Is the world flat? Is the world round?

About two months ago I revived my Quora account.  This was, in retrospect, a mistake.  The question and answer process is quite hopeless, even when compared to Reddit, and since that time I have got a dailyish email digest of questions and answers.

The first day’s missive wasn’t too bad.  There was a nice mix of physics (what if a grain of sand at ~c hit the Earth? – not much really) and theo-scepticism (ie don’t two passages in the bible contradict each other – perish the thought that the bible might be errant!).  The second was good with some stuff about electrons, quarks and ethics.

The next day there was a trick maths question (written to imply addition, but actually leaving other operations open) and then they kept coming.  The most recent versions are of the ilk “A couple go to the movies, they have two children together, he has three children and she has four, of which two have two children each while his children only have one each.  How many people went to the movies?” – the answer (noting that I have not checked) is two.  The couple went to the movies, not the couple and all their progeny.  The answer for the latter, unasked question is 14.

Similarly, with the farmer who takes X eggs from a population of Y eggs.  He’ll have (in his immediate possession) X eggs.  If he owns all the chickens that laid the eggs and the law says ownership of a chicken means ownership of all eggs laid by that chicken, then he owns (and thus has) Y.  It’s not a maths question, it’s a vagueness of the word “has” question.

Anyways … less than two weeks in there was this question “Is The Flat Earth Society serious?”  Then I started getting more evolution denial questions (How did the Platypus come to be if evolution does not explain it?)  And the flat earth questions became more common and, frankly, more troll-like.  I have to admit that I have looked at a couple, but in the past week or so the headlining topics have been:

Have you ever met a flat-Earther who finally converted to globe Earth? What made him/her change his/her mind?

Can you show an example of some perpendicular object viewed from far away that is seemly tilted due to the curvature of the earth?

Why can't the ISS take a picture of Earth and prove to the Flat Earth Society that Earth is not really flat?

Can someone show me solid proof of the earth being a round planet and not flat, other than NASA and their photos?

Perhaps I am to blame for clicking on a couple of these topics, but I am getting pretty sick of them.  There’s the constant battle between the monkey brained part of me that does want to know what an actress that I don’t know who starred in a show that I didn’t watch looks like today and the rational brained part that knows that 1) even if I did want to see what that actress looks like, I’ll be forced to look at photos I have even less interest in before getting my endorphin reward of seeing what I was seeking, and 2) letting myself be click-baited today allows the machine hone its click-baiting skills to get me again in the future.

So, I am going to purge myself of future interest in the stupid questions by stating here and now that the Earth is flat.

In fact, it’s very, very flat with a deviation of less than 0.2% from a perfect oblate spheroid and about 0.33% from a perfect sphere.

If the Earth were entirely covered in water, and ignoring the moon, the surface would still be an oblate spheroid because that’s the shape it would assume such that the forces zero out – the combination of gravity and centripetal force due to rotation – which is another way of saying that the surface of the Earth is flat (in terms of spacetime).

What they should be saying, if they aren’t just trolls, is that the Earth is a disk – which it clearly isn’t.

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Part of the “controversy” is that a YouGov survey concluded that a ridiculously high proportion of “millennials” believe that the Earth is flat.  However, the survey was as bad as a Dolly quiz.  “Dolly” was a teenage girl’s magazine which used to have hilariously bad quizzes, so “Dolly quiz” is my go-to smackdown on any poorly worded survey – the YouGov survey is worse than usual.  These, I kid you not, were the survey question and options:

Q: Do you believe that the world is round or flat?

Option 1: I have always believed the world is round

Option 2: I always thought the world is round, but more recently I am skeptical/have doubts   

Option 3: I always thought the world is flat, but more recently I am skeptical/have doubts   

Option 4: I have always believed the world is flat

Option 5: Other/Not sure

So what does “flat” mean (they mean planar, don’t they)?  What does “world” mean (should they not have used the term “Earth”)?  Can’t the Earth be both flat and round (isn’t a standard dinner plate both flat(ish) and round(ish))?  What does “always” mean (I have no clear recollection of what I believed when I was 4 years old, but I am reasonably confident that, when I was two, I had no belief about the shape of the planet, so doesn’t that mean that I have not always believed the Earth is spherical)? Why skip between “believed” and “thought” (are not thinking and believing distinct)?

