Is it just me…?

Just watched the 3rd part of The Genius of Charles Darwin (presented by Richard Dawkins) and I must say that this was Richard’s best TV performance yet.The tone and pace of the programme was perfect. I’m now getting less frustrated by the collection of ignorant creationists, as Richard’s technique of letting them talk their way into deeper and deeper holes just makes them look like the idiots they are.

I was not impressed by the wishy-washy science teachers who didn’t want to offend the feelings of their students by emphasizing the truth of scientific evidence over the ‘evidence’ of their religious beliefs.

I thought the segment with the Archbish of C was quite funny. He really was squirming when Richard pushed him on whether he thought that the virgin birth was a scientific fact and all but admitted that his views were a bit silly and didn’t make any sense as a truthful representation of the world. It was good of him to appear on the programme, but if he is the top guy in the C of E, then we don’t have much to worry about!

I’ve been keeping a close eye on the lead up to the US elections. I’m not sure whether I’ve become more politically aware, or whether I’ve just been following more US blogs and podcasts over the last few months. One story that I spotted today was on the good old BBC, however. It was a debate between McCain and Obama. Nothing unusual so far. The odd thing in this case was that it was billed as a ‘religious forum’, hosted by the pastor of a mega church (that phrase makes me shudder) called Rick Warren.

The reports I’ve read so far don’t really spell out why the questions asked of the candidates were particularly religious and why they couldn’t have equally been asked in a secular context on the ethical and moral beliefs of the two men. Abortion, same-sex marriage, teen pregnancies and, more personally, “What was your greatest moral failure?”, “Who are the three wisest people in your life?”, “Why do you want to be president?”.

Why do questions like this need to be asked in a religious setting? If I wanted to vote for someone, I would want to know how he came to hold his views on a particular subject. If somebody is against same-sex marriage or abortion in any situation, then I’d expect to hear reasonable argument about why that is a sensible position to hold. Just saying “That’s my position because my religion says so” doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in someone who has to make important decisions based on many sources of evidence and opinion.

To pick out one of these “moral” issues, I find the obsession with same-sex marriage particularly annoying. Apart from the obvious point that it’s nothing to do with anyone else, the argument often seems to over a matter of semantics. Obama was quoted as saying that marriage should only be a “union between a man and a woman”, but he supported same-sex civil unions. If there is no legal difference between a marriage and a civil union, then is the argument just over m-word? Some even argue that the only true marriage is a religious one. Of course, what they mean by this is a Christian marriage ceremony, pushing away other religions as well as secularists.

I once heard someone from one of the humanist organizations suggesting that we could leave the word ‘marriage’ as the description for the Christian ceremony and everyone still goes has to go through a civil process to formalize their union. At first I thought this was a good idea. Of course, everyone would still refer to the civil unions as ‘marriages’ and ‘weddings’, whatever the formal designation. The other reason it would be a bad idea is that marriage didn’t ever start off with religious connotations. Marriages were going on long before it became a Christian ceremony in the Middle Ages. The Romans even had legal same-sex marriages!

It would be interesting if any politican who made a statement on a moral matter actually explained why they held that view rather than just refering to the standard line of the party they belong to or the religion they happened to be born into.

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When I was watching the Olympic highlights on the BBC yesterday, I thought I recognized the music they were playing. I realised that it was Hong Kong Garden by Siouxie and the Banshees (incidentally, the first single I ever bought), but played in a plinky-plonky Chinese style. I wonder what they are planning for London 2012? Anarchy in the UK performed by the London Symphony Orchestra?

I’ve never quite understood advertising and sponsorship deals. I was looking at the Castrol website for work the other day and I found out that Castrol were the official suppliers of engine oil to the Euro 2008 Championships. Would you be more inclined to put certain oil in your car (or, in our particular case, aircraft landing gear) because they were connected with football? Anyway, at least we now know what Christiano Ronaldo puts on his hair…

Common spelling mistakes should be accepted into everyday use, not corrected, a lecturer has said. Ken Smith of Bucks New University says the most common mistakes should be accepted as “variant spellings”.

I’ll accept this when I accept that Bucks New University (formerly High Wycombe Discount Carpet Warehouse) is a genuine centre of learning.

