If We Evolved from Monkeys, Why are there still Monkeys?

My latest piece for Elucidations on Atheism. I’ll admit it is a relatively easy question, but it is a surprisingly common misconception.

Enquiries on Atheism

This is an oft-repeated creationist question. Usually, it is meant to be rhetorical. Anyway, here goes.

Humans did not evolve from monkeys—not in the near past; however, more on this soon. Besides, the term monkey is, unintentionally or otherwise in this case, misleading. Monkey is a generic term typically used to refer to a primate with a tail; specifically, they comprise the new world (Platyrrhini) and old world (Cercopithecoidea) primate suborders. Humans, part of the genus Homo, belong to the ‘great apes’ family along with chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans (scientific name: Hominidae). We evolved from a common ancestor from the ‘great ape’ family, not from the old/new world monkeys.

This, I admit, is being a bit pedantic, so I’ll answer the meaning behind the question, instead of taking it literally, which it clearly is not. The closest animal relative to us, the chimpanzee with whom we share 98.4%…

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Is Religion Child Abuse?

My first blog post over on Elucidations on Atheism…

Enquiries on Atheism

To begin, the title is a truncated description of the question we received, which was: “Why do atheists like Richard Dawkins consider religion to be child abuse? Do you agree or disagree with this assessment?” Isn’t that the loaded question? To start off, I’ll clarify Dawkins position.

He did not come up with this particular position himself. He was recounting what a former theist had told him of her experience. Namely, that when she was a young catholic child she was: one, sexually abused; two, taught that her Protestant friend who recently died would burn in hellfire for eternity. In her own opinion, the thought that her friend would burn in hell for eternity was worse than the abuse she suffered. Dawkins recounted her story, and said to his interviewer that he understands the position. However, he did not go on to qualify that all religious teaching is equivalent to…

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Natural News

I can’t remember where I got the below photo, because I’d really like to give credit for the good-hearted laugh I got out of it. I wish I could also attribute another phrase connected with Natural News: “Where science goes to die.” Classic! Anybody know the original sources? As is obvious, I really, really, really dislike Natural News and totally agree with Brian Dunning’s assessment that Natural News is the worst anti-science website on the Internet.

The second photo is actually a serious statement.

 

Tell me you didn’t laugh when you hit No. 10.

UPDATE: Attribution has been found! The Ask a Skeptic facebook page originally came up with the text of the comic strip.

Awesome Carl Sagan Quotes

I bought a small eBook recently chock-a-block full of Sagan’s best quotes. I wanted to highlight some of my favourites. I haven’t read all of Sagan’s books (some 30-odd) but I haven’t yet met a Sagan book that I didn’t like… a lot! If anyone was ever going to be my hero, Carl Sagan would be one of them:

On argumentation:

(1) – “The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” 

On history:

(2) – “You have to know the past to understand the present.”

On evolution:

(3) – “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”

On drugs:

(4) – “The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Misc:

(5) – “You are worth about 3 dollars in chemicals.“

(6) – “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.“

(7) – “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God,’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying…it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.“

(8) – “The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support libraries.“

I man-love Carl Sagan…

Favourites? Mine are (1) and (6). Has anyone read more than one Sagan book? If so, which one of those are your favourites? I can’t decide between Broca’s Brain and Pale Blue Dot. Both marvelous insights in science, skepticism, and astronomy with the added delight of them being beautifully written english.

Organic Farming: what is it good for?

Last week, my blogging buddy Allallt, wrote a post, GMOs: it’s our right to know. But what will you do with the information? I asked him to bring to bear his simplicity to the issue of GMOs, and I think he succeeded quite well. Today, he writes on organic farming. I can’t help but agree with–almost–everything he says. See if you do too, and if you have any questions Allallt will be responding to comments (though responses maybe delayed due to travel).

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There are many shopping trends in the real world, and painfully some of them are fashionable instead of well-thought-out. But I find myself unable to criticise the people who shop locally because it is fashionable; of course I would rather they did it because it weakened corporations¹ and supported local businesses, all of which are noble, but they are achieving that regardless of whether they know it.

