Last Minute Holiday Gifts?

Still thinking about giving the gift of science to your favourite pagan, humanist, or otherwise interesting person? Decided to wait until you reached the critical "five days before the holiday" window? Then you've come to the right place. I work in a science store... I can help.

What follows is a list of things that I like. That doesn't mean that you have to like them, but it's a start. Oh, yes, and I'm shamelessly linking to the webstore that I built for HMS Beagle, with a lot of help from our friends at Zen Cart. The store isn't done yet (still lots of descriptions and images to go), but it works, so take a look!

1. Give the gift of Astronomy. Specifically, give a telescope, with all of the filters and fun that go with one. I've got my eye on the Celestron Omni XLT 150, which looks like a great starter reflector. Sure, you could spend less for a wobbly mount or a smaller aperture (or even, if you're not careful, rotten optics), or spend less for a Dobsonian mount (which is fine, you still get a great aperture for a good price). I just really, really like the look of this one. Trust me, it's solid and stable, as you'll find if you have to have it shipped (tube and mount together will weigh about 60 lbs.)


2. Give the gift of Chemistry. Specifically, give a chemistry set. If you don't have the capital to spend building your own, from a book like Robert Bruce Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture, then you should look at one of the top chemistry sets currently on the market, the Thames and Cosmos C3000 Chemistry Set. It's big, it's bold, and it's probably a little too safe. But it's a start.


3. Give the gift of Nature. I'd pick a spotting scope, for observing wildlife, or a good pair of binoculars. Since we have the binoculars, I'd pick the scope, just for variety. For the scope, you can go larger and heavier, but there's a nice light one, again by Celestron, the 50mm Mini Zoom. It's waterproof, has a three power zoom, and comes with a small tripod. The optics are really crisp and nice.


4. Give the gift of Microscopy. You can do a lot with a microscope, as Natalie Angier points out in The Canon. There's a lot of amazing stuff to see, and a good scope can let you look at both slides and larger, three dimensional objects. The T-2400 model from Ken-A-Vision is a good place to start, at an affordable price, but if I'm picking for myself, then I want the T-2200, also from Ken-A-Vision. It's more expensive, but you get more for your money.


5. Give books and magazines... The book listings you can find anywhere and everywhere. If I were picking a magazine for myself, it would be along the lines of Skeptical Inquirer, Seed, Make, Scientific American, Mineralogical Record, or Astronomy, for a start. It's the gift that comes round four or more times a year!

Do you have recommendations of your own? Leave me yours in the comments. Happy gift hunting.

Missouri Citizens for Science, Redux

I've brought this up before, quite some time back, but it's now official: I'd like to see a grass roots Missouri Citizens for Science organisation become a growing, active concern.

There are Citizens for Science entities in other states, but apart from a reference on the seemingly also-defunct Red State Rabble blog, I can't find anything else for Missouri. Obviously grass roots organisations come and go, but this is one that I would really think needs to stay. Why?

The whole affair at Park Hill (which remains unresolved, but appears to have gone into a sort of stasis), added to the existence of a conservative Christian "science centre" in Camdenton, leads me to believe that there is a clear and present need for such an organisation in Missouri. There has apparently been one in the past, but currently there's no web presence (the domain "moscience.org" appears to be for sale), and no outreach at all. The web part I can correct, at least at a superficial level - it won't be a spectacular web page, but I should be able to put something together pretty quickly. At this point, I'm envisioning a page of information with links to resources, maybe even a store for our own gear, if I can get a certain friend on mine on board with doing some designs...

Over the holidays, I'll be looking into the issue - in between trying to help assemble toys, I suspect - to see what can be done.

If you were a member of a former incarnation of the Missouri Citizens for Science, are a current member, or have any interest in helping, please let me know in the comments... I don't want to tread on the toes of anyone in the existing organisation - if there is one - but I think that this is worth doing.

So Far, No Honking

I've had this bumper sticker on my (now rather dirty) car for about two weeks now. As yet, no takers.

If I were indulging in wishful thinking, I'd put it down to the inherent politeness of Midwesterners. Yeah, that's it! They wouldn't want to honk, even if they did understand PE, because it might seem rude!

I'm fooling myself, aren't I?

At any rate, until I get myself together enough to write a longer piece on it, you can find Punctuated Equilibria, in the words of one of its developers, the late and much-missed Stephen Jay Gould here (scroll down, or search for "punctuated" on the page), a whole page on the Gould Archive here (from his landmark book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory), or check out the Wikipedia entry, for a start.

And in the meantime, if you see a car with a PE sticker on it, do the right thing: honk!

Super-Massive Black Hole News: Panic Still Unwarranted

Well, it's official. There's a super-massive black hole in the centre of the galaxy.

Time to panic, time to flee? Not really (and I'd have to ask, if you chose the "flee" option, where would you intend to go? The Magellanic Clouds?). It now appears that these enormous black holes may actually help to hold galaxies together.

As reported by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere in this press release, a team of German astronomers has made detailed observations of the object called Sagittarius A*. Specifically, by carefully observing the movements of a group of stars at the very centre of our galaxy for some sixteen years (one of which completed a full orbit in that time), the astronomers have been able to deduce the mass of this hidden giant lurking at the core of the Milky Way.

From the article:

The team used the central stars as "test particles" by watching how they move around Sagittarius A*. Just as leaves caught in a wintry gust reveal a complex web of air currents, so does tracking the central stars show the nexus of forces at work at the Galactic Centre. These observations can then be used to infer important properties of the black hole itself, such as its mass and distance. The new study also showed that at least 95% of the mass sensed by the stars has to be in the black hole. There is thus little room left for other dark matter.

