Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?
Documentary which tells the story of evolution theory since Darwin postulated it in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is now scientific orthodoxy, but when it was unveiled it caused a storm of controversy, from fellow scientists as well as religious people. They criticised it for being short on evidence and long on assertion and Darwin, being the honest scientist that he was, agreed with them. He knew that his theory was riddled with 'difficulties', but he entrusted future generations to complete his work and prove the essential truth of his vision, which is what scientists have been doing for the past 150 years.
Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Marie Leroi charts the scientific endeavour that brought about the triumphant renaissance of Darwin's theory. He argues that, with the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), it may be possible to take that theory to a new level - to do more than explain what has evolved in the past, and start to predict what might evolve in the future.
It was essentially no more than the usual collection of fibs, half truths, fantasies and non sequiturs but it made a nice change having someone other than Richard Dawkins presenting the same old fundamentalist bullcrap
And, no, Armand didn't fill in any holes but he did attempt to pass off some absolute whoppers whilst pretending to do so
There was one slightly novel element. It was I think the first time I've ever heard a TeleDarwinevangelist admit that this most beautiful and truthy of scientific theories is currently capable of predicting absolutely bugger all and only 'works' retrospectively
Ah well, it's only a century and half old. Give it time
You can only imagine how far Newton would have got trying to pull that kind of shit
"Isaac was fucked if he knew what was going to happen next"
A conversation between MegaLoon Rupert Sheldrake and Bruce Lipton...
WARNING!!: The following video contains traces of West Coast American New Age Hippies - which may be harmful to people with an allergy
The conversation continues in Youtube friendly bite-sized lumps here (Segment #3's my favourite)
If you're interested in out of the box thinking about the Science of Life, Rupert is certifiably out of his box. Whilst I personally don't buy everything Sheldrake comes up with I share his suspicion that there is some organising principle or force missing from the mainstream life science narrative. Sheldrake is a source of more interesting and challenging ideas, and warm humour, than Dawkins could even dream of...
I met him whilst walking in the fresh, crispy mountains of Italy last week. I think it's what the locals call a 'Ghiro' - in English a 'Fat Dormouse'.
Conspiracy fans will be delighted to learn that the fat dormouse was introduced to the UK a 100 hundred years ago by Lord Rothschild...
"Their nickname is the Seven Sleepers as they hibernate for seven months of the year. Walter Rothschild, who later became the second Baron Rothschild, brought the first six Glis Glis to England in 1902. No-one knows exactly how, but they escaped into the wild from the Rothschild home at Tring Park and have spread and bred! However, instead of happily hibernating out of doors they moved inside for the English winter! Soon, local farmers were complaining of apple stores being ruined and local people were hearing unexplained bumps in the night ... a sure sign that the Glis Glis were making themselves quite at home in the attic. One woman was convinced she was going mad!"
This was clearly a pioneering act of primitive bioterrorism, though how fat dormice fit in exactly with the global banking conspiracy, the foundation of Israel, freemasonry and space aliens is still not 100% clear to me
-
And because I'm more than a little bit sad, all the walking I've been doing here and in my Mothersland and my encounters with fat dormice, amusingly-shaped mushrooms (another time, another photo) and all sorts of other livings things in their natural environment, I've been pondering upon the 'Genius of Darwin' as much as ever - especially the impact of Darwinism on the way people think
As it happens, whether Darwin was right or wrong about the Evolution of Life makes virtually bugger all difference to most people's daily lives.However, Darwinism has affected the way people interpret tangible events that do impact on their daily lives
Before Darwinism and the Enlightenment, most people believed that someone, or some entity, was responsible for everything that happened. The weather, the outcome of battles, the shape of tea leaves in a cup, the throw of some dice; all was the Will of some god or other.
