Why Richard Dawkins is no fun

Recently, Richard Dawkins was interviewed in Salon, promoting his new anti-religion book.

There is nothing terribly surprising in it, but this section is intriguing:

[Salon]: But it seems to me the big "why" questions are, why are we here? And what is our purpose in life?

[Dawkins]: It's not a question that deserves an answer.

Well, I think most people would say those questions are central to the way we think about our lives. Those are the big existential questions, but they are also questions that go beyond science.

If you mean, what is the purpose of the existence of the universe, then I'm saying that is quite simply begging the question. If you happen to be religious, you think that's a meaningful question. But the mere fact that you can phrase it as an English sentence doesn't mean it deserves an answer. Those of us who don't believe in a god will say that is as illegitimate as the question, why are unicorns hollow? It just shouldn't be put. It's not a proper question to put. It doesn't deserve an answer.

I don't understand that. Doesn't every person wonder about that? Isn't that a core question, what are we doing in this world? Doesn't everyone struggle with that?

There are core questions like, how did the universe begin? Where do the laws of physics come from? Where does life come from? Why, after billions of years, did life originate on this planet and then start evolving? Those are all perfectly legitimate questions to which science can give answers, if not now, then we hope in the future. There may be some very, very deep questions, perhaps even where do the laws of physics come from, that science will never answer. That is perfectly possible. I am hopeful, along with some physicists, that science will one day answer that question. But even if it doesn't -- even if there are some supremely deep questions to which science can never answer -- what on earth makes you think that religion can answer those questions?

On reflection, this is probably just a statement of some version of positivist philosophy, which is nothing new. However, hearing it stated this way seems to unintentionally make it sound like, at best, a terribly dull philosophy, and at worst, a heartless and almost dehumanising one.

Actually, reading the sequence of questions makes me think that maybe Dawkins has oversimplified the question (when he says "if you mean, what is the purpose for the existence of the universe..") into such a form that he can claim it to be a nonsense question. But in doing so he seems have dismissed a personal concern for purpose in one's own life as being just as illegitimate as demanding that the universe as a whole have a purpose.

Does he really believe that? If he does, the interviewer was right to express some astonishment.

Anyway, even if he is not as dry a positivist as this interview makes him sound and he allows some legitimacy to the question of how people may find purpose in their life, his dismissal of the relevance of purpose to the universe does not sit well with modern discussion of the anthropic principle in cosmology. It is the apparent co-incidences of the physical constants of our universe that lead to such speculation. Yet Dawkin's attitude would seem to deny that this is a fair question to even ask. At the very least, thinking about ideas like the anthropic principle and the possible multiverse strikes me as intellectual fun, yet it would seem Dawkins attitude seems rather a wet blanket on the issue.


Maybe it would just annoy Dawkins too much if it turned out that the religious impulse had intuited a truth about the universe that science took a few thousand years to confirm, so he just dismisses that as a possibility out of hand.


For the record: I am actually only lukewarm on the anthropic principle and have not really followed the intelligent design argument with much care. I don't think ID in terms of biological evolution is a valid science topic in a school science curriculum, but am happy for the anthropic principle to be covered if any high school science spends much time on cosmology now.


I also know how atheists go on about not needing God to have a sense or awe and wonder from the scientific understanding and observation of the universe. No one need point out to me that Dawkins would say this. Being thrilled by nature is probably a natural impulse that is shared by everyone. The issue of how humans are valued and treated within nature is the more interesting point where materialists and the religious can start to wildly diverge.

Getting off drugs

Theodore Dalrymple has been going on about his quite contrarian views about illicit drugs for a few months now; I think I have not previously mentioned it.