I’d have to go with Option 5.  Not only that, I think (believe?) that anyone who answered anything other than Option 5 is either lying or misunderstood the question (as asked).

Of course, you could interpret the question and give an answer based on your interpretation rathe than the question as asked, but people will interpret the question differently.  The Earth isn’t round, it’s an oblate spheroid (oh ok, it’s round if you cut it through the equator, but nowhere else – although the cuts do go from almost perfectly round to mostly round as the cuts get closer to going through both poles).  And it’s very flat.  So strictly speaking it’s more correct to say that the Earth is flat.  Sphericalish, but nevertheless flat.

And then there are the people who’d look at the stupid question and give a stupid answer.  I’d say that, hopefully, the company controlled for that, excluding obviously stupid responses (the question should have been one among many questions – and it clearly was since they were able to split the data up by age, gender, religious affiliation, political affiliation, region, etc), but then this is the same company that posed this stupid question.

What’s really odd is that the analysis implies that the more religious you are the more likely you are to believe the Earth (or world, whatever that means) is flat.  But the more Republican you are, the more likely to are to believe that the Earth is round.  I’m not an expert on American politics, but I would have put the Republicans are more religious than Democrats, so there’s something odd going on there.  Perhaps it’s just that trolls are more likely to do their trolling for the Republicans?

This all just reinforces an opinion that I developed years ago – don’t rely too heavily, if at all, on opinion polls and their like.

The in this Sentence is Not Misplaced

But the “not” may be.

I have a long-term beef with a particular phrasing that is specifically American but which seems to be bleeding into English of other nations.  The most recent variant I have seen was from Australia’s ABC in an article on the misuse of the term “fascist”.  The author, Matthew Sharpe, is an Associate Professor at Deakin University in Burwood, Melbourne so he should know better, but I do note that he is affiliated with Continental Philosophy.  I also note that his About page has him as “membver” of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (here are the specific grant details).

Anyway, the offending phrase is at the end of the first section, repeated twice, first as “… all movements that aim to do this are not fascist”.  Or rather I should say was, clearly someone was even more incensed than I was (or had more time on their hands) and complained about the obvious miswording leading to a correction.  This is excellent news, but the rot does seem to be starting and something should be done about it.

What I intend to do, as far as this noble cause goes, is analyse the language a little, apply a smidgen of logic and common sense and demonstrate why Matthew Sharpe’s original wording was wrong (and thus why the ABC was correct in correcting it).

Let’s break his phrase down a little:

(all) (movements that aim to do this) (are) (not) (fascist)

which can be thought of as conforming with the standard pattern.

quantifier subject existential-verb adverb adjective

Yes, “not” is an adverb meaning that it modifies a verb.  As an adverb “not” can take on a bit of an existential role, for example this is one of the characteristics that one might list against a cat: “not dog”.  Note that the term “not dog”, when applied to a cat, is effectively the same as saying “there is something X, such that … X is not a dog” – so there is an implied existential verb (ie is).  We can apply the same logic to other categories, like adjectives and adverbs: “beautiful”, “high”, “slow”, “(made of) gold”, “the same”, “fascist”, and “all”.

I don’t really want to address Sharpe’s argument about what is and what is not fascist here.  I only want to address his poor grammar (before it was corrected), so let’s use another version, a phrase that I have used before and will undoubtably use again (although I may be forced to change the subject if the rot continues):

(all) (Americans) (are) (not) (intelligent)

Compare this to another possible statement that we could make about Americans:

(all) (Americans) (are) (very) (friendly)

In the first instance, the poor speaker when asked “Who is intelligent?” could reply with “Not all Americans” or maybe “Some Americans” or even “A lot of Americans”.  And this is basically my point.  When you formulate a sentence, you generally indicate who (or what) you are talking about, then you indicate what sort of thing they are doing and then indicate in what way they are doing it (or to whom they are doing it).

This is what is happening in the second sentence, as clarification will draw out when asked “Who is friendly?”  “Americans, all of them are very friendly”.

