Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

From a fine dissection of the (religious) right's view of evolution over at Science And Politics:

I do not believe in evolution. It is not something you believe in or not: it is something you understand or not.... Evolutionary biology is sitting on such large mountains of strong evidence collected over the past 150 years that it appears impossible that over the next 150 years we will be able to collect an equivalent amount of data challenging it in order to question the validity of evolutionary theory. It is one of the strongest supported theories in all of science. For all practical purposes, evolution (as in 'common descent') is a fact, and natural selection is the strongest of several mechanisms by which evolution operates. There is nothing controversial about this. (Emphasis mine.)

The piece goes on to tease out the relationship between the "pathology" behind the creationist view and other tenets of the right-wing canon, at least in the US. I'm here visiting my family for a week and spent the morning outraged at the Sunday morning television shows, especially the nearly-evil Pat Robertson, who wouldn't quite say, but wouldn't deny, that he thought Muslims and Hindus shouldn't be judges in the US. Makes the Tories' Michael Howard seem reasonable (but only in comparison).

And, since this post was started yesterday (albeit in a country that doesn't celebrate it): Happy May Day!

Also, since I know he likes to be associated with positions that shouldn't be controversial, but still are, happy birthday to Dave Winer! I'll try to make it to the dinner in your honor tonight!

I grew up with this view over the Hudson River from my family's apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The George Washington Bridge is on the left; the Empire State Building is a tiny speck toward the right.

Update: a better version of the montage, and an even bigger one is available by clicking on it or here

Dateline: New York. As a briefly-repatriated expat, I expected to be largely spared the onslaught of election coverage here in the UK. However, I woke up this morning to hear about a small explosion outside the British Consulate in New York. This hits home -- the consulate is on Third Avenue and 52d Street, about a city block from where my father works in New York.

Blair is largely beloved by Americans, to the extent that he's know at all: he "stands shoulder-to-shoulder" with Bush on the war(s) on terror and Saddam, assuaging neocons and those won over by the fear factor, and yet he's still Labour enough to please the Democrats, if not the true lefties.

Out in the blogosphere (which has been much less active than in the US elections), Kos says maybe you should even vote for the Tories, but Samizdata says no, you shouldn't.

From the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto on "Why I'm Rooting for the Religious Right":

One can disagree with religious conservatives on abortion, gay rights, school prayer, creationism and any number of other issues, and still recognize that they have good reason to feel disfranchised....

In the past three elections, the religious right has helped to elect a conservative Republican president and a bigger, and increasingly conservative, Republican Senate majority.

I don't think Taranto understands the meaning of the word "disfranchised".

In a companion piece, Christopher Hitchens talks about "Why I'm Rooting Against the Religious Right": Quoting the New Testament, he points out "that the Eleventh Commandment is not 'Thou shalt speak no ill of fellow Republicans,' but is, rather, a demand for the most extreme kind of leveling and redistribution." As Ed Cone says, "as usual, I find Hitchens funny and smart when he agrees with me."

Meanwhile, NPR reports on the latest skirmish in the right's war on evolution and their attempts to promulgate lies and force religion on the rest of us.

I've been a bit quiet the past week, so here's a very random top ten from my just-completed trip to North America (New Jersey/New York and Toronto). In no particular order, except for number one:

1. My sister's wedding -- Congratulations and Mazel Tov to Allison and Chris!
2. The skeleton of the new Daniel Libeskind extension to the Royal Ontario Museum (unfortunately the plans to build a Libeskind addition to the V&A Museum across the road from my office have been scuppered).
3. The Mekons, "Wild and Blue": my favorite obscure-ish rock'n'roll band in the whole world. But this is a country song, from Curse of the Mekons, one of the few rock records about the end of the Cold War.
4. Hearing my old friend Dennis Blackwell sing.
5. Travel Karma: a free upgrade for one leg of my trip, and nearly not making it back to London on the return flight.
6. Pushing closer to new results from B2K. (More info when we're allowed to talk about it!)
7. Visiting the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, one of the best places to be an astrophysics postdoc (although I'm biased, since I was there 1993-96).
8. New designs for The High Line by Diller and Scofidio, on display at the new Museum of Modern Art, New York.
9. New York blogger/geek dinner with Dave Winer, Scoble, Steve Rubel, and lots of others off the A-list but just as cool (photos here).
10. General Tso's Chicken from Star of China in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

The Guardian has run excerpts from a new collection of Richard Feynman's writings, Don't You Have Time to Think?. In this, written in 1961, he talks about the future of human society and what could happen to physics. First, he's pessimistic:

The future of physics depends on the circumstances of the rest of the world and is not merely a question of extrapolation of the present rate of progress into the future.... One of the most likely things, from a political and social point of view, is that we have soon a terrific war and a collapse.... Physics, fundamental physics, may possibly not recover....

