Monkey Tale

I have always been a fan of Richard Dawkins, we share a lot of common beliefs which is ironic when you consider that Dakwins’s book is all about getting rid of beliefs. That’s not strictly true of course, the books aim is to help the reader realise that all beliefs should be based on scientific and logical information rather than myths, hearsay, religion or whatever you want to call it.

As an atheist myself this book did not change my opinion in anyway, but it did a good job of informing me about many aspects of religion and the biological and sociological desire to believe in such things. I kind of wondered why Dawkins was writing this book, as although it touched on biology which is his field, the book was more about the psychology of man and the history of religion. However after delving into the book further and thinking about the issue as a whole I began to think: “Why shouldn’t Dawkins write about such a thing?” Why shouldn’t anyone write such things since religion itself is is a self-qualified subject. I could make up my own religion right now if I wanted to, and I would be the worlds leading expert in my chosen faith.

The book provides some powerful arguments, from all different angles. This is a massive body of work that I feel should be read by everyone – atheists and theists alike. I have two main criticisms regarding this book. Firstly, that the book loses a little bit of credibility in my mind by being overly biased. You can tell Richard Dawkins is passionate about his subject, but as I know from my own discussions and arguments about contentious subjects, too much passion can come across as being fanatical. My second criticism is the the final chapters feel a little bit weak, but only in contrast to the rest of the book. I guess a book should slow down near the end, but it just didn’t feel quite right in this case.

Another issue I have is that I think Dawkins missed out an important argument. Saying that, I can see why he may have chosen to do this. I have no issue with good people believing in God, generally their thoughts do me no harm. My biggest issue is that established religions are an infrastructure for power. The simple fact is that give a man the power to control millions of people, he is likely to use it for his own gain, regardless of any personal belief systems. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Christian church has always commanded power, indeed it has been telling people what to do and killing people in the name of “Our Lord” for tens of centuries. People are driven by fear and if they do wrong according to the people that control this power, which is not God but rather the Church of any particular religion then they are punished. I say this because Churches do change the rules and laws that are written in scriptures. In the Christian faith not many people follow the Old Testament, so who are we to pick and choose the words of God? (Dawkins does touch on this point, but omits to mention the damage done by the people in charge of any given religion, but as mentioned earlier, I can see why he may have done this.) Similarly Henry the VIII changed the Church of England for his own reasons – these changes were not the word of God but rather that of an obese, power hungry monarch. He set himself up as Supreme head of the Church of England in place of the Pope and dissolved the monasteries and confiscated their wealth. Today the church of England has around 15 million followers. [source]

To control people, a governing power usually tries to limit the knowledge and intelligence of the people that empower it. This is why when America attacks countries in the Middle East the first targets are television stations, and leaflets are dropped by air, and also why Fox news backs the Republican party with such vigour. Look at the censoring of the media in China. Knowledge is power. The Bible states that’s eating the fruit of knowledge is an evil sin, and it is only in relatively recent years that the Bible has been freely available in English – before that priests, popes and religious leaders could leave the interpretation of the written work up to themselves. This is my problem with religion, its not the faith or the belief in God that I don’t like, its the people in control of that belief system.

One fascinating fact brought to my attention in the God Delusion is that many people consider Jews the murderer of Christ. They seem to forget that Jesus was a Jew himself – after all were he to be a Christian, he would be the ultimate narcissist. The book is filled full of other interesting facts, opinions and beliefs that really do get you thinking about the issue regardless of your personal beliefs. Like me you wont agree with many of them but atleast you will think about the subject in more detail than you could have imagined before.

Every book has its faults (yes, even that book), including this one, but I think Richard Dawkins is a brave man a deserves a medal for writing this important piece or work.

Last year I saw a fantastic film called Idiocracy. The film illustrates in a most humorous way how things could be in several hundred years if stupid people started breeding at a phenomenal rate while smarter people just worked and worried throughout their lives. In this future, the smartest man on the planet is what we would consider very average indeed today. Comedy aside, the film makes some very interesting points, and I believe people are getting stupider over time, although not necessarily because of breeding patterns.