This article gives a summary of his idea: that addiction to drugs (heroin in particular) has been long romanticised, and that the modern assumption that it can only be overcome with medical treatment is wrong:

When, unbeknown to them, I have observed addicts before they entered my office, they were cheerful; in my office, they doubled up in pain and claimed never to have experienced suffering like it, threatening suicide unless I gave them what they wanted. When refused, they often turned abusive, but a few laughed and confessed that it had been worth a try. Somehow, doctors—most of whom have had similar experiences— never draw the appropriate conclusion from all of this. Insofar as there is a causative relation between criminality and opiate addiction, it is more likely that a criminal tendency causes addiction than that addiction causes criminality.

Furthermore, I discovered in the prison in which I worked that 67% of heroin addicts had been imprisoned before they ever took heroin. Since only one in 20 crimes in Britain leads to a conviction, and since most first-time prisoners have been convicted 10 times before they are ever imprisoned, it is safe to assume that most heroin addicts were confirmed and habitual criminals before they ever took heroin. In other words, whatever caused them to commit crimes in all probability caused them also to take heroin: perhaps an adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives.

He goes on to defend his position in this article.

It is certainly a controversial view, and an interesting one from someone who seems so conservative on this point but who is not personally religious. He was interviewed by The Brussels Journal recently, and it is well worth reading.

Moving up in life

Why should only Islam be getting all the bad publicity? It's good to see some attention being given to this aspect of Hinduism:

Like tens of thousands of other untouchables — or dalits — across India yesterday, Mr Cherlaguda ritually converted to Buddhism to escape his low-caste status....

"Untouchability" was abolished under India's constitution in 1950, but the practice remains a degrading part of everyday life in villages.

Dalits in rural areas are often bullied and assigned menial jobs such as removing human waste and dead animals.

The sometimes intense violence against them has led to a migration to the cities, where caste is easier to submerge.

At yesterday's mass conversion of dalits — almost 200,000 changed religion — they all repeated 22 oaths, including never worshipping Hindu gods and never drinking alcohol.

So, you have to give up alcohol to get out of being on the bottom of the social scale. Must be a hard choice for some.

This was from The Age, taken from The Guardian.

Rudd's first hand experience

Kevin Rudd's first hand experiences with North Korea make for very interesting reading in today's Australian. Jasper Becker's background piece is good too.

Japan's economic sanctions have been decided:

Japan's measures include a ban on all North Korean ships entering Japanese ports, a ban on North Korean imports, and barring entry by North Korean nationals other than those living in Japan.

I wonder how this is going to go over in Pyongyang.

The corkscrew into Baghdad

Air and Space Magazine seems to have a lot of its content online. From their website comes this description of the corkscrew approach aircraft landing at Baghdad still use:

Once the plane arrives at about 18,000 feet—still safely beyond the range of weapons like the SA-7 shoulder-fired missile—the pilot banks sharply and descends toward the runway in a slow, tight circle, like someone walking down a spiral staircase. During the spiral the crew keeps an eye out for other air traffic, and for anything coming at them from the ground. After several turns, the pilot pulls out of the rotation with careful timing, straightens out, and lands. The whole thing takes seven to 10 minutes, roughly the same as a regular approach, but it all takes place directly overhead, instead of beginning 20 miles from the runway....

....for passengers, particularly those making their first landing in Baghdad, the corkscrew can be intimidating. “You have no forward-looking vision,” notes Neuenschwander, “so if you’re looking out the side windows, you’re seeing either the sky or the ground. A lot of people tense up, especially if they don’t have much flying experience.” Flying into Baghdad on an Air Serv aircraft, journalist Betsy Hiel recalls “a woman across the aisle gritting her teeth so hard that she snapped one tooth off.”

Ouch.

A spoon full of sugar

Hmm, this is just one of those days where I find little on my scan of the WWW that seems worth blogging about.

Here's a couple of minor things barely worth mentioning:

* a review of a biography of "Mary Poppins" author PL Travers notes that she was not that nice a person (and a real pest for the Disney company, even though they made her rich):

Travers was hardly all sweetness and light. She could be imperious and dictatorial - she bullied illustrator Mary Shepard when they worked together - and was notoriously tough to interview. She would blithely lie about her age and upbringing (she liked to claim her dad owned a sugar plantation). Like her famous creation, she boasted that she "never explained" anything.