There would be practical problems at that time that would occupy the attention of intelligent people. There would be no fun in it. The new discoveries wouldn't come for a while.

It would not be useful. No one has yet thought of a use of the results of the experiences we have with the high-energy particles. And finally, it is possible that antagonism is produced by the terrible calamity: a universal antagonism toward physics and physicists as a result of the destruction.

Already, there is pressure on physics to be useful. The watershed came in the early 90s, with the cancellation of the Superconducting Super-Collider (SSC), when physicists, after living off of the reflected glory of, and indebtedness toward, geniuses like Feynman himself during the Manhattan project, finally realized we had to be able to justify our budgets to the government and the people, and not just to ourselves.

And of course, Feynman missed one source of "antagonism toward physics": the rise of the religious right and the know-nothing fundamentalist attitudes that come with it.

But he also tried to be more optimistic:

Suppose there is no collapse. How, I don't know, but suppose there is no collapse. Then what? Suppose we can imagine a society somewhat like our own continuing for a thousand years. (Ridiculous!)...

One possibility is that a final solution will be obtained. What I mean is that a set of fundamental laws will be found, such that each new experiment only results in checking laws already known, and it gets relatively more and more boring as we find that time after time nothing new is discovered that disagrees with the fundamental principles already obtained....

[Or,] the questions [could] become more difficult. How will it look then?... Discoveries are made more and more slowly, questions get harder and harder. More and more people find it a relatively uninteresting subject. So it is left in an incomplete state, with a few working very slowly at the edge.

It is possible, of course, that what we call physics will expand. I believe, for example, that physics will expand into the studies of astronomical history and cosmology.... What is the whole history of the development of the universe?... If the laws of physics change with absolute time, then there will be no way to separate the problems of formulating the laws and of finding the history.

This is exactly what has transpired in the nearly half-century since Feynman wrote this: cosmology has become a fully-fledged part of fundamental physics, and the astrophysical laboratory has become as important as terrestrial ones, as, as he predicted, data drips in from particle accelerators more and more slowly at greater and greater cost. We cosmologists are lucky, too, because we have an easier time hawking our wares to the public, with our beautiful pictures and the almost primeval human reaction to the celestial sphere.

Update -- AUT - Israeli boycotts revoked:

AUT’s special council ... voted to revoke all existing boycotts of Israeli institutions.

AUT council has decided to base its policy on providing practical solidarity to Palestinian and Israeli trade unionists and academics, by agreeing a motion committing the union to having a full review of international policy, working alongside NATFHE and the TUC.

UK higher education has a long and proud tradition of defending academic freedom. The struggle to maintain academic freedom whenever it is under threat is one that AUT will always support and this principle will continue to guide our work.

Sally Hunt, AUT general secretary, said: 'It is now time to build bridges between those with opposing views here in the UK and to commit to supporting trade unionists in Israel and Palestine working for peace.'

It's unfortunate that the AUT only gets notoriety for stunts like this; maybe it should spend more time dealing with issues like contract research and low pay.

Of course, this forces us to confront the question of whether, in the post-Thatcher, post-Reagan era (albeit with a Labour government, at least in name), unions can -- or even should -- have any influence beyond the narrow confines of negotiating for their direct constituency (if that), whether they can promote social justice more broadly.

The Smithsonian is taking money from crackpot creationists (there is no other kind of creationist) to let them screen a movie propounding their crackpot (I am trying to make a point here) views. In their report on this, The New York Times manages the relatively nuanced "Although Charles Darwin's theory is widely viewed as having been proved by fossil records and modern biological phenomena, it is challenged by those who say that it is flawed and that alternatives need to be taught." Unlike me, they are unwilling to use the word "crackpot" -- are you getting my point? -- which I think is a shame. Pharyngula points out that arch-sceptic James Randi is offering to do something about it, and admonishes us to help.

Meanwhile, Pharyngula (who is emphatically not a crackpot!) comments on another bit of crackpot dross (actually, he prefers the harsher "moron") called 'Entropy: Enemy of Evolution?' which opens with the manifestly incorrect statement "Very few scientists have considered or pondered the implications of the law of entropy upon the theory of evolution" and descends from there. In addition to his own commentary, Pharyngula points to further excellent rejoinders to the crackpots at Talk.Origins.

Finally, Sean Carroll makes the excellent point that "It's a characteristic feature of crackpots in any field, as seen in the Einstein skeptics as well -- a sneaking suspicion that the so-called experts could be so completely stupid as to miss a point that is so obvious any high-schooler could come up with it. Or an Intellectual Conservative."

P.S. sorry for any access problems over the weekend -- due to a power failure at a nearby station...