Yesterday I was reading an article posted on Digg.com about why many sci-fi series seem to get canceled. The article suggested that this was because the people that watch sci-fi were a minority target audience and therefore often overlooked. I have a different idea about this. Sci-fi fans tend to be, how shall I put it, geeky. Not all of them, but a larger proportion of people that love Firefly or Stargate SG1 are going to also be interested in science in general, time travel, computers and technology. Geeky things. As a rule geeks tend to be smarter than say hardcore followers of Oprah or the x-Factor. Broadly speaking we could say that people that wonder about the possibility of transporters and time travel are smarter than people that wonder if they could win the X-factor - I feel I do not need to prove this, as its pretty obvious.

Now what has this got to do with why sci-fi shows getting canceled? Well as a sci-fi fan myself, and a self-professed geek I am very skeptical about adverts. In fact I make a conscious effort not to be swayed by what the little stories on TV tell me. I try to judge a brand by its reputation and my experience with it, if some famous guy on TV tells me “We care about our customers” I wonder to myself why they need to try and convince me about it. I am one of those annoying people that curses at adverts and really can’t believe that they work - but they must do. I’m pretty sure that the more educated and intelligent a person, the less likely they are to be swayed by advertising on TV, so it makes sense for television producers to avoid targeting this minority audience that are less likely to buy into the adverts that support their programs.

I saw a good example of this dumbing down last night. There was a program on about Steven Hawkins which sounded pretty interesting except in reality it was rather lame. At one point it described a known phenomenon that happens on the quantum level, when for a fraction of a microsecond matter and anti matter spontaneously exist canceling each other out. (Sound familiar?). Except instead of using the words matter and anti-matter this show called them “little particles” and illustrated them as glowing snooker balls. I think its pretty sad if a science show can’t even use a term like anti-matter for fear of overwhelming its audience. The show obviously wanted to appeal to the largest market at the cost of a more detailed and intelligent exploration into physics. It is well known that Hawkins himself was told that his book sales would half each time he printed a formula in his book a Brief History of Time, as he put it “Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in one equation…” Surely someone wanting to read such a book must be prepared to read more than one equation.

In the UK there has been some concern that exam results may be getting easier and easier. Many people can’t understand how year on year students get better and better exam results and yet kids don’t seem any smarter than they have always been. It has been suggested that the reason is because exams today are not about the understanding of facts and figures, and the meaning of a subject but instead are about the exam itself: students learn how to pass exams. In 2006 the guardian newspaper reported on this in an interesting article. It stated:

Ellie Johnson Searle, the director of the Joint Council for Qualifications, welcomed the results, which follow a series of curriculum reforms designed to make the subject “more accessible”.
“The turnaround in mathematics - both in overall numbers and in achievement - is encouraging in the first year of the new specifications,” she said.
However, a report from the government’s exam watchdog this year found that the changes had left some teachers “shocked and appalled” at the “unacceptable dumbing down” of the course.
Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, said it was a mistake to try to attract more students to maths A-level “by making it more accessible, in other words, easier”

Similarly the Times newspaper reported in 2007 that:

Pupils taking GCSE exams will be asked multiple choice questions for the first time and be allowed to take unlimited resits.
It has also emerged that, under a planned overhaul of the system, up to half of GCSE English marks would be awarded for basic skills such as punctuation.
The planned reform of the exam system has fuelled accusations that testing standards are being lowered. Bethan Marshall, a senior lecturer in English education at King’s College London, told the Times Educational Supplement: “If you make 50 per cent of the GCSE about doing the basics, you are dumbing down.
The subject is about so much more than being able to communicate accurately. And if you’re still doing basic skills at GCSE level, Heaven help you. It’s pretty boring.”

I’m not sure if these proposals were followed through, but the fact that people were considering them is worrying to me anyway.

