Looking Out To Sea

From Charlie Brooker’s latest column:

God/no God? No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!

I was going to just tag this one on my Delicious feed but decided it merited a bit more publicity. The Times on Revealed: UK’s first official sharia courts said:

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

I honestly don’t care who you get to arbitrate on the argument you have with the next-door neighbour about his apple tree blocking out your sunlight blah-blah-blah. But since when has domestic violence counted as a civil matter?

Has this been the case with other arbitration systems and I didn’t notice? The story is typically light on relevant details, comparisons and caveats — or even a comment by someone who might know the law. “News media: Like information, but less informative.”

Tip of the panama.

I mean that in the sense that Feynman talked about cargo cult science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

A cargo cult religion, then, would be an act of apparent religiousness that doesn’t mean anything — it has no meaningful content at all. Not stories, parables, histories, ethics or in fact anything else.

Now, having said all that, I present a video of Kanon Tipton, the grandson of Reverend David Tipton.

I am really struggling to make a serious point, but the silliness of the video is fighting back. It’s a tiny child going through all the motions of fire-and-brimstone preaching with none of the real words. Maybe I should just leave it there.

If you’ve not heard about the Jewel of Medina story, read the story about “the next Satanic Verses”. My favourite quote was the university professor claiming:

You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.

Well, I’m pretty sure you can. If you can film The Passion of the Christ it should be possible to do anything. But even if you can’t, we’ll just wait for them to film Song of Songs instead, right? No need to turn it into pornography at all.

Well, I was going to write about last night’s trip to the cinema, but this caught my eye and I couldn’t resist pointing it out. You might have heard of Poe’s Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

It strictly applies to fundamentalism but is more generally considered to mean “you can’t come up with a parody so absurd that someone won’t believe it, or that someone already doesn’t”. It’s the more general sense that seems relevant here.

Despite endless evidence that it is both ineffective and dangerous, abstinence seems to be the predominant topic of sex education in the US. But how does one actually teach that? Uh, well, like this:

Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots… a woman is stimulated more by touch and romantic words. She is far more attracted by a man’s personality while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.

Microwaves are turned on by sight? Crockpots are attracted to your personality?! I call Poe’s Law! This can’t possibly be real!

Unfortunately, it is, it really is.

(Hat tip.)

Is there a meaningful difference between

• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it will give them autism
• someone who won’t vaccinate their child because it promotes promiscuous sex

And having asked that, what do you think about compulsory vaccination? I haven’t thought about it yet and I’m ready for bed. Comments please!

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.

On Monday night Alan Penny came down from St Andrews University to talk about SETI. In particular, he wanted to convince us that spending money on searching for intelligent aliens is a good thing.

He didn’t really achieve this aim. Over the course of his talk he diminished his expectations and ended up stating that searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence would happen anyway, so that was that. He certainly didn’t convince me, and I don’t think anyone I was with changed their mind after hearing him speak either.

He spoke about the general arguments for and against the existence of intelligent life — such as the anthropic argument — which mostly served to highlight the futility of the search. Then he tried to convince us that it was worthwhile anyway. His arguments boiled down to two things, which I will render in a deliberately mocking and provocative fashion just because I can:

Where’s Your Logic Now, Science Boy?

People aren’t going to stop looking for aliens so it doesn’t matter what we do. This isn’t actually an argument for anything, more a statement of the romantic outlook of many people with cash to burn.

But Think Of The Children!!!

SETI is an easy concept to grasp and (because of the aforementioned romanticism) people are always interested in it. But it also requires science, so — in the absence of a real space programme — we can get kids interested in science by hunting for aliens.

He changed his mind during the talk from emphasising government-sponsored science (“should we spend money on SETI?”) to private foundations, so his first point is doubly irrelevant. No one is actually going round to billionaires’ houses and telling them how not to spend their money.

The children argument is interesting. It makes me uneasy, since it seems to beg the question that SETI is science¹ in the first place. The primary means by which SETI does its work is by examining signals picked up by radio telescopes to find “artificial signals”. Unfortunately I don’t know what an “artificial signal” looks like, since the only definition we have of one is a signal created by an intelligent being.

The speaker didn’t bother going into the detail of what they actually look for, which is a shame. The Discovery Institute have spent years telling people that they have means by which they can identify “design” (see “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity”), all of which have been bunk. By what means do SETI discriminate natural from artificial? What, exactly, does the SETI@home program do when it churns through radio data?

So the way I see it, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is as scientific as the hunt for Big Foot or Nessie — involving lots of fancy James Bond toys but requiring us to ignore the fact that there is no evidence to suggest these things exist to be detected. In that respect, getting people interested in science with SETI is a bit perverted. There’s no lack of exciting work which both starts with some reasonable evidence and produces results all while using fun kit.

Meanwhile, in that other world which claims to know artifice when it sees it, Scientific American got a look at the creationist propaganda film Expelled in a private screening put on by the film’s associate producer, Mark Mathis. They then recorded a conversation/interview with Mark Mathis.

You can listen to the guy (part one, part two) repeatedly digging himself into rhetorical holes and then weaseling his way out. It’s remarkable how many times he used the argument “ah, well I wasn’t actually responsible for that bit” whenever a good point is raised. I began to wonder (and I’m sure the SciAm folks did too) what he actually did do.

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.