Creationism in Turkey
I was surprised by the tone of John Gray’s review of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and religion in Islam by Taner Edis (24 February, p 50). He presents the creationist movement in Turkey as if it sprang spontaneously from the stress of modern Turkish secular life; yet quite another story was widely reported several months ago. See for instance Reuters’ story of 22 November 2006 at , which included the following: “In 1985, a paragraph on creationism as an alternative to evolution was added to high-school science textbooks, and a US book Scientific Creationism was translated into Turkish. In the early 1990s, leading US creationists came to speak at several anti-evolution conferences in Turkey.”
Or read Edis’s own words: “Though Turkish creationists hail from a very different religious culture and history, their wholesale adoption of Institute for Creation Research-style arguments means that we cannot explain creationism by narrowly sectarian factors alone. Creationism mobilizes traditional Abrahamic convictions about the moral significance of the natural world against the threat of social modernity. Hence successful variants of creationism have a potential to spread beyond the environments in which they originally evolved.” This is part of an article titled “Cloning creation in Turkey” on the National Center for Science Education website .
In both cases, “evolution” is the word used for the scientific concept that is being taught against. Even the Turks’ conference against it referred to the concept by its name: Edis reports on the NCSE site that in April and July 1998 Bilim Arastirma Vakfi (BAV; the Science Research Foundation) held three international conferences in the major cities of Turkey, with a theme of “The Collapse of the Theory of Evolution: The Fact of Creation”. Why then, in New 杏吧原创, is evolution called Darwinism, and what is a “militant Darwinist”? And do you plan to change other theories, such as gravity, to -isms?
Religion of the real
In his review of a book by yet another of Richard Dawkins’s many detractors, Bryan Appleyard employs a well-known fundamentalist canard in claiming that “Any view that religion is the source of all evil and atheism the origin of none is plainly absurd when confronted with the largely atheist bloodletting of the 20th century” (3 March, p 47).
Forget for the moment Appleyard’s disingenuous mention of a “source of all evil”; Dawkins has never claimed awareness of a “source of all evil”, as Appleyard ought to know.
It is useful to consider the actual source of much of the so-called “atheist bloodletting of the 20th century”. If by this Appleyard means the excesses of the avowedly “atheist” Stalinists and Maoists and whatnot, he chooses to forget that these phenomena were themselves religions, cults of the state and the leader, fundamentalist fervours that encompassed hymn, ritual, idol and doctrinal enforcement into brutal movements whose true believers tolerated no dissent.
Religion is a multiformed adaptive syndrome linked primarily by the ligature of “true belief”, whether in the magic invisible deity of the Abrahamic faiths or the assorted very visible deities of ancient and modern cults of the state. Religion needs no imaginary gods; real ones work very well. If so many have “faith” in a magic invisible deity that will punish or reward one after death, can others be blamed for faith in a very visible and plainly puissant living deity who can have one’s entire family tortured to death before one’s eyes in this life?
In whatever form it takes, True Belief tends toward intolerance of those outside the faith, coupled with a willingness to employ falsehood, if not violence, to combat and destroy the infidel, of whatever stripe. Seen in this context, the old “atheist bloodletting” argument certainly stands testament to the imaginings of true believers, who invariably deny the religiosity of all whose faith differs from their own.
Unkind milk
I read with interest and dismay the article stating that a taste for milk shows evolution in action (3 March, p 12).
Many research papers published in the last few years state that about 45 per cent of the (UK) population have a problem with digesting cows’ milk. This involves not only lactose, but the milk as a whole. When babies are put onto goats’ milk infant formula 鈥� which also contains lactose 鈥� there is no problem. The allergenic reactions vary considerably, from excessive mucus production via the goblet cells causing otitis media with effusion (fluid in the middle ear) to eczema and asthmatic symptoms.
Troll tales
There has always been plenty of evidence for interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans (3 March, p 28). It’s just evidence of a type normally ignored by mainstream scientists and archaeologists.
European and Middle Eastern folklore contains many accounts of strange human-like but non-human people who normally live in forests and marginal territories. Starting with the remarkably suggestive descriptions of Enkidu, the wild man of the forest, who became friends with the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, there is a wealth of oral history on the subject describing fauns in Greek and Roman myth, elves in Germany, trolls in Scandinavia and the Firbolg in Ireland.
Certain characteristics of the forest creatures seem to be consistent across all the folklores. They are clearly different from normal humans. They are shorter, stockier, frighteningly strong and very hairy 鈥� often described as reddish and goat-like. They have funny-shaped heads, and always pointy ears. It’s hard to look at early illustrations of trolls or gnomes without being reminded of Neanderthals.