"Undoubtedly the most spectacular aspect of our long term study is that it has delivered what is now considered to be the best empirical evidence that supermassive black holes do really exist. The stellar orbits in the Galactic Centre show that the central mass concentration of four million solar masses must be a black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt," says Genzel [Reinhard Genzel, leader of the team from the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching near Munich]. The observations also allow astronomers to pinpoint our distance to the centre of the Galaxy with great precision, which is now measured to be 27 000 light-years.

-- ESO Press Release, 10 december 2008

As some of you will no doubt know, next year is the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating 400 years since Galileo first pointed a telescope at Jupiter and observed its moons. With so many amazing discoveries being made in 2008, hopefully we won't have found everything in the universe before 2009, or else there will be very little to talk about...

For more on the story, be sure to check the Max Planck Institute site (in German) and Astronomy.com, among others.

Io, Saturnalia!

It's that time of year again, mes amis, a time to celebrate and give gifts and all of that good stuff. Presents under the tree, satsumas (or clementines) in the stockings, a nice goose or tofurkey roast for Boxing Day and a glass or two of good port... the traditional things. And, of course, no Christmas would be complete without re-reading 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle' (the only Sherlock Holmes story set at Christmastide), and at least one of Dickens' Christmas books or stories - those are my traditions, anyway.

It's not only Christmas time, of course. It's also Saturnalia, as the citizens of Nova Roma will know. It was thinking of the Feast of Saturn which has led me to open my copy of the Oxford Classical Dictionary ( Wiki | listing on Amazon ) for the first time in a very long time indeed. Originally a single day festival falling on 17 December, Saturnalia was eventually expanded to a week, although there were always spoilers attempting to cut that time back to three or five days (Augustus and Caligula being two of them). Although its origins are shrouded in some uncertainty, Saturnalia was meant commemorate the end of fall planting under the auspices of the Roman god Saturn, who in this incarnation was a god of the sowing of fields. A "Lord of Misrule" (saturnalicius princeps) was elected to sit outside the Temple of Saturn on the Capitoline in Rome. The holiday featured the exchange of gifts (sigillaria), banquets, and the reversal of master and slave roles (Rome, like every major state of this time, held a large population of slaves). It was a time intended for merriment and good-natured japery. In short, it sounds like it would have been a fun time.

This custom of feasting and gift-giving at the end of December has been thought to be the the inspiration for the eventual take-over, by the upstart Christian movement, of the 25th of December as their high holy day (the Nativity), although that didn't officially happen until the 4th century CE. The date of 25 December specifically was previously the feast day of the Sol Invictus ("unconquered sun") cult, a Roman Imperial successor (or addition) to the revels of Saturnalia. Many of the other customs (greenery, lights, charity) belong to the Roman New Year, which originally fell on 1st March, until the calendar reforms under Julius Caesar in the first century BCE moved the day to 1st January. Knowing this, those of us who fall in the non-theist category could be forgiven for looking on the whole modern Christmas celebration somewhat cynically, if simply from an historical perspective. At such a great historical remove from the Roman era, it is easier for people not to understand the history that they may or may not understand as well as they think.

Never minding what you celebrate at this time of year, though: be certain to consider those less fortunate than yourself. Personally, I haven't exactly had a stellar year (the second half has been better than the first, though), but in difficult times, it's more important, rather than less, to remember others less fortunate than ourselves, and to be heartily grateful for what we do have (which I am). At least, that's what my humanist's moral compass and atheist's ethical system tell me. Scroll back to my potato days entry for suggestions of possible donation sites, or give some tinned food to a local food pantry. Find a charity that supports causes in which you can believe, and help them out. It's usually pretty simple.

And once you've done that? Make a little merry, as much as you can.

Io, Saturnalia!

Carbon Dioxide Detected on Exoplanet

This story was originally posted back in late November, but in reading through the updated piece at Science News, I was struck by the last line. First, the main story.

Essentially, carbon dioxide has been detected in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star HD 189733 (am I the only one who thinks these stars should be given really great proper names when you find something like this?). This planet has already given up the information that it has water vapour and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere, and is now the first exoplanet of any size on which carbon dioxide has been detected.

"One explanation for the carbon dioxide, says Swain [Mark Swain of NASA's JPL], is that because the planet lies so close to HD 189733, completing an orbit in just 2.2 days, it receives an unusually high dose of ultraviolet light from the star. The intense ultraviolet radiation could have altered the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere, breaking down compounds and creating new ones. If other explanations can be ruled out, “this would be the first real evidence that [ultraviolet starlight] can make a substantial contribution to the atmosphere of these extrasolar planets,” Swain says. In the solar system, for example, ultraviolet light from the sun is believed to have triggered complex chemical reactions in Earth’s early atmosphere."

-- Science News, 9 December 2008

But the bit that I found particularly interesting was the last paragraph:

"The new finding “means that three of the Big Four biomarkers for habitable/inhabited worlds have now been seen: water, methane and now carbon dioxide,” Boss [Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institute for Science] says. “The only one that has not yet been detected is oxygen/ozone.”

Ibid

That last sentence is incredibly exciting. It means that astronomers are rapidly closing in finding out whether or not there are other Earth-like worlds out there, and that the chances for such a place look quite a lot more likely than they did twenty years ago. Think about that for a moment: what do you think the implication of finding another planet like Earth would be? Answers in the comments, if you're so inclined.

Casey and the Straw Man

Following the exploits of the members of the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement is a sort of perverse pleasure for me, something of an exercise in schadenfreude, if you will. For my own amusement, not only do I routinely listen to some of the more execrable of their podcasts, but I also get update emails from the Disco, a little thing that they like to call "Nota Bene" (although they have to explain for the more cloth-eared of their readers that it's Latin for "note well" in each of the emails under that name). In it, readers will find all of the delightful nuggets of banality penned by some of the lower-wattage lights of the ID crowd that they've come to expect: Klinghoffer, Luskin, and Egnor, among others.

I consider this reading to be a sort of "opposition research", in the same way that one political party will study the policies of another in attempting to find the inherent flaws and weaknesses, or the way that a barrister might try to find ways in which their client could not have been outside that pub on the rainy Tuesday night in question.

