The Day Today - 4th April 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Solidarity brother.

I couldn't stop laughing after reading this opening paragraph...

Once, literary criticism was an elite vocation. Now, writes Martin Amis, we are all critics and in this new democracy, talent and integrity are the losers
Do you agree? Join the debate on our talkboards

The Big Rip gets even more depressing, not only is everything just going to tear itself apart, our ability to work out the nature of the universe will disappear.

In this review, Michael Ruse points why economists can't quite get it right when they rationalise our behaviour down to equations (a debate picked up elsewhere), broadly speaking our brains have not evolved to find the truth, but to survive - a subtle but important difference.

The Day Today - 20th March 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Economics and the Rational Actor.

It is easter this week, when Jesus rises from the dead like a Vampire.

American converts are taking a 2,500-year-old faith and making it over in their own image -- self-absorbed.

The Universe - we now know...

All together now with the Monty Python "I'm not dead yet!"

Men can't write - and neither can women.

Finally, since it is a religious weekend, a brief look at how Americans are moulding Buddhism.

The Day Today - 29th February 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Science writing of the year - from the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious.

Pulsars are the dense cores left over after stars of a certain mass explode into supernovae. Weighing as much or more than the sun but only as big as asteroids, they can rotate tens or even hundreds of times a second (versus once a day for Earth). Sky surveys have identified about 1800 pulsars within the Milky Way, most of which emit pulsing radio signals that rise and fall as the pulsars spin.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, this is one of the best opening paragraphs I have read in a while.

Amateur political-astrophysicists in Labour have, since the rising star of John Key put their party in the shade, made a compelling case for a kind of conservative dark matter.

I wonder if I could have a go at this...

If New Zealand's political mileu were scaled up to the cosmic level, Helen Clark would be the Sun and John Key the Gegenschein, a faint opposing glow of whichever of her policies strike the dust of public opinion just right.

...best leave it to the professionals.

Dr Seuss. Why was, and is, he so good?

The idea, which now seems obvious, was that children would best learn to read using absorbing, entertaining books composed in a simple, limited vocabulary.

Reading should be absorbing and entertaining, a truth borne out by all great children's writers, including Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling (although I don't care for Rowling much myself, seeing kids queue for books gladdens my heart).

Even if we all go back to living in caves, the earth will warm up. Fortunately - even though it's not for 7.6 billion years - we're working on an out. Every 6,000 years we'll use the extra pull of a passing asteroid to move the Earth out a bit. Quite the survival instinct we have!

Current affairs corner, as The Economist points out Cubans have had a rotten deal from a miserable regime—and they know it. but what form will their climb towards freedom take?

More current affairs, and more from The Economist, why is Kosovo so special that its independence is recognised above others?

George Friedman on the "Good War" in Afghanistan - no-one cares because it isn't important.

Hot and Cold at the same time.

It may be hard to picture a world with both sweltering temperatures and expanding ice sheets. But to Norris, the counterintuitive result just underscores the complexity of climate science. He says that his team’s research overturns “simplistic notions that you make the planet warmer, and all the ice goes away.”

In fact, says Norris, “Very warm conditions are actually kind of nice for growing ice sheets, as long as you have a cold enough spot someplace on the planet.” Warm global temperatures mean that a lot of water is evaporating, and this water can return to the earth as rain or, in cold areas, as snow. If these snowy areas stay cold enough year-round, the snow will accumulate over time.


Is there any way to stop the traffic jams on the way back to work on Monday? Probably not.

The Day Today - 26th February 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Anthropologists as spies - the expert local knowledge of methodological researchers has been put to martial use since world war two. "Almost two decades later, during the Gulf War, proposals by conservatives in the AAA that its members assist allied efforts against Iraq provoked only minor opposition."

Conservatives in the AAA? Stunning. But anthropologists are now being used more covertly in both the War on Terror and War in Iraq...

A look at what Physicists are thinking about time at the moment.

"The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace." wrote Montesquieu, and he's right - inflicting violence on your customers is a bad business strategy. And new research seems to be confirming this.

Aaaah, Toqueville on America.


