Gary William Murning Online

The following five phrases all fall into the “I never want to hear it again”-category.

1. Two rule-breaking housemates go to Big Brother jail.
2. And God created…
3. John Leslie.
4. I do not feel sufficiently committed to your material to offer representation.
5. Credit crunch.

Especially if they’re all used in the same sentence.

Now, before I post this link, let me just preface it with a wee disclaimer.

1. I know this isn’t typical of Americans. Most are surprisingly normal, once you get to know them (although you, my friend, can be a bit of a nutter when you’ve had a few… or even when you haven’t ) So I’m not American-bashing.
2. Christians are people, too. And a large percentage of them are actually really great human beings who think Darwin rocks and don’t even believe in Hell anymore. So this isn’t a Christian-bashing piece.
3. Stupid people deserve respect. They are… oh, sorry, no, wait! Scratch that. This is a stupid-people-bashing piece!

So, to the article. This just cracked me up. Not only because it’s just so amazingly self-centred and disproportionate (sorry, people, God’s a bit preoccupied in China and Burma right now), but also because, well, it’s got a former beauty queen (I’m assuming that that means she’s ugly now) and someone called Rocky in it.

Oh, and if that doesn’t make you smile (I am, admittedly, easily pleased) how about this?

“These prices will come down, just like the walls of Jericho came down in the Bible.”

Does this mean he’s planning on sounding his horn?

Richard Dawkins on the strangeness of science.

Oh, damn. Now I’ll have to find another silly law to break on an almost hourly basis. Any suggestions?

I was going to write a “proper” post today but — what with having tech issues (which delayed the start of my writing day) — I’m afraid I’ve had neither the time nor the inspiration.

So I’m going to share this new discovery with you, instead. New to me, at least. A genuinely clever and funny comedian called George Carlin.

WARNING: Contains stong language.

PART TWO.

“The mind of God is music resonating through ten dimensional hyperspace.”

Michio Kaku.

I bet no one’s teaching that in Sunday School today

My favourite quote of the decade so far:

“I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.”

Ricky Gervais My Argument with God.

I’m always rather shocked when science is accused of being “cold” or bereft of “meaning” by those outside the field. As a non-scientist who has been increasingly drawn to the discipline over recent years, it was in fact the sense of beauty and wonder I felt when I read about Darwin, Chaos Theory, the Big Bang etc that prompted me to read and learn more. I didn’t feel threatened or afraid, I felt exhilerated and, yes, a little surprised that I could understand a lot of this stuff (albeit in a fairly rudimentary way.)

So today I’d like to share this video with those of you who haven’t already seen it (I’m also including a transcript, but I would urge you to watch the video if you can.) The article was written by Richard Dawkins on a trip to Galapagos and originally published on The Guardian website.

The Lava Lizard’s Tale.

TRANSCRIPT:

A guide at the Natural History Museum stated confidently that a particular dinosaur was 70,000,008 years old. When asked how he could be so precise he replied, “Well it was 70 million when I started this job, and that was eight years ago.” The evident experience of Valentina Cruz, our wonderful Galápagos naturalist guide, suggests that I must add a similar margin to the estimate of 100 years that she gave us for the age of the black lava fields on the island of Santiago. The exact date of the great Santiago eruption is not recorded, but it definitely happened on one particular day in one particular year around 1900. I shall call it SV day (Santiago volcano day). I need to seem as precise as the museum guide, although the exact date doesn’t matter. Perhaps it was January 19 1897, 100 plus eight years before my visit to the island.

SV day was one day in the late 19th century, a day on which, elsewhere in the world, somebody’s grandfather was born at some particular hour. Somebody else died. A moustached young man in a straw boater met his true love for the first time and was never the same again. Like every day that has ever been, it was a unique day. Every second of it. It also was the date of the great Santiago volcano, the one that made the lava fields that I walked this January in the company of lava lizards, Tropidurus albemarlensis, although I knew it only when they moved and betrayed their camouflage.

Lava lizards are pretty much the only things that do move over these barren fields of black, clinker-ringing rock. And as they do so their splayed hands are feeling - though they do not know it - the fingerprints of past time. Fingerprints? Past time? Wait, that is the theme of the lava lizard’s tale.

Santiago was one of the four Galápagos islands on which Charles Darwin landed in 1835, and it was the only one where he spent any time, camping for a week while Captain Fitzroy took the Beagle to fetch fresh supplies. Darwin called it James, for he and his shipmates used the English names of all the islands: the evocative Chatham, Hood, Albemarle, Indefatigable, Barrington, Charles and James. He and his small camping party had trouble finding a clear spot to pitch their tent, so thickly did the land iguanas carpet the ground. Today there are no land iguanas left on Santiago. Feral dogs, pigs and rats did for them, although there are still plenty of land iguanas on other islands of this iconic archipelago, while the closely related marine iguanas abound on all the major islands including Santiago.

The black lava fields of Santiago are an unforgettable - almost indescribable - spectacle. Black as a female marine iguana (of course the simile really should go the other way) the rock is called rope lava, and you can soon see why. It is drawn out and plaited in twisted ropes and pleats, folded and gathered like a black silk dress, coiled and whorled in giant fingerprints. Fingerprints, yes, and that brings me to the point of the lava lizard’s tale. As the lizard scuttles over the black lava of Santiago it is treading the fingerprints of history, rolled out by the sequence of particular events that tran-spired, minute by minute, on one particular day late in Darwin’s century, marking the minutes of that day, the day of the Santiago volcano.