And this time... oh, poor Mr Luskin. He just tries so damn hard to come up with something to say. This is a man who seems moderately surprised at anything said by anyone in any interview he's ever conducted. A good example of this: when interviewing Steven Fuller (a sociologist!) for the ID: the Future (now in 3-D!) podcast back in September - who was quite clearly an American, as anyone with ears would have told you - not only did Mr Luskin mispronounce the name of the university (Fuller holds his post at the University of Warwick: it's "Warr-ick", mate - something called the "law of consonantal shift" that you might want to look into), but he then went on to belabour the absence of his guest's accent, taking pains to point out that he "has a number of English relatives", so he "knows English accents". Mr Luskin may well know them - just not well enough to reproduce basic aspects of pronunciation. (ID: the Future is out there on iTunes, if you want to listen to the train wreck in progress, or I'm sure that there must be another source that doesn't increase their download figures.)

Then there was the whole fracas with Tiana and Kate from the Enemy Combatant Trail Mix and Cuddly Atheist blogs, respectively, and their by-now famous (and utterly brilliant) encounter with Mr Luskin at the Disco. As you'll hear on the most recent episode of Skepticality (look for the show dated 2nd December 2008), they blagged their way into the Bat Cave Discovery Institute and got the grand tour and the free literature, operating under the pretense that they were, in fact, a couple of fun-loving girls looking for some good... information on alternatives to Darwinian evolution? I guess so. Apparently, they were also as overwrought as newts (read: mildly intoxicated) at the time of deciding to undertake their commando raid on the Fortress of Solitude Disco, although being allowed into the hallowed halls must have been a very sobering experience indeed.

Why do I bring all of this up now? Good question. Leaving aside the matter of just how willing the Disco is to debate "the issues" (presumably, the answer is "not terribly") and have the "civilised discourse" about which Mr Luskin claims to feel so strongly, we are faced with having to evaluate their positions on - gasp - the strength of what they actually say. In articles and stuff. Really. Why? 'Cause that's what we do when people won't talk to us like the grown-ups that we might otherwise have assumed them to be.

The articles that appear in the tired dog and pony show of "Nota Bene" are therefore of particular interest to us, because they are like a drunk telegraphing his punches in a bar fight. They indicate to us new fronts in the battle to jam that Wedge that they keep trying to make us forget about somewhere quite uncomfortable indeed.

Sadly then, it's not good news for our faithful interlocutor when he once more sails into uncharted waters with his latest piece: "Materialist Science Fiction Promoted to Students at a Local Public Library". As we know, if you subscribe to Intelligent Design, then books, unless they are stamped with the Dembski-Behe-Wells seal of approval, are not your friends. And even in modern public libraries, there are bound to be one or two books about the place.

What is the particular book that has raised Mr Luskin's ire? It is a controversial title called Life on Other Planets, by Rhonda Donald. Unfortunately for him, this book is readily available in my local library. Not that anyone needed to even see it to know that if he objected to it, there was very likely little wrong with it. Clearly it's a bit simple and doesn't express itself with the clarity and thoroughness that I might otherwise have liked... oh, wait a moment: it's a children's book! That's right, Mr Luskin, you're now pitting your finely honed legal mind against... a children's science author.

So what is our fearless hero's objection to this book? That it's speculative? That until we know more about neighbouring star systems it is very difficult to imagine what might constitute "life" on distant worlds? That the dream of encountering extraterrestrial life, though statistically possible, is still dependent upon variables that we haven't even begun to compute yet?

No. None of those. He's worried about some Dembski-esque rubbish about "information."

One of the pretend assaults on evolutionary thought (and maybe "assaults" is too strong a word, let's say "skirmishes") has been to say that, according to information theory, evolution cannot be true, because there is no mechanism by which the "new information" required to move from general randomness to "specific complexity" (that is, when something is so thoroughly coded that it looks like it must have been "created" by the big angry designer in the sky). Information theory, as I understand it, is a great way to work out problems in software, to understand how networks and distributed computing systems work, things like that. It is, however, complete bollocks in reference to evolutionary biology.

At this point, yes, I'm going to dismiss everything that Mr Dembski has ever said with this simple statement: "information theory, as applied by Mr Dembski, says absolutely nothing useful about evolutionary biology and should be discarded". There, I've said it. No, I'm not a mathematician, just someone with an active baloney detector. But don't worry, real mathematicians have rejected the whole "information" argument already. To use the "information" argument is to play on terrain dictated by the ID gang, and what's wrong with perfectly ordinary evolutionary biology, without all of these nonsense "filters", "sieves", and "collanders"? By the time I've read a chapter of Dembski, I can't decide whether to put out my eyes or make coffee and pasta while sifting dirt for pottery shards. Seriously. What Dembski did was not to simplify the way in which we understand evolutionary biology, it was to overlay his own mathematical wing-nuttery onto reality and demand that reality take notice.

Mr Luskin, therefore, wants us to be outraged by the absence of references to "information" in author Donald's description of "a recipe for life" (see, we're back to cookery already) in her speculative book for children on the subject of extraterrestrial life. Because the "complex and specified information" is not brought up by the book's author, the book should be classified, in Mr Luskin's head, as science fiction.

Let's think about this again for a moment: Mr Luskin walks into his local public library... presumably to see if there are any naughty books about Evilushun that they'd like him to play Bradbury fireman with. No, they reject his request, but then he happens to see a book, perhaps displayed on a table, trying to entice children to read. It's a table about space, or some such thing. He picks up the book, and scans past page 4 (big photo of a radio telescope), reads the title of Chapter One, "Is Anybody Out There" on page 5, skims a bit, and comes to page 6, where the big heading A Recipe for Life leaps out at him. He reads the next seventeen words, and stops and closes the book. Perhaps he read a bit further, to see if at any point it mentions Professor Dawkins ritually slaughtering puppies, but failing that, he puts it down. He has his new topic for the newsletter: what a scoop! This book, which has the temerity to suggest that you need "at least three things" for life on Earth to exist, is clearly science fiction, not science fact.

