iainjclark's Mysterious World

More books, probably the last of the year.

( 19. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell )

( 20. The Little Sister – Raymond Chandler )

( 21. Northern Lights – Philip Pullman )

( My books of 2009 )

So that's 21 books this year vs. 9 last year. I set the bar low but I'm still pleased to have notched up more than twice as many as last year. I had a bit of a blip after The Little Sister in which I started two¹ books² which still languish unfinished on a shelf, which slowed my pace considerably.

My wife meanwhile notched up 38 books, vastly outstripping me as always and beating her tally of 35 last year.

( My wife's books of 2009 )

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¹ Apocalypse How by Daily Show writer Rob Kutner, initially a very funny take on surviving the post-apocaypse, but one where the law of diminishing returns sets in very quickly.

² Who Wrote the New Testament by Burton L Mack., a scholarly, secular attempt to reconstruct the actual beginnings of early Christian belief through literary and historical analysis, but one that for me feels nearly as much of a conjectural house of cards as the religion itself.

This atheist bus advert is funny, sensible and positive. Really the mildest, nicest of messages. Amusing, then, to see how divisive it's proving on the very Guardian comments section that inspired it.

( Warning: Contains Atheism )

The campaign has reached £73,000 and climbing, far in excess of its stated goals. Which is nice. It all seems pretty harmless, and indeed pretty rare -- which is attested to by the level of slightly boggled media coverage.

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¹ Genuinely sorry if all this offends anyone, by the way. I really do have a pathological conviction that even mentioning atheism in polite company is offensive, which is probably why I find this ad campaign so refreshing.

I'm greatly enjoying Prof Richard Dawkins's current C4 series The Genius of Darwin, commemorating the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. All pretty basic and obvious stuff about evolution perhaps, but I've been hoping for some time now (in this world of lowest common denominator science programming) that someone would come along and just Explain This Stuff to a wide audience. Too often TV gravitates towards only the most controversial or biographical aspects of science, or assumes that everyone knows the basics when it's sadly apparent that everyone doesn't. It's nice to see some basic facts set out clearly.

A lot of people seem to find Dawkins abrasive, but he's generally at his most self-effacing in the series to date, perhaps because this time around its premise rarely seeks to pitch him into direct confrontation with those who oppose his views (unlike previous series The Enemies of Reason and The Root of All Evil?). I don't find Dawkins particularly arrogant myself, but that's probably because I agree with him. He makes few concessions, but although I personally might not call a book on religion "The God Delusion" a) my book wouldn't sell many copies and b) I find it hard to argue with this title as a basic position.

So far the first episode has provided a whistle-stop tour of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, while the second has covered human evolution, and specifically the evolutionary roots of altruism, drawing on Dawkin's own work in The Selfish Gene. I've always been fascinated by the idea that humans are 'designed' for small family groupings and that much of our behaviour can, for good or ill, be explained by the rules for living in groups writ large. What's pleasing is how optimistic a view of human nature Dawkins manages to convey even while explaining biological origins of human behaviour that many might find unpalatable. He's obviously a liberal idealist who finds himself disgusted by the various political and capitalistic practices to which the word "Darwinism" has been metaphorically attached.

Next week it's back to the shameless creationist-baiting with a (to my mind much-needed) attempt to examine and rebut the attempts of intelligent design to cast doubt on evolution.

My only source of puzzlement about the series is that the C4 website¹ describes it as "polemical", whereas it's about as polemical as Earth: The Power of the Planet. It's not an opinion piece, it's the kind of straightforward explanation of accepted scientific knowledge that used to be commonplace under the banner of Equinox or Horizon . After all creationism attempts to refute geological wisdom as surely as it does biological wisdom, but we don't go around calling Dr Iain Stewart a polemicist.

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¹ The C4 website has whacky floating banners that completely screw up the page in Firefox, but seem fine in Internet Explorer. Or rather, the IE tab plugin for Firefox which is about as close to Internet Explorer as I care to get these days.

Got up early this morning. We sat and drank coffee and watched the end of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story "Carnival of Monsters" on UK Gold+1. Very creaky production values but quite entertaining, and a very civilised way to start the day.

Then we flicked over to the Heaven and Earth Show on BBC1, which was staging a small 'debate' between a Creationist, a Christian, and Geneticist Steve Jones. *bangs head on desk* It may take me several hours to stop ranting.

It was your typical example of the Creationist planting a few choice seeds of doubt over evolution which, while absolutely unscientific, are impossible to refute in an interview sound-bite. And since the Creationist only has to create specious doubt while the scientist has to summarise and prove the entire theory of evolution in one sentence, it's really a no-win situation. Thankfully the CofE representative agreed that Creationism doesn't belong in the science classroom, and Steve Jones chose to step back and argue that belief in divinity and the soul are not inherently incompatible with evolution.

Nonetheless, the Creationist was allowed to get away with all the usual tricks: saying that science is just another "competing" theory equal to any other, that "science" is interpreted through the context of our culture and so is not objective fact, that evolution is science's version of a "Just So" story (oh the irony!), and this recent favourite - which I still don't understand - that the mechanism for evolution by genetic mutation is apparently unupported by any evidence (!) and that evolution requires the spontaneous creation of genetic complexity out of nowhere. Apparently. Indeed, although the creationist admitted to not knowing much about genetics, well-informed people had told him that antibiotic-resistant viruses actually have less genetic complexity and therefore don't prove evolution! I'm no expert myself, but I'm staggered that anyone can fundamentally (or wilfully) not understand the process of natural selection and mutation to this extent. Am I missing something that makes this whole 'genetic complexity' argument even remotely logical?

What really annoys me is that Creationists are always pitched against geneticists, yet Creationism by definition refutes not just evolution but also most other branches of science. After all, to say that the Earth and human life are only thousands of years old is contradicted by the evidence of plate tectonics, geology and erosion, radioactive decay and carbon dating, the stratification of fossils and other biological material in a geological context, cosmology and microwave background radiation from the big bang etc. etc. You can't just cherry-pick evolution as being false without invalidating more or less every other branch of science.

Sigh. Why do I even get sucked in by these things?