Archive for the ‘Society & Politics’ Category

Chapter 1: Variation Under Domestication

Chapter 1 opens with general overview of how animals differ from one another under domestication and yet in many cases come from one source species. He claims this as a promising place to look for explanations of how so many species came to be.

It's interesting what a paltry sample he has to draw from in conducting his analysis; scientists today have a crushing wealth of taxonomies, specimens, numbers, research going back dozens of generations about species Darwin never knew existed. So he is wrong in some of his assumptions about domesticated animals (for example, he guesses that dogs are so varied as to likely come from more than one ancestor), and about the sources of some of the variation (like drooping ears in some domesticated animals arising simply from disuse of the ear muscles).

I do not believe, as we shall presently see, that all our dogs have descended from any one wild species….

That's right: there are many things Darwin was wrong about. (Creationists love to chuckle and point at these places, as if they're the ones who discovered his errors through their own research and the arrogant scientists don't know about it yet.) This is what's so great about science: when science is wrong about something, it gets disproven and is no longer believed to be true.

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In celebration of Darwin in Malibu, which I'm directing at the Generic Theater in March, I am finally reading The Origin of Species and posting chapter-by-chapter summaries and commentary. Part 0 covers the history of the book, plus its title page and introduction.

Part Zero: The Origin of the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin was a naturalist. He was on track to become a doctor, but he proved a rather squeamish medical student, and left medical school for Cambridge to become instead an Anglican priest. His father, a doctor, was disappointed enough by this to say, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." While at Cambridge, he found his true calling: that of a naturalist, an all-around scientist of the natural world (and especially the creatures which inhabited it). "Naturalists" were the progenitors of modern biologists, and like so many very early men of science, the best of them  became masters of many disciplines. Naturalists combined aspects of what we know today as biology, botany, entomology, taxonomy, chemistry, geology, and more.

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'Nuff said.

Anyone who's met Nick S. knows he's smart, insightful, and delightfully droll. When he calls you out on something, it's worth taking a hard look at yourself. He left a comment on my last post, Three Vague Words on Pottery Prove the Bible True, in which I claimed it was a wild leap of exaggeration to take an archaeological artifact of dubious value and hold it up as evidence of the literal truth of a Biblical parable. (Read the comments thread here.)

His comment was:

Yes, religious minded people can accept silly things to support their view of the world. It's a consequence of a preference for convenience and comfort rather than truth, I suspect. But then, the non-believers accept equally silly "truths" in their longing to discredit a worldview driven by faith and powered by something bigger than themselves.

Isn't it just as silly when people say things like, "hey I read the The Da Vinci Code, so now I know the truth, and I can stop thinking about such things"? Scientists too, in their sometimes-mad quest for more knowledge can also believe silly things. (Eugenics anyone?) Last time I checked there wasn't a lot of compelling evidence to sustain string theories and an 11-dimension universe, but people still talk about those ideas, and ideas like them, as if they were uncontested fact.

I value both faith and science, but I think if you wish to point out the foolishness of some religious folks, then it is only fair to also point out the excesses and foolishness of the knowledge-worshiping or narcissistic non-believers.

Nick, I can always count on you for a thoughtful and challenging comment! I wrote a response but it was too long to go in the comments thread, so here goes:

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Imagine, for a moment, you are a skilled archaeologist, having devoted years of your life to the uncovering, cataloguing, and assimilation of physical artifacts. You are on an expedition in Sweden, doing research into Scandinavian artifacts in the hopes of illuminating the lives and history of Vikings. One of the artifacts, one of many you publicly announce to little fanfare, is a shard of pottery. Only three words of the old language are clearly legible: "slave," "king," and "judge."

Those three words, common in Viking stories and legends of the day, say nothing about what or whom they refer to, and could be anything from a child's reader to an epic poem. A minority of modern Scandinavians still believe in the Viking gods, and they proudly insist that it refers to Odin–who in Norse mythology (oops, I mean in their truth) is the "king" of the gods, the head of the twelve "judges," and to whom male "slaves" were sacrificed during blót festivals. What more proof could any rational person need? Odin is said to have visited Uppsala, Sweden in person–the king of the gods walking on earth–and those three words on the pottery prove it!

The next day, all of Sweden is abuzz with wonder. The neo-Vikings rattle loudly in the media that their ancient beliefs have been shown true. A week later, their exaltation spreads to the world's newspapers, which pick up the story and spread it uncritically and with arresting headlines. "The God Odin is Proven Real," the stories read, "By Startling New Archaelogical Find." You are now a hero to neo-Vikings everywhere: you have just proven Odin.

Sound implausible? Read on.

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No one should ever have to choose between doing the right thing and being happy.

It's a variation on what's sometimes called a Hobson's Choice (though Wikipedia has just informed me that it's more correctly called Morton's Fork). It's also pretty similar to Sophie's Choice.

I was reading this article, where the author says, "Psychologists assumed that their patients wanted to be happy, failing to notice that, for many people, being good is more important than being happy." Made me realize something. Wherever society is immoral, its members must choose between being good and being happy. You must make the choice, though it's a choice you should never have had to make. The rule holds regardless of the size of the society; it can be as small as two people or as large as everyone.

What's wrong with a world that forces this kind of choice? Keep reading.

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A couple of months ago, I started writing a long post about the movie Expelled. I made the mistake of assuming there were but a handful of sane voices in the meeting-place of public opinion, and that I needed to join them to be heard above the crowd cheering on this insidiously dishonest movie. But when I showed up at the meeting, the crowd was jeering and the filmmakers had already been laughed out of the room. My humble services were not needed–much to the relief, I'm sure, of those who would have received them.

So I just slapped together this list of links so you can enjoy the saga if you like. For those who are curious about the Expelled kerfuffle (a polite term deriving from the Latin word "clusterfuck"), I include the following one-paragraph synopsis:

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My Sundance screenplay, All of Creation, featured among its themes the importance of science to understanding our world and finding meaning in it. In fact, the slot I took at the Sundance lab (talked about in this post) was created by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which advances science and science understanding in the popular media. I've always loved science, but only recently realized that it is under systematic attack by religious fundamentalists posing as scientific thinkers. I still remember watching Inherit the Wind as a kid in the late 1980's, thinking what a great movie it was and how lucky the world was to have outgrown such astounding stupidity as Creationism. It's still one of my favorite films–and favorite plays–but it's since come to my attention that the rabble-rousing inanity has resurged under the laughable sheen of Intelligent Design, or ID for short.

These IDiots, like the obscenely rich coiffed televangelists of our nation, leverage the great wealth they've accumulated from hoodwinked believers and spend it on very professional public-relations efforts to garner public sympathy for opinions which get laughed out of courtrooms and scientific journals because they are so effortlessly demonstrably false.

I've had some success with my screenplay about science, and have begun writing another and have already applied for one grant on its behalf (as documented in this post), so I think I have a certain responsibility to counter this tent-revival of infectious ignorance. I'm going to write about the new farce of a film, Expelled, and to do so I wanted to do a little groundwork to provide one small example of the kind of IDiocy I'll be referring to therein. So here goes my first crack at the debate, in the form of a rebuttal to an excerpt of a piece of ID propaganda:

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