Things That Make You Smile

Here's a funny little story out of the United Kingdom, via the Beeb, "No God slogans for city's buses". Proving once again that the British are well in the lead on the whole "humanism over unreason" thing, buses in London may soon sport the following message: "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Frankly, I love the understatement of this campaign, begun under the aegis of the British Humanist Association (BHA). There's also a surprising twist: originally, it was only going to be a campaign on which about £10,000 would be spent, but the BHA received an unexpectedly enthusiastic response from donors, resulting in their raising £36,000. This means that the planned campaign could expand, not only to signs inside the buses, but to other cities, including Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh.

Of course, the pro-irrationality lobby has turned out to object to this, as you can read in the news story. But the ever-eloquent Profesor Richard Dawkins has stepped into the breach with this statement:

""Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride - automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children.

"Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side.

"This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."

Isn't it telling that the pro-superstition lobby get their knickers in a twist over the sign on the side of a bus? World religions have responded, at least in part, to the events of the past quarter-century with increased levels of intolerance and irrationality. It doesn't seem, though, as if they expected a response, and they've been amusingly wrong-footed by it as a result.

Film Review: Religulous

Saturday night we went to see Bill Maher's new film, Religulous ( wiki | Official Site ), with Mr and Mrs Antbus. We did, in fact, have to go south of the river, as nowhere in the Northland is playing it yet. The theatre, which is in a weird sort of 1950s-era split-level ranch-style shopping centre (currently under heavy construction) was surprisingly full for a 5.30 Saturday night showing, and a fair number of the viewers were... well, let's just say that they were well past the prime of life. This surprised me more than a little.

I'll explain why. The Leawood Theatre is located in Johnson County, Kansas, in one of the posher suburbs of that county, the town of Leawood (if not exactly at the posh end of the town). JoCo is a big centre for the self-appointed nouveau riche suburbanite types and those who aspire to bland suburban mundanity. There are also, as mentioned, a good number of OAPs. The neighbourhoods are laid out just oddly enough not to be on a true grid, without actually being interesting. The schools are supposed to be among the best in the whole of the Kansas City metropolitan area, although I can say from first-hand experience of both the schools and their products that they are not remarkable except for the amount of money it takes them to produce the same result as other, less well-endowed public schools. It's a nicely-masqued but vulgar, spiritless place that takes itself a bit too seriously. And it's conservative. Like most of Kansas, very conservative.

So the crowd at Religulous was a surprise. Compared to Expelled, which was playing at many more theatres (although, when I went about three weeks into its run, with dramatically lower attendance), I had imagined that this would be more of a "preaching to the converted" experience.

As the film began, though, and Mr Antbus and I returned with our overpriced cinema sodas, I settled in more comfortably when I realised that there probably wouldn't be fisticufs breaking out between realists and irrationalists - at least, not that night. The crowd laughed a good deal when it was supposed to, and seemed appropriately shocked especially toward the end.

Enough has been written about the film already, elsewhere, that I won't go into it too deeply, other than to cite a few high points. There are some big laughs in Religulous, and some deeply troubling and sobering moments. If you've seen Richard Dawkins' 2005 programme for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil?, then you've already got some idea of the arguments that are deployed against irrationality and faith. But Maher's approach, more convivial and warm as it is, complement's Professor Dawkins' more academic effort, as well as Jonathan Miller's Atheism: A Rough Guide to Disbelief ( wiki | Official BBC Site ).

The film uses Maher's own upbringing as a jumping-off point. The son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, the young Bill did not even realise the conflicts between the faiths of his parents until after they abruptly stopped going to church. It was not until he was much older that he began to ask questions about his own upbringing. The use of his family history refreshingly candid and effective in communicating his background with religious issues.

The film opens with Maher on the site of the ancient town of Megiddo, the site at which the biblical Revelation states that Armageddon will come (the word 'armageddon' is derived from the name 'Megiddo'). Maher also tackles the question of the primacy of the Jesus story by reminding us of two precursors: Osiris and Mithras, who conveniently have many of the same sorts of "miracles" attributed to them, as well.