Long before the appointed moment arrives, the election becomes the greatest and so to speak sole business preoccupying minds. The factions at that time redouble their ardor; in that moment all the factitious passion that the imagination can create in a happy and tranquil country become agitated in broad daylight. . . .

The entire nation falls into a feverish state; the election is then the daily text of the public papers, the subject of particular conversations, the goal of all reasoning, the object of all thoughts, the sole interest of the present.

...and, when discussing what form despotism might take in a democracy, on New Zealand!

It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living? . . . [This power] extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

'Twas Darwin Day on the 14th, and I completely forgot. Here's his great-great-grandson visiting America - just like Toqueville.

And Martin Heidegger wrote a little on Time - just like the physicists.

The Day Today - 25th February 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

A book review in Reason magazine on how Latin Americans view the world, foretelling the current situation, and explaining why the evil leaders that beguile the continent are so popular.

Greece, like the South American, prone to being a bit "past-heavy"

Your science comes courtesy of Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins.

Roger Scruton gives an opinion the the accidental nature of things British.

A really awful article arguing that artefacts should not return to the countries they were stolen from. I mean, look at some of this guy's arguments

"In many cases the nations asserting rights to artifacts have little in common, culturally, religiously, artistically, or even ethnically, with the civilizations buried beneath them."

So what? Does that mean I can nick the television under your house because you don't wear flares anymore?

This look at economics by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer has been doing the rounds on the left, blogs and up blogs. Here's an earlier take with extra anecdotes. For what it is worth, facts like these, that people are sometimes or even often irrational, only strengthen my libertarian convictions. If we are wrong, then it is far worse if that error is made and imposed on all by a government than if that error is made by a far more isolated individual or company.

Take something like the mortgage crisis in the U.S.A. or finance companies here. Yes, if you are involved it is no doubt awful to lose your life's savings, but the whole economy of the United States or New Zealand won't collapse because of it meaning that those involved have at least some chance of recouping their losses elsewhere. On the other hand, in places like North Korea where the government has taken it upon itself to make all the decisions for everyone, you have famine (at the very least). It's called putting all your eggs in one basket, and is not a good idea.

Finally, an excellent music video for Nick Cave's "Love Letter".

The Day Today - 8th February 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

We return to conspiracies. I posted a review of Richard "Face on Mars" Hoagland on January 17th, here's another debunking of his theories. What I found stunning was the following quote.

This isn’t just some remote corner of an intellectual ghetto on the Internet—the book came within one tick mark of making it onto the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback non-fiction (it reached #21 nationwide).

Let alone that it is classed as "non-fiction", there were only twenty non-fiction books ahead of it! Over to the professionals with the extraordinarily fascinating Matthew Dentith being interviewed on Bfm. the young lady was taken with our Matthew, she tries to wind up the interview put can't stop asking questions.

It's BBQ season - my count for this week alone shall be three by this evening - and you can't have a BBQ without a pool. On Waitangi Day, Josh had a BBQ, and a pool, for our enjoyment. Onw of the day's running gags was "What Would Anne Coulter Do?" - after Ben's shirt, and in relation to the pool I told the following story to Ewen from a book review in the Economist.

The book starts with a poignant story from 1951 of a victorious children's baseball team that wanted to celebrate by swimming at a municipal pool in Youngstown, Ohio. But one team member, Al Bright, was black. Initially the pool attendants denied him admittance. After many protests, the supervisor relented. The “negro” was allowed to enter the pool so long as all other swimmers left the water, and he sat on a rubber raft. As his teammates looked on, a life-guard pushed him once round the pool, reminding him, “whatever you do, don't touch the water.”

A look at the fundamentalist / evangelical intellectual tradition in America.

Something for those who watched the documentary on nuclear power on Sunday night. James Lovelock is for it as well.

"I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess'. And I think it is true. The real dangers to humanity and the ecosystems of the earth from nuclear power are almost negligible. You get things like Chernobyl but what happens? Thirty-odd brave firemen died who needn't have died but its general effect on the world population is almost negligible.

"What has it done to wild life? All around Chernobyl, where people are not allowed to go because the ground is too radioactive, well, the wildlife doesn't care about radiation. It has come flooding in. It is one of the richest ecosystems in the region. And then they say: what shall we do with nuclear waste?" Lovelock has an answer for that, too. Stick it in some precious wilderness, he says. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on.

