I’ve added some more slides to the Presentation page. I’m afraid I’m getting a bit slow on these - they take a great deal of time to research and write I’m afraid. I’ll see whether I can speed up soon. I’m determined to finish them by Christmas. There are only 10 left and I think I’ve done most of the longest ones.
Just a short rant this one. Well, not so much a rant as a request. I’m not being mean, and I hope I’m not being elitist, when I say “please, television executives, will you kindly stop wasting so much money on mindless, insipid and tediously self-indulgent television and actually produce some shows that are worth watching?”
Giving the public crappy TV is like giving children hamburgers every day and hiding all the fruit & veg. Do most kids know that those things are no good, and that they would be much healthier with a better diet? Yes, I reckon they probably do. But they don’t care because their bodies have evolved to want salty, fatty, sugary foods and that urge is a strong one.
Reality TV shows, vote-one-off-a-week competitions and self-indulgent celebrity documentaries are the intellectual equivalent of fries and coke. They are one of the best arguments for not giving the public what they want - surpassed in stupidity only by the democratically-decided Presidency of George W Bush.
OK, so there’s not much we can do about commercial TV, but the BBC - now they should definitely be held to a higher standard. The BBC is not there to cater purely for the lowest intellectual denominator - they are supposed to provide a level of entertainment that the commercial stations are unable to provide because the commercial stations are completely at the mercy of market forces.
Stephen Fry, as ever, has much to say on this point. You should definitely listen to his almost super-humanly self-effacing podcast. Here’s the episode on broadcasting. Now there’s a man the BBC could afford to pay more. He’s almost finished his 6-part documentary travelling around America and all I can think is that it’s such a shame he’s had to whizz around the place so stupefyingly quickly without having the chance to get stuck in to any one location. I would happily submit to a doubling of my TV licence fee if it guaranteed a doubling of Stephen Fry air time. Even better - you could give him some of Jonathan Ross’s £6m per year.
We have a great wealth of intellect and wit in this country, why not celebrate that instead of a parade of desperate, moderately talented wannabes all competing to sleep with Andrew Lloyd Webber?
I think you probably see where I’m going with this. And it’s inevitable, of course: where’s all the good science broadcasting? At the moment all we seem to get is the occasional programme about venereal diseases and embarassing warts, and the odd ‘and finally’ at the end of the news. There is a whole landscape of life-changingly important science in the vast expanse between ‘boffins have discovered’ and the Elephant Man. Where are the documentary series exploring this? Where are the new Carl Sagans? Where is the next David Attenborough?
Ben Goldacre points this out excellently in his new book, “Bad Science” (yet another plug!). He says that the reason why there is so little decent science broadcasting (and writing) is simply because most journalists are humanities graduates without even the most basic understanding of science and no real grasp of its importance in the 21st century. So, we are barraged by highly pretentious programming about Kant and Wittgenstein, about the Tate Modern and that pesky Tudor dynasty; but when there’s a truly life-changing news event coming from science it tends to get drowned out either by the story about Victoria Beckham’s latest pair of shoes, or about the health scare du jour - no doubt accompanied by an analysis from some woefully under-qualified pseudoscientist. And whenever a science story reaches the papers, it’s always dumbed down to the point that it barely resembles science at all.
Yes, I know that I wrote something that sounds pretty much opposite to this viewpoint, just a few days ago. Allow me to clarify everything. My position is the following: I believe that everyone should have the right to watch whatever they want, if it’s legal. Commercial channels will always tune their output very closely to please the demographics that give them most advertising revenue, but the BBC need not do this. I’m not suggesting that the BBC completely turn over the airwaves to educational documentaries and I’m certainly not saying that we should ban anything - I’m merely saying that the current state of affairs seems woefully out of balance.
So, anyway, to conclude: we need more science journalists. I will gladly write stuff if anyone wants to publish it. Scientists of the world - write to your local papers and ask why their science journalism is so inadequate. It’s about time that we started skewing the column inches towards what actually matters.
With apologies to Bill Maher:
New Rule: People with no sense of humour should stop complaining about things said by comedians.
Seriously people, if you don’t like comedy, then don’t watch it. But don’t stop the rest of us from enjoying it - that’s just selfish.
Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are not to everyone’s taste, but they are undeniably amongst the most popular comedians working in Britain today. Ross has been suspended for three months, and Brand has resigned, along with the extremely competent controller of radio 2, for a few prank phone calls that they made live on Brand’s radio show a few weeks ago. At the time, out of the estimated 400,000 listeners, the BBC received two complaints. Count them - two!
After some major news channels aired the story, the number of complaints increased and, two weeks later, stood at a little under forty thousand. That’s forty thousand people complaining on behalf of someone else, about a radio broadcast that they had never even heard.
For what it’s worth, I think that Andrew Sachs has a legitimate grounds for complaint - the show had been unpleasant for him, that is to be sure - though nobody forced him to listen to it. It was made hugely more embarrassing when it moved to the larger media - which was partly his own fault, but the blame for which must lie with the newspapers for printing it. After all, at most 400,000 people (who know how to take a joke) listened to the original show and would probably never have spoken about it again. After the newspapers got their hands on the story, pretty much everyone in Britain, and countless more around the world, knew all about it.
Anyway, that’s one person who had legitimate grounds for complaint. Perhaps two if you include his granddaughter, a professional exotic dancer who has certainly profited enormously from the media coverage of her burlesque group. Two people have a right to be offended, and forty thousand complaints were received - entirely from people who never heard the show, and were not affected by it in any way. Also, and I hesitate to say it, but let’s remember that this is a man who made a career out of perpetuating a crude racial stereotype of Spanish immigrant workers. In the name of comedy. If the same rules had been followed back in the seventies then the world would never have experienced the comic genius of Fawlty Towers.
I’m not saying that we should encourage false or libellous comments to be aired; I’m not saying that it is necessary a good or wholesome thing to make jokes about the sex lives of others; I’m not suggesting that the Brand/Ross debacle was a good thing and that it wasn’t a mistake for the BBC and for the two comedians - both of which have since apologised unreservedly for any offence caused. What I am saying is that this is not something that comedians should have to worry about - losing their jobs whenever they crack a joke that someone happens to dislike. We don’t hold any other segment of society to this absurd level of scrutiny - hunting them down and threatening them with their livelihoods for saying something true on air.
Do you feel that your licence fee shouldn’t be spent on things of which you disapprove? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t want my licence fee to be spent on sporting events in which I have no interest whatsoever; in tedious game shows, depressing soap operas and relentlessly inane reality programmes. But, you know what, I have the maturity to accept that the entire Universe doesn’t revolve around me.
Comedy is meant to be controversial - it has never been anything else. Comedians have always been the only ones who could say things that the rest of us could not say - but which, in many cases, the majority of us had been thinking all along. Comedy is a great leveller - it is a catalyst for questioning and undermining those ideas which are upheld purely by the status quo, and silently opposed by the majority. The great benefit of comedy is, and has always been, that it can test the taboos and the no-go-zones of society and avoid us falling in the undeniable intellectual quagmire that would result in taking too seriously the claims of those individuals who choose to be offended by things that others quite rightly wish to say. I’m reminded at this point of the Mohammed cartoon farce.
The main role of comedy is to entertain, but it does that through questioning and challenging those aspects of our world that are least open to questioning themselves. For those who disagree, go and read King Lear. Also, go and find something more worthwhile to complain about. There’s plenty of things that we really should be getting angry about in this world - violence, crime, political injustice, oppression, abuse, poverty, disease, hunger, ignorance, brainwashing, climate change, nuclear weapons, and so on. Complain about those things, and let comedians get on with their jobs.
Finally, being offended is a choice. Things people say cannot possibly ‘offend’ you, like they have some sort of magical power over you. Nothing any person says has any effect on you whatsoever unless you make a personal decision that you’re going to let it. If we ban everything that causes offence then our civilisation would descend into chaos. Omnivores offend vegetarians by eating meat. Non-muslims offend muslims whenever they say that Jesus is God, or that Muhammad made up the Koran. Protestants offend Roman Catholics by stating that the communion wafer is only ever a bit of bread. And pretty much everyone offends Richard Dawkins all the time.
Seriously people, like I said, find something better to do with your lives. Build a legacy, feed some starving Africans or set up a youth group to help underprivileged inner-city kids. Whatever, just don’t bother me with it.
Awww America, we love you. I’m so happy this morning to wake up to the best news imaginable.
Congratulations to President-elect Obama. I know you can make a really positive change in your country and we in Europe are all looking forward to watching it happen.