The interviews which Maher conducts range from the worryingly comical, as in the case of Mark Pryor, the junior Arkansas Senator who points out that there is no intelligence prerequisite to entering Congress (much to his own chagrin as he realises what he has said), to the thoughtful and curious, as in the case of the trucker's chapel, where Maher talks with a group of long-haul drivers. In perhaps one of the more surreal moments, Maher talks with Ken Ham, of Creation Museum infamy. Ham's biblical literalism and consequential placement of dinosaurs and humans as contemporaries within his 'museum' perhaps makes him too easy a target for Maher's amusement. Additionally, in one instance, that of the Floridian Holy Land theme park, the park's publicist is frantic at not having been told the identity of the film's central figure. In these cases, Maher and director Larry Charles appear to have taken a page from the producers of Expelled, who often substituted the dulcet monotone of Ben "I'm an Intellectual" Stein after the subject had already been warmed up.

Bill Maher's humour may not be everyone's cup of tea, and he may not always have the right end of some issues, but it must be said that, as far as Religulous is concerned, he seems to have done an excellent job. Religulous is a compelling and intelligent film, and anyone on either side of questions of faith should make a point of going to see it, and asking themselves the questions that follow as a natural consequence.

Still not sure if you want to see it? Here's the preview:

Request Time

I happened to be looking at my traffic, as I sometimes do in the still watches of the night, and saw that someone out there reached my blog using this search on Le Google: "chapter synopsis of climbing mt improbable". Of course, as far as I can guess, they're looking for the 1999 Richard Dawkins book, Climbing Mount Improbable. As I mentioned at the beginning, that's where the name for this blog comes from, if in a rather unwarrantedly facetious manner (sorry, Professor Dawkins).

So I'll consider that a request, to be handled soon over on Science Books Reviewed, very soon, hopefully, if I can get one or two other projects knocked out in short order. I also have John Allen Paulos' new book, Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up, George Johnson's The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, and one or two others to fill in the backlog. Keeping watching this space, or Science Books Reviewed, and I'll have something for you soon.

Political Designs

My friend antbus is as talented and gifted an artist as he is an inept and frankly embarassing cricketer. We get on nonetheless - it might be a mutual admiration of the fluid which I believe is known as "beer" that has something to do with it.

He's asked for publicity help with his new, politically relevant t-shirt designs, and I'm only too happy to pass this information on to all four or five of my readers. Take a look at the T-Shirt Monkey site. I think you'll enjoy it.

Mighty Oaks

In Kansas City, there's been a row brewing recently over the role of ACORN, a community organisation which helps to ensure that low-income and minority voters are properly registered to vote, as is their right.

You tend to hear the mutter and buzz of misinformation, particularly that being spread by the McPalin campaign (McCain campaign accuses ACORN of undermining election integrity, but offers no proof), and what does it really boil down to? More un-subtle attempts to pander to some of the more intolerant in his crowds? Come on people, it's 2008, even in Missouri. White people, black people, yellow people, brown people, red people... what do they have in common? Oh, yes, they're people. And people, as long as they meet the base requirements set by law, get to vote. Get over it.

Yes, there have been some problems with ACORN registrations, but, if you'll forgive continuing the arboreal theme, that's more likely the product of a few bad apples than a tree that is rotten down to the roots. And when the joint statement is given by (current) Missouri Governor Blunt, a Republican, and a McCain campaign lackey, all based on a tip-off (or "wild exaggeration") from Faux Newts, well, you can imagine that there might be some cause to doubt the integrity of the sentiments of righteous rage at "voter fraud". Hopefully, as Missouri registration closed last Wednesday, this will all be quickly resolved.

For a perspective on the goals of this sort of campaign tactic, you can read this interesting article by Tom Matzzie on the Huffington Post: How McCain will steal the election from Obama (sort of).