Assuming for a moment that there is evidence that exam results are getting easier, why would this happen? Who does it benefit? The government and educational institutions are under pressure to work to statistics. All hell would break lose if the pass rate went down year on year, so essentially education is being targeted to the majority. Forget the moral implications here for a moment, I’m not saying that eduction should be for an elite few, simply that it is possible that we are all being dumbed down - not just by the media.

In general people like things that are easy. I recently read a book about web usability by Steve Krug called, Don’t make me think! The title itself tells you a lot about what is perceived as usability these days: make everything easy. There is logic in this approach but I still worry that things might become too easy one day and no one will have to think any more. I wonder if the the film Idiocracy might be closer to the mark than it first seems.

I think the theory of evolution is a great one, it is a very simple way of explaining how people, animals, plants and all of the living things came to exist in their many wonderful and wide ranging forms. Many scientists now take the theory of evolution as true, and those that don’t often believe this because of a conflict with their personal religious beliefs. Evolution is happening right now all around us, and it will continue to happen. The problem a lot of people have with evolution, myself included is that it doesn’t explain what happened before life existed. Many scientist say that the building blocks of life could have evolved out of simpler forms into basic DNA molecules, or possibly RNA originally. Ok, lets assume for a minute this is true, what about before then? If we go back far enough we eventually get to a point where we have to ask ourselves: How did the first matter come into existence?

Well there is the big bang theory of course, but where did that matter come from? It can’t just appear out of nowhere, and it cant have just been there for ever can it? Other theories include the big crunch theory and various combinations of energy and light converting into matter but none of these theories really explain where the very first matter - the first of anything came from.

I have a theory about this, but my limited understanding of quantum mechanics may hinder my ability to explain it. As I understand it, in quantum theory matter has a probability assigned to it of its location and existence. Wikipedia explains it more eloquently than I can:

“Generally, quantum mechanics does not assign definite values to observables. Instead, it makes predictions about probability distributions; that is, the probability of obtaining each of the possible outcomes from measuring an observable. Naturally, these probabilities will depend on the quantum state at the instant of the measurement. There are, however, certain states that are associated with a definite value of a particular observable. These are known as “eigenstates” of the observable (”eigen” can be roughly translated from German as inherent or as a characteristic). In the everyday world, it is natural and intuitive to think of everything being in an eigenstate of every observable. Everything appears to have a definite position, a definite momentum, and a definite time of occurrence. However, quantum mechanics does not pinpoint the exact values for the position or momentum of a certain particle in a given space in a finite time; rather, it only provides a range of probabilities of where that particle might be. Therefore, it became necessary to use different words for (a) the state of something having an uncertainty relation and (b) a state that has a definite value. The latter is called the “eigenstate” of the property being measured. “

So to surmise, matter can exist at a set location or not, we do not know until we have observed or measured its existence. (Even weirder things happen when it is observed, but I wont go into that). So what does this have to do with my little theory on how the first matter came to be? To understand this we need to think about what it was like before there was any matter. There was space - infinite space. Not the stuff we think of with satellites, planets and stars, there was just space - nothing else. This would have been going on for an almost infinite amount of time, infinite in fact until the first matter came to exist (So you could say approaching infinite).

Matter exists now; we know this, so we can say for sure that the odds now of matter existing are 1 in 1. Quantum theory states that a particle has a probability of existence and location and given an infinite amount of time, no matter how low the odds are for a particle of matter to exist initially, it would surely happen - as it has. So we could say that matter came to exist because over an infinite amount of time it would have to exist. We know that because matter does exist now, the probability of it existing in the past must have been above 0. Its wasn’t luck or chance - it was a mathematical certainty.

Maybe the matter or light, or energy or whatever it was that first came to be evolved. If it was not very good at existing it would cease to be until the process happened again this time with a more suitable particle of matter until eventually we have matter through out the universe. Maybe it happened time and time again (and will continue to happen). Maybe this matter was pulled together by gravity and created the big bang/ Maybe the matter had some sort of atomic explosion and that caused the big bang, I don’t know. Maybe the big bang never happed.