...Travers's troubled relationship with her adopted son, Camillus, is more hinted at than detailed. (She failed to adopt his twin brother and then never told him that he was adopted or had a twin. The twins found each other by chance in a pub when they were 17.)....

After long coveting the rights to "Mary Poppins," Disney finally got what he wanted. The deal made Travers a millionaire, but she was deeply conflicted about the movie. She harangued Disney and the writers with pages of notes about items she felt were untrue to the spirit of her books. At the première (which she attended, although not at Disney's invitation), the 65-year-old Travers wept.

* The Departed, Scorsese's return to gangster territory, gets rave reviews, except (oddly) from Margaret on At The Movies. She comments:

It's so violent, it's so vile in the language, you know, particularly the sexual language.

Generally, I have always felt Scorsese is over-rated. I used to think maybe I had to be older to appreciate him, in the same way I came to like some of Woody Allen as I aged. But it hasn't really happened for me. He is obviously very knowledgeable of cinema history, and seems basically a nice enough man, but I find it hard to warm to his subject matter.

* In the Baldwin family, there is no middle ground. Salon reports that Stephen Baldwin is the complete opposite of evil brother Alec, in that he is a born again Christian (of a particularly nutty variety, it would seem) with the ear of the White House. (Well, if you can believe Salon on that sort of thing.) Very odd.

Cats control the population

Long time readers know of my interest in the ongoing research into the weird effects of toxoplasma infection.

Now it turns out that it seems to affect the gender balance of offspring from infected mothers!:

The parasite, toxoplasma, infects around 15% of Britons, but up to 80% of the population in some countries. It is spread by contaminated cat faeces, but also lurks in uncooked pork and beef.

Researchers in the Czech Republic collected medical records from 1,803 newborn babies between 1996 and 2004 and checked them for information on the mothers and babies including gender, the number of previous pregnancies, and the mother's levels of toxoplasma antibodies.

They discovered that women whose antibody count was high - suggesting a substantial infection - had a much higher chance of having baby boys. In most populations the birth rate is around 51% boys, but women infected with toxoplasma had up to a 72% chance of a boy. Toxoplasma causes congenital defects in newborns and can trigger miscarriages, but a link with the gender of newborns has never been identified before.

What other surprises about this bug are out there yet to be discovered?

By the way, this fairly recent study, if I read it right, implicates strong maternal toxoplasma infection with schizophrenia in their adult children. I believe men are much more likely to get schizophrenia than women. Does the discovery that the maternal infection favours boy babies account for this higher rate in men?

Repeat after me: cats really are evil.

About the Iraqi death figures

It's interesting to compare the BBC's report on the latest survey with the report in Nature.

According to the BBC, the latest estimate of 600,000 odd dead:

...is vigorously disputed by supporters of the war in Iraq, including US President George W Bush.

True, but wording it that way gives the impression that it is only supporters of the war who are disputing. Later in the article it makes mention of "critics" and never gives any indication of who they are.

Nature, on the other hand, gives a clear indication that there are critics who are unlikely to be considered "war supporters":

"I doubt it is large as they say," says Jon Pedersen, a social scientist at Fafo, an independent research centre is Oslo, Norway. Pedersen helped run a United Nations study that concluded between 18,000 and 29,000 people died as a result of violence between the start of the war and May 2004.

He says that violence has become more frequent since his study, but doubts whether the real number can be so much bigger than media reports suggest. Iraq Body Count, a website that collates mortality figures from media sources, puts the current figure at around 45,000.

"We are told about at least 30 to 40 deaths per day just from news reports," says Pedersen. "But 500 per day is very different."