Casey, dear boy, you might want to read the rest of the book: it's only fifty-six pages, index included, and there are lots of pretty pictures. And here's what it talks about: the rest of Chapter One deals with the organic molecules found in interstellar space and the hypotheses about the beginnings of life on Earth. Chapter Two deals with extremophiles, with life that exists at the edges of what we would consider comfortable and possible. Chapter Three deals with exploring our solar system, looking for other life, or signs of it. Chapter Four discusses hunting for planets outside of the solar system. And Chapter Five is concerned, in a purely speculative manner, what an alien species might be like. That's the book: short and sweet and largely readable. So here's the problem with your assessment.

You see over the years, I've read a lot of science fiction. It used to be, in less-enlightened times, that there were just a few main ingredients in the successful science fiction tale: rocket ships, ray guns, robots, and robustly-bosomed maidens requiring rescue, preferrably on planets which have yet to discover the social taboos which dictate the necessity of clothing. Sure, it wasn't high-brow, but it wasn't half exciting when I was a teenager. Of course, science fiction is more sophisticated now, and so am I... well, for the most part. But what I can tell you, from my own expertise, is that the book that has caused Mr Luskin such caniptious and impotent rage is not science fiction. It is... science. For kids.

And here once again Mr Luskin has done what he and his Disco-theque colleagues are very good at doing: he has, without doing a whole lot of work or research, constructed a nice, tidy straw man, and then, ever so proud of himself, he's knocked it on its arse. Well done, sir. Well done, indeed.

The problem with straw men, though, is that sometimes they get back up again, especially if you're talking about science fiction.

To Seek Out Strange New Worlds...

...the first place you might want to go would be Exoplanets.org. Maybe everybody already knew about this site as well, and just hasn't told me yet, like that whole Year of the Potato thing. I'm sure that Phil Plait has blogged about it somewhere (I'm not even going to look, it'll just remind me that I need to read Bad Astronomy more often, and that I still haven't bought Death from the Skies! yet - sigh). Nevertheless, I'm finding it more than a little interesting. This morning, I was looking at the Kepler Star Wheel, downloaded from the NASA Kepler Mission site, and noticed that it had a link (which was wrong) to a source for the star wheel's included exoplanet table. That, in turn, after a few minutes' fruitful searching, led me here.

Included in the site is a list of all known exoplanets, with data and references. I haven't been able to determine quite when it was last updated, but I'm assuming that it was within 2008, as that's the date on some of the references. The number of planets known outside of the solar system? 228.

You read that right. 228 worlds known. Five of them alone in the system around the star 55 Cancri. Five. As illustrated in the picture by the talented artist and helpful friend of my other blog, Lynette Cook (take a look, she does gorgeous work, or check out her Zazzle store). Obviously, illustrations like this are imaginative, and may not represent the real appearance of these star systems. One day soon, we'll know for certain. But for now, they're the best thing that we have, and I have to say again, Ms Cook does gorgeous work.

When I was watching the original Star Trek series as a child, in repeats Sunday mornings on one of only five broadcast channels in town, it was always taken for granted in the stories that there were worlds around other stars. I saw Kirk, Spock, and McCoy go to them each week. But we didn't know that these "strange new worlds" were acutally there. What's amazing is that now, we do. We know that there are other solar systems. We know that the ancient prejudice of ours being the only world, around the only star, at the centre of a universe built as a sort of blind belief proving ground is false.

The other aspect of that Star Trek parallel is the discovery of Earth-like worlds on which other civilisations may exist. Of course, in retrospect it might have seemed odd that most of them either looked like a set in a studio or like parts of southern California (just as all alien worlds in classic Doctor Who look like gravel pits in the Home Counties), and more than 75% of those were home to humanoids physically similar enough to us for Kirk to have a snog with. That's the part that we don't known about yet. But it should be the part that fires our imagination, and makes us want to know more. Finding these planets may still be a quarter century away, although some people have suggested that such a discovery is coming a lot sooner than that. And it should be pointed out that finding a planet is one thing - finding a civilisation is quite another.

As human beings grow as a species, it is to be hoped that we will continue to make decisions that move us further away from the darkness, and into the light. There's so much more to see and find, and so many questions that remain unanswered. That's what gets me out of bed on cold, dreary mornings that promise snow.

So take a look at Exoplanets.org, and maybe it will remind you, as it reminds me, just how monumental this information is. Thanks to dedicated scientists and amateurs, human beings know more about worlds beyond our own solar system, and have learned it in just twenty years. That is what science can do for you.

Potato Days

In a light-hearted moment, I give you this story reported by the Beeb, about a man in Lebanon who claims to have found the world's heaviest potato. At 11.3 kilos (24.9 lbs), it would certainly do fish and chips a couple of times, if you could bear to eat it. In all candor, I'm not sure that I could. It reminds me of a creature from some nameless B-movie horrorshow that I saw as a teenager. In the movie, I think that the potato was sentient, had one eye, and was called "Jeff".

Which brings me to the truly staggering news that I learned from this story: did anyone else know that it was the International Year of the Potato? Did you know and not tell me? Why would you keep something like that from me? I mean, really - the year's almost over, too. How am I supposed to pack a year's worth of potato celebrations into the remains of December?

Kidding aside, while I thought that Potato 2008 would be something typically silly, like sharing potato salad recipes and the ongoing search for the potato that most resembled Elvis, but in reality it's an important project to emphasise the importance of the potato as a subsistence crop, which can help alleviate hunger world-wide. Yes, there are also recipes, some of which I'll probably try. But in the meantime, take a moment to consider the humble potato, and how it can help with that crucial goal of alleviating hunger around the world. And if you haven't done it already, donate to a local food pantry, or to an organisation like Harvesters or Oxfam, or your own personal favourite. Even in these difficult economic climes and times, it's important to remember that there are always less-fortunate people who need and deserve your help and mine. Just don't give them any monster potatoes named "Jeff".