The Day Today - 17th January 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

Reading for sheer pleasure. I am not alone.

I dream of reading the way Machiavelli described it during the boom years of Italian humanism in the 16th century. He said:

"Evenings I return home and enter my study; and at its entrance I take off my everyday clothes, full of mud and dust, and don royal and courtly garments. Decorously reattired, I enter into the ancient sessions of ancient men. Received amicably by them, I partake of such food as is mine only, and for which I was born. There, without shame, I speak with them and ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their humanity respond to me."

More discussion on the few who did good during the Holocaust.

Here we want to remember precisely so that such acts of compassion will be repeated in the future. Just as to the evil we say "never again," to the goodness we must say "again and again." These acts of solidarity, although accomplished by only a fraction of the 700 million people who lived in Nazi-occupied countries, are part of the story. Indeed, the only way out of the antihumanist darkness is to follow those lights that did shine, even if only here and there.

Read on for the story of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why.

Since Morthos has gone, I'll provide the conspiracyising with a very entertaining review of a Richard Hoagland (Face on Mars, see the image at the top) press conference which was long and tedious and filled with the kind of tortured logic that turns out to be rather common for conspiracy theorists who take disparate pieces of data and insist that they’re connected and that they make more sense than, well, more logical explanations.

And to finish, some science. Physics to be exact, the interpretation of quantum theory to be even exacter.

Bohr believed that the uncertainty was not just a product of observation, but an actual feature of nature itself. It was not that the experimenter was too clumsy to measure the position and momentum at the same time. Rather there was simply no such thing as a particle that possessed these two attributes simultaneously and to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. The uncertainty principle expressed an inherent limitation in nature.

The Day Today - January 1. 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

As Brain Stab desiccates around me...

Here's Camille Paglia telling the Europeans she don't take kindly to their sort.



Theodore Dalrymple on modern art that has merit!

All this one understands at once—immediately—on seeing the photographs that make up a series that simultaneously satisfies the eye. It is a brilliant conception, brilliantly carried out. But it is no mere exercise in cleverness, such as one might expect from artists in more fortunate political climes: for one understands at once also that the artist is a patriot, a man whose heart genuinely bleeds for his beloved country, whose emotions run too deep to be satisfied by expression in simple propositional form.

There is, within the study of modern German history, a debate as to whether Germany was "defeated" or "liberated". I tend towards the latter view, an opinion reinforced by a study of German resistance movements which consist basically of half a dozen - albeit courageous and commendable - bomb plots. The rest of Germany's seventy million seemed to have just done nothing. so this article by Peter Schneider is welcome because he begins to bring out stories of Germans who did try and do something and explains why their stories have until now been hidden.

He also has a bit of a go at Goldhagen and his view that German civilization had for centuries been driving toward the "project" of the Holocaust; at any point, millions of Germans could have stepped into the shoes of the hundreds of thousands who actually committed the crime. A good listen is Clive James interviewing Michael Burleigh. I have, apparently, wasted my money on Goldhagen's book, but Burleigh's is at the local "Second Hand". Might look out for Fest as well.

Harry Potter - nihil novum sub sol este.

From this very interesting piece on primate cultures comes something we libertarians have known all along. Treating people as individuals is better - in this case to ward off xenophobia.

There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active—aroused,...Or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske, of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge.

Sorely Tested

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

As the evil monkey is to Chris, or the chicken is to Peter, so Creationism is to me. I hate it, and find myself standing at the top of the stairs pointing out its obese failings and launching into a hearty attack should it get too close.

I hate Creationism for its abysmal understanding of biology and D-Grade philosophy. I hate creationists for the above, and for their slimy lying deceitful ignorance, their deliberate misrepresentation of other people's work and lack of anything remotely scientific in their own.

This may be all very well. But the thing is, my previous post was an exhortation to all to apply the "Principle of Charity" to our opponents, and here I am facing a belief that deserves nothing but derision. I am sorely tested, but must lead by example nonetheless.


The latest affront comes from Mr Cresswell's Blog, where he gave one Berend de Boer free reign in return for a beer. O tempora, O mores. The old hoary chestnut of transitional fossils and the fossil evidence for evolution was the order of the day, and Peter gave Mr de Boer space to "pile up the quotes from evolutionists having serious doubt about that fossil evidence?"