A state of armed neutrality frequently exists between them and normal humans, with occasional child-stealing and impregnation of human females by the forest creatures. All over Europe we find the changeling myth, in which a child turns out to have been exchanged for an elf/troll baby 鈥� and is usually then exposed in the forest. Even today people put up horseshoes whose iron is supposed to keep the fairy-folk at bay and stop them stealing our children.
No doubt the changeling story originated as an explanation for the more obvious results of a mating between a Neanderthal male and a human female. Probably babies who were not obviously elvish (no pointy ears?) simply passed as human.
Many songs and tales also describe fierce fighting between the pure humans and the terrible forest people as humans expand or cut down forest.
All this suggests that there should be more genetic material showing deep ancestry in populations with recent folklore about forest people and changelings 鈥� Scandinavians and Irish in particular. It is also possible that Europeans got their strangely hairy faces, funny white skin and tendency to red or blonde hair from their interbreeding with Neanderthals, in which case genetic material showing deep ancestry should also correlate with male hairiness and red hair.
This would also account for our squeamishness on the whole subject. Why wouldn’t Neanderthals and humans have interbred whether they wanted to or not? Has nobody ever heard of rape?
Misreading prejudice
In his article on the roots of racial prejudice Mark Buchanan quotes Lawrence Hirschfeld’s finding that children think a fat, black child in a police costume is more likely to grow up black than to grow up fat or become a police officer (17 March, p 40). I would, however, dispute the conclusion that for these children “race is more important than other physical differences in determining what sort of a person one is”.
Could it simply be that 3-year-olds are sensible enough to realise that it is a lot harder to lose skin pigment than fat or clothes? It doesn’t take much observation to see that people change clothes daily, that adults are a different shape from children, but that skin colour tends to run in families.
The child has no need to be aware that the uniform represents the wearer’s occupation; or that chubby kids and obese adults, while quite different in appearance, have the same type of deviation from the norm and might represent a personal trait; or that skin colour represents any of the characteristics assigned to race. These concepts are a lot more advanced, and Hirschfeld is imposing his own adult concepts to make assumptions about the child’s thinking.
From Ernest Ager
Buchanan considers several arguments for a genetic basis for prejudice, but misses a glaring one 鈥� that there was a survival benefit from being wary of strangers. Strangers may be identified by many different markers: skin colour, eye shape or hair colour to name but a few. People would not be hostile to colour but to difference.
Chimpanzees or baboons will attack interlopers on “their” territory, and they will also attack neighbouring groups. No doubt they have their own markers to identify the outsiders. Evidence for this inbuilt trait can also be seen in young children, who may be perfectly happy when introduced to other young children, yet often have a fear of unknown adults. Here, it seems, the “otherness” marker is size.
Exmouth, Devon, UK
Sail the jet stream
Your article on “greener” aircraft never mentioned airspeed, concentrating instead on wacky designs (24 February, p 32). We know that Concorde burned more fuel per passenger kilometre than a subsonic plane.
Turboprops burn less fuel than jets do, but travel “in the weather”, not above it, which is where the jet engine achieves best efficiency. Propellers driven by piston engines can be more efficient again.
Real savings can only be made if people fly less, more slowly and much more intelligently. With reduced airspeeds, it could be important to exploit the weather, following the jet streams in the same way that sailing ships, which used no fuel at all, followed the trade winds. Some passengers might, though, be put off flying by the variable schedules this would lead to.
And let’s drop the carbon offset business and the continuing stupidity of in-flight duty-free sales, which increase weight and thus fuel consumption. We need to do all of this and more, with legislative force, very quickly.
Twin twister
Douglas Hofstadter seems keen to introduce complexity where no need for it exists (10 March, p 46). In his thought experiment, a person is teleported at the same time to both Mars and Venus, with the apparently paradoxical result of the one person being in two places at the same time.
The problem disappears entirely if the “self” of that person is considered to be just a product of the physical existence of the person and the present time in which they exist. The passage of time results in a continuous stream of new “selfs”. (Who am I? Where am I? When am I?) The “selfs” of the past are locked there and unchangeable, so it is irrelevant whether the “self” of the present owns them or not. The “selfs” of the future are unlimited in number and, once dispersed in space, are no more part of the one existence than twins would be.
Something similar happens to all of us at the point of conception. At that time our “self” consists of a single cell that is then scanned and reproduced to become two identical cells (teleported). If they were not held in lockstep in time and place they could easily become two separate individuals. Sometimes that is exactly what happens and identical twins result 鈥� no paradox there at all.