Well, that’s my idea anyway. As always I would be interested to know your thoughts on this.

This is one of those questions that has bothered me a bit for a while until I found the answer, now I am more bothered. Think about the question before I give you the answer. How do TV broadcasters report that say 10 million people watched a certain soap opera on TV yesterday?

Although Television sets do emit an electromagnetic signature which is used by detector vans, this is a local event and broadcasters cant measure all of the TV sets in a set country at once. When asking friends about this I got a variety of responses. One of them is that some TVs are implanted with a special device that sends the data to the broadcasters, but the flaw to this is that TV ratings have been happening for many decades, before such technology was viable. Another response is that a sample of people are phoned up and asked what they are watching, but surely, at least one of the people I have spoken to about this subject would have received at least one phone call in their life time asking what they were watching?

The actual answer is a combination of both possibilities suggested above. Apparently, using a variety of methods a small (supposedly representative) proportion of the population is asked to record the results of what they watched. My problem with this is that these results can never be 100% accurate. Similar methods are used to predict the winner of a presidential race, and as we have seen these figures can be manipulated or miscounted. I was really hoping there was a hi tech explanation to this question -  indeed some people do apparently have devices inside their televisions to report what they are watching, but its not the answer I was hoping for.

I would be interested to know if anyone has been part of a rating survey. If so, please leave a comment below.

In my last post I talked briefly about religious tales and stories from the past. I was hesitant to write about such things as I know some people are easily offended when options are presented to them contradictory to their own religious or spiritual beliefs (Are they the same thing?) The more I think about this, the more absurd this seems. Why is it that someone can tell me that god does exist and I am not offended and yet I can barely hint at the possibility that maybe there is no god.

As for my own belief in a god, I’m undecided on this matter – I don’t have all of the evidence, and I doubt that I ever will, however based on what I know already I believe that it is improbable. I’m not going to try and force this on anyone - feel free to believe in whatever you want, I wont be offended.

I first realised that its difficult to talk freely about religion when I was 15 years old. I was having a discussion with a boy that was in my class about religion. He was, and no doubt still is a devout Muslim. Without realising I might offend, I said that I did not believe in any god and how could everyone’s god exist when many religions state that there is only one god. Instead of providing a good counter argument (and they do exist) to prove me wrong he punched me several times in the head. Being a junior boxing champion he gave me a black eye and a split lip. This did not prove anything to me except that feelings can get in the way of serious discussion. I was honestly curious about his faith and wanted to know more. I did not know at the time that religion was a topic not to be touched. Although I have no personal faith system, I believe hitting people is bad. I am also believe this is the case for most religions.

I have since then met many intelligent people that are strongly religious and have been able to discuss religious matters with them. I am always slightly guarded about such discussions as I do not want to provoke or offend. For me to state such a thing as “Your religion/belief system/moral values are wrong” is insulting the very core of that person and is essentially telling them that not only do I disagree with them, but that I think they are wrong for believing such a thing.

I have noticed a similar response regarding certain sports. Several times now I have been threatened because I don’t support a certain football/rugby team. Once I was in a Liverpool pub and whilst visiting the toilet three men cornered me and asked me what football team I supported. I said I did not support any team but if I did it would be some lowly team that needs all of the support they can get. I was told that if I was to say that I supported Manchester United (a big rival team and nearby city) they would have kicked my head in. Ok, to be fair this attitude was not helped by the fact that they were intoxicated, but I can never imagine myself saying such a thing to anyone regardless of team/religion/age/race/gender.

I believe that team mentality has a lot to do with these heightened feelings - I believe a group experience increases ones emotions towards a belief system exponentially. If someone is to criticise the belief behind these feelings, either by stating such or just by not believing they are seen as attempting to essentially reduce the perceived value of them.

