a gigantic system called the Grid, is amazing. Everything about the LHC is fabulous, and I'm tremendously proud that Europe can get involved in this kind of research.

Recently, I was just as enthusiastic about this whole field of scientific investigation as I am today about genetics. In particular, I've admired the two books of Brian Greene about strings.

It's fascinating to try to compare research work and challenges in two different domains such as genetics and physics ("compare" is an inadequate word). The fields in which Richard Dawkins writes so brilliantly are in fact relatively down-to-earth, almost commonsensical, compared with the LHC universe. Even though there are still countless fuckwits who do their silly best to declare that Dawkins is wrong about almost everything, the truth of the matter is that he's operating in a scientific domain whose concepts and laws are fairly well specified by now. That explains why Dawkins can now amuse himself (as I'm sure he does) by fighting verbal battles with adepts of religion, creationism and quackery in general. I'm not suggesting that he doesn't have any more serious scientific work to do. No, I'm trying to say that, since he's standing on such firm ground, he can afford to take time off from scientific challenges in order to tackle the social and human tasks that consist of educating his fellow human beings.

In the world of physics, on the other hand, the great researchers are not yet in a comfortable position enabling them to get involved in comprehensible discussions with the general public. When geneticists set out to unravel the human genome, they had a clear idea of what they were looking for, and what they would eventually find. But there is no such clarity in the case of the LHC. There's even a distinguished Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Comay who's convinced that the CERN researchers won't find anything at all by means of the LHC: neither the Higgs Boson nor strings. And why not? Simply because such entities, according to Comay, cannot possibly exist! Any dumb nincompoop can enunciate his fuzzy personal reasons for dating the start of the universe, or the age of dinosaurs, or for demonstrating the existence or nonexistence of God. But it's a different kettle of fish when you decide to talk about the Higgs Boson and strings. Even Pope Benedict XVI wouldn't normally be expected to state his profound opinion on such matters. We know beforehand that, no matter what the people at CERN find out about the universe through the LHC, the facts and their conclusions will remain totally incomprehensible for the vast majority of observers.

In fact, that's what's nice about scientific domains that are based upon extraordinary concepts and advanced mathematics. These obstacles filter out the fuckwits. Inversely, the problem at the level of Darwin, Dawkins and DNA (just to name these three pillars) is that everything's so beautifully simple, immediately obvious and totally proven... except to loud-mouthed peanut-brained fuckwits.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Dawkins says Ratzinger is "the perfect pope"

[Click the image to access the Dawkins article]

In The Washington Post, this is splendid "strident" Dawkins (he hates that adjective), at his anti-papistical best. I love the final paragraph:

No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

Dawkins is an outspoken Englishman of the finest kind. A nice but weird association has sprung into his mind. When Dawkins is confronted by nasty foes (such as Ratzinger, the "leering old villain in a frock"), he speaks in the intense poetic style of Winston Churchill during the Blitz.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Cameo portrait of Dawkins

Tom Chivers, the editor of "strategic events" at the Telegraph, has penned an excellent short piece about Richard Dawkins, and the present ire of the great scientist concerning the hosting of this year's Templeton Prize by the US National Academy of Sciences. The title of the perspicacious article by Chivers says it all: Richard Dawkins is more than a 'militant atheist': he's a magnificent writer who changed my life.

I agree with Chivers that it's a little sad to see a great scientist and writer such as Dawkins bogged down at times in the murky domain of religion, where much of his energy and brilliance is squandered in casting pearls before intellectually-mediocre swine (such as Creationists who claim that the world is only a few thousand years old).

To my mind, it's far from obvious that Telegraph readers are the sort of folk who might be capable of digesting Dawkins, and willing to do so. So, I say: "Bravo, Tom!"

Friday, March 12, 2010

Impossibility

Early in the 20th century, when the general public started to hear about statistical thermodynamics, science writers became interested in finding striking metaphors for impossible happenings. They were motivated in particular by the need to say just how unlikely it would be for a glass of water, on the kitchen table, to suddenly freeze... in spite of the theoretical possibility that this could happen.

