Give em hell, Elie Wiesel!

(Darwin is a cold bath after Jesus).

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"I don't think anything should be taught as dogma,"

well, there goes the entire american public education system.

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Originally posted by RUR:

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God, why do we have to let the fucking US godbotherers drag us down?

They may drag you all down to hell yet.

Melbourne is hell???

More like limbo, actually...

*goes for witty rejoinder*

*dies of radiation poisoning from fallout drifting down from the north*

Ah well. Payday rolled around again, so I'm semifunctional once more. As a hard-bitten journalist, I would like to offer ONE tip to anyone considering this benighted profession:

Never, ever, ever, EVER, take a pay-cut to go into "business news". It's a very bad sign indeed.

I just want to put out one idea here. Actually, one-and-a-half. At the end of the 19th century, some physicist said -- "We've solved all the problems of physics, it's all understood now. There's just two little problems, actually, one is the Michaelson-Morley experiment, and the other's the ultra-violet catastrophe. Everything else we can explain."

The one problem led to relativity theory, and the other led to quantum theory.

Now, that guy was actually doing science a favour, even by being an asshole. So even by being assholes, I do believe the Intelligent Designers are doing us a favour in this debate by pointing out problems. The axiom here for me is that you really, really, really need to understand that there are genuinely severe problems with "Darwinist" evolutionary theory. That Richard Dawkins list of worthwhile problems in evolution is worth having a look at, because even Dawkins (who I think is a real asshole deluxe) has to admit there are problems.

I just want to put in another word for Lamarckism and "inheritance of acquired characteristics". For one thing, years ago the biologist Conrad H Waddington showed in flies with certain veins in their wings, induced by radiation, that the "acquired" characteristic could be genetically inherited, but that's not my main point.

Lamarck's classic example of "inheritance of acquired characteristics" was the giraffe, whose long neck, he said, was acquired by the striving of giraffes to reach higher and higher leaves on trees, this leading to their offspring being born with longer necks. Now we know that this is genetic "nonsense". But I want to put one argument to you, which I've never really seen in print before.

Let's say you've got a horsey kind of creature, that eats grass. But the grass is getting thin. The creature sees some leaves up there on a tree, and thinks "Hot damn, those look good", and stretches its neck and manages to reach them. And because it's got an extra source of food, it survives where others die. And (this is my really crucial point) -- it shows its offspring, look, stretch your neck, and you can just reach those leaves and eat them.

Now this is an ACQUIRED characteristic, one that comes from an **idea**, which can be taught and passed on. But the moment this behaviour has been ACQUIRED, by whatever means, it becomes subject to normal Darwinian selection -- i.e. if a creature with a slightly longer neck is now "randomly" born, it will have a better shot at reaching those leaves. And so selective pressures will be set up to favour individuals with longer necks -- once the behaviour has been acquired.

But this is ALL contingent in the first place in the one creature saying "Hot damn" to itself. It was an IDEA, and an idea that could be taught and passed on, that led to the characteristic being "visible" to the normal Darwinian process of selection. In the strictest of senses, one is seeing here the "inheritance of an acquired characteristic".

Now think of the human race, and how long it takes a baby to become independent and self-sustaining -- years and years. We take an awful lot of teaching, and an awful lot of "acquired characteristics", to become fully and autonomously functional in the ecosystem. Actually, I think most humans don't get even close to this, but let me not get too cynical here today, just after payday.

Just a thought.

I'm busy reading Rupert Sheldrake's "The Presence of the Past" -- very interesting, and I'm reading it very slowly. My alternative "nom de guerre" for myself on this site was going to be "cargo cult" -- odd bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam reach us here (not least via the internet) and we tend to obsess a bit over them. So until I've finished this book, I'm going to shut up here. And I want to apologise a little to G-natrix, because I only just realised that he started this thread, so he can say what he pleases here.

What I want to say right now is -- and this has really been stewing in me: -- so George Bush lends an ear to "intelligent design". George Bush also used the US State Department to try foist tons of genetically modified grain on starving southern African nations like Malawi, which rejected this stuff because they didn't trust it. And there were many snide comments in the press saying "These stupid people would rather have their populations starve than feed them GM food. After all, Americans eat GM food, so it must be alright."

It really, really outrages me that US foreign policy is being used to push this poisonous stuff on very poor Africans. If you want to attack Bush on his "evolutionary" stance, please attack him on his support for Monsanto and other very non-godly interferers in the natural process -- people who for e.g. engineer "terminator" genes into plants to render them sterile, genes that could NEVER evolve in nature, purely because it makes for more profits as the farmers have to buy new seed every year. Bush is playing a very clever game when he starts talking "intelligent design" -- don't get diverted. I'm crazy, OK? I have this absolutely absurd notion that a large number of these born-again believers can be hijacked into thinking (shock horror), or at least be hijacked into accepting the product of some real thought, instead of bullshit, and that's why I engage in this argument. I'm mad, I know, but that's my core business.

I like your madness, "Crazy" Carlos.

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And I want to apologise a little to G-natrix, because I only just realised that he started this thread, so he can say what he pleases here.

And I apologize (a little) for that crack about "they" a while back. And it pleases me to say:

Maybe no one really, really, really needs to understand anything about how science works except the scientists who make their living at it. The problems that Dawkins lists are problems in the analytical sense: they are challenges that provide opportunity for fruitful science, and none of the problems he lists are likely to generally falsify our rather robust theory of evolution (which was the point he was making). The objection that scientists have to ID is that it provides no fruitful avenue for investigation. Rather it takes holes that could potentially be patched through the scientific process and fills them with hypotheses that are not testable, falsifiable, or logically compelling. If we were to look at science as an addiction, I would say that ID does not give me my fix for the day. It's not even fringe theory (the way plate tectonics or global warming or the Cretaceous meteorite once were). ID does not capture the imagination of scientists nor does it engage scientists intellectually, which is why it is not debated on its merits within the scientific community. The debate is in the public sphere. THAT debate is what got me to start this thread, because the people stirring up the pot are doing so for political advantage, and the methods they are using to stir the pot seem to belong to a class of phenomena that WG explores in PR in particular and in his cautionary ouvre in general. The Discovery Institute and its wealthy backers are banking on the belief that a well-funded strategy of marketing and media-exploitation can turn the public against the scientific community and defeat science on its own turf. The reason they are doing this is this (or so I claim, as the son of a journalist and as a working scientist): the scientific community, as much or more so than the journalistic or artistic community, has the power to block the power-hungry. As such the scientific community is a threat to be neutralized by anyone who seeks despotic power. The idealized scientist-heroes of a thousand science fiction stories have fought this battle, and now we're fighting it in real life.

An exciting time to be a mild-mannered evolutionary biologist who wants nothing more than to hole up with his laptop and twenty tanks of critters and an iPod full of industrial music and forget about the big bad world.

Stay crazy, Carlos.