Let’s use brackets differently to make this even more obvious:

(all Americans) (are) (not intelligent)

(all Americans) (are) (very friendly)

In the latter sentence you could easily imagine that we could drop the “all” and still maintain the meaning.  If you drop the “all” from the first sentence, then you keep the real meaning (Americans are unintelligent), but the meaning that the poor speaker is trying to get at is lost (“Americans are not intelligent” cannot be reasonably understood as meaning the same as “Not all Americans are intelligent”).

As I noted above, when you seek clarification, even the poor speaker may instinctively group the “not” with the correct word, ie “all”.  Note further that it’s not just about putting “not” where it should be, it’s also about picking the right word.  The poor speaker could fix the sentence by merely substituting “all” with “some”:

(some Americans) (are) (not intelligent)

This is clearly a true statement, there’s a spread of intelligence in all societies and there are going to be unintelligent people in each of them (although not all of them will get elected to high office).  What is totally bizarre is that some people might believe that you can have two sentences, one that starts with “some” and another that starts with “all” but which are otherwise precisely the same and nevertheless mean precisely the same thing.  Consider:

Some people think that that is totally bizarre

All people think that that is totally bizarre

See, it simply doesn’t work.

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Finally, some (but not all) might point out that no less than Shakespeare wrote “All that glisters is not gold”.  This is true.  Rather it is true that Shakespeare wrote that but, in fact, some things that glister (or, in the modern vernacular, glitter) are gold.  So he’s wrong, or he’s just being poetic.  He also wrote “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm from an anointed King”, which is also wrong since he really meant “Not even all the water in the rough rude sea”, otherwise he’d be implying that some of the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed King, just not all of it, for example there’s a bit over near France that’s hopeless at the job.  In this instance, he could even have said “All the water in the rough rude sea/Cannot wash the balm from an anointed King”.

Shakespeare was basically hopeless, except for the fact that he was writing 400 years ago, when the language was a bit different (if thou doth recall, thou flibbertigibbet), often in iambic pentameter which demands a different sort of grammar than an opinion piece about what does and what does not constitute fascism.

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In the original phrasing Matthew Sharpe was saying that none of the movements that aimed to do what he was talking about (taking over the state in part by destroying liberal institutions like an independent media and individual rights) were fascist.  This is a dangerous sort of thing to be saying, even accidentally.  Sure, not all of them are fascist, but some of them most certainly are.

Grammar nazi out.

Arguing Conscious Realism to Absurdity

Back in Fine Tuning Towards Ignorance, I presented a scenario in which a fat dormouse (Chubby Loir) was saved by a crack in a barn wall, because he could squeeze through, while Tiddles the cat could not.  I want to revisit that scenario in light of the notion of "conscious realism".  If conscious realism were true, then there would be no objective, observer-independent reality and my representation of reality could be different to your representation of reality.  Now I naturally think this is bollocks, but let's pretend that it wasn't bollocks.  Let's also anthropomorphise Chubby Loir and Tiddles to the extent that they become conscious agents (unnecessarily for most of us, I hope, since these beings have previously been given to very human-like thought processes, and consciousness is not necessarily limited to humans).

Imagine then that they are both particularly pessimistic in their outlook.  Chubby Loir has been sighted by Tiddles and thinks to himself: "Just my luck, I'm going to be eaten now, but I might as well attempt to survive, even though I know it won't be successful."  Tiddles thinks to herself:  "That's a tasty looking dormouse, I almost certainly won't catch it, but I've got nothing else on the agenda, so I'll have a go anyway."  And the chase begins, with both running half-heartedly towards the barn.

Now I don't know whether, in the "conscious realism" paradigm, our attitudes affect our subjective realities, but something apparently will so the pessimism of Chubby and Tiddles can stand in place of whatever the actual mechanism is that permits their realities to differ.

As they approach the barn, they both see a crack, but their subjective realities with respect to the crack differ.  Chubby sees that it is too small for him to wriggle through but Tiddles sees that it is wide enough for Chubby to run through easily, but far too small for her to follow.  So, we reach the absurdity.  Chubby stops, convinced that certain death will follow, because he can't get through the crack while Tiddles stops, and watches as Chubby runs through the crack and escapes.  So we'd have two contradictory "realities", one in which Chubby escapes and one in which Tiddles (who does not belong to Schrödinger, by the way) eats him.