In 1913, the French mathematician and politician Emile Borel proposed the metaphor of a million monkeys typing for a year and producing by chance a copy of all the books in the world's greatest libraries. Recently, wags have observed that you only have to examine the blog phenomenon to discover that humanity can't expect too much from millions of naked apes armed with keyboards.



In The Blind Watchmaker [pages 47-52], Richard Dawkins proposed a variation of the monkeys-and-typewriters metaphor in which the goal consists of producing a single line of Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. If you use an algorithm that examines periodically the monkeys' output and retains, as a new point of departure, only the line whose letters are closest to those of the target, then the goal is reached quite rapidly. But I always thought it a pity that Dawkins should introduce this twisted version of the metaphor, because it might cause adepts of so-called "intelligent design" to imagine—for a misguided instant—that Dawkins is suggesting that evolution operates with a target "in mind"... which, of course, is nonsense.

In The God Delusion [page 113], Dawkins introduced a new metaphor to illustrate quasi-impossibility: that of the Ultimate Boeing 747, borrowed from the English astronomer Fred Hoyle [1915-2001].

[Click the photo to see a Dawkins video that mentions the Boeing metaphor.]

The basic image is that of a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, which just happens to blow together various bits and pieces in such a way as to build a Boeing 747. People who believe erroneously that evolution is a theory of chance and random constructions consider that this metaphor illustrates the absurdity of imagining that a living animal could be the outcome of the random shuffling of its components. In fact, they're spot on. That would indeed be a stupid way of looking at Creation of any kind, with or without a capital C. Fortunately, Darwin's theory of evolution never calls upon processes of that absurd kind. On the other hand, Dawkins points out that something like the Ultimate Boeing 747 process would have been required—at some eternal instant in the Dreamtime (that precision comes from me, not Dawkins)—in order to create the kind of mysterious entity known as God.

[Click the photo to see the encounter.]

A week ago, in a funereal setting in Melbourne, Dawkins was interviewed by a local journalist named Robyn Williams... who seems to have a sound reputation in Australia. I make that last point because I was rather horrified by the stupid way in which this fellow tried to get the ball rolling. He had invented his own silly and fuzzy little metaphor for impossibility: something to do with the chance that all the people in the audience might find their correctly-numbered seats, by pure chance, if they were to sit down in a random fashion. A lesser man than Dawkins might have asked: "What the fuck does that have to do with Darwin's theory of evolution?" But Dawkins is, of course, an unruffled gentleman... and he put Robyn Williams back on course in a polite and even pedagogical manner. It was a truly beautiful example of the Dawkins style.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Darwin Day

A year ago, I wrote my first blog article on Darwin Day [display].

This National Photographic photo must be dedicated grudgingly to the memory of our hero, because Darwin apparently thought that the fabulous marine iguana, symbol of the Galapagos Islands, was ugly. He also dared to straddle the back of a Galapagos tortoise.

That's not the first time we've heard of otherwise intelligent individuals behaving as silly sporting tourists. So, we should be prepared to pardon posthumously the young naturalist for his frivolous behavior. In any case, Galapagos is where the theory of evolution seems to have been conceived. I imagine these islands as a sacred place: our Jerusalem.

In Christian theology, certain great figures have been linked to animals.

The four Evangelists are associated with symbolic creatures: a lion for Mark, an ox for Luke, an eagle for John, etc. It's high time to update theology. I proclaim: Henceforth, our beloved Saint Charles D will be represented by an iguana, our living Saint Richard D by a tortoise.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Religious no longer a protected class

I've just finished reading a fine book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, written some fifteen years ago by the US philosopher Daniel Dennett. Last year, I had encountered an extract of this work in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins.

A short article by Dennett, entitled Religious no longer a protected class, has just appeared in The Washington Post [display]. He sums up his theme as follows: "Activities that would be condemned by all if they were not cloaked in the protective mantle of religion are beginning to be subjected to proper scrutiny." Dennett points out the existence of a "double standard that exempts religious activities from almost all standards of accountability", and he insists that it be dismantled immediately. He compares the violence done in the name of religion to "crimes of avarice", and he looks forward to the day when clergy who are "telling pious lies to trusting children" and "making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer" might be convicted of fraud.

Dawkins has commented: "What an utterly splendid piece by Dan."