I should note that Berend does not explicitly state that he is a creationist, although he does list it as one of his interests (alongside the Bible), and so it would be premature, though not in my presumption inaccurate, to tar him with that brush, and to be fair, he has stated elsewhere that he is unsure about ID being scientific - not that this would make any difference since all creationists ever do is moan about evolution, and moaning about evolution is all Berend has done whether creationist or not.

So, let's see if we can add some formal structure to Berend's argument.

1) Evolution is divided into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
1a) Micro-evolution is the rearrangement of existing genetic material.
1b) Macro-evolution is the appearance of new genetic material.
C1) If Macro-evolution has occurred then the fossil record would show examples of 1b.
2) The following list of quotes come from believers in evolution.
2a) They state that the fossil record does not show 1b.
2b) They are qualified to make that assessment, and the quotes are scientifically recent.
2c) They have been quoted accurately.
2d) If (2a), (2b), and (2c), were true then we can reasonably assume that the fossil record does not support macro-evolution.
2e) 2d is true.
----------
(C) - The fossil evidence does not support evolution.

Let's start at the beginning. Berend's definition of evolution:

Micro-evolution is natural selection, i.e. Darwin's Finches, but also breeding dogs and horses. It is a rearrangement of existing genetic material. No one is arguing that this is real and is happening.

"[M]acro-evolution...is the appearance of new genetic material, new functionality that didn't exist before."

I have said before that I have never met anyone who did not both understand evolution and mange to refute it (a quote borrowed from Lenny Flank and that certainly is the case with Berend de Boer. Measuring his definition against reality, we find out that Microevolution is the occurrence of small-scale changes in allele frequencies in a population, over a few generations, also known as change at or below the species level.

Which, of course, means that Macroevolution, if it is even a valid concept, is change above the species level. If it is even a valid concept, mind. But we won't get distracted down that path, the point is that Berend is wrong, and that is premises 1, 1a, and 1b taken care of.

So, Berend has his definitions wrong at the offset, not a good start. Incidentally, speciation, and thus macroevolution, have been observed heaps. Now to our sort of halfway conclusion C1. Let's recap where we are up to

1) Evolution is divided into micro-evolution and macro-evolution.
1a) Micro-evolution is the rearrangement of existing genetic material.
1b) Macro-evolution is the appearance of new genetic material.
C1) If Macro-evolution has occured then the fossil record would show examples of 1b.

C1 is fairly innoccuous. Whatever sort of evolution has occured it would not be unreasonable to expect that if there was a fossil record it would show examples of it. As species evolved, and fossilised, we would expect to find transitional and intermediate fossil examples of them. It might pay to amend it slightly in the light of 1b being rendered meaningless to:

C1a) If evolution has occured we would expect to find transitional fossils in the fossil record.

This might also involve getting rid of premises 1, 1a, and 1b completely, but I'm not going to go overboard examining all the possible permutations. The point is that (once again) whatever happened in evolutionary history we should find examples of it in the fossil record.

Now on to the second half of Berend's argument.

2) The following list of quotes come from beleivers in evolution.
2a) They state that the fossil record does not show 1b.
2b) They are qualified to make that assesment, and the quotes are scientifically recent.
2c) They have been quoted accurately.
2d) If (2a), (2b), and (2c), were true then we can reasonably assume that the fossil rcord does not support macro-evolution.
2e) 2d is true.
----------
(C) - The fossil evidence does not support evolution.

Now then, I am not going to go through every single quote and apply all those criteria to them. We would be here forever. Instead, I will cull them so the strongest (for Berend's argument) quotes are left. If the strongest quotes fail then we would reasonably expect the weaker ones to fail as well.

The most important criteria is recency, part of 2b. Science is an incredibly fluid discipline with many new discoveries being made all the time. If you take science papers at university you would be bloody lucky to get assigned a textbook that had not been revised within the past five years. But we are going to be exceedingly generous and give Berend a twenty year window. If Berend's quotes are more than twenty years old, we can ignore them, they are obsolete.