Pederson also points out that the pre-invasion death rate recorded by the Al Mustansiriya team is very low. Figures from the United Nations Children's' Fund from before the war put the number at around 13 deaths per thousand per year. If correct, this suggests almost no increase that can be attributed to the conflict.

Further down, the report notes:

Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, says that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts.

Of course, Tim Lambert's unerring faith in statistics, how they are collected (and the objectivity of scientists) leads him him to support the study to the hilt. Funny how a science person can seem to lose all sense of common sense skepticism of their own field. (Can't say he ever shows a sense of humour, or any other likeable characteristics either.)

Here's one thing that strikes me as a bit fishy: the Lancet authors say that the deaths claimed by the families were backed up by death certificates in 92% percent of cases (according to Nature.) Given the poor infrastructure in Iraq since the war, what is the reliability of the information in death certificates? Frankly, I am a little surprised that there were even that many death certificates issued. Is there a financial incentive for relatives to falsely claim a death in the family?

Also, who is responsible for burying the dead in Iraq? Is there the equivalent of an undertaker's profession there? Or do Mosques have a role in this? Is this survey method really the best way they think they can up with to estimate deaths?

Just saying...

A suggestion about STD's

Bad news today on the increasing rate of new sexually transmitted diseases in Australia, including HIV.

Whenever figures like this come out, the experts say that safe sex (at least as far as HIV is concerned) has probably decreased because everyone knows that being HIV positive is more or less treatable now. This sounds very plausible, but the same doctors usually say that the treatment for HIV is not easy, and there are often significant side effects, so people have no reason to be complacent. (Especially when some drug resistance is starting to become more evident, a recent Melbourne study said.) A quick Google search brings up this site with a very long list of articles dealing with various side effects. Doesn't sound like a walk in the park in many people.

So, isn't the issue of the possible unpleasantness and uncertain success of treatment of HIV infection the thing that they ought to be advertising now to discourage people from taking the risk of contracting it in the first place? Maybe they do conduct campaigns of that sort in gay targetted media, but I have my doubts. If they don't, I wonder if it is out of concern for depressing people who are just diagnosed.

It might be the same for chlamydia, in that it is relatively easy to treat but still carries risks of infertility. It's the side effect that should be emphasised then.

A free Big Mac for Peter Singer

For once, Peter Singer says something that I don't object to:

The Princeton University professor - whose book, Animal Liberation, sparked the animal rights movement 30 years ago - told The Guardian he would choose McDonald's over a small independent takeaway because "a big chain has a national and international reputation to protect".

"I see big corporations following what consumers will buy," Professor Singer said.

"If you have sufficiently educated consumers, you can get ethical food from big corporations."

Some suggestions about how to deal with North Korea

These are from another interesting blog I just found, In From the Cold. He suggests various ideas about how to deal with North Korea. Guess we will find out soon enough what the US and China actually will do.

Very cool space station pictures

Found via Futurismic (a blog newly added to my roll) is this site by a guy who takes photos and movies (through his telescope) of the international space station transiting the moon and sun.

I didn't know your amateur telescope could show so much detail of a thing 260 miles away. Very interesting.

Economic growth good for the environment

This short article from Seed would be good to wave around at the next Greens conference. An extract:

The root of the deforestation problem is social and economic. Rather than creating a conflict over resources, economic growth has given the Dominican Republic the opportunity to protect its wild places and to plan its development around them. The Dominican Republic has national parks, and eco-tourists enjoy a wide range of wild areas and the native plants and animals they support. This is due in large part to development—as measured in roads built, high wages, and industrial production. The existence of a stable government encouraged this sort of long-term thinking and has made the ongoing protection of forests possible.

Makes sense really.

Now there's a poison you don't hear about much

Botulism toxin in carrot juice has poisoned a couple of people in Canada.

For some reason, I remember an old episode of Quincy in which some bad chilli was sucked up in a hose left near a public water fountain. People drinking from the fountain got botulism poisoning that way.

Why I remember that episode in particular is not at all clear.