There was no such thing as chance. Everything that happened was the predetermined outcome of a controlling intelligence
After Darwin, it was considered very clever to believe that everything of any importance or scale was the result of blind chance. Any pattern of events that appeared to be result of design was simply the result of blind chance combined with some kind of selection mechanism
The result was that, in the act of denying the Hand of God in natural affairs, Darwinism also had the consequence of denying the Hand of Man in human affairs
Anyone who suggests that the course of human, or natural affairs, may be the result of the interplay of intelligent planning and the natural selection of random events is now branded an irrational religious lunatic or a conspiracy theorist
Shit just happens
and if you don't believe that Shit just happens then you're only fit for the Funny Farm
Because I'm a Loon I believe that the promotion of this kind of thinking, as an essentially exclusive model to explain how the world works, was an entirely deliberate course of action - but I would wouldn't I
If you would like to witness a nice example of what I'm talking about, the mainstream coverage of the recent financial turmoil is a nice case history
The unwavering message of the mainstream coverage of the 'Credit Crunch' is...
The impending implosion of our financial system is an unintended consequence of unreasoning, animalistic, undirected greed and fear
No-one could have predicted it
There is no predetermined objective
The people responsible for our great financial institutions are honestly trying to unfuck things as best as they can for the Common Good
The possibility that the crisis could have been deliberately engineered in some way, and that some very clever, powerful people knew exactly what was going to happen, is deemed so unlikely it is not raised even to be debunked
Presumably, the fact that so many On-line Conspiranauts have been predicting this crash for years, in accordance with their insane models of how the world really works, is merely blind luck
And if all those CCTV cameras, databases, terrorism laws and detention infrastructure are turned towards, instead of the shadowy terrorists, a general public fucked-off with being robbed blind that will be an unintended outcome too
The reason why I have such a very big problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is the leading spokesperson for Darwinist Evolutionary Theory. As it happens, I personally have many strong objections to Darwinism. However, some of my best friends are Evolutionists yet I feel absolutely no need to direct abuse at them
Nope, it's not the Darwinism thing that pisses me off about Dawkins
It's the fact that he represents the perversion of what now passes for popular science which has little to do with the idealised scientific method and a lot more to do with advocacy, case-building, lawyers tricks and politics
Science shouldn't be about amassing whatever evidence you can find to support your ideas
It should be about seeking out the material which most strongly challenges your theories
The perfect scientist says to himself every day 'I don't want to be wrong so I'm going to come up with everything I can to prove myself wrong'
Some common clues which suggest that someone posing as a scientist might actually be behaving like a Dawkins-style scientician include...
Cherry picking of real data and the rejection, or editing, of anomalous data
Any attempts to force people into 'you're with us or against us' style false choices
Any claims that the science of any subject is 'settled once and for all'
Attempts to depict anyone with opposing points of view as a nutter
The problem is, of course, when faced with a fundamentalist pulling these kind of stunts is that it's difficult not to be drawn into a similar pattern of behaviour and respond to foamy-mouthed advocacy with foamy-mouthed counter advocacy
I've had a couple of recent exchanges with some chums on the subject of man made global warming
They send me links about temperatures going up. I send them links about temperatures going down
They send me links about polar bear numbers shrinking and pictures of cute baby bears stuck on ice floes. I send them links about about polar bear numbers not shrinking and pictures of ice breakers stuck in ice
and then I remembered visiting Athens this year, a few days after it had been covered by six inches of freak snow
and then I remembered a mate spending the night in my place after visiting China with a suitcase full of flip flops and chinos only to walk into the worst snowstorms in fifty years
Here in the UK we've just endured yet another spectacularly shitty summer, with the BBC covering up for that other bunch of propagandist stooges at the Met Office, who fucked-up their summer forecast yet again, by downplaying how bad the summer was and knocking out articles suggesting that there was nothing unusual about this summer at all...
I can't find any reference to that fact on the State Broadcasting Company's website but I did find an old article bigging up the implications of sunspot activity four years ago (link corrected), when sunspot activity was consistent with the global warming myth. The article ends with the most outstanding horseshit I've seen labeled as science for at least a week...
'This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.'