We ignore quotes of Charles Darwin, of G. G. Simpson in 1959, Norman Newell, Stephen Jay Gould from 1977, Colin Patterson from 1979, S Stanley from 1979, and David Pilbeam. The Richard Dawkins quote is unreferenced.

So, we are left with:

1) A quote from Stephen Jay Gould from his 2002 book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory"
2) A Colin Patterson quote from 1988.
3) A Mark Ridley quote from 2004.

I'm also going to cull the Michael Denton and Luther Sunderland bits. Because of premise 2., and in Sunderland's case because of the first half of 2b.

We're down to three quotes. Let's start with Colin Patterson. In Berend's words:

"Dr Colin Patterson, a senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History and author of the book Evolution said (quoted in Darwin's Enigma, Luther Sunderland, 1988):

Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least "show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived."? I will lay it on the line-
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record."

1988 is (just recent enough to be included, but has Patterson been quoted accurately?

No.

And we are down to two. Messrs Gould and Ridley.

Let's start with Gould. According to Berend:

"In his last book, the Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Stephen J. Gould wrote:

... since we have no direct data for key transitions that occurred so long ago and left no fossil evidence ... such entirely speculative scenarios must be understood within their acknowledged
limits -- that i as hypothetical stories, "cartoons" in Buss's words, invented to illuminate a potential mode and not as claims about any historical accuracy.

Stephen J. Gould also quotes George Gaylord Simpson:

... the greatest and most biologically astute paleontologist of the 20th century ... acknowledged the literal appearance of stasis and geologically abrupt origin as the outstanding general fact of the fossil record and as a pattern which would "pose on of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.""

For those who don't know, "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" is more than 1,400 pages long. Berend has helpfully left out that page numbers of his quotes. But we can dismiss those quotes for two reasons.

Firstly, when people quote Gould as doubting evolution in any way, they are distorting him.

Secondly, Gould recognises this tactic, and does not approve of it. He does believe there are transitional fossils, as quoted accurately from the above link.

"transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim."

Given those two facts, I would bet that Berend has taken Gould out of context and has distorted Gould's message.

Which leaves us with Mark Ridley. Berend again:

"In Evolution by Mark Ridley, published in 2004, we learn why there has never been a Nobel Prize awarded for evolutionary theory. He states:

We need to keep in mind the status of the evolutionary biologist's argument here. The series of stages may in some cases not be particularly plausible, or well supported by evidence, but the argument is put forward solely to refute the suggestion that we cannot imagine how the character could have evolved. (p. 263)

He continues and concludes his argument in the following paragraph:

It is fair to conclude that there are no known adaptations that definitely could not have evolved by natural selection. Or (if the double negative is confusing), we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection. (p. 263)"

To be honest I can't see how this strengthens Berend's case at all. Mark Ridley firstly (presumably, since I don't have Ridley's book, and given Berend's form I have very, very little certainty that he has been quoted fully and accurately) says that there are some cases where evidence is lacking and that scientists put forward scenarios to explain how they could have evolved - which is their job as scientists, to try and find answers and put forward hypotheses, and so on. But Ridley doesn't doubt evolution or the fossil record at all. As he said "we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection."

And that's pretty much that. After culling out a good many obsolete quotes we were left with two distortions and one guy who says that "we can conclude that all known adaptations are in principle explicable by natural selection." Hardly the death knell for Darwin, is it.

The final word on fossils and evolution goes to Richard Dawkins from his most recent book

"In spite of the fascination of fossils, it is surprising how much we would still know about our evolutionary past without them. If every fossil were magicked away, the comparative study of modern organisms, of how their patterns of resemblences, especially of their genetic sequences are distributed among species, and of how species are distributed among continents and islands, would still demonstrate, beyond all sane doubt, that our history is evolutionary, and that all living creatures are cousins. Fossils are a bonus. A welcome bonus, to be sure, but not an essential one. It is worth remembering this when creationists go on (as they tediously do) about 'gaps' in the fossil rcord. The fossil record could be one big gap, and the evidence for evolution would still be overwhelming. At the same time, if we only had fossils, and no other evidence, the fact of evolution would again be overwhelmingly supported. As things stand we are blessed with both."
The Ancestor's Tale, p13.