There cannot be many other ways to see, laid out before you, a complete history, second by second, of one particular day, more than a century ago. Fossils do the same thing but over a much longer time scale. The molecules of a fossil are not the original molecules of the animal that died. Even fossil tracks, like those Mary Leakey found at Laetoli, don’t really do it. It is true that Laetoli shows you the exact places where two individual Australopithecus afarensis (those diminutive hominids carrying chimpanzee brains around on human legs), perhaps a mated couple, placed their feet during a particular walk together. There is a sense in which these footprints are frozen history, but the rock that you see today is not as it was then. That couple walked in fresh volcanic ash which later, over thousands of years, solidified and compacted to make rock. The lava ropes and pleats of Santiago, those giants’ fingerprints, are still composed of the very same molecules that were frozen into precisely those positions, only a century ago. And the time scale over which the distinct ropes and pleats were laid down is a time scale of seconds.

Tree rings do it on a time scale of years. Where the whorls of lava fingerprinting are laid down second by second, and fossils are laid down by the millions of years, each tree ring marks exactly one year. Thick rings or thin label good growth years or poor and, because every sequence of half a dozen years or so has its own characteristic pattern of good and poor years, the patterns can be recognised, again and again in different trees, as labels of particular clusters of years. Old trees and young trees show the same fingerprints so, by counting rings and daisy-chaining the patterns from increasingly ancient wooden relics, archeologists can compile a catalogue of fingerprints outspanning the longest-lived tree.

Something similar can be done with sediment patterns laid down on the sea bottom and revealed in cores of mud taken up in deep sampling tubes. And, over the longer time span of hundreds of millions of years, the named strata of the geological series are, in their own way, fingerprints of time. What is so remarkable about the lava fields of Santiago is that these fingerprints were set out on the timescale that we humans deal with every second of our lives, the time scale of musical notes, the time scale of an artist’s brush, the time scale of everyday actions and the stream of human thought.

This is a real thought for a surreal landscape. And the Galápagos islands are replete with images that could have come straight from a surrealist’s canvas. A tiny desert island off Santa Fe (Barrington to Darwin) looks fit for Man Friday except that instead of palm trees there are giant cactuses. As if the Arizona desert had been transplanted into an azure sea; no surrealist could have done it better. And what are sea lions doing in the Arizona desert, to say nothing of shocking pink flamingos, equatorial penguins, or flightless cor morants earnestly hanging their impotent, stubby wings out to dry? As for the large flounder that I saw when snorkelling off North Seymour Island, it was pure Salvador Dalí. Changing colour to match the corals over which it slid like an oval carpet, I would certainly not have spotted it if Valentina had not gracefully dived to point it out to me. It was only later that my wife compared the flounder to the flowing, bending watch of a Dalí painting. And wasn’t that very painting, the one with the bent watches, called The Persistence of Memory ? Not a bad title for the lava fields of Santiago, scuttling ground of the Galápagos lava lizards.

Reality, if you go to the right place, and see it in the right way, can be stranger than a surrealist’s imagination. No wonder Darwin drew his early inspiration from these enchanted islands.

 Still can’t see the beauty and wonder?

To mark Darwin’s birthday, I’d like to take a few moments to share with you some of the incredible illustrations from The Voyage of the Beagle – Darwin’s account of the second survey expedition of H.M.S. Beagle. Ideas formed on the journey would ultimately lead to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

To see the full-size versions, click on image or visit the image page on Darwin Online.

(Please note: Darwin was not the illustrator. Illustrator details can be found here.)

A few years ago, I went on a small adventure — a “journey” into the realm of Spirit and Other Such Ephemeral Delights. I studied Wicca, Witchcraft, bits and bobs of Ritual Magick, Shamanism, you name it, I read about it and saw the possibility of using it positively in a purely symbolic way. I saw benefits in visualisation and meditation, and I even found that runes and the Tarot could be really effective at “framing” and “sorting” things I already knew. I liked the earth-based belief systems, because they possessed an (at times rather superficial) awareness of our relationship with “the planet”, and the concept of “oneness” had a poetic appeal. But beyond that, I never “believed” in the way that the vast majority do.

Oddly, this didn’t hinder me in the least when my time came to take over the Yahoo group of eclectic Wiccans I’d joined about two months earlier. Apparently, the existing group owner (who’d been doing this stuff for decades!) had me down as a “natural” (for “natural”, read “mug”.) I was already considered an authority by the group and, one small power struggle aside, my transition from ordinary bloke to know-it-all eclectic Wiccan took, in total, about three months.

I made some genuine and sincere friends there, let me first make that clear. I didn’t set out to “infiltrate” the group so that I could write about it later (though I’m doing it now, and may write more in the future, this was not my intention at the time.) I was aware that the majority had a very literal interpretation of things that I only viewed as symbolic — but I managed to skirt round that. I was creative. With a little imagination (a very telling phrase), it’s amazing just what can be achieved.

Today, I find even my non-mystical interpretations of the “spiritual” etc. relatively worthless. I’ve found more effective methods of ordering my thoughts, relaxing and motivating myself. And as for the dreamcatcher-flogging, show-me-your-Chakras-and-I’ll-show-you-mine hordes, I despair at the way their brand of escapism is, as Mike pointed out here, being legitimised — and even funded by the tax-payer!

Below is Episode Two of Richard Dawkins’ Enemies of Reason series — titled, very appropriately, “The Irrational Health Service”. Episode One is also available through YouTube, but I feel this is the really important one. Please try to spare a few minutes to watch it and let me know what you think.

Sorry?… Oh. What happened to the group? You don’t really want to know… do you?

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Part Five.