Donald Hoffman, the author of this madness, might argue that in his conception of "conscious realism" beings evolve so as to achieve fitness which is not necessarily consistent with reality, and the scenario I describe is inconsistent with fitness because Chubby gives up on trying the crack and Tiddles fails to eat him.  But even if their perceptions of reality are consistent with a more optimistic fitness, we could still have Chubby seeing that he could get through the crack and escape and Tiddles seeing that the crack is sufficiently large for her to get through and slay Chubby.  Two contradictory realities again.

Of course, it is possible for either of them to make a mistake.  Chubby could misjudge the crack and end up stuck in there, with his enormous bottom poking out, ready for Tiddles to drag him out and devour him.  Or Tiddles could either misjudge the crack as too small when it wasn't or end up getting stuck there herself, so that she ends up getting munched on by a fox.  But in both of these cases, this was because their perceptions of reality were inconsistent with an actual objective reality.  And youtube is replete with "fail videos" in which people misjudge objective reality - in which their own personal subjective realities were wrong, and we can only say they were wrong because there were objective realities against which we can compare them.  The objective realities into which they ran face first, or against which they crushed their (usually) adolescent manhood, or onto which they painfully fell.

(I could only bear about two minutes of the last compilation linked, so I didn't watch the others - watch at your own peril.  While I'm clearly more empathetic than I normally let on, I note that a number of the victims were idiots who managed to hurt themselves with what appears to be some forethought and are, therefore, possibly prime candidates for judicial culling from the gene pool.  I'm hoping that there were no actual culling events recorded.)

Anyways, you could call this the YouTube Argument Against the Madness that is Conscious Realism.

You're welcome.

The Ludicracy of Conscious Realism

It's sad to see that Quanta Magazine should take Donald Hoffman seriously when he waxes lyrical on the nature of reality, based on his "conscious realism".  This is a broadly respected repository of science journalism, but in this case, the editors appear to have let the article through because it mentions quantum stuff.

Naturally, I object to "conscious realism" in general, because it is total bollocks, but I also object some of the specific nonsense spouted by Donald Hoffman.  Now I would have provided a Wikipedia link to the page on "conscious realism" here, but there isn't one.  When you google the term, you end up at a document written by Donald Hoffman, which states:

Conscious realism is a proposed answer to the question of what the universe is made of. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.

Hoffman even gave a TED talk on the topic - Do we see reality as it is?

My major beef is with this specific claim (from the Quanta Magazine article, but also referred to in the TED talk):

Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

I don't think I can state this strongly enough: This is total and complete bollocks.  It's lunacy.  I'd call it quantum nonsense, but this might lead some readers to think that it's nonsense on a minuscule rather than massive scale.

This idea could only work if, in order for trains to work, we were obliged to explain them to each other - to synch our individual subjective realities with respect to the trains in our shared experience.  Think about it for a moment.  Engineer E designs a train at the request of Customer C, who approves the drawings and passes them over to Manufacturer M.  At various stages during the process, Surveyor S visits the construction site and compares the train, in its current form, to the design detailed in the drawings.  Eventually, S signs off on the construction and M presents the train to C who then puts it onto a pre-existing rail network, with pre-existing tracks, pre-existing bridges and pre-existing tunnels and sets it off on its way.

There is certainly some discussion between E, M, S and C, but the process does not involve a word by word, squiggle by squiggle explanation as to what each of the pieces of paper have written and drawn on them.  For the information to flow accurately from person to person, and for a train to result which fits on the tracks and into tunnels (etc, etc), those pieces of paper (the drawings) must have an independent, objective and (at least temporarily) immutable reality.

Once the train exists, we don’t need to discuss with each other the location of doors and seats, and so on.  If my reality of the train could truly be different to your reality of the train, then we could enter via different doors and you could sit on a seat in a location that, in my reality, doesn't even exist on my train (for example, you might have the train as being four metres wide, whilst mine is only three metres wide).  Animals that cannot even converse with us (guide dogs for example) will reliably enter and exit via the doors in a train that must necessarily have an objective reality (and may not be perceptible at all by those being guided).  An objective reality is necessary because we could not synch any differences in subjective reality with them.  (Cross country horse events would be a nightmare if horse and rider could not independently observe an objective reality with respect to jumps and other obstacles - both need to be aware of what they are jumping over, and when, in order for them to move in concert and make the jump.)