When the language of climate change gets so screwed up that the Sun is referred to as having an 'indirect impact on global climate' (as opposed to the presumably ever so direct impact of that devil gas CO2) you can be pretty sure somebody's trying to sell you a serious lemon
Coelacanths are, of course, popularly known as 'living fossils'
The oldest Coelacanth fossils have been dated as being about 400 million years old. The youngest fossil Coelacanths have been dated at about 70 million years old
And, for a while, palaeontologists and evolutionists thought that the coelacanths could possibly have been the first fish to develop legs, take the first tentative steps on land (presumably whilst holding their breath until they evolved a set of complimentary air-breathing lungs) and started the land-based evolutionary branch which culminated in the birth of Richard Dawkins
There wasn't actually any direct evidence that leg-sprouting fish have ever actually existed but they would fit nicely into a particular story and so evolutionists have allways been keen to find, or draw, some
Fantasia (1940) - leg sprouting fish make their appearance @1:48
Unfortunately for the coelacanth's place in evolutionary history, the coelacanth had to be taken off the list of possible candidates when people started pulling living examples out of the sea from the late 1930s onwards...
which raised all sorts of interesting questions such as...
Where had they been hiding for the last 70 million years?
How is it that a fish that was once identified as being the possible ancestor of all land based tetrapods, which is a fair old slab of evolution by any measure, didn't actually evolve very much at all?
According to the Coelacanth page on Talk Origins that's because -'The theory of evolution does not say that all organisms must evolve. In an unchanging environment, natural selection would tend to keep things largely unchanged morphologically' ...except for when things do change
which is another way of saying that evolutionary theory is a great way of 'explaining' things after they've happened but crap at predicting what will happen (cf. Nostradamus)
(things must have been very quiet around the waters off Japan, where this character lives, for the last 550 million years)
More walking fish - this time courtesy of Guinness
Coelacanths do, however, clearly have a sense of humour and are aware that humans used to draw pictures of them walking around the sea bed on their fins, rehearsing their conquest of Land
Because, whenever anyone points a video camera at a coelacanth, they swim around doing cute little vertical headstands, keeping their feet fins as far away from the sea bed as possible...
So, in the context of the coelacanth, the term 'living fossil' is another, shorter, way of saying...
'we used to think this creature was long dead and thought we could get away with making up all sorts of fairy tales about it but then the fucker turned out to be still alive and left us all looking like gimps, the bastard'
The Coelacanth - My Fish Selection of the Month, August 2008 - learn more over at...
NB Richard Dawkins is currently appearing in Summer Season over at Channel 4 - and for someone advocating such a supposedly unassailable case his compulsion to tell one or two whoppers in the process is quite perplexing
And whilst on the subject of pathological thinking, there’s a recent article in New Scientist which a couple of people have sent me the link to largely, I suspect, because of its excellent title…
Putting aside the fact that average global temperature appears to be currently falling, I have been enjoying the sight of a couple of pairs of tits bouncing around my back yard for the last month or so and, yes, they do seem to be doing well
Apparently, scientists who have been staring at tits for over 30 years have discovered that tits have the uncanny ability to eat their favourite food if it becomes readily available earlier in the year
One would also suspect that tits also have the remarkable ability of eating less of their favourite food if it is not readily available
All of which proves, er, not very much at all
The New Scientist article includes a link to similar high grade research carried out on squirrels…
...which proves that when faced with abundant food supplies squirrels ‘evolve’ in less than four generations into… fat squirrels
This is pseudo-scientific bollocks of the highest quality; combining, as it does, both climate change bollocks and neo-Darwinist bollocks in one seamless, grant application-friendly package
"Because climate change is happening so fast, the perceived wisdom is that mammals won't be able to undergo evolution to keep up with that. But this work offers a little glimmer of hope, at least for some species."
And, as with so much of what passes for rational orthodoxy in the new normal of our post 9/11 world, I keep asking myself did so much of what passes for science these days turn into politicised nonsense recently or has it always been this shite?