End of potato sermon. On with the day.

Thinking the Irrational, Living the Irrational

Last night, I was listening to a recent edition of NPR's This American Life (absolutely one of the best things on American radio, and if you don't listen, you should), the episode called Heretics. It focuses on the story of Carlton Pearson, an incredibly successful evangelical pastor who, after a career built on his powerful and charming preaching style, had stopped believing in hell. The story takes us from his beginnings, living in a world in which "demons" are literally "cast out" of people - something which I've always assumed to be a sort of collective psychosis - to his development into a close member of the Oral Roberts television empire, and then, finally to his own "mega-church" in Oklahoma.

Those of you who read this blog with any regularity are now probably wondering... why is he telling us this? It's because of the twist that comes next: the pastor, who has taken the time to really learn about the origins of the bible, who understands where it came from and even the times from which it emerged, stops believing in "hell" as a literal place of torment, and decides that the real meaning of the bible is that all people, no matter what, will go to heaven, and that it isn't fair that some people go to some eternal torment, carried out by a vengeful deity. He decides, through his own "revelation" (I don't believe in the bicameral mind, so I assume that he was really just talking to himself), that no matter who or what you are - no matter the religion, ethnicity, orientation, or whatever else, that everyone would go to some sort of "heaven", rather than being tormented if they made the wrong choice, and rewarded only if they made the right one.

In the course of explainin this, he makes a point that we've heard somewhere before: "The god we've been preaching... he's a monster." Which I believe has been said by someone else, namely Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion.

When he started preaching this in his mega-church, the predictable reaction occurred. People became offended, said that he wasn't "preaching the word of god" (which they assumed to be the King James translation of the bible), and left. Some went off to form their own churches. Most just left to go somewhere else where, presumably, people were damned to torment and agony, as their benevolent and loving creator intended.

And all of these "good" people, all of these kind, christian people - they now talk about Pearson as though he were dead. In a world where people's opening conversational gambit of "what church do you go to?" somehow doesn't seem intrusive, bullying, or flatly inappropriate, still being associated with Pearson's church makes the members target for discussion, scorn, and ridicule.

It's funny, but intrinsically sad, that people have to live this way. Religious people seem to often describe themselves as "living in the light", but in the light of what? Does ignorance and superstition have a light, or is it more likely, as Carl Sagan suggested in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, darkness? Is it really, as I would contend, one of the most monumental wastes of time and energy that the human race has ever devised for itself?

What struck me most about this segment was the treatment of the world as though it really were infested by demons - that demons were around every corner, waiting to suck the unwary in and consume them. If you live like that, now, are you really any better off than you might have been living in the 12th century? If you only think irrationally, you have no choice but to live irrationally.

At any rate, it's a fascinating piece, and if you're so inclined, take an hour out of your day to listen to it. You can find it here, or on iTunes.

A Whale of a Tale

I'm periodically seeing the terms "evolution of whales" turn up in the searches that bring people to my blog, and being an obliging sort of creature, I want to do my bit to help. I'm not a cetacean biologist nor an expert on evolutionary biology (just a very interested amateur), but I think that I can safely say that I know when I hear a fish story, and the opposition to the evidence for the evolutionary development of cetaeceans is one such.

Whale evolution is one of those shining examples of how the predictions made by evolutionary biology work. Therefore, it one of the most obvious bêtes noir of the intelligent design / creationist movement. ID-o-bots like to repeat certain mantras, as though by dint of circularity, their febrile maunderings will magically become true. One of the favourites from a long list of canned responses is that "there are no transitional whale fossils". If wishes were horses, boys...

As Donald Prothero points out in his brilliant book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, this claim is made in the infamous Of Pandas and People, and repeated ad nauseam sine curia by creationists, often without any knowledge of the evidence (Prothero, p. 322). In reality, there are a whole host of transitional fossils. When this fact is gently brought to their attention, the ID-o-bots then like to say "well, they're not complete". And that may well be true: the whale fossils may only be 70% or 80% complete. In fact, despite the interpretive framework provided by comparative anatomy, many of our fossil species are still "incomplete" by this definition. So they're right: we should just throw them out as useless because we don't have the entire skeleton, down to the last, most infinitesimally miniscule fragment of bone? In fact, why do we bother with bones at all? Why don't we demand that the animal present itself to us in its original living form, and to hell with all this mucking about with fossils? In fact, if these extinct species would just go to Seattle, and address the brilliant hive mind of the Discovery Institute in person, in English, and possibly with subtitles, that would save us all a lot of bother, and the Disco-bots could just tell the animals to their faces that they never existed.

Obviously, I'm having a bit of a chuckle at the expense of our "friends". In science, we work with what we get. The miracle of fossilisation - and I use the word in its proper sense, that being to imply something tremendously unlikely and therefore extraordinary - and our ability to recover and interpret the remains of animals dead tens or hundreds of millions of years is no minor thing. It is not to be dismissed by ill-informed amateurs trying to fit the world into their preconceptions.

Carl Sagan's mantra from The Demon-Haunted World, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is compelling in this case, because what we have, in the case of whales, is an extraordinary claim - that whales evolved from land-based mammals who returns to the seas - backed up by extraordinary evidence. We've got whale fossils. We've got them in droves. And they all tell the same story, in a beautiful, tidy sequence. It's a fait accompli, it's as close as you can get to knowing, absolutely, that it happened without actually living for fifty million years and watching it happen.

For those of you looking for more on the subject of whale evolution, here are some links:

Books

• Prothero, Donald: Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (linked above) - there's a short section whales, but this is the book you want for the grand argument about evolution and fossils.