I agree that there are certain aspects of reality that are fuzzy to us - colours vary due to lighting and there is evidence that the perception of some colours may be language dependent (Lenneberg and Roberts).  The idea is that given the lack of a specific word for "orange", speakers of Zuni find it more difficult to differentiate between two colours that an English speaker would have no difficulty distinguishing.  Females, who generally have a better handle on language, also have a greater range of colours that they can distinguish, despite not having any huge difference in their physiognomy.  (There are apps written for men to help them discuss curtain, cushion and dress colours with women - "What do you mean, the light green cushion?  It's not light green, it's chartreuse!")  There are a range of illusions that we may fall prey to: the illusion that an image on a page is 3D, if it is sufficiently well drawn, or the illusion that a spoked wheel is spinning in the opposite direction that it is actually spinning and so on.

However, these illusions and inaccuracies on our part as imperfect sensory creatures should never be taken to mean that reality is somehow "imperfect", let alone non-existent.  To pretend otherwise represents a monumental level of hubris.

To my mind, Donald Hoffman's "conscious realism" constitutes an equally monumental level of stupidity, complete with a massive begged question - where do these "conscious agents" of his come from, if there is no objective reality?  It's a form of quantum woo.

But then again, who knows, it might just be a misconception on my part.

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And by the way, I couldn't decide on whether I should use "lunacy" or a reference to the ludicrous nature of the idea of conscious realism in the title, so I split the difference.  It also hints at some sort of governance by the ludicrous, a word for which the need of is becoming more and more critical each day. 

What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?

This brief article, about what happened to the dinosaurs, is written with the hope that it will go some way to displacing the current site that tops the Google search results when you type in the search string "what happened to the dinosaurs" or "what really happened to the dinosaurs".

If you carry out this search and find that the result is as disturbing as I found it, then you can do something about it.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and see there is a link to "Send feedback".  You can write what you like, but here's what I wrote:

Your search engine is biased towards creationism - alternatively it has been gamed by creationists - for the search term "what happened to the dinosaurs".  Very disappointing.  I use a few of your products and it would be sad, but not overwhelmingly difficult, to leave them behind in order to protest your apparent lack of action with respect to this problem (http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/05/26/what-happened-to-the-dinosaurs/ was posted almost five months ago).

The idea is that when you perform an internet search, you should have some level of confidence that the results are not complete crap and this example serves only to reduce my confidence - in Google.  To be fair, I also tried the search string "what happened to the dinosaurs" in other search engines.  For example, I typed "what happened to the dinosaurs" into Bing (there is a reason for the repetitive nature of this post).

Sadly, they also have the same problem.  So I gave similar feedback.

Then I typed "what happened to the dinosaurs" into Yahoo! (Does anyone still use Yahoo!?) Because Yahoo! is powered by Google, I got Google's results.

I got a bit smarter and pasted "what happened to the dinosaurs" into Gigablast - finally finding a search engine that doesn't have a creationist website as the top result.  Instead it's a website talking about how Google Answers used to have an answer to "what happened to the dinosaurs" which quotes an article saying that Google had it wrong.  And the same creationist result appears shortly after (with something from "Present Truth Mag", a Seventh Day Adventist publication, just pipping it).

Getting a bit bored with the whole process, I decided to check one last search engine - DuckDuckGo - and, yep, the top result for "what happened to the dinosaurs" is yet again that same nonsense creationist website.

I think therefore that it's not really Google's fault, although Google could do something about it.  It's just that the creationists have managed to corrupt the search protocols so that the search string "what happened to the dinosaurs" promotes their web site.

In order to resolve this, I suggest that people who have a web presence try to create an article that would edge out those peddling nonsense about what happened to the dinosaurs. Ideally, if we got enough people involved, we'd see the web site in question relegated to the second or third page.