I posted yesterday about the Artificial Life conference in the UK this week and I was surprised about how little the subject seems to have moved on since I was involved a decade ago. One of the things I did back then was to interview a futurologist at BT, Chris Winter. Chris had a tank full of ants in his office and he told me how he was studying them so he could use the ants’ method of simple individuals following a small number of simple rules to produce a complex, self-regulatory, self-repairing network.

BBC’s second ALife story in two days talks about the same ideas from BT and they don’t seem to have got much further either…

My news aggregator picked up this story today. It’s all about the efforts of a German university to use Artificial Life techniques to evolve realistic animal and human motion. The basic idea is that you build a model that has the same constraints as a real system, then genetic algorithms and neural networks to get your model come up with the best solution to the goal that you have set. It looks quite nice, but it doesn’t seem to have moved on a great deal since the work of Karl Sims that I first encountered a decade ago. This was back in the good old days when I was involved with Artificial Life as part of my job.

The  reason that the BBC picked up the story is because ALife XI is taking part in Winchester this week. I attended Alife V in Los Angeles a few years back and it was great fun. It was such a contrast to the normal academic conferences that I was used to. As well as the engineers and scientists there were also biologists, film makers and performance artists. Watching how the evolution of biological systems or whole ecosystems could be modelled and powerful and efficient the evolutionary process could be was fascinating.

Perhaps the brainwashed closed-minded students that Richard Dawkins had to deal with in his latest TV program would benefit from seeing how exciting and interesting ALife and evolution can be.

I had my son’s end of year school report yesterday (he is 7 1/2). While he was rated as above average in all subjects (of course!), the teachers were critical in one particular area - something that they had previously brought up with us. They said that he always wants to take time over his work, particularly writing and drawing, and likes to make sure it is correct and accurate before he finishes it. When they first mentioned this a few months ago we took it as a compliment! They felt it that wasn’t a good trait and it was far more important to get something finished, however badly, in the little time available while they rushed from one subject to another, rather than spend time doing something properly.

Even at home he will spend hours drawing very detailed pictures or building complex models out of lego. If he gets something wrong, he will scrap it and start over again.

I always thought that attention to detail and the ability to concentrate on one task for a long period were good things. It’s bad enough that today’s internet culture is giving a generation of children with the attention span of a goldfish - it’s another thing when this is reinforced by schools.

I’m currently reading “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill and there is one section early on that jumped out at me.

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except  to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is; that is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

It’s that last sentence that I found particularly interesting. The first example that came to mind was of the debate between those who accept evolution and those who believe in a religious version of creation. Does it strengthen the position of a true viewpoint to be tested against a falsehood rather than avoiding the debate? I know Richard Dawkins refuses to debate creationists because it is not possible to hold a sensible debate based on evidence and reasoned argument against someone who doesn’t play by the same rules of evidence and reason. After hearing ‘debates’ between biologists and creationists who refuse to accept the existence of transitional fossils I can see his point.

I’m wondering if the nature of public debate was really different in Mill’s time or whether he was only involved in debates with other educated people. The problem these days is that you don’t have to have any understanding of a subject or hold any evidence in order to put your case to a mass audience. Witness the case of the MMR scare where one dodgy study put one side of the case, but there was an overwhelming number of studies that showed the opposite. If you just looked at the mass media, the simple fact that there were two sides to the argument was treated as if both sides were of equal merit. This story just won’t go away, Americans are now getting ‘advice’ on the safety of vaccines from those bastions of the medical profession, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, on Oprah.

Was Mills correct that debate between two opposing positions - ‘true’ and ‘false’ is a benefit to the side of the truth? Or have we got to a point in society today where the lack of critical thinking and the persuasiveness of the mass media means that ‘truth’ doesn’t mean anything and that any point of view that is put forward on TV must automatically be valid? Also, there doesn’t seem to be any real argument - everyone’s position is equal, so there is never any reason to be persuaded to change your mind. Without trying to sound like a Monty Python sketch, there’s more to an argument than saying ‘No, it isn’t’.

Was there ever a golden age of civilized debate when, to win an argument, it was enough just to be right?