Looking Out To Sea

Comment of the century, on the wonders of herbal medicine:

The great thing about British herbal medicine, of course, is that it’s automatically geared to be very compatible with your physiology.

That’s foreign herbs bad, native herbs good for those still boggling.

A wee while back Rowan Williams got in a bit of trouble with large parts of the thinking world for, amongst other things, saying evolutionary biology was some kind of Dawkinsian cult which wanted to kill all believers. Well, something absurd was certainly reported in the press (which is the same thing, right?).

I’ve given up trying to decide if accurate reporting by newspapers is just a hoped-for ideal that has never been attained, or whether we currently just have a fine crop of journalists who (to paraphrase Terry Pratchett) use truth more as a reference point than as a shackle. Instead, what I can do is find out what he actually said. All the archbishop’s speeches, essays and similar productions appear on his official website eventually. And the official transcript (and the original audio recording) for this Faith and Science speech is now available.

First I’d like to present what Rowan Williams said on the day:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

Immediately we can see that, though he later refers to neo-Darwinism, he is not talking about “straightforward biology and genetics”. A curious claim, like saying “I’d like to talk about ice cream — by which I don’t mean the frozen cream dessert or non-dairy equivalents”.

Rowan Williams may be guilty of many things, but clarity is not one of them.

The transcript, however, includes a small aside intended to clarify the matter of his poor wording. I just wanted to leave it out first in order to give you a good idea of what the original audience would have heard. This is what the transcript says, with my emphasis:

First of all there is the extension of Darwinian theory beyond straightforward biology and genetics. [Note: This extension of the theory is sometimes loosely called ‘Neo-Darwinism’; but this is potentially confusing, as this term is more strictly applied to the fusion of Darwin’s original theory with Mendelian genetics. I did not avoid this confusion in the original version of this lecture.] The heart of the conflict between faith and science as it’s frequently presented these days is no longer a simple stand-off between what people might regard as two rival accounts of how the world came to be.

So, in this small aside he has admitted to being foolish and unclear, by redefining perfectly good terms. Fair enough. He goes on:

In spite of all the fuss about creation science versus evolution, that’s actually not where the intellectual energy of the debate lies. The real issue is in this extension of Darwinian principle and theory into an entire theory of culture and intellectual life. This is a vision fairly regularly reiterated by Professors Dawkins and Dennett and it deserves a moment’s explication.

What he’s talking about here is memetics. That’s what it looks like. (Richard Dawkins came up with the word, though he hasn’t done much research into it since it was mentioned in The Selfish Gene. I’m not sure about Daniel Dennett but in the couple of lectures of his I have seen he mentioned memes a bit.) Why Williams ever thought “neo-Darwinism” was a good label for this I’ll never understand. He may have been thinking of Universal Darwinism but I don’t think that’s accurate either.

He suggests that “science” (or maybe just that evil Dawkins fellow) have been concocting fairy stories about the world and letting the stories run away with themselves. They have not paying attention to the evidence. This is a curious argument since it doesn’t reflect the reality of (visible) academic research into memes or the attention that is paid to them. As far as I can tell, memetics as an active research area is dead at the moment. The only Journal of Memetics — not even a paper one at that, just an online publication — has been closed for business for at least three years now. This is not quite the threatening body of science the archbishop makes it out to be.

The whole speech seems rather pedestrian in the end. If you were to replace every instance of ‘Darwinism’ with ‘memetics’ then it would make more sense but it still wouldn’t say more. Susan Blackmore, who is mentioned in the speech as a “follower” of Dawkins (ah, the science-as-religion canard, where would we be without you?), raises most of these arguments in her own book on memes. They are not new to the people interested in the field. The remainder seem to be ordinary philosophical musings about reductionism and so on, or the realisation that popular views of genetics (a “gene for X”) are not very accurate. In any case, there is nothing actually show-stopping in his speech, and no obvious connection to faith.

Anyway, I’m getting a wee bit off the point. In short, Rowan Williams did not call biology a fairy story: he called memetics a fairy story. Though in the process he did admit that Christianity was a fairy story, which was a surprising point. Why did the press not quote that bit so widely? Maybe it’s old news by now.