On cars in Kansas, I still see bumper stickers from time to time which say: "Kansas. As Bigoted As You Think." And if it's all the same to Republicans and Fox Noise, I'd prefer that we don't have cause for a similar sticker in Missouri.

Mercury (Is) in Retrograde (At the Moment)

To begin with an aside, I liked Bloc Party's first album and all (they were described as a cross between the Clash and the Specials, with a hyperactive drummer and catchy hooks, what wasn't to like?), but I really don't like that 'Mercury in Retrograde' song. I must be getting old.

However, Mercury is topical at the moment, and it also happens to be in retrograde for real. I found myself thinking back to the days when I was first learning about the solar system, as a child in the 1970s. I vividly remember my school's library, and how vast it seemed. Some of my classmates were less than enamoured of library day, but I loved it. Even from my first years, I wanted to go and look at the books on the shelves for the "older kids", and I remember having to demonstrate that I could read at a sufficient level before being turned loose in the stacks. For whatever reason, I've always been something of a bibliomane. My inevitable release into the wider world of bookshelves came, and I found, among other things the books about science, and more specifically the books about space.

In the days before inexpensive colour printing, the book which fascinated me is one which is now terribly elusive: it was a black hardcover, possibly with a colour photograph of Saturn as an illustration, and was illustrated with black and white photographs. The triumphs of NASA in the 1960s were being followed by an ambitious plan of exploration by robotic probes. The book, which had been printed before even the Viking missions, was something of a celebration of that. Of course, that meant that much of the information about the outer solar system came from Pioneer, and much of the information about the inner solar system came from the Mariner missions. In a pre-Voyager world, details were still more than a little sketchy, consisting almost entirely of observations that could be made from ground-based astronomers. That work of course shouldn't be minimised, since statistically all but the tiniest of fractions of human history looking at the stars from the surface of the Earth was the only way that we could know about what lay beyond the veil of our atmosphere. We knew roughly what sorts of worlds these planets must be, we knew that some of them had moons, but specific details - of the kind which are now commonplace - were comparatively few and far between.

I remember poring over this book, absorbed in the descriptions of distant worlds. I was fascinated by Pluto, for example, as something about its remoteness and seeming mystery was compelling in its own way. I felt a bit saddened, I must admit, when it was demoted from planetary status, but I've gotten over it. Like everyone else, I'll have to wait until 2014 to see how the saga of Pluto works out.

One of the other things that struck me was how little we knew of Mercury. For being so comparatively close, it too is a mysterious world. That point has been driven home by new photographs from the Mercury Messenger mission, some of the best ever taken of the planet. Launched in 2004, Messenger is closing in on its final destination, a stable orbit around the innermost planet of the solar system, where it should arrive in 2011. When it arrives, we hope to learn even more about the formation of the solar system, as well as completing detailed studies of the planet itself. "Messenger" is an acronym of sorts, standing for "MErcury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry, and Ranging" - which of course tells you exactly what we hope to learn about the first planet. If you're still in doubt, try the "Why Mercury?" page on the JPL site.

When the world is at sixes and sevens, it's comforting in a way to concentrate on the deeper mysteries of the universe. It reminds us that the scale of things, that the enormity of space and the depth of time are facts which put the daily travails of the human race in their place. And as I believe that I've said before, there's always more to learn. We just have to look for it.

As to that first excursion into the planets when I was a child... I'm still hoping to find that book again one day, just for nostalgia's sake. If anyone has any idea of what I'm on about and can point me in the right direction, do drop me a line and let me know.

Quick Notes for Monday

Here's a collection of a few quick topical links for this morning, just in case I run out of time later in the day. If for some reason you read here for some of this news and nowhere else, I really have to ask... why?:

• Religulous tramples An American Carol: caught a preview for the new Jerry Zucker outing, which is a clear attack on Michael Moore. I'm not a huge Moore fan or partisan; something about his films never quite gels for me. I think that he means well, but that he's slightly too scattered for his points to be effective. However, Mr Zucker's new assault, clearly intended not so much to be funny as to assassinate Moore's character right up and down the party line, is failing against the only obvious barometre: Bill Maher and Larry Charles' elephant in the room anti-religion film, Religulous. The figures are here (look at entries 7 and 9 in the list): basically, despite being released in three times as many theatres, An American Carol only barely out-grossed Religulous, and the latter's per screen average was three times as high as a result. Jane Hamsher's take is at the Huffington Post.
  