From Brian Messent
When asked why we need to challenge the common-sense idea of a “self” by Mike Holderness, Hofstadter makes two mistakes.
First, he bases his argument on a thought experiment which is, so far, untestable. Maybe the reason we cannot simultaneously teleport copies of one person to two different places is the indivisibility of “self”.
Second, the copies arriving on Mars and Venus would be identical only in the instant of arrival. As soon as they experienced their first sight of the new environment they would be different people, even though they may appear outwardly identical.
Of course there is the hardware, and some software, that we were born with, but the software that we collect throughout life never stops modifying itself. I am not the same person I was yesterday.
Yes, this may sound simple and mechanistic, but anything further is bordering on the realms of spiritualism and religion. We should not allow our self-awareness to lead us astray.
Lake Placid, Florida, US
From Phil French
In Hofstadter’s account of the “teleporter cabin” experiment two copies of you were created on separate planets. His discussion about the nature and location of the “self” seems influenced by the idea that your terrestrial body was destroyed in the teleporter cabin’s scanner.
I have to confess that I forgot to destroy you.
Afterwards, to spare myself embarrassment, I returned you quickly to where I’d found you. You didn’t appear to notice anything unusual.
The two copies were made successfully but as you were apparently unaware of them, it seemed as if your “self” was completely unaffected. How far did my inefficiency affect the significance of the experiment?
Reading, Berkshire, UK
Burned by pastry?
The Pastry peer-to-peer internet TV transmission protocol described by Duncan Graham-Rowe appears to send video data to all subscribers whether they want it or not (3 March, p 26). As a network administrator, I have found that some peer-to-peer radio services use 10 times the expected bandwidth even when “switched off”. A few megabytes of data actually consumed by the user ballooned into gigabytes transmitted to others.
This is a huge problem for businesses that have to pay for every gigabyte sent or received. I would immediately block all users of my network from signing up to any service with this behaviour.
On the other hand, P2P services such as TVUPlayer redistribute content equal to that consumed, stop when the user tells them to, and so cost my network no more than unicast services.
Pastry may have its place, though 鈥� an internet service provider that is also a cable TV provider may find Pastry lets it distribute thousands of channels to its subscribers at no extra cost.
Plot and counterpoint
Jonathan Gottschall tells us that literature can be analysed from the perspective of Darwinian strategies related to survival in ancient societies (3 March, p 38). If the Greek heroes, and their descendants in thrillers and adventure stories, reflect a world in which men were men and women were scarce, then surely modern romantic fiction must reflect female strategies for mate selection in our society, and detective stories describe the battle against destabilisation of society.
Publishers of genre fiction know that readers of boy-meets-girl romances dislike adultery; similarly, it’s wrong to kill people, so the detective usually gets his man. These rules are imposed through the wallet of readers who desire a world of moral certainty.
But writers of literary fiction often ignore or subvert these rules 鈥� which is why they provide so much more than a good yarn. Adulterous liaisons in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and the curious glamour awarded to the serial killer in Patrick S眉skind’s Perfume add depth, moral ambiguity and perhaps a little disgust to the enveloping experience of a good read.
Future imperfect
It’s hard to find anything of substance in Ray Kurzweil’s comments on not going back to nature (3 March, p 19). His thesis appears to be that rapid technological change is good and that people who question that notion are bad.
This may well be true, but his supporting argument is curiously irrational. Rather than giving us reasons to support his ideas, he attacks those who disagree with him by using what are, in much of the English-speaking world, highly emotionally charged words. People who disagree with him are dangerous fundamentalists (that alone puts them into the same category as suicide bombers and anti-abortion fanatics). They are fearful, damaging, unyielding, extreme, anti-technology, disruptive, Luddites, relinquishist and posing.
Not only does he attribute all these bad traits to the people who disagree with him, but he implies that their opposition may lead to millions of people not getting enough to eat, that their obstructionism is responsible for hundreds of thousands going blind every year, that they are a major obstacle to the relief of suffering, and that accepting their ideas would require totalitarianism, and support bioterrorism by driving technological development underground. In contrast, people who support his ideas bring great news for human development, are responsible for tremendous medical advances, feed millions, democratise power, cure cancer and bring other, unnamed, but profound and important benefits.
In support of all this he notes one “gee-whiz” technological advance which, without supporting evidence, we are asked to believe will lead to us being more non-biological than biological within decades, and supports a highly dubious claim that the fruits of our progress are available to anyone with a computer with an irrelevant anecdote about people who got rich quickly.
From Peter Coates
Ray Kurzweil unfairly labels people who have qualms about the direction of modern society as “secular fundamentalists”. Reasonable people can be concerned, even should be concerned.