I’m willing to bet you’ve never seen stupidity like this before:

Scientists at the Roslin-based firm Global Bioenergetics think disturbance to bees from mobile phones, radio signals, wi-fi and microwaves is disrupting them with devastating results.

Oh no! It’s electrosmog!

This little report in The Scotsman is such awful, transparent, witless advertising for some useless snake oil that I’m honestly gobsmacked it could ever have been published.

The scientists are trying out a new device, called a Bioemitter, that transmits electromagnetic waves to provide a stable environment and reduce stress for the bees in their hives, boosting their immune system.

By strange coincidence the scientists¹ have just the thing to solve all your bee-related problems! (It can even work pigs and chickens!) They use electromagnetic waves at particular frequencies² to boost the bees’ immune systems and kill off parasites. It’s almost like magic: it must be very advanced technology.

But what’s this down here, right at the bottom of the article, after all these winning statements about how much good this Bioemitter can do?

Now [the company] is trying to secure funding to carry out trials on bees using the device.

Yes! That’s it! All these claims are nonsense! They have no idea if this thing works at all. (And given the absurd nature of the claims, I think it’s easy to guess the outcome of any rigorous trial.)

To round things off, why not mention a scientist? Any scientist will do!

Ms Murray said: “Bees are so representative of the whole ecosystem. Einstein said we have only got five years to live without the bees. I believe this is evidence that everything we have done to our environment is coming to a head.”

Ah, where would an article on good beekeeping be without mention of that famed theoretical physicist beekeeper Albert Einstein.

I have a conundrum to lay out. Or at least, a question which seems to require some nuance in answering.

One the one hand, it’s poor form to rebut an argument without some familiarity with it. Recently Mark Ravenhill wrote a terrible piece about how “Richard Dawkins’ secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration” (that’s a direct quote, believe it or not) at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog. It’s painfully obvious that the guy hasn’t read anything of what Dawkins has written on religion — he erects and burns straw men with gay abandon. Most of those projected opinions are the opposite of what Dawkins states in his book. And it’s not the first time people have attacked his work at length without bothering to read or understand it. (Mary Midgley’s review of The Selfish Gene is a classic in this genre; you can read Dawkins’ extended rebuttal to it here.)

On the other hand, it’s a common argument from pedlars of pseudoscience and the like to claim they will reveal all the proper scientific details in their book. And refuse to be drawn on the matter unless you read their book. Which is to say, buy their book.

So the question is, what kind of argument is “read this book!” and should it be used with sincerity? When is it valid? In the first case, it’s obvious that if you’re criticising someone’s views you should have at least a reasonable understanding of those views. And yet many people will hide behind that, using the cost and effort as a shield for their weak arguments. I’m not spending twenty quid on Amazon every time I run across a crank with “revolutionary” ideas on physics, medicine or what-have-you. I feel that this doesn’t let them off the hook.

The middle ground exists, when the arguments are large and complex enough to fill a book but the proponent tries to condense them. If someone writes, say, a blog post to describe their ideas, is it reasonable to attack the contents of this post only — is it valid to argue against just the presented arguments? It seems disingenuous to think otherwise — there is no visible difference between someone who presents all of a poor argument and someone who presents the weakest part of a good argument. Both can claim their ideas get better explanation in their book. Buy my book!

I feel a certain degree of unease when I see people use this gambit, whichever side I agree with. It doesn’t help anyone’s understanding to say “you don’t know anything, away and read This Book”. I don’t like to see it used even when I agree with the people who use it. This may be an inherent dislike of unfree information, which is probably related. It’s okay to make a claim if you’re willing to reveal all the information that supports that claim. That seems as good a guiding principle as any.

This is a round-up of things that don’t deserve their own blog posts.

• My birthday seems to fall right in the middle of Homeopathy Awareness Week. The ignominy.

• Last week Rowan Williams appeared to have contracted Hovind’s disease, a condition common in the United State of America, with symptoms such as absurd mischaracterisation of biological theories. The speech took place on 17 March as the first of three lectures, Faith and Science, Faith and Politics and Faith and History. The official transcripts of these lectures have not appeared online yet. I still don’t know whether he’s merely a nutty man with bushy eyebrows or something even weirder.