The mysterious origins of Life - as illustrated by a large banana smeared with warm, dripping peanut butter
As I've posted on this blog, once or twice, I'm not a big fan of Darwinism. For many reasons, which I'm not going to go into here, I'm about as sure that it doesn't stack up as I can be about anything
I am also equally sure that mainstream scientific orthodoxy on the closely-related, though not the same, subject of abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of Life from inanimate matter is also pretty ropey
It's not a question about abiogenesis being hugely improbable. As things stand, within the restrictions of our current level of knowledge, abiogenesis is flat out impossibile. There is nothing like a viable theory to explain how something as simple as a single-celled organism (not simple at all) can spring into existence out of its constituents chemical parts. And as for actually replicating that process in a lab, forget it.
Put simply, the notion that life spontaneously sprang out of nothing is currently a faith based belief; anchored on two extremely sophisticated scientific principles which only someone with a brain as large as Richard Dawkins' can comprehend...
Life must have come from somewhere
There's no fucking way I'm bringing God or Space Aliens into it
And if anyone bumping into this post thinks they can pull me up on this; without reverting to Dawkins-style bullshit and deceit, I'd genuinely love to hear from them (False-choice, 'you're either with us or against us', proofs that people who believe in Jesus are wrong about the origins of Life and therefore Dawkins must be right definitely don't count)
Over the years I've seen several thoughtful, intelligent attempts to communicate the deficiencies in mainstream science's attempts to grapple with abiogenesis
This is not one of them...
Peanut Butter, The Atheist's Nightmare!
I originally posted a link to that video on the Conspiraloon Alliance blog and wasn't going to bother replicating the post here
However, someone posted a link to another Masterpiece of Food-based Creationist PR in a comment underneath...
The atheist's nightmare: the banana
Where this Creationist obsession with high-calorie sandwich fillings comes from God(?) only knows, though it does apparently have its limits. Follow-up searches for titles such as 'Why Secular Humanists Fear Spreadable Marshmallow' and 'Jam - The Agnostic's Nemesis' on Google/ Youtube have, so far, stubbornly refused to yield any positive results :(
And whilst on the subject of climate change, I spent part of yesterday mooching around the Natural History and Geological Museums....
Strictly speaking, the Geological Museum doesn’t exist as a separate entity any more. It was incorporated into the Natural History Museum a few years ago and renamed The Earth Galleries but fuck that.
For most of its history the Geological Museum stuck closely to the uniformitarianism roots of the British pioneers of geology and placed as little emphasis on natural catastrophes as possible. As a consequence it was a dry, desperately dull place filled with hundreds of display cabinets, containing thousands and thousands of meticulously annotated chips of rock that only bearded men in Aran jumpers (including myself for a time) could ever possibly derive gratification from.
Tip: Geologists are easily mistaken for WW2-era U-Boat commanders. They are not the same thing and are only rarely seen wearing the Knight's Cross
The crushing dullness of the Geological Museum was compounded by the fact that the adjacent NHM wangled first-call on all the best dinosaur fossils for its own galleries.
Which made the Geological Museum a lovely place to go to get away from the crowds in London as nobody ever went there.
A few years ago this all changed. The specimen cabinets were relegated to the deceptively trendy sounding ‘Gallery 66’ and the Geological Museum was turned into B-Grade theme park; filled with pointlessly interactive exhibits, loop videos of things exploding and loads of fake gem stones. The average age of the target audience was reduced from about 37 to about 4 years old. Hutton and Lyell must be spinning in their graves.
Though, it must be said, the Geological Museum is now a lot more popular than it ever was before its lobotomy.
Anyway, in true Field Trip style, I recorded all my most important observations from yesterday's visit to the Geological Museum and NHM in a little notebook, complete with detailed sketches and photographs – the highlights of which include…
After walking through a series of exhibits that explained that global climate is the poorly understood product of the interaction of many awesome cosmological forces such as
it became quite clear that the geological evidence indicates that we are currently living in an ‘interglacial’ period and that global temperature is set to fall drastically in the (geologically) immediate future.