Now we just have to survive two more months of the other guy…
Make sure that, on your way to vote for Obama/Biden, you also go out and vote a big fat ‘no’ on Proposition 8. For those of you not in California, Prop. 8 is a crazy bit of homophobia that has been slipped into the vote by a list of mental right-wing religious fundamentalist weirdos. It says that same-sex couples shouldn’t be allowed to marry. Apparently, now that the nutjobs have lost the battle (in most states) to stop consenting grown men from doing whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes, their next battleground is to stop those same men from putting whatever they want on their ring fingers.
Please don’t let the petty little crazies impose their ridiculous views on the rest of us. If we keep denying them then they’re bound to get the message sooner or later.
Please, if you have any love whatsoever for the future of science and reason, go out tomorrow and vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. If you do not then there is a very real chance that John McCain and Sarah Palin might get their crazy little minds into the White House. If that happens then the two people running America will think that fundamental scientific research is a bad thing. If McCain dies in office, which isn’t unlikely, then you will be left with the most powerful nation on Earth being run by a witless creationist simpleton with no more ability to lead a 21st century superpower than your average mollusc. Please, learn from the mistake of the last eight years and elect someone with a brain.
I know you’re all thinking “shut up Europe, we don’t care what you think - this is our country and our President.” Of course it is, we understand that. It’s not because we want to patronise you that we’re saying this - but you have to realise that the American elections will have repercussions around the entire world. The reason why so many Europeans care about the outcome of your election is because it is, in a very real sense, our election too. Don’t be angry about that - be proud that your country has such a powerful global influence. Unfortunately, for the last eight years, that influence has been predominantly negative. Please don’t allow that to continue.
We cannot vote tomorrow, but you can. Please make your vote count.
Also, don’t do drugs. And stay in school.
After a few subtle hints, I’ve finally decided to fulfil the promise I made in an earlier post to talk a little bit about the subject of information in Evolution.
This all comes from the commonly-held creationist belief that evolution somehow disobeys the laws of thermodynamics or of information theory. In fact, that seemed to be the entire basis of the young-earth creationist beliefs of Answers in Genesis representative Paul Taylor (about whom I was writing in the post above). The claim is that we can’t get information from nowhere, so evolution can’t possibly have created complex creatures from simple beginnings. Creationists often cite the second law of thermodynamics which, they say, essentially encodes this problem.
Thermodynamics, for the record, is an area of physics dealing with how systems respond to things like adding and subtracting energy, or changing the pressure or temperature. The second law talks about how a value known as the ‘entropy’ of a closed, isolated system will always remain the same or increase over time.
In case you’re bothered, entropy is a measure of the complexity of an isolated physical system. It is a difficult and precise mathematical concept, but it basically corresponds to the amount of energy in a system that is ‘useless’ (that is, cannot be harnessed to do work). A system with high entropy is one, therefore, in which most of the energy is useless, in some precisely defined physical sense. Think about the room in which you are sitting - there’s lots of energy there just because the air is warm, but you can’t gather it up in any way in order to power a television. However, it came from a much lower entropy state like a lump of coal or a bucket of oil, where the energy is more useful. There’s the same amount of energy, but it’s just in a more usable form. Once you convert from low entropy to high entropy, you can’t get it back without putting even more energy in.
The creationist claim, needless to say, is false in every way. The most important way in which it is wrong is that it completely misrepresents the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. Entropy, so the creationists claim, is a measure of disorder. They claim that the second law of thermodynamics states that all systems tend towards greater disorder. Of course, this statement is untrue. The second law of thermodynamics actually states some complicated physics-y stuff that is utterly irrelevant to the plausibility of evolution, but which appears to have been hijacked by nutters.
So there you go, the second law of thermodynamics is utterly irrelevant to Evolution. And it’s irrelevant for two reasons: (1) it applies only to isolated systems - which the Earth isn’t, and (2) it’s not really talking about disorder at all.
But you can see that this argument doesn’t hold water for far simpler reasons - merely by applying common sense. For a start, we know plenty of physical systems that get more and more complex over time. Like, well… you. Humans start out as a microscopic cell, and end up as billlions of cells all operating in a beautifully choreographed whole. Want another? How about crystals? Anyone who has ever seen crystals grow will realise that they form in a very organised manner from a chaotic soup of chemicals. Snowflakes are another regularly quoted example.