  As far as my own viewing tastes go, let's put it this way: of the two, I'm only going to see Religulous, even if I have to go south of the river to do so (anyone want to build a good independent / art house theatre in the Northland? I think that there is a void that needs to be filled there...).


• The American right's fact-challenged princess, Governor Palin, is joining with her running mate in trying to campaign against the ghosts of the 1960s. Her latest attack has been that Senator Obama consorts with domestic ne'er-do-wells. To put that into context, here is the Wikipedia article about the Weathermen, and analysis from MSNBC.


• There's a new site calling attention to McCain's economic philosophy and history, Keating Economics. Funny, we haven't seen much of Neil Bush in recent years, have we? Still, with echoes of the savings and loan crisis ringing in our ears, it was inevitable that all of this would come up again. With the final month before the election now here, the organ stops are all being pulled up to build up into that final roar...


• If there's a resurgent word that I'm now officially sick of hearing misappropriated by the right, it's maverick - if you have to call yourself a maverick, then the odds are good that you are probably nothing of the sort. I think that Rolling Stone may have gotten sick of it too. The current issue has a new McCain story up too... Make-Believe Maverick. Also definitely worth your time to read.


• One of the few joys of this election... watching Tina Fey's impressions of Palin on Saturday Night Live. Here's the latest, via the Huffington Post. As a bonus, Queen Latifah's portrayal of Gwen Ifill was much appreciated... by Gwen Ifill - she seemed well-pleased on Meet the Press, at any rate. SNL... more politically relevant than ever?

And finally... if you're in the US and eligible to vote and you aren't registered... what are you waiting for? In Missouri, for example, the deadline is Wednesday. Some state deadlines may have already passed (check with your local election commission)... but if yours hasn't and you aren't yet registered, what are you waiting for? MSNBC reports that a swelling of the voter roles which may aid in defeating the McPalin ticket. Either way, I don't care what party you're voting for (well, I do, but no matter...), you need to do this. If the US is really a participatory democracy, then the key is participation. Register. Today. And vote on November 4. It's your right.

Best Line Yet from Election Coverage

I was reading about the new tactic adopted by Governor Palin to try to undermine Senator Obama in an article on the Huffington Post when I snorted in a rather undignified manner at this quote, from Democratic stratgist Jenny Backus:

"It's a giant changing of the subject," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. "The problem is the messenger. If you want to start throwing fire bombs, you don't send out the fluffy bunny to do it. I think people don't take Sarah Palin seriously."

Beautiful. Well-said. The mental image is priceless... reminiscent of this clip...

Which begs the question... when will Governor Palin's claws and fangs come out for all to see? After all, Hallowe'en is coming...

There's Always More to Learn - Dinosaur Edition

The disagreements in the scientific community are often played up by the anti-science crowds in their effort to make a case for their own views. In terms of concord, suggest the intelligent design crowd, anything less than 100% agreement - even agreement anywhere in the ninety percent or higher range - is apparently just cause for everyone to down tools and take the view that it must have been a designer after all. Mechanisms of nature which are predictive and shown repeatedly to be the driving force in the gradual changes in species over millions of years are insufficient in the light of this "all or nothing" approach. Mind you, they still won't tell us who the designer is, but with the number of biblical quotations that lace their books (at least, in the West, Adnan Oktar aside), we can probably take an ultimately accurate wild stab in the dark as to their number one candidate.