• I’m re-reading Neuromancer for the Nth time and I’ve only just noticed that the Finn wears a tweed jacket. I don’t know how, but I always pictured him in a dishevelled wax jacket. Also, despite the nay-sayers, it’s still an awesome book.

• I’ve decided not to wait to get myself an Eee PC. The beefier one probably won’t appear until the end of the year and I can always upgrade if it seems worthwhile. Now I just need to find someone who has them in stock…

• If you’ve got some time to spare, and especially if you hated learning mathematics at school, you should read Lockhart’s Lament (PDF). It’s captivating, entertaining and educational — even funny! — not to mention an extremely accurate picture of what school maths was like. (Incidentally, if you search for lockhart's lament there is a lot of discussion, and in nearly all of them someone has pasted the same mini-critique about it being in a “historical vacuum”. It starts “As I see it, Paul Lockhart’s essay would be much more powerful if…”.)

• Our internet connection still seems well screwed up so I can’t access Delicious from home. So if anyone checks my saved links you’ll not find anything new. Sorry about that.

• Alien loves Predator has been updated for the first time in what feels like forever. Now when is Everybody Loves Eric Raymond going to take the hint and follow suit?

That’s all folks.

I took it upon myself, to save you the effort, of collecting together some of the interblag’s lists of common denialist arguments. Feel free to add some more interesting ones in the comments.

• The best place to start is John Baez’s Crackpot Index, a scoring system to help you decide if someone’s personal system of “advanced”, “revolutionary physics” is merely common-or-garden delusion or something altogether grander.

  Many of the ideas in this list can be easily applied to other pseudosciences. Ben Goldacre recently posted a horrifying “lecture” from a homeopath that invoked Einstein, Hawkings (sic) and so on in the same vein. Only stupider — much much stupider.

• And on the related topic of science journalism, Black Stacey has a list of Science Story Tropes which crop up all over.

  It’s honestly hard to choose which one I hate the most. The “folk wisdom” stories are probably the most dangerous because people have a hard enough time disbelieving things they’ve “always known” — having distorted scientific evidence just makes things worse.

• If you’re not sick of people taking liberties with reality and science from that homeopathy video, how about some Creationist Bingo? With a leap and a bound and some long-since refuted talking points you too can call the Earth an even 6000 years old.

• Last on the list is Global Warming Denial Bingo with a useful set of links to refutations built in. Isn’t modern technology wonderful?

Are there any more good pages of a similar nature? I was surprised not to find a general woo/pseudoscience checklist. Maybe a gap in the market?

This story is just too funny not to pass on: PZ Myers gets barred from entering a screening of Expelled, a film whose message is basically “the Darwinists (sic) are intellectual frauds who have kept real science out of biology”.

Read his account in full, I urge you — there is a most fantastic twist to the tale.

Watching how the ID supporters attempt to spin this story will be amusing. The producers delved too deep in the Mines of Irony and who knows what they awoke in the darkness?

This is the most baffling turn of events from a man I have often considered to harbour quite a deal of common sense.

Dr Rowan Williams, said “Neo Darwinism and Creationist science deserve each other. Creationism is a version of slightly questionable science pretending to be theology, and Neo Darwinism is a questionable theology pretending to be science.”

If evolution is bad religion — and not a science at all — where exactly does that leave his views on the history of life. If we weren’t created and we didn’t evolve, we…?

Dr Williams admitted that Neo Darwinism, a theory supported by Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, is “most problematic” to theology, but he called it “a pseudo science” and “deeply vulnerable to intellectual challenge because it is trying to be a theology.”

I’m extremely curious why Rowan Williams thinks “trying to be a theology” makes one open to intellectual challenge. Even the ridiculous Answers in Genesis creationists admit there are arguments that creationists should not use, but that doesn’t stop them being used all the goddamn time. Clearly intellectual challenges have no effect on theology.

Despite all these apparent absurdities I’m not willing to write Williams off yet. He does not have a good track record on being understood by the press, so I’m willing to wait for an official transcript to appear. But it doesn’t look good for him.

Christopher Brookmyre’s latest is dedicated to James Randi and Richard Dawkins. It mentions Firefly (quite a lot). It’s about criminals and paranormal researchers and woo science. It briefly touches on Intelligent Design creationism. It’s pretty damn funny and bitterly sarcastic when it needs to be.