There are many things I believe in very strongly. For example, I feel very strongly that racism is a bad thing. I live in a town where not all of the people feel the same way as me, however I would never hit someone for feeling resentment towards another person just because of their race. I would much prefer to discuss the issue with them (as I have done) and hope that some of the things I have to say might open their eyes to new possibilities. I also know that if anyone is going to be outwardly angry about it its them, not me. In fact I have been physicaly threatend becuase I have said that racism is a bad thing.

There is also a strong relation between a parents belief systems and that of his/her children. We all know people that support the same football team as their dad, vote for the same party, share the same faith and feel the same way about other issues such as the aforementioned racism. I suspect this is because the family group is the beginning of the group mentality.

Either way, I wish in this day and age we could have a serious discussion about our beliefes without the fear of retribution.

I was reading a fascinating book last night called The Know It All Book: 365 Steps to Being Very Clever Indeed. The book is as it sounds filled with various facts and interesting pieces of information. Being not a particularly religious web monkey, the book does contain rather too much information about faith for my liking, however I believe all knowledge is useful and I respect the beliefs of others.

One piece of information that struck me was that many scientist believe that Goliath from the David and Goliath story could have suffered from a pituitary gland defect causing his great height and tunnel vision that would allow David to sneak up on him and kill him.

This got me thinking. What other mythical and religious stories could be explained by modern day science? I know I have to tread lightly here because I do not want to upset of offend others who hold their faiths dearly. However part of me thinks why should it matter after all religious faith is viewed by believers aside from science isn’t it? Even if somehow someone disproved the existence of God, people would still believe. Regardless, I hope that I do not upset of offend anyone with what I am about to write as it is certainly not my intention.

The Burning Bush is a religious metaphor that has been interpreted by various faiths in different ways. In the book of Exodus it is described as the bush that was on fire, but was not consumed by the flames. It was burning, but there was no fire. I began to think about this. There are certainly plants today that burn you but do not have flames, from types of nettles to chilli plants. Could it be that such metaphors are literal translations that have been lost or changed somewhat over the centuries? I’m not saying this is so, but I wonder what stories and tales that have been past down, written, translated and rewritten could have been based on real life examples of nature and science?

Written By Simon Keat Bsc Phd

There is an ever growing body of evidence that supports the idea the earth is warming at an increased rate as a result of mans activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. In the next 50 years it is predicted that most parts of the UK and Europe will warm by 3-5°C. One important predicted impact this will have is that species will shift their ranges towards the poles as the earth warms. A particularly notable example of this is the apparent sightings of great white sharks, typically from South Africa, off the coast of Cornwall and Devon this summer. Insects have also been following this trend of poleward range expansions with many documented examples of northerly range expansions in Europe.

The small red-eyed damselfly has expanded its range over the last 30 years into northern Europe and in 1999 crossed the English Channel and became the first recorded example of a migrant damselfly establishing colonies in the UK. Since its arrival in Essex in 1999 this species has rapidly increased its range in the UK and can now be found at sites from Devon to East Yorkshire. It might seem obvious to assign the rapid range expansion of this species to global warming, however as with all scientific questions it may not be as simple as it initially seems.

In southern Europe the small red-eyed damselfly takes one year to complete its life cycle but a study of the life cycle of this species in the UK showed it had a 2 year life cycle. So it might be that this species has changed its life cycle, allowing it to expand northwards into cooler areas because its development has slowed to 2 years, not because of global warming. The point I’m trying to illustrate is that scientists must look carefully at the evidence before assigning it to a particular cause like global warming. There is also a counter argument that governments will only act when the evidence is overwhelming, so it’s in our interest to paint a worst case scenario picture to get action from the government.

Ok, this doesn’t sound as interesting at first as it really is. Dictyostelium discoideum is not really a mould and is only sometimes slimy. In fact its a form of ’social amoeba’.

What is really interesting about it is that normally these amoeba live alone, but when starved of food the work together to form a structure millimeters long that is able to reach towards light. After the structure is formed spores are released in an effort to continue survival.