• Thewissen, J. G. M., Editor. The Emergence of Whales: Evolutionary Patterns in the Origin of Cetacea (Advances in Vertebrate Paleobiology)


• Zimmer, Carl. At the Water's Edge: Zimmer's excellent and thoroughly readable book on the subject

Websites:

• Afarensis' longish post on the evolution of whales


• PBS's Evolution of Whales page


• Philip D. Gingerich's Evolution of Whales Page - Dr Gingerich is one of the key researchers into whale evolution, having discovered first pakicetus fossil back in 1978. An extensive bibliography of papers on the topic is included.


• The TalkOrigins Evolution of Whales page, also extensively footnoted


• The Wikipedia Evolution of Cetaceans page (also thoroughly referenced

A starting point, then, for those who wish to read more deeply on the subject. I'll be posting additional links and books here as I find them, so stay tuned...

Stop Believing in Astrology!

When I was a child, the horoscopes in the newspaper fascinated me. They were always on the same page as the comics, though, which should have told me something. It took a while, because it's easy - and forgivable - to be slightly credulous and gullible at thirteen, but gradually I began to realise that what was written in the horoscopes said sod all about my life, nor, indeed, about anyone else's.

I don't think that it was until I started working in a bookshop when I was eighteen, though, that I noticed three things:

1. That astrology books come out every bloody year to sell you an explicit forecast for your life


2. That the people who came in, specificially looking for the new astrology books, were a bit odd (subjective and annecdotal, yes, but also telling)


3. That astrology books have different predictions in them from the things in the newspaper.

I could have noticed other things, but that's the easy list, because I want to get on to the clip. Roll James Randi, from his UK television series, "James Randi, Psychic Investigator" (must have been in the early 90s, I would guess), and his celebrity guests (watch the audience pan, or read the clip name):

It's painfully good fun, isn't it, watching someone go so far wrong? The best line? For my money, it's this:

ASTROLOGER: ... I think you do your friend a grave injustice. I've looked at his horoscope, and I'm sure that he's capable of far more than....
FRY: Well, I've looked at him, you see.

Now, for the last time: how many times does this nonsense have to be debunked in a forum like this one before we understand that it is all nonsense?

Distant Echoes of the Stella Nova

Newly announced in this news story from the Beeb is the discovery by astronomers at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii that light from an supernova first seen in November, 1572, which kick-started the work of astronomical science in the Renaissance, has been observed again, indirectly: this time in faint light reflected from a distant dust cloud. The story is covered in greater detail on Astronomy.com (see if you can spot the typo in the story, though), by another (apparently only in German for now, sorry) on the news page of the Max Planck Institute, and by Subaru team themselves.

The supernova of 1572, the violent death of a star which was bright enough to be visible during the day and outshone even Venus (bear that in mind, with the current Venus - Jupiter conjunction in the southwestern sky), stunned Elizabethan England, and a Europe embroiled in religious and political turmoil. More importantly, it put a decisive nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian view of the heavens as immutable, to which idea most authorities still subscribed at this time (this despite previous supernovae, notably in 1006 and 1054, never mind the regular visits from comets, including Halley's Comet, which is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry commemorating the Battle of Hastings in 1066). Suddenly Aristotle, and his view of the universe, to which the Church and secular authority had long pinned their colours, wasn't looking so clever.

What happened as a result was that there was a revolution in astronomy, and in our ways of looking at the universe. Nicolae Copernicus, Tycho Brahe ( Tycho Brahe Homepage | Wiki ), Johannes Kepler ( NASA Kepler Mission site | Wiki ), and Galileo Galilei ( the Galileo Project | Wiki )were all directly affected by the supernova, and it gave rise to new and powerful questions in their formidable minds. The famously metal-nosed Brahe (he lost the tip in a duel) wrote the Stella Nova to detail his observations of the "new star". And though he was mistaken in his attempt to support a geocentric (earth at the centre of everything) view of the universe, made observations so detailed and accurate that Kepler was able to use them to support the Copernican model of a heliocentric solar system. And eventually, even the Church which at one point threatened Galileo by showing him the instruments of torture - the threat was implicit and concrete - would have to apologise to him, albeit posthumously (it only took four hundred years), on the strength of the astronomical evidence built on the foundation of the 1572 supernova.

It's at moments like this, when some piece of history echoes back to you again, that it becomes evident not only how much we owe those first real scientists of four centuries gone, but also what we owe the current generation, which continues to make such incredible, breath-taking discoveries.

Jeremy Clarkson Wouldn't Be Amused By This At All

People who know me will attest to the fact that I like a good dinosaur story, more, perhaps, than is entirely healthy. Fortunately, there's been a particularly good crop of them this year. With all of the fossils laying around in museums just waiting to be examined, described, and announced, I think that I can safely rely on there being new dinosaur entertainment aplenty in the coming years.

The most recent example is that of a new species of pterosaur which had been discovered in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil. Named by the paleontologist who first described it, Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth (Hampshire, UK), the new species, lacusovagus ("lake wanderer"), is a member of the Chaoyangopteridae group of toothless pterosaurs. Excitingly, not only is it the sole member of the Chaoyangopteridae found outside of China, but it is also much, much larger. To quote the article:

"Mark Witton identified the creature from a partial skull fossil from which he was able to estimate that it would have had a five-metre wingspan - bigger than a family car [emphasis added] - and would stand over one metre tall at the shoulder.

He said: “Some of the previous examples we have from this family in China are just 60 centimetres long - as big as the skull of the new species. Put simply, it dwarfs any chaoyangopterid we’ve seen before by miles.”

-- University of Portsmouth website

In short, that's quite a pair of wings to stretch out over your Audi. It occurs to me to wonder how the Stig might handle such a creature lurking around the track, but that's a train of thought that leads nowhere productive, more into "which one would win in a fight, a sabre-toothed cat or a pterosaur?" territory (yes, before you get cross, I know that they weren't contemporaries). Read the full story on the University of Portsmouth website, or the shorter summary on the BBC News site.