Kent Hovind tried to dodge the restrictions of the second law of thermodynamics by famously redefining it. He tried to claim that the scientific objection (that the Earth is not an isolated system because there’s energy flow into it, hence the second law doesn’t apply) was wrong. His argument was that adding energy to systems makes them even more disorganised. Take earthquakes, for example. But what Hovind is doing here is redefining the law itself. The second law states that the entropy of an isolated system will never decrease over time. But Hovind is saying that the ‘isolated system’ bit is just wrong; so what we have here is a totally different (and provably false) law that Hovind has invented - not the second law of thermodynamics. You can’t say “Clever physicists invented this amazing law of nature that disproves evolution. Except that they got the law slightly wrong and it actually should say something else.” That’s just massive dishonesty.
As an aside, we can show how adding energy to a system actually does increase order. Take a jar of grains of all sorts of sizes, add some energy by shaking it, and notice how the denser ones have sorted themselves to the bottom, with the lighter ones on top. Ah, physics - you gotta love it.
So on to the generation of new information in the genome. Let’s look at that closely.
The genetic code contains the instructions for building every cell in our body. You could say in a very real sense that the 3 billion-ish base pairs in the human DNA are like a recipe for generating a human being. If you’re new to genetics, Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive introduction. It’s worth reading a little bit on this or it might not make much sense. There’s a few simple concepts that you need to grasp, and then the rest is just reading long words.
Every living thing uses DNA codes to specify how to make another individual. You can take, say, all the DNA from a mouse and lay it side-by-side with the DNA from an average human and add up all the differences. When you compare the genes, one against the other, then we’re about 85% identical. The other 15% would, therefore, encode the differences between a human and a mouse. OK, so this is slightly misleading - in reality there are other differences, not just the differences in genes - for example, we have extra non-coding sequences (’junk DNA’) that are fairly different. But all the differences basically boil down to three things:
So, all the difference in ‘information’ between mice and humans - or, indeed, any two species - boils down to differences in their DNA. And those differences are one of three things - either insertions, deletions or mutations. That is, either we add a bit, we remove a bit, or we change a bit. And the best fact is that we know exactly how all three of those can occur - through replication errors at the stage that DNA is being copied in a living cell. And, better than that, we have seen it happening in the lifetime of modern science. Here’s a simple method by which any of these could have happened:
Well, essentially I’ve just shown that there is absolutely no impossibility whatsoever with information theory applied to the genetics of evolution. I could just stop here and the case is closed, but just as a simple illustration, let’s look at how new information can arise.
Let’s take a string of four letters, “AAA”. Think of it like a genetic string. In this case, it codes for (’translates into’) the amino acid Lysine. Amino acids are, as the oft-repeated phrase says, the building blocks of proteins which are the very basis of all life.
Now, let’s say there was a replication error which involves accidentally duplicating this string one time too many, so we get “AAAAAA”. Do we have any new information? Well, yes we do in a sense. This new string tells us not just to make one Lysine, but to make two.
But we don’t need to stop there. What happens when we accidentally get a genetic mutation in one point in this new string. What if the 5th ‘A’ swaps for a ‘G’? Now we get ‘AAAAGA’, which gives us Lysine and Arginine. So now we have a totally different string, which codes for two different amino acids. What we have here is completely new information which has been generated by well-known and totally understood evolutionary processes. Anyone who wants to claim that this is insufficient has only one way out - they have to show that there are some parts of animals that are not spceified by the genetic code. Good luck with that.
Job done.
I’m catching up on a few bits of recent news that I haven’t written about. Also, there are a few more presentations on my site - see the tab at the top of this page for more details. I’ve finally done one about the mythological flood of Noah.
After my initial blog post on what children should be taught in school, I have since seen several discussions that have echoed exactly what I was saying. Starting with Richard Wiseman’s studies of teaching school children magic, we now have the UK government calling for better teaching of finance in schools.
One of the biggest problems facing children coming to adulthood in the 21st century is the bewildering array of tantalising propaganda encouraging them to spend their way to happiness, and the utter lack of any immediate incentive to do otherwise. It’s tempting to blame the children, though at some level you have to imagine the analogy of waving a bottle of whisky in front of an alcoholic: the fact is that advertising and peer pressure are extremely powerful influences and very few can truly avoid them.