This process was first discovered in 1947 by John Tyler Bonner. Scientist today are still fascinated by the fact that these brainless creatures can work together to ensure their survival. It is believed that these amoeba secrete chemical signals once they start to starve and this is what cause this seemingly intelligent organisation.

There are many creatures on this planet that work together in similar ways such as bees, ants and termites, but I think slime-mould aggregation is a particularly amazing example.

This is rather a controversial question I know but it is something I have wondered about for a while. Before people start writing in, let me point out that I have lived in the country most of my life so I am no way trying to insult country people. Sorry about the picture, but I just couldn’t resist!

People that live in cities generally have to be more aware of certain dangers that just aren’t found in the generally slower pace of the country, namely lots of people. When you have lots of people sharing the same space and resources you tend to get more danger. This I think we an all agree on. I have witnessed a robbery, an attempted robbery, vandalism many times and theft, all in different towns and cities. In the country I have not seen any such crime, probably because there are less people to cause it.

When people are faced with challenging difficulties they generally learn how to deal with these difficulties if they are to survive, a small example of Darwinism. In my humble opinion, city people are slightly more “street wise”, presumably this is due to the additional stimulus of an active and slightly more dangerous environment. So to reiterate my original question, does living in a city make you smarter?

A counter argument is that these days many wealthy people are buying up all the homes in the country, this is certainly the case in England. Many of these homes are in fact second homes or holiday homes. Although I dispute the idea that wealth is linked to innate intelligence, I am pretty confident that a privileged background and private education helps. Around 50% of students at the leading universities of Cambridge and Oxford are from the 7% that went to private schools. [source]

I think there is no real way to prove or disprove this idea, but I would be interested to hear about anyone else’s opinions on this matter.

As mentioned in my introductory post, a monkey could allegedly write the complete works of Shakespeare given enough time, due to random key bashing. Given infinite time and pure randomness then all and every event can and will happen, as infinite is never ending.

However, I have a problem with this theory. You see I don’t think a monkey could hit keys purely randomly, just as people cant. For example ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 10. A big proportion of people pick the number 7 straight away. Why? Because they like it, and it is very often a persons “favorite number” and is considered lucky by some. Most people do not pick the number 1 or 10 because they don’t consider it in the range of 1-10, however, clever people will pick these numbers to try and catch you out. After 7 people tend to pick other odd numbers, in my experience 3, 5 and 9 are the most common. People tend to have a blindness to the number 2 and the numbers 4, 6 and 8 aren’t picked very often. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself, ask someone. First of all think about the sort of person they are, are they likely to be the sort of person who would pick 7 straight away? If they are not, are the likely to be clever and pick 1 or 10? Already we have narrowed down the probability from 1 in 10 to 1 in 7, and with a bit of guess work we can narrow it down further. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule.

Another question to ask people is “Think of a Jungle Animal”. If you can pressure them to answer quickly they are quite likely to pick a Lion, even though Lions don’t live in the jungle. Similarly “Pick a garden vegetable” tends to result in the person choosing “Carrot”. Its a great little party trick!

My point is people don’t do randomness very well, the human brain is actually trying to emulate randomness but is a slave to previous ideas and experiences. A monkey has similar thought processes and is no different in respect to randomness.

Ok then, if we can’t use people or animals to create the pure random factor needed for our Shakespearian plays, then we could use a computer couldn’t we? No, computers cant do random either. When a computer program executes a random function, it is actually just picking a number from a very long list of numbers or a mathematical algorithm which appears random. Such functions are called pseudo-random number generators.

Even if you shake a dice or flip a coin, its not really random, as the outcome is determined by many factors such as the position of the dice before you throw it, the speed in which it is thrown, the temperature and pressure of the air around it to name but a few.

So, how do we get randomness? Some natural events are completely random such as radioactive decay. Measuring such things can give you true randomness. This is not to say a monkey or a computer couldn’t write the complete works of Shakespeare, it just means it wouldn’t be done in a  completely random way.