More on defending Islam

Karen Armstrong's continuing "crusade" in defence of Islam was the subject of a long post here on 18 September.

The next day there was a much more detailed criticism of her Guardian article from someone who actually does know a lot more Islamic and Crusades history. It's a very good read, seemingly confirming most of my suspicions about the (un) reliability of Armstrong on this topic.

The writer, Robert Spencer, also has a more recent article on the criticism of Jack Straw's very mild comments against the veil. It's also well worth reading.

Your iPod understands you

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts special reports | Steven Levy on the secrets of the iPod shuffle

See above for an interesting article about randomness, meaning and iPods.

A backgrounder on North Korea

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books

I have posted about this lengthy review of a couple of books on North Korea before, but Blogger search seems to no longer work properly here.

Anyway, it is worth remembering just how crazy North Korea is when thinking about what to do with a (possibly) nuclear armed North Korea.

Also, a few months back I heard Phillip Adams interview one of the very, very few academic semi-apologists for modern North Korea. That's how I read the conversation with Gavan McCormack anyway. Unfortunately, no transcript is available. However, look at what he writes in this article:

It scarcely needs to be said that the main victims of the DPRK state are, and have always been, the people of North Korea. There is general agreement on the basic facts. Approximately 200,000 people—just under 1 per cent of a population of around 23 million—are thought to be held in labour camps. Between one and two million—5 to 10 per cent—are estimated to have died of starvation, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled, mostly to China. Although the DPRK’s peculiar blend of terror, mobilization and seclusion has been slowly losing its coherence since the end of the Cold War, the system still stands, held together by the absolute authority of the ‘Dear Leader’, Kim Jong Il.

Yet set in a historical context, North Korea’s record on this score pales before the sum of suffering inflicted by Japan and the superpowers—not least the US—on the Korean people.

But : the difference is the current nightmare of North Korea is self imposed. It makes little sense to "put in context" a vicious and cruel government that lets ideology lead to mass starvation (see the New Yorker article above) by talking about how much it has suffered under Japan decades ago.

But he does criticise the USA, and that is always enough for someone to be a guest on Adam's show.

UPDATE: this commentary piece from The Times seems pretty well argued to me.

It's not just sharks, snakes, crocodiles, spiders and stingrays

Boy's fight for life after octopus encounter | NEWS.com.au

This happened just north of Brisbane. It's been a while since someone was killed by a blue ringed octopus, but I remember one adult was when I was a child.

Yuck 2

Guardian Unlimited | Science | Stem cell experts seek licence to create human-rabbit embryo

It's hard to keep up with stem cell research issues, but is it any wonder that people do bring up the animal/human embryo issue with headlines like this?

I still have my hunch that, like the "war on cancer" from the 1970's, stem cell research will go on for decades without any sense that it has lived up to its hype.

Not all killer asteroids found yet

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UK to join 'killer' asteroid hunt

I wonder whether people are starting to feel that most major asteroids with potential to hit the earth are already identified, given that every couple of years there is mention of one that might hit the earth sometime in the future. (With later calculations often showing it shouldn't happen after all.)

The story above warns that in fact there is a lot of small rubbish still not spotted:

"The current generation of search telescopes are designed for the objects about 1km across and larger, because if one of those hits, it could cause instant global climate change," said Alan Fitzsimmons, a professor of astronomy at Queen's University Belfast.

"The smaller objects need a larger telescope and a more efficient camera system - they're the kinds of objects Pan-Starrs has been designed to detect.

"Even though they're smaller and don't cause as much damage, there are more of them and they hit more frequently."

Although sub-1km asteroids might not cause devastation on a global scale, they could cause death and destruction at a local and regional level, potentially wiping out millions of lives.

The last significant event like this occurred in 1908, when an asteroid or comet exploded above the Tunguska region of Siberia. The area was sparsely populated and, as a result, did not cause extensive loss of life.