It’s a great return to form for Mr Brookmyre — I thought A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil was pretty awful — and you’ll probably love it.

And if you don’t love it then I’ll put the evil eye on you.

There’s a pretty famous usability study done by Tog et al about the apparent advantages of mouse over keyboard for quick execution of computer commands. It’s a famous study because it seems to have escalated out of all reasonable proportion. In the words of the man himself:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R&D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

The gist of it is that there seems to be a ‘hidden’ delay when using the keyboard which doesn’t happen with the mouse, because the user takes some time to recall the keyboard function before it gets executed. But this memory access time is invisible in the short term… you only notice that you can’t remember a keyboard action when the the answer doesn’t come to mind for a good second or so.

The conclusions as stated are so bald and so strange that I’ve never met anyone that actually agrees with them as written. If keyboards are so slow, why do we not use the mouse in combination with an on-screen character map instead? “Well, we didn’t mean it like that…”

So you have to wonder, what did you mean it like? I don’t think anyone will reach 70 words per minute by clicking buttons with a mouse (though I’m willing to see studies). Of course, I don’t believe Tog was stupid enough to argue that either. John Gruber recently addressed this issue too, which made me re-examine what he must have been talking about. Gruber makes the valid point that keyboards are much faster when you’re doing repetitive actions — ctrl-C, ctrl-V, repeat — but I’d argue that’s not going far enough.

Muscle memory and so on

The key combination to place the letter ‘a’ on the page is quite simple (the keys even come pre-labelled, though you have to realise that pressing the key labelled ‘A’ won’t actually give you a capital A by default; but I digress). But even the simple act of typing takes a long time to learn — but eventually you learn where all the letters are and then it goes somewhere else in your brain. I haven’t got a great mental map of the keyboard but I can still type reasonably well without it, because my fingers know what to do.

Similarly, I know that ‘going’ on a mobile phone with predictive text is ‘left right left right left’ but I have to think about what those keys are. My fingers find it faster than I can think about. If you’re a frequent user of the text editor called vi then you’ve probably left emails and other documents littered with :wq. Because that’s the combination to save and quit in vi but not anywhere else. I know I want to save and exit so that’s what happens without me needing to think about it.

When I speak French — not very often, and not very well — some phrases and conjugations jump quickly to my lips without me thinking about it. If I then think about it, I’ll start to doubt myself and have to conjugate from first principles. And invariably discover I was right all along. This internalisation of action happens with almost everything you learn — grammars, keyboard shortcuts or violin playing. It just happens and it’s the reason we can become experts at things after much study. Tai chi, karate, ballet — they all have set actions and forms which train the body and the mind to moving in a particular way, so that action happens unconsciously.

The unconscious movement happens to me when I’m not editing in vi. (I type ‘escape : w q’ and then nothing happens.) This happens to me when I move from keyboard-friendly window managers like xmonad to more mouse-oriented ones like GNOME. (I type alt-2 to check my email and nothing happens.) It happens all the time and that’s when I notice that these actions have become second nature. At that point I have to think — hold on, how do I save in this program? or how do I move to the left workspace from here?

And that’s the point where recall is an issue. That’s when it seems noticeable, and it slows me down. Is this what Tog meant? I don’t know but it seems more feasible than the notion that all users take two seconds to remember all keyboard combinations. If I can do things without even knowing I do them then it doesn’t seem likely that I’ve had two seconds of down time to get to that point. That would be similar to suggesting that a black belt takes two seconds to remember to block when being attacked.

Keyboard and mouse evangelism

But all the argument in the world isn’t going to help because Tog’s got 50 million dollars of evidence to support his statements. And all my examples aren’t going to prove anything because, remember, users experience “real amnesia!” when performing keyboarding actions.

So the keyboard users will continue typing out their characters one at a time and the mouse users will continue to click on their on-screen character maps — no, I mean the keyboard users will continue to ctrl-S and the mousers will continue to File → Save.

And the real reason for this loss is that we can’t actually see what was studied or what the results were. We’ve got a few all-encompassing phrases which seem to generalise out of all proportion and no solid data. If only we had more evidence of what the studies showed then people would be more inclined to believe it. Saying we’ve done studies doesn’t cut it, guys.

:wq