But I do remember an MMA-training, body building, rice counting, all-round massive and scary guy at my university gym explaining his weekly shopping, coming in at a student loan-destroying £100 a week. I spent about that a month and I paid the lion share of a couple living together. £100 is a ridiculous amount of money to spend on one person. And he shopped at Asda (the WallMart of the UK). I understand that to be a 275 lb guy you need to eat a lot, but it’s still ridiculous. His justification of this spending was “I buy organic”.

Well, “I buy organic” didn’t cut it for me. I buy responsibly sourced and, where possible local (but there are no local pineapples or tuna). And I know why I do this. I wanted to put in some muscle, so I asked him why he bought organic in the hope that he would share some evidence that food farmed by inorganic methods² some way impede muscle growth. And his answer, much to my disappointment, was that he didn’t know what might be on conventionally farmed food, nor their impact. That is an awful reason to spend as much as 70% extra on his shopping (assuming he could do the shopping for just under £60 otherwise).

Organic food is expensive for two very basic reasons, and one of them is fashion. Do you think Bob Geldof buys organic? Of course he does. But the other reason is that it is much more capital-intensive. You need more land and more man-hours (and these are the expensive things). What’s the point?

To a farmer there is an excellent point, money. To the consumer there may be peace of mind, but only if the mind was in turmoil about an imagined slight. And the peace is imagined too. Rotenone, a pesticide allowed in farms which are organically certified, is not the tree-hugger of love and peace you might want it to be. It might as well be DDT. But organic chemistry is organic chemistry³, and organic certification allows rotenone onto the farms. But that needn’t worry you, you can wash it off. But if we’re washing stuff off, why not just go back to the cheap and wonderful conventionally farmed food?

We might as well be clear about this: organic food cannot be demonstrated to be healthier than conventionally farmed food. Organic food is a fictional answer to an imagined problem. And this false-security and peace of mind comes at a considerable cost: less yield per field means we need more fields to get the same amount of food. In a world where people are already starving and the demand for food is only going up, this is a massive issue.

Enter Thomas Malthus. Thomas Malthus described what has become known as a Malthusian crisis. This crisis will appear at the moment the Earth is producing the maximal amount of food and it will be able to support fewer people than exist. This is an easily imaginable process: my mum has an allotment, and it produces enough food for that house and about the same again for resale. If everyone on the street relied on my mum’s allotment for food the street would be well into a Malthusian Crisis; there simply wouldn’t be enough food. And you would want her to use fertilisers and pump the ground with pesticides if you lived on that street!

With farms dwindling to climate change and the pressures of urban sprawl, and the demand on farms increasing with every new mouth to feed, we are constantly teetering on the verge of a Malthusian crisis, inventing new technologies to squeeze a little more productivity out of the land. At the moment we have some leeway and can produce enough food. But knowing this problem is coming means we know organic is not the answer. Organic is a way to get less out of the land and preferentially sell it as a fashion accessory to the richer part of the world, starving the rest of it just a bit more. And it’s set only to get worse.

The End

1 – When you understand what Nestlé did with powdered baby milk or what Coca Cola did by drying up the water table, both in Africa, you will understand why it is important to weaken corporations. They are painfully and immorally bulletproof. Collapsing corporations may be an unachievable goal, but changing the nature of our economics so that the market is run by an ethical consumer would make all the headway we need. And we do that by making ethical decisions when we shop.

2 – Did you notice that roundabout way I had to describe food farmed by inorganic farming methods? That’s because “organic farming” is a stupid name; it’s a marketing ploy and not a technical name. “Organic” means carbon based, and all food is carbon based. There is no such thing as inorganic food, so linguistic pedants like me have to tiptoe around this nonsense. I point that out not as an aside, but because I went on using the term “conventional farming”, even though I am including organic farming (see my previous guest post) in the arsenal we should use.

3 – Petrol is organic, but I imagine you’d have a few choice words if it was on your carrots.