Oh, and don't forget to provide an answer or a link which accurately explains what happened to the dinosaurs.  I'd suggest:

• Dinosaur - talks about dinosaurs in general and points out that they weren't all killed in one single event,  in part because birds are dinosaurs and in part because only late Cretaceous era (non-avian) dinosaurs were driven extinct by the asteroid - admittedly this does include three of the most readily identifiable dinosaurs (none of which existed in the Jurassic period): Tyrannosaurus Rex, Tricerotops and Velociraptor
• Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event - talks about the big event that many believe is the answer to the question "what happened to the dinosaurs", but isn't really the whole story (because a lot more than dinosaurs went extinct at the time and many dinosaurs were already extinct)

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Edit one day later: sadly enough, it seems that this has absolutely no effect at all.  I'm going to have to live with the minor irritation.

The subtle distinction between "believe" and "believe in"

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone going on about "believing in evolution", well … let's just say that I could afford quite a few hot dinners.  Despite being well-fed, however, I'd still be grumpy about the lack of understanding about how "believe" differs from "believe in".

It is probably a largely semantic issue - what do we really mean by believe?

For me, a belief is related simply to the state of considering something to be true.  I believe that I am sitting on a chair (in part because I am sitting on a chair).  For a theist (the sort of person most likely to err and say that others "believe in evolution") belief can mean something more, so that it involves an act of will, perhaps even the overcoming of doubt (often caused by evidence that shows that supports the notion that a specific belief is false).

Sometimes an atheist like myself will use "believe" in a slightly different way, so as to imply doubt - not doubt that has been overcome, but doubt that remains.  So I might say that I believe my football team will win on the weekend, because I don't know that they will and I'm a little more confident that I would be if I just said that I hope that they will win.  But I am nevertheless aware that there's an element of hope in there - you know, like wishful thinking.

I think that this can lead us atheists, at times, to misconstrue how a theist thinks about belief.  We tend to see this form of belief as lying a lot closer to hoping (or dreading if we are less optimistic) while I think that theists see it as being a lot closer to knowing (perhaps some theist or ex-theist could shed light on this).  If so, then there's an element of magical thinking, similar to those life-coaches who rattle off such nonsense as "if you truly believe it, it will come true".

"Believing in" something is quite a different concept to "believing" it.  Say I was listening to the coach of my football team as he described how the team planned to make the finals next season, that they've all been working very hard, making sacrifices and putting the "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe" the coach is to say that I think he's lying - they haven't been working hard enough, not enough sacrifices have been made and there's no "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe in" the coach is to say one of (at least) three things.

Firstly, I could be saying that I don't have any confidence in him, that I don't think his plans are sufficient to get my team through next season or something like that.

Secondly, I could be implying that I don't think that the idea of coaching is a good one, suggesting that it would be better if all the members of the team just did their own thing and turned up on the day and tried their best (an approach which I heartily recommend to all competitors in the league).

Alternatively, I could be saying that I don't believe that he exists.  This would of course be ridiculous, he's right there, giving a speech that I am listening to.  It would of course be quite different if I didn't believe in the coach that you were listening to, if I could neither hear nor see him.

If we talk about "believing in evolution" then strictly speaking, we know it happens - because we breed dogs, and cats, and sheep, and pigeons ... we can force them to evolve.  Not even a creationist could argue against that (well ... a somewhat mythical beast, the rational creationist, couldn't argue against that).  The sort people making the claim along the lines of "atheists believe in evolution" are actually referring to the theory of evolution.  Does the theory of evolution exist?  Well, yes, it does.  No-one is contesting that, as far as I know, not even the creationists.

We could ask a similar question: "do atheists believe in creationism?"  Strictly speaking, we do, because creationism exists.  We sort of wish it didn't because it rots people's minds, but wishing something doesn't make it true.

Then there are the other meanings of "believe in".