This apparent mismatch between geological data and what people are being told by the mainstream media every half-hour or so has been neatly dealt with by placing a sign at the very end of the exhibits relating to climate change…
'If increasing greenhouse gases cause the predicted rise in temperature there will be devastating effects on the environment – deserts will expand and melting ice will flood low-lying land.
However, the Earth is due to enter another glacial phase in the next few thousand years so natural and induced climate changes may cancel each other out, for a while at least.'
Best dinosaur related merchandise of the day
Carnage Action Dinosaurs
Tricera-pops
Nodding Dinosaurs
Unsurprisingly, most of the dino-related products on offer these days are low-grade tat manufactured in China - including a series of 'missing-link' fossils created in the palaeontological equivalent of a chop shop that initially went down very well with evolutionists in recent years
Most bizarre instruction of the day
First, pretend your hands are two small mammals
Sneakiest use of the F Word of the Day
For the better part of 150 years mainstream geologists have gone to superhuman lengths to emphasise how gradual the forces that shape most of the Earth are. This dates back to clashes with 19th century believers in the literal word of the Bible, particularly the Book of Genesis and the 'world was created in seven days' thing.
So, perversely, geologists found themselves celebrating and promoting the sheer mind-numbing dullness of their subject and playing down the significance of more compelling stuff like volcanoes, earthquakes and floods …especially floods.
The problem with that approach is that there is an awful lot of evidence that much of our world really was shaped by catastrophes. Take fossils for example. More often than not fossils are found in thick deposits that bear all the hallmarks of the sudden, dare I say catastrophic, death and preservation of the creatures contained within them.
The history of scientific catastrophe denial really is a very nice example of data being twisted or flatly ignored whenever it doesn't suit a prevailing paradigm. And one that comes to mind whenever I hear some knob on the television talking about scientific consensus or scientific 'truth' as if such concepts are ever sacrosanct.
So hats off to the curator who drew up the card for this exhibit...
and steered clear of euphemisms such as ‘inundated’ and actually used the F Word, even finding a way to capitalize it too...
Noah's rejects?
Catastrophes are undergoing a period of rehabilitation at the moment. Not because there is so much evidence to support their occurrence – that’s always been there, and arguably why some creation myths (the scientific consensus of their day) got going in the first place. Nope, scientific catastrophism is becoming popular because there’s money in it. Whether it’s NASA plugging asteroid impacts to keep its space program going or environmentalists blaming Katrina on global warming (sorry, climate change), catastrophes scare people and where there’s Fear there’s Loot, and Influence. Any similarities with religions playing exactly the same game are, I’m sure, not entirely coincidental.
For example, the difference between these two claims...
'God sent Katrina to punish America for its sinful ways'
'Katrina was the natural result of our unsustainable and wasteful behaviour'
is what exactly?
By far and away the scariest exhibit of the day
And on the subject of scaring the living crap out of people…
The best laugh of the day came at the end of waiting in a twenty minute queue in a darkened passageway that led to a room containing a life-sized animatronic T-Rex flailing around and roaring in a really scary way. The effect on unsuspecting and impressionable small children is entirely predictable.
I’ve uploaded a (far too) short eight-second video clip onto Gootube. You can just catch the sound of traumatised children whimpering in shock and fear in the background in the last couple of seconds.
Now that’s what 21st century science is all about.
It’s been a close-run contest but my coveted Mad Scientist of the Month award has to go to...
Professor Stephen Hawking
For starters, looking like the inventor of the Daleks always gives him an inherent advantage in any mad scientist contest. Plus he said some radically original things in an interview he recently gave before receiving the UK's top science award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal…
He told the BBC that life could be wiped out by a nuclear disaster or an asteroid hitting the planet.
The human race must move to a planet beyond our Solar System to protect the future of the