Take, for example, the suggestion that bird evolution can be linked directly to survivors of the therapod dinosaur lineage (seemingly earlier off-shoots of the therapod line). Therapods were the two-legged, feathered dinosaurs, of which some famous exemplars - archaeopteryx, sinoraptor, and recent Chinese fossil discoveries, among others - seem to point conclusively toward evolution and adaptation from the saurian to the avian.

I've met at least one paleontologist who is one of the opposing camp, a group which suggests that this business of the evolution of birds from dinosaurs is, in fact, completely ridiculous. Among others who do not accept the direct therapod connection are paleontologists like Larry Martin of the University of Kansas, for one, who is among a number of highly respected experts who have found the evidence to be unconvincing. They appear to be in a dwindling minority within the paleontological community, though, especially in the light of the growing number of fossils discovered in China which appear to point to a direct therapod-to-avian connection. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop their disagreement from being seized upon by "cdesign proponentists", who are apparently above doing research of their own, instead using a legitimate conflict of scientific opinion as the hammer-to-nail seal in the coffin of evolutionary theory (short answer: no, it isn't).

The discovery of a new therapod in Argentinia opens up the debate yet again, as recorded in a recent story from the National Geographic (and other news sources). Argentinia has been a rich source for fossils since before Darwin's time, and has now yielded Aerosteon riocoloradensis, which is shaking the tree once more. One of the most interesting claims about this new fossil is that it breathed in the same way as modern birds. No doubt, this will be a source of controversy.

How do we know how dinosaurs breathed? How do we understand what their lungs must have been like, when lungs don't fossilise? This is a function of comparative anatomy, a field pioneered by one of the true geniuses of the 19th century, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Cuvier, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and a director of the Muséum National de l'Histoire naturelle (Wiki | Official Site), pioneered the comparison and identification of animals by their physical characteristics, a field which forms the basis of the discipline of comparative anatomy. It was Cuvier who determined that certain fossils, including a variety of extinct elephant lineages and the Paraguayan megatherium were not from known examples of otherwise unknown living species, which in part led to the first realisation that several major faunal groups were represented in the primitive fossil record that were not known in the modern world.

We can tell a great deal from bones, as the much vaunted techniques of crime scene investigation, in all its televisual glory, tell us. The shape of bones can lead to the reconstruction of a face or any other body part supported by bone, because we know how the shape of the bones dictates the distribution of tissue in different species. Broken or damaged bones tell us about lifestyle. The bones themselves can be different - bird bones, as is well known, are hollow, giving our avian friends the ability to fly. And, when faced with an unknown bone, we can rebuild with a fair degree of accuracy a representation of what the living creature must have looked like. This was the field pioneered by Cuvier, and it is said that he could look at a single bone and reconstruct an accurate picture of the animal from which it came. Probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt of his skill and expertise.

Cuvier attributed the similarities that he observed between species, and the clear distinctions from other species, to the concept of the Great Chain of Being, or scala naturae, a theoretical framework still popular in the 18th century which proposed a natural hierarchy of all of the creatures in the world (and the gods and sprites outside of it). It is from the scala naturae concept that we still retain the conception of the lion as the "King of Beasts", and the oak as the "sovereign of trees". The scala naturae also gave rise to the idea of the divine right of kings, which as a part of modern theology is curiously lacking in the schema of beliefs propounded by creationists, especially American ones. But back to Cuvier, in the face of the similarities between related and unrelated animals species which he observed, he couldn't accept the idea of the transformation of species, even as tentatively put forward by the Comte de Buffon. According to John C. Greene, author of The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought, "Cuvier was attempting the impossible task of reconciling two conflicting views of nature" (p. 173 ff). Greene continues: "That Cuvier was able to make these views seem compatible testified both to the greatness of his prestige and to the strength of the contemporary demand that the new science be reconciled with the traditional view of nature." It would take a mind like that of Charles Darwin, and another fifty years, to wrest all of the conflicting threads of 18th and 19th Century thought into place, and to show the incompatibility for what it was.