So today’s young adults are left in massive debt before they’re very far into their twenties, and consequently they have extraordinary amounts of money stress, and are often forced to work far harder than is healthy for them either psychologically or physically or, unfortunately, declare bankruptcy. Personal bankruptcies are at terrifyingly high record levels. I can’t help but think that it would be fairly easy to instil into children an understanding of simple topics like compound interest (which we as humans, have absolutely no innate ability to understand, it seems); the enormous danger of accumulating credit card debt; setting aside money for necessities; delayed gratification; insurance, pensions and tax. And, of course, there are many more.
I wish I’d learned about such things when I was a school child. Fortunately, my parents taught me how to save money, and studying maths helped me to understand compound interest, but it wasn’t until I was well into my twenties that I began to understand about concepts like tax and mortgages.
Money can’t buy you happiness but, rather like a baseball bat, in the wrong hands it can cause a lot of suffering.
There is a wonderful and highly informative scientific research paper in the field of psychology which was mentioned to me twice in the space of two days, so I thought I absolutely had to comment on it. If I believed in omens, that would probably be one. The paper is called “Incompetent and Unaware of it”, by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University. It was written in 1999, and has become something of a legend in the area of pseudoscience. Or, more precisely, of opposing it.
For those of you interested in more than a mere summary, the entire paper is freely available here (PDF). The paper puts forward a simple hypothesis, which is proceeds to rigorously prove in four separate trials. That hypothesis: That people who are not knowledgeable in a certain area not only perform poorly in tests of that particular sphere of knowledge (obviously) but also, interestingly, massively overestimate their own skill relative to that of those around them. People who are highly above average in that area tend to underestimate their performance. This is basically what Socrates was saying over two thousand years ago when he famously reasoned “The only true wisdom is in knowing that I know nothing”. Or words to that effect. Essentially, it takes a certain amount of knowledge to understand how much knowledge there actually is to be obtained.
I guess this is like the story a friend of mine told me. When he was eight years old in primary school and he’d just learned long division, he asked his teacher if he’d learned all of maths yet. He just figured that, as people got older and learned more maths, they just had to do sums with longer numbers. For what it’s worth, that same friend went on to get a PhD in computational physical chemistry from Cambridge, so I think he did find out some more stuff eventually.
This is relevant for several reasons. Firstly, after reading Ben Goldacre’s excellent book “Bad Science” (please buy it!), it is clear that this has some relevance for why so many newspaper journalists insist on writing stories about science that they don’t understand. But it’s also important because it explains why so many pseudoscientists don’t understand that they’re wrong. After all, if you have no idea of the scope of a subject as enormous as, say… ooohhh.. genetics, then it’s perfectly plausible that you’ll believe creationism. Or if you don’t understand any physics then it’s perfectly possible that you’ll believe in homeopathy or crystal healing. I guess it’s like the seven year old who totally ignores all complex mathematical analysis because his horizons don’t stretch any further than the 12 times table.
If you don’t do anything else I ever tell you, then make absolutely sure that you read Ben Goldacre’s book “Bad Science”. Just to make it easier for you, here’s the Amazon.co.uk link. Dr Goldacre is a trained medical doctor, and he is also extraordinary skilled at explaining the scientific method plainly to the layperson. The most important thing to take away from Dr Goldacre’s book is the terrifying degree to which the media is able to deliberately manipulate the available information to tell the most exciting story - the one that sells the most newspapers - not the one that is true.
The other thing I took away from the book is something that I guess I already knew - the aggression with which a party defends their claims varies inversely with the truth of those same claims. Dr Goldacre is altogether far too generous about the degree to which pseudoscientists are aware of their own delusions. He seems to think (or, at least, he claims in public) that most pseudoscientists are just confused, and they actually believe that they are right. I personally disagree. Given the ease by which evidence massively disproving their theories can be obtained, I think that it takes a particular kind of conscious deception to be able to go out in the wide world and push quack medicine on the unsuspecting public.
Anyway, as I said, go out and read the book - it may make you very angry, but in a good way.
Dr Colin Frayn obtained his PhD in galaxy evolution. from the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, UK in 2002. He has since worked extensively in nature-inspired computation, data analysis, science education and combatting Internet fraud. He currently lives in London, UK, and works in the finance industry.