Do we "believe in" natural evolution meaning that we think it is a good idea?  Well, no, I don’t think so.  Instead, we tend to avoid it.  After all, we don't look on dispassionately as our children fail to evolve quickly enough to counter the latest version of the influenza virus.  We don't let women die in childbirth because their hips aren't wide enough.  We don't let myopic people die out (imagine making them drive without glasses for the sake of evolution …)

Or do we have confidence in evolution, in the same way as we might have confidence in and thus believe in the coach? Since evolution is not goal oriented, this doesn't really seem applicable.  There might be some people who have some bizarre faith that, if we don't come to grips with climate change, everything will be alright because we'll just evolve gills.  Such people don't comprehend how evolution tends to viciously prune its metaphorical tree of failed experiments, to the extent that something like 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct (being aware that species are designated by humans, really there are only as many species as we are collectively aware of, so this estimate is based on some rather rubbery assumptions).  If humans manage to be part of screwing the environment up so badly that we can't live in it, we won't magically adapt - we'll just die out, like most of the dinosaurs did as the Earth's climate changed on them over a period of 175 million years.

So, we don't believe that evolution is necessarily good, nor that it necessarily aligns with our goat of ongoing survival as a species.  Therefore, we don't "believe in" evolution in either of those senses.

But, given careful definitions of the terms "believe", "evolution" and "is true", almost every single one of us does believe that evolution is true.

You can go to ...

I saw that some rather fervently anti-Obama people had threatened to leave the US for some mythical nation in which their narrow view of the world would be more mainstream.  I’ve heard Australia and Canada mentioned.  I’ve also seen people from Australia and Canada vigorously deny that their nations are suitable candidates.  For example, both countries are bastions of homosexual tolerant, socialist leaning pro-choicers – and they are both plagued with rampant atheism.

In an effort to assist, and noting that two key issues for these people are right-to-life and institutional homophobia, I thought I might do a little research into which nations are most suitable for emigrating bigots.  I’ve found some which have banned both abortion and (at least male) homosexuality.  I’ve also provided figures for the proportion of each nation that is Christian.  For comparison purposes, the nation these people intend fleeing is nominally 78.4% Christian – nations with lower than this proportion are marked red.  Additionally, given that these fleeing bigots don’t like certain other religions (which I am too coy to mention directly), I’ve also indicated the proportion of Muslims in each nation (compare to current infestation representing 0.6% of the US population).

Benin	27% Christian	24% Muslim
Kenya	83% Christian	11% Muslim
Lesotho	90% Christian	0.05% Muslim
Mauritius	32% Christian	17% Muslim
Nigeria	48% Christian	50% Muslim
Senegal	5% Christian	94% Muslim
Somalia	0.01% Christian	99+% Muslim
Tanzania	62% Christian	35% Muslim
Togo	29% Christian	20% Muslim
Uganda	84% Christian	12% Muslim

(Note that slightly more than 50% of the Togolese have indigenous beliefs while slightly fewer than 50% of Mauritians are Hindu.)

For American “culture war” refugees, the nation which appears to be overwhelmingly the most attractive is Lesotho.  Unfortunately, Lesotho is a small landlocked nation which is poor but nevertheless a little bit socialist, having spent 7.6% of its GDP on health care in 2008 (compared with the virulently socialist 15.2% frittered away by the US Administration in 2008 – join the dots people).

For those who are incensed by such profligate misuse of the public purse, the most suitable haven (so long as they can put up with the relatively high numbers of Muslims and the whole being African thing) would have to be Kenya, with their 4.2% spending on Health.

Interesting, isn’t it? 

The country that seems to best suit this new wave of asylum seekers, those escaping the horror of four more years under an Obama-led government, may in fact be the country that Obama’s father came from.

Patently Paradoxical Pabst's Perplexing Performance

I recently looked at an article by Adrian Pabst posted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), titled Politics of paradox: Reclaiming the radical centre.  I remain unconvinced that this is not some sort of hoax, Sokal-style.  Try to see if you can read more than a couple of paragraphs without stumbling across such nonsense as:

"The events of 11 September 2001 marked the displacement of secular terror by religious terror and the clash of fanatical faiths that are secretly collusive."

The clash of secretly collusive fanatical faiths?  What?

When doing a bit of research to see whether Adrian Pabst was a real person, I stumbled across a similar article posted two years ago at a centre-left policy think tank.  Interestingly, however, at that time Pabst made no mention of "the uprising of civil society and the Church against authoritarian regimes and state-orchestrated atheism" or that his work was based on "the tradition of Platonism and Christian Neoplatonism".

What's going on here?

And don't get me started on the ABC's decision to lump religion together with ethics ...

(For those wanting something less brief, I recently posted My World View - Part 1.)