1. “Bill Nye, Are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?”
And WHAM, straight in with the most instructive message of the lot. This guy isn’t engaging with the facts. He doesn’t even want to engage with the facts. For him, it’s not a factual issue at all, but a moral one.
This is a response to Buzzfeed’s 22 Messages From Creationists To People Who Believe In Evolution. If you know the background to the post, you can skip the introduction and go straight to number 1.
On 4 February 2014, Bill Nye, a well-known US science advocate and TV personality, debated with Ken Ham, President of Answers in Genesis, a creationist propaganda organisation, at the latter’s “Creation Museum” in Kentucky. The full video of the debate can be watched here.
A Buzzfeed staffer called Matt Stopera went to the debate. While there, he asked creationist attendees to write questions and messages to Bill Nye and evolution/science supporters, and took photos of them with those messages. The full gallery is here.
The first time I read the creationists’ messages, I thought they were so stupid, I wanted to dismiss them all with rapid-fire answers. I imagined assembling all 22 people in a line, in order, and marching down it, pointing at each one, saying, “Yes, no, yes, no, the rotation of the earth relative to the sun…”
Later I realised it’s worth considering them in a bit more detail, though not because they have any validity, nor because a fuller response might persuade them. As Peter Boghossian argues in his book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, it’s no use arguing over facts and evidence with religious fundamentalists. They’ve already rejected ‘reasoning from evidence’ as a belief-forming mechanism. His approach is to try to understand humans as imperfectly rational, as suffering from psychological flaws which prevent them from understanding, or even trying to understand, the world around them – and then to find ways which pragmatically help to repair those flaws.
Therefore, in the spirit of trying to understand the reasons behind the 22 creationists’ messages, I’ve written 22 responses. They’re not short, and the whole thing was getting too long for a single post, so instead I’m going to post each one separately and link them from here as I progress.
I’ve just been sent a link to an article by third-rate Australian Gillian McKeith clone, Jess Ainscough. She runs an absurd ‘health’ blog called “The Wellness Warrior”, and the article in question is 8 Foods People Think Are Healthy … But Aren’t.
I started reading the article before I had a look at the author, her blog and other posts. I didn’t take long to realise something was wrong. The third food on the list was fish. In her reasons for avoiding fish, she states that wild fish are full of mercury, “the second most toxic element on Earth next to radiation.” Now, without doing extensive further research, I don’t know whether wild fish contains significant amounts of mercury or not. However, at this point I can safely say that Jess Ainscough is a fucking idiot.
In Jaipur, we visited the Albert Hall, an ostentatious Indo-Saracenic pile built by the British and now housing the state museum of Rajasthan. While we were there, I noticed a phenomenon occurring which I’ve often wondered about before. A young man was walking around the museum exhibits, scanning each cabinet and shelf with a digital video recorder. He wasn’t taking any time to look at the exhibits himself, just watching the swivel screen as he quickly passed from case to case, to make sure he captured every object in his sweep.
Now, let’s establish some basic truths. This video would be completely unwatchable. Not just because of the sickening motion of the camera (have you ever noticed how in television and film, almost all filming is done with static camera shots? And ‘tracking shots’, where the camera moves, are used only very sparingly, by expert directors? There’s a reason for this) but also because of the awful tediousness of the subject. I’m willing to bet that no-one in the entire history of humanity has ever sat down and watched one of these videos after their holiday. After all, if you don’t find the exhibits interesting enough to actually look at them while you’re there, you’re hardly going to want to watch them on a shaky, blurry video afterwards.
If someone lets you use their computer, and it needs some updates installing – assuming the owner isn’t there to ask – should you do it?
On the one hand, it’s none of your business. It’s their computer, their responsibility to update it. Just say “no” to the pop-ups and continue checking your email. Maybe they know what they’re doing, and have actively chosen not to run the updates: they prefer the version of the program they’re currently running, for example, and are holding off from upgrading to the latest one.
On the other hand, perhaps like most computer users they’re just hopelessly technologically illiterate and don’t realise they’re supposed to say “OK” to all some of the pop-ups that appear every time they boot up. And what if some of the updates are urgent security patches? Without them, the machine could be hacked, infected, recruited into a botnet and used to attack other systems. Like a child without a measles vaccination, increasing the risk of epidemic in the wider population, every second this computer isn’t updated puts every other computer in the world at greater risk. It’s not just acceptable, it’s your duty to update.
A bit of a break from India for a minute, while I deal with some idiots on Amazon.
I’ve just finished reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It was the 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and it’s been raved about ever since. Normally I avoid anything with this much hype, but I decided to take a risk on it. Also, I needed a new book, and it was one of the few literary novels stocked by the Indian bookshop, among its stacks of get-rich-quick self-help tomes and Osho tracts.
It was a good decision. The book is, quite simply, terrific. It’s one of the best things I’ve read for years, and I’d zealously recommend it to anyone.
I’ve just read some of the reviews of it on its Amazon UK page, and a lot of people are criticising it for its bad grammar.
Yesterday, NASA published a logarithmically scaled map, below, of the solar system and surroundings, to accompany the news that Voyager 1 has left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space.
Solar System, in Perspective by NASA/JPL-Caltech
I’ve always been opposed to brand “loyalty” card schemes, like Nectar and Tesco’s Clubcard, and I’ve never signed up for any. We all know that they’re used to track customer shopping behaviour, and I don’t want to be tracked in that way. But it was only recently that I was struck by the fundamental dishonesty involved.
The story promoted by companies running the schemes is something like this: each time you shop with us, we’ll give you a tiny discount, but it’s only redeemable in discreet chunks, and we think this will give you an incentive to continue shopping with us instead of our competitors. In other words: we’ll trade you a non-binding increase in the probability that you’ll choose us for future shopping, which we think is worth two or three pence in every pound, in exchange for rewards equivalent to, say, one pence per pound.
The flaw in this story is that carrying a “loyalty” card doesn’t increase a customer’s chance of using the same shop on any future occasion. As far as I can tell, there are two types of people: those who don’t use any “loyalty” schemes (like me), and those who use every “loyalty” scheme going, and carry around a purse stuffed with cards so that they can get points and discounts wherever they happen to shop.
Ever since I accidentally bought a book about British folk traditions on Amazon a few years ago, I’ve been making an effort to attend a few of the more interesting ones. In the past two years I’ve been to the Haxey Hood Game, the Burning of Old Bartle in West Witton, Preston Guild Fair, and the York Mystery Plays.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, in and around the Staffordshire village of Abbots Bromley.
Today’s Richard Dawkins-centred Twitter row is about child marriage and Islam. It was sparked by his circulation of a Huffington Post article on the tragic case of an 8 year old girl in Yemen who died of internal injuries caused by the wedding night sex with her new 40 year old husband. A 2009 law to set the minimum age of marriage in Yemen at 17 was repealed by conservatives as “un-Islamic”.
Many of the religious apologist responses pointed out that poverty, not Islam (or any other religion), is the key factor in the prevalence of child marriages. Indeed a recent report by World Vision UK, linked from the Huffington Post article circulated by Dawkins, identifies the girls most at risk of child marriage as tending to be “poor, under-educated and … rural” and living in areas with high death rates, civil conflict and “lower overall levels of development including schooling and healthcare”. “Poverty, weak legislative frameworks and enforcement, harmful traditional practices, gender discrimination and lack of alternative opportunities for girls (especially education) are all major drivers of early marriage,” the report summarises.