When you look at the chest cavity of an 80 million year old dinosaur, comparisons with modern reptiles and birds which are similarly structured provide us with an excellent idea of the arrangement and function of the internal organs (that is part of the evidence from the new find cited in the National Geographic article). In the light of evolution in a Darwinian mode, we are presented with an explanation for this: earlier forms gave rise to later, through natural selection and descent with modification. It's first-year Evolutionary Biology, in essence. Sometimes, as Cuvier said two hundred years ago, and well before Darwin, the process throws up dead ends, and sometimes not. Cuvier says (quoted in Greene):

"Nature never oversteps the bounds which the necessary conditions of existence prescribe to her; but whenever she is unconfined by these conditions she displays all her fertility and variety. Never departing from the small number of combinations that are possible, between the essential modification of important organs, she seems to sport with infinite caprice in all the accessory parts. It even frequently happens, that particular forms and dispositions are created without any apparent view to utility. It seems sufficient that they should be possible, that is to say, that they do not destroy the harmony of the whole."

-- Georges Cuvier, Lectures I, p 58-9

Despite getting this much of the puzzle, Cuvier, didn't see the whole. In that way, he is much like the unscientific "cdesign proponentists", who I like to think he would have reviled. But it seems as though he had made it part of the way along the road, and given slightly greater knowledge, Cuvier too would have been convinced by descent with modification via natural selection. And he would have been delighted to know that the field which he pioneered had yielded so many fruitful results, that even to this day human beings were unearthing more and more of the story of life's past on Earth.

At the end of the day, it doesn't seem that the idea of a scala natura was as far wrong as we might once have thought. It was, in a sense, right. But it was right for entirely the wrong reasons. Rather than a divine hand forging links in a chain, it has always been selection of random mutation building on accreted adaptations over a huge span of time. And that is the sort of theoretical achievement, whether illustrated by birds descended from dinosaurs or from the diversity of the proboscidae, of which "cdesign proponentists" could only dream.

There is always more to learn. And learning must come from doing. The more that we do, the more we study, the more we search for new things that we have never seen before, the more we will learn. And as human endeavour goes, that's certainly the most worthwhile way to spend your days that I can think of.

EDIT: Several edits for clarity in the above, proving once again that I shouldn't rush my drafting process. Apologies for the annoyance of having to read for revisions.

Welcome to October

I'll get back to the science soon, really, I will...

But I just had to note this: even George Will finds Sarah Palin unconvincing. Well, in reality, it seems that he put it a little more firmly than that. I'm not an adherent of Mr Will's philosophy, per se, but I do respect him for his ability, seemingly lost by many self-styled conservatives, to take a position that might be unpopular with the base. And this latest statement does endear him to me somewhat further. I imagine that he'd be fascinating company over a long lunch.

In the meantime? Since I have to say something about science to greet the new month but don't have time this morning to finish my dinosaur post, I'll give a list of my activities yesterday and today:

• Part of the day was spent assembling insect nets. They're really quite nice - sturdy wire hoops, really nice netting, and a neatly designed handle into which the whole thing fits. Wish I'd had one for my long-ago insect collection - it would have been ideal. We also got in a dozen really nice insect-collecting kits - killing jar, pins, labels, a short guide, collecting envelopes: a really nice set, if entomology is your bag.


• I'm getting better at explaining and selling microscopes. As with anything, the more that I work with something (and I hadn't touched a microscope in longer than I care to think prior to a year ago), the easier it becomes.


• The giant holiday telescope order (part 1) arrived: Dobsonians and refractors mostly this time. They're filling up the basement at the moment, until we can get them sorted properly and ready for sale. That will probably take up a good chunk of my day today. Need a telescope for the holidays? Let me know.


• While I was filling the basement with telescopes, I again noticed the still-overflowing containers of minerals awaiting identification and pricing. At some point, I'm going to get to those too, although I don't yet know when "some point" might be.

So that's life in October, 2008, leaving all the scary economic stuff to one side, for the moment. Life carries on. Autumn's here. Now, back to work.