The Genius of Charles Darwin — Hosted by Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins examines the legacy of Charles Darwin. The three part programme will be broadcast on Channel Four at 8 pm on Monday 4th, Monday 11th and Monday 18th August.

One for the diary, if you live in the UK, I think. I’m certainly looking forward to it.

(If you’re not in the UK and want to watch this series, keep checking YouTube. I’m sure it will be up there or on Dawkins’s site sometime soon.)

[EDIT: see also Episode One Summary.]

Queerer than We Can Suppose.

Richard Dawkins on the strangeness of science.

Blasphemy!

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

The Beauty and Wonder of Science.

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?

Darwin Day!

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.)

Step Inside the Pearl (No! Don’t!)

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.

Irreligion.

I haven’t actually had chance to read this particular book, yet (will probably wait for the paperback), but it is definitely going on “the list”.

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Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up

by John Allen Paulos

From: RichardDawkins.net.This little book just arrived on December 26th, and I must have missed it in the Christmas shuffle.  

A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind

Are there any logical reasons to believe in God? Mathematician and bestselling author John Allen Paulos thinks not. In Irreligion he presents the case for his own worldview, organizing his book into twelve chapters that refute the twelve arguments most often put forward for believing in God’s existence. The latter arguments, Paulos relates in his characteristically lighthearted style, “range from what might be called golden oldies to those with a more contemporary beat. On the playlist are the firstcause argument, the argument from design, the ontological argument, arguments from faith and biblical codes, the argument from the anthropic principle, the moral universality argument, and others.” Interspersed among his twelve counterarguments are remarks on a variety of irreligious themes, ranging from the nature of miracles and creationist probability to cognitive illusions and prudential wagers. Special attention is paid to topics, arguments, and questions that spring from his incredulity “not only about religion but also about others’ credulity.” Despite the strong influence of his day job, Paulos says, there isn’t a single mathematical formula in the book

“John Allen Paulos has done us all a great service. Irreligion is an elegant and timely response to the manifold ignorance that still goes by the name of ‘faith’ in the twenty-first century.”– Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation 

“He’s done it again. John Allen Paulos has written a charming book that takes you on a journey of flawless logic, with simple and clear examples drawn from math, science, and pop culture. At the end, Paulos has left you with plenty to think about, whether you are religious, irreligious, or anything inbetween.”– Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History, and author of Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries 

“For years John Allen Paulos has been our guide for reading newspapers, playing the stock market, and understanding what all those graphs and charts and formulas really mean. No one knows how to dissect an argument better than Paulos. Now he has turned his rapier wit to the grandest question of them all: Is there a God? Those who are religious skeptics will find in Paulos’s analysis new ways of looking at both old and new arguments, and those who believe that God’s existence can be proven through science, reason, and logic will have to answer to this mathematician’s penetrating analysis.”– Michael Shermer, author of How We Believe, The Science of Good and Evil, and Why Darwin Matters

The Four Horsmen.

“On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.”

Fascinating, informative and thought-provoking.

Sir David Attenborough on God.