As It Grows Colder, Butterfly Thoughts

I've been pondering butterflies recently, and not solely because I made a wall of them for the science store either. It was a really good summer for them, especially if you had a couple of thriving butterfly bushes to draw them in, like... well, like butterflies to a butterfly bush, more or less.

In any event, here are a couple of the photos that I took at the time of some of our insect visitors. If you've never tried, butterflies are swine to photograph, and it's a good thing that I now have the really good digital camera, as otherwise I would have been very annoyed to have paid to have this film developed. You're just seeing the cream of the crop: the other twenty-odd images include weird angles, missed focus, and inexplicable angles which highlight the attractiveness of the ground.

The two pictures that follow are from 15 August 2008, at a little after 4pm, according to iPhoto. I've tried to make identifications based on the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, but if anyone out there has specialist knowledge, let me know, as I'm very much a novice when it comes to insects. That being said...

First, we have the male tiger swallowtail (pterourus glaucus):

And, secondly, what I think is a female tiger swallowtail:

As we move into our yearly hibernation, and there's a threat of slushy rainy goodness in the forecast, it's comforting to think about the summer that will come again, as it always does.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting Fomalhaut

Some days, when it look as though the rest of the world is doing its damndest to crumble around you, there's a bit of news that takes your mind off of everything.

For me, in this case, it's news of the first direct images of an extra-solar planet, reported several weeks ago, but still pretty damned fascinating.

Previous evidence for the existence of extrasolar planets has been indirect, gleaned through techniques like gravitational micro-lensing, periodic changes in the brightness of stars, and emissions spectra. Now, however, we are finding not only that - as long suspected and predicted by the nebular hypothesis of solar system formation - there are planets orbiting many different stars, of all classes and types, and that we can observe them directly, given a sufficiently large telescope.

Planets, of course, don't equal life. The planets that we are most likely to be able to see at this time are the gas giants, on which it is unlikely that we would find something that we would call life... all of the possibilities presented in Carl Sagan's Cosmos aside. What we're really looking for are rocky, terrestrial worlds, even if we haven't found that many yet. But it's a start...

For a better accounting, here's the story on Science Magazine's site, although you're bound to be able to find it elsewhere.

EDIT: Embarrassing... originally mis-spelled the wretched star's name in the title. Fixed now. Fortunately, only ten or twenty people at most will think that I'm a complete idiot (well, that is, "at most" over the usual number...)

Teach the Controversy? What Controversy?

For those thinking that I had let slip the creationist science teacher thread, well, I haven't. Because there's been a reply, of sorts.

And here are some words that you never want to hear from someone in education (other than “let’s role-play through that scenario”): "I think that it is the teacher's job to teach high school biology students about the controversy over evolution".

Let's try to say this once again, for the benefit of the anyone who hasn’t already gotten the message: there is no controversy. The only controversy is the one that you have manufactured, the one that exists in your mind, the one made up by the Disco. Otherwise, there isn't one.

So here's a letter, or rather an email, to that effect, couched in the most respectful terms that I can muster, and with all the eff-ing and blinding of the previous drafts removed in an effort to appear more grown-up:

Dr B*** K*******
Principal, Park Hill High School
7701 NW Barry Rd.
Kansas City, MO 64153

Dear Sir,

It has come to my attention that, in response to one of your science teachers espousing creationist and / or "intelligent design"-based views in a high school biology class at your school, your response to the concerns of district patrons has been that the teacher in question should "teach the controversy". I have to say that I am gravely disturbed by this response, if it has been accurately reported. I have the pleasure of working in Parkville, and I regularly encounter both your students and their parents in the course of my duties at a retail establishment in Parkville.

I would like to take a few moments to highlight for you several matters in response to that assertion, matters which you may have overlooked in arriving at this extraordinary view.

1. Science is a collective endeavour. It does not consist merely of lone, self-proclaimed elite individuals, squatting indelicately in their towers of ivory and delivering edicts to an unwilling world. Science is a collaborative effort which has, in the past two, or three, or four hundred years, built upon an ever-growing foundation of knowledge and understanding to fashion the world in which we now live. Our technology, our medicine, our standards of living and perpetuating ourselves in this world: these are down to science. All of these developments – some might say advancements, if they are thinking linearly – have not been positive, and there have been mis-steps. But in the main, if you were given the choice of living at the beginning of the 18th century, and the beginning of the 21st, which would you choose? That is a choice – perhaps over-portentuous but well-intentioned – illuminated in the light of the knowledge of science.


2. Most people view a hierarchy of evidence and proof in science differently from the conventional understandings: this is because there are specific technical definitions in science which fall outside the colloquial definitions given to these same words. For example, the arrangement of the words:
   
   
   

   
   
   • Facts
   
   
   • Hypotheses
   
   
   • Laws
   
   
   • Theories
   
   

   
   
   
   
   ... would conventionally be arranged, according to their general usage, as such: Facts, Laws, Theories, Hypotheses. However, for the purposes of science, they are organised thusly:
   
   
   
   

   
   
   • Theories
   
   
   • Laws
   
   
   • Hypotheses
   
   
   • Facts
   
   

   
   
   
   
   ... demonstrating the scientific notion that "facts" are observable features in nature, that from these we derive "hypotheses", that should hypotheses survive scrutiny they can be construed as "laws", and that laws are the foundation of grand, over-arching "theories". Thus, to call something a "theory" (as in evolution, gravity, structure of the atom, electromagnetism, et cetera), you are really referring to the "fact" in colloquial usage (my description is after that found in Scott, E., Evolution vs. Creationism, p. 11).