杏吧原创s as a whole are intelligent and thoughtful people, which makes the effects that unsuspected ignorance has had tragic. Neither scientists nor the broader community had any idea what damage we were doing with CFCs, DDT, PCBs and even CO2. It is not clear that modern (conventional) agriculture is as free of unforeseen side effects as was thought by bright, well-intentioned scientists.
When the headlong rush is driven by an ever increasing rate of change driven almost purely by a profit motive, where we see signs of massive costs which are “externalised” 鈥� that is, not borne by those that impose them 鈥� it is reasonable to be worried that we are building a system that in potentially unstable.
We do not have complete, or even close to complete, knowledge of how our world works: not its climate systems; not its ecology; not even the details of how soil works. The world Kurzweil paints for 2030 has this world significantly modified, irreversibly and on a global scale. This is a very dangerous attitude.
Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada
Capital idea
Adrian Pollock portrays capitalism as the main obstacle to a sustainable future (10 March, p 23). I suggest the problem is that the “science” of economics makes a basic assumption that time is the ultimate scarce good we have.
When “time is money”, the more processes will be speeded up to be economic. The technology to realise this uses more power and thus more free energy 鈥� as defined in the 1870s by mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs 鈥� and more carbon dioxide.
The laws of thermodynamics should have taught us that Gibbs free energy is the ultimate scarce good 鈥� not for the individual consumer but for humanity and for all natural systems.
We have to develop a macroeconomic theory based on the scarcity of free energy.
And we have to develop technology to minimise the use of free energy: not only direct use, but also indirect use as capital and materials in production and consumption. The economy has to slow down.
From Brian Hicks
Economists recognise that a command economy, such as Cuba’s, has such inherent inefficiencies that it is not viable in the long term.
In that sense, there is no alternative to capitalism. The question is how much state regulation you wish to have, and how far you wish market forces to operate.
I naturally agree that “capitalism needs continually to expand”. Any economic system needs to maintain employment in the face of growth in the size of the labour force and in productivity.
In striving for this, western economies have engaged in unsustainable consumption of resources. But if you accept that price and profit signals in a (relatively) free market can be an aid to change, then the capitalist economy has a part to play in achieving sustainability.
Beckenham, Kent, UK
Laptops for whom?
It is unclear how the One Laptop per Child project can achieve meaningful goals without higher levels of literacy (24 February, p 27). According to the UN Development Programme’s 2005 report, Thailand has a literacy rate of 92.6 per cent, Brazil 88.4 per cent, Libya 81.7 per cent, Nigeria 66.8 per cent, and Rwanda 64 per cent. Then there are the further inequalities uncovered when the figures are disaggregated by gender.
There is also the question of whether the laptops will remain in the children’s hands.
It takes two
A national healthcare system which includes annual Pap smears is crucial to preventing cervical cancer, as Ralph Moss says (24 February, p 20), but that is only part of the solution. There also needs to be a mandatory test for men.
As someone who has gone through a human papilloma virus diagnosis and ensuing biopsy, what is most frightening is that women usually have no idea who the virus came from in the first place.
A three-pronged battle planis needed: optional vaccination, mandatory and free annual Pap smears, and a test for men to be included with other standard tests for sexually transmitted infections.
A different animal
I have to take extreme exception to your editorial saying that humans “should not expect to be radically different from other animals” (3 March, p 5). We are radically different. Any fool can see the differences.
I have no problem with having evolved from animals, and with being an animal, but look how far we have come. What animal has the sense of wonder that we have, or the curiosity? What animal has produced a symphony, or integral calculus, or probed the galaxies, or invented surgery or antibiotics, or painted a landscape, constructed microprocessors or 747s, or developed politics and morals?
Of course our ancestry is evident in our aggression, our caretaking, our social patterns and so on; but our complex brains have taken us so far beyond that. Out of complexity, a higher order of functioning has emerged which has opened a yawning chasm between us and our nearest relatives. We may still murder and rape, but not inevitably.
The analogy of a spectrum is misleading, as it implies a difference in wavelength only, with the essentials unchanged. But this isn’t a spectrum, it’s a hierarchy (a dirty word for postmodernists, I know).
This is extreme postmodernism gone mad, and is another example of reductionism trying to bring us down to being nothing more than talking apes. The danger here is that if we really believe this guff it reduces our incentive to rise above our humble instincts and proclivities. Yes, I’m intellectually arrogant and proud to be, and eternally grateful for my big powerful brain. We may still be lying in the gutter, but some of us are definitely looking up at the stars.