NB – My original draft included “lowering pollution” as a benefit of shopping locally. This only seems to be true in the more extreme of cases. For example, I used to live in Bristol, and I could buy a wide variety of food that was Bristol or Avon sourced—sometimes cycled from the farm to my local grocer—and that is the low-carbon option. But short of this extreme, international big-business farms have become so efficient in terms of yield and pollution and other costs that it would be better for the environment for me to get my salmon from a big Alaska-based company than it would a small, family-run Scottish farm. This is despite Scotland being considerably more ‘local’. But to continue along the idea of the “ethical market” force, sustainable food supplies are still worth hunting out; don’t think buying international is synonymous with buying unsustainable. Line caught tuna is still better that trawled tuna.

My Interview at GreenState TV

My recent interview with GreenState TV. I actually had a lot of fun talking with Emily and Rick (though you won’t hear or see them); it was more of a conversation about GMOs than an interview about them. A very fun one! I’d do it again anytime.

Source link: GreenState TV.

Random Rationality.

Allallt had some nice things (and valid criticisms) to say about my two books. As well as a better name for S3, which I totally would’ve done if I had known. R2D2!! God damn it, why didn’t I think of that?!

I’ve met some truly gifted folks on WP, and I hope one day, I get to meet them all in person. This is what the Internet is all about. 🙂

Thanks for your kind words Allallt. I hope to repay your help one day.

Allallt in discussion

A blogging buddy, Fourat Janabi, has written two books now. And you need to read them both! They are called Random Rationality (R2) and Science, Statistics and Scepticism (S3). If I’d had my way the second book would have been called Dutiful Diligence (D2 – giving the name R2D2 – but I should have voiced that a lot earlier than now). You can colour me biased here, as I had a small hand in the writing of both these books, but they are amazing concise books that give your mind a run for its money.
As the name would suggest, the first book–Random Rationality–is a somewhat disjointed but eloquent look at many of the controversial subjects we talk about today: what the hell is politics anyway?; What’s the big deal with drugs?; The Universe and Nothing; God? The book is forceful, thought provoking and great. It is the inspiration for…

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Connecticut legislature makes anti-science history

Once again, the progressive contrarian hits the nail on the head. The fall-back line of the antis (as Mark Lynas refers to them) is that 64 other countries also have banned them (or not yet approved them) GMOs, therefore, we should too! But, again and again, the obvious goes in one ear and out the other; it matters zip ditty nada how many other countries banned them. Mooney finishes off his post with a brilliant argument to conclude: 74 countries also have laws against homosexuality, so should we follow their lead? Should we restrict free speech and woman’s rights because Saudi Arabia, and who knows how many others, have done so? No, they have bad reasons for doing that, as do these 64 countries that have banned GM.

It doesn’t matter who said what when under any circumstances past, present–and future. The only thing that matters is what evidence is given for that position and given that evidence, is that position then justified? The fact that this legislature had Jeffrey Smith, a former yogic flying instructor testify instead of a molecular biologist, biochemist, or science organization doth bring shame, and hopefully a pox, to their house. As Christopher Hitchens would say: “For shame!”

Contrary to popular belief

Today’s post is a version of an op-ed that was quickly and roundly rejected by the Hartford Courant with a curt,  No Thanks, response.

The Connecticut legislature made history recently when it overwhelmingly approved a gmo labeling bill. They made history by giving credibility to the anti-science views of crackpots, frauds, and charlatans.

In 2012, the Assembly’s GM labeling task force had one Jeffrey Smith testify.  Readers of this blog are well acquainted with him. He is the go-to-guy and is considered an “expert” on gmos. Unfortunately he is not a scientist and has no agricultural experience. He is considered a joke among the scientific community.

His bio and resume are vague. What is known is he was a member of the Maharishi Natural Law Party in Iowa, whose solution to the national crime problem was “yogic flying.”