3. In biology, among real, practising biologists, there is no controversy over evolution. Give me a number of the community of professionals that you would like to tell you that - ten, one hundred, one thousand - and I will send some emails and provide those names and statements. I would also direct your attention to this well-documented article from Wikipedia, The Level of Support for Evolution. Of particular interest may be the section, Other Support for Evolution, which includes the numerous court decisions, at the state and federal level, which have addressed the teaching of creationism and "intelligent design" in schools. A shorter, similar list can also be found on the website of the National Centre for Science Education. We’ve been down this road before – in the courts. In every case since 1968, the teaching of creationism has been rejected in public schools, either at the state or the federal level.


4. Your school’s very admirable mission statement:
   

   
   “Mission Statement: Through the expertise of a motivated staff, the Park Hill School District provides a meaningful education in a safe, caring environment to prepare each student for success in life.”
   -- Park Hill High School Course Description Handbook, p. 1
   

   
   
   … is most laudable indeed. However, having introduced narrowly defined theistic beliefs of a particular religious sect (and no one except the most gravely misguided would suggest that Intelligent Design creationism is anything other than that) into one of the school’s core curriculum classes, how does your establishment define the act of attempting to “prepare each student for success in life”? By introducing artificial divisions within the student body, at tax-payer expense, I would argue that you are undermining the future success in life of your student body.
   
   
5. I would direct you again to the student handbook, describing the content of the Biology curriculum:
   

   
   

   ” Course Description: A survey course that covers the principles governing all life and includes the following topics: the origin of life, cells, cell reproduction, genetic natural selection, classification, evolution, ecology, environmental issues and chemistry of life. Similarities and diversities of life processes are explored with emphasis on discovery and critical thinking through various laboratory experiments.”
   -- Park Hill High School Course Description Handbook, p. 56

   
   

   
   
   … this mention, in fact, is more specific than the standards given by the State of Missouri (found here). Intelligent Design creationism, it should be noted, appears on neither. Nor should it.

This mantra of "teach the controversey", of trying to make a real and useful comparison between the established science of evolutionary biology and the whimseyless nonce of intelligent design fails also to take into account something fairly central to the discussion: presentation bias. If a teacher presents only the storyline forged by the ID movement to a classroom full of students who are not conversant with either the raw data, scientific method, or the fully tested and predictive nature of evolutionary biology, and they don’t understand how science works (see point 1, above), then they are not being “taught the controversy”. If the teacher says something on the order of “Darwinists claim that we are all descended through evolution from monkeys, ha ha, isn’t that stupid”, then they are not being “taught the controversy”. They are being taught – if you can honestly call it that – from a position of fraudulent authority, and they are being taught deliberate and methodical mendacities. “Teach the controversy” sounds all very fair and upright and red-blooded and American and all of that, but it is a deception. And I feel reasonably certain that you can see that, if you take a short time to examine the matter thoroughly.

If there were a genuine “controversy” in biology, scientists would be the very first to take it apart, down to its very atoms, to see if it were plausible, possible, or not. Science, as an endeavour, as a way of thinking, must always evaluate new ideas in light not only of the existing data, but of any new data that might be found, or as a consequence of employing a new approach to that data. If Intelligent Design creationism were valid, if they had any bearing whatsoever on science and nature, they would already be a part of the scientific vocabulary and arsenal. With the exception of a minute proportion of the scientific community, these two ideas have been examined, reviewed, and found to be sorely wanting.

In conclusion, I must state not only how disappointed I am that any educator would adscribe to such views, but that he or she would feel the need to support them when they were expressed by someone over whom they had direct authority. I cannot stress strongly enough that these views, as they have been represented to myself and to others, are not merely incorrect or unscientific (although they are both): they violate established precedents in American Law. I would therefore urge you to reconsider not only your support for this position, but the prestige and position of your school, which I have otherwise thought to be well-regarded.

In closing, I would emphasise that there are numerous resources for you to use in order to make an informed decision on this point. I would also heartily recommend that you view the PBS NOVA episode entitled Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, regarding the Dover, Pennsylvania trial over the teaching of Intelligent Design creationism (it’s freely available online, you can find it here, through the Mid-Continent Public Library system (you have a branch right down Barry Road at Boardwalk, just around the corner from Hobby Lobby), or for purchase at venues like Amazon.com), and there are, of course, countless books, titles and authors of which I will gladly list for you. One which immediately springs to mind is Ken Miller’s new book, Only a Theory (again, it’s in the library or available through the normal retail outlets), which I am reading right now and finding most illuminating. Should you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line.

In so saying, I remain,

Gravely concerned and very sincerely yours,

William Nedblake

So that’s been committed to email. A response, if any, will be noted here.

A Good Day's Work

So I missed the occultation of Venus by the moon / triple conjunction today, even though I've been watching Venus and Jupiter in the evening sky for a week now, when weather conditions permitted. There's a photo of it over at the Beagle Science Blog, though, so be sure to check it out. The Beeb has also posted some photos from amateur astronomers (under the predictable silly title of "the smiling sky"), so look there too, if it catches your fancy.

But I haven't been idle, today. Being left to my own devices, I've been working on updating some areas of the webstore, pretty much non-stop today. It was all my fault for thinking of LEGO^TM this morning - this has resulted from going through and fixing a number of related listings on the site, finding images, creating descriptions, and the like. So it hasn't been a bad day's work. I've also done some domestic tasks, watched an episode of The Day the Universe Changed (Episode 2, 'In the Light of the Above', which tells of the fascinating aftermath of the fall of Rome, the retreat into the monasteries, and the weird monastic way of looking at the world, all thanks to Augustine) while folding laundry, flipped through the Mineralogical Record recent book called Mineral Identification: A Practical Guide for the Amateur Mineralogist', and now I'm settling in to a well-deserved aperitif, trying to decide whether or not I want any dinner.

And this is what happens, when I'm left to my own devices for long enough. Not stellar, but demonstrates a work ethic. Could be worse.