In 1996, the Daily Illinni wrote, “Smith presented charts with evidence of a correlation…

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Sharing is Caring:

“In a very real sense human beings are machines constructed by the nucleic acids to arrange for the efficient replication of more nucleic acids. In a sense our strongest urges, noblest enterprises, most compelling necessities, and apparent free wills are all an expression of the information coded in the genetic material: We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.” — Carl Sagan

The ‘Appeal to Nature’ Fallacy

There is this notion that has been bugging me lately: the notion that nature is all-knowing, all-wise, acts as a mother to us, and that we should abide her infinite wisdom and abundance. It is otherwise known, to scientists and philosophers, as the appeal to nature fallacy. This notion, which is more of a feeling really, has serious shortcomings. One—and really the only one I need, and want, to address—is that it can only express itself through being lucky enough to be born at the top of the food chain, and it must then, by definition, in being expressed, fail to acknowledge the grim, short, and painful subsistence lives of almost every other member of every other species on this planet, even that of pre-civilized humans.*

This fallacy is, to repurpose to my own ends, a quote from comedian Bill Maher, ignorance masquerading as wisdom, which would, in any other age but this, be punished by nature itself with astonishing brutality and swiftness.

As the singer Gary Numan put it: “If nature is proof of God’s amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genus at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.” Rob Hart put it another way: “Nature is not on our side. Most of it is trying to kill us. Nature abounds with neurotoxins, carcinogens, starvation, violence, and death. It is technology that makes our lives so comfortable.” He neglects though to mention virus’, bacteria, and genetic disorders. (I’m sure I’ve missed a few too.)

One of the few benevolent acts of nature toward us was, albeit unwillingly, the gift of intelligence, which has allowed us the opportunity to wrest ourselves free one step at a time from her invidious grasp. That intelligence, after 250,000 long, brutal subsistence-lived years, has recently born such fruits as GM food, medicine, and sheltered lives free from her (it’s) wrath, yet is being met with scorn and ridicule by those who adhere to the “nature rocks” mantra.

I’m not saying that just because appealing to nature is bunk—it is—that therefore synthetic things are automatically better. That would be guilty of the same fallacy, reversed. No, rather it is to say that we must take everything on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes natural stuff is better, sometimes it’s not; but to presume that just because something is natural that it is better is to arrive at that conclusion devoid of reason, logic, or evidence, regardless of how prevalent it is in society. As Vasil Deniador said (well, Isaac Asimov really said it, as it is his fiction book) in Foundation and Earth: “Common belief, even universal belief, is not, itself, evidence.”

The appeal to nature fallacy will help us with nothing and take us nowhere, and should be confined, for once and all, to the dustbin of history. Of course, it won’t be; at least not yet, but it should be.

With that, I’d like to conclude with a quote from Science Based Life: “Surely, if we have learned anything about our advances in other areas like medicine, agriculture, and public health measures, the way forward is with science, not backwards with an assumed beneficence of Mother Nature. The “unnatural” advances of humanity are some of its greatest achievements. Surgery, vaccination, conventional agriculture, electronics, and engineering (genetic or otherwise) have us living longer, healthier lives. If organic foods really aren’t as nutritious, if natural can also mean dangerous, if genetically modified foods have no scientific reason to be labeled differently, we simply cannot afford to continue making the naturalistic fallacy. What is best for us, what is healthier or safer or more nutritious, is something that falls out of proper research, not common sense.”

* – It was only 200 years ago that a day old baby had a life expectancy of 37 years. Go back 400 years, 2/3s of all children in Britain died before the age of 4, but it’s natural, so who needs vaccines, hygiene, and plentiful food, right? Go back 2000 years, and the average life expectancy drops to 25 years.

P.S. Recall that average life expectancy indicates that 50% of the population died before that age, and the other 50% after, not that everyone dropped dead at said age. Once one hit 15 years of age so, average life expectancy usually increased to between 45 to 60 years. But that is little consolation to the half who died young, and the majority of them who died as children.

P.P.S. I think this is the shortest post I’ve ever written. I guess that shows how few words are needed to show the appeal to nature fallacy for what it is. (That’s my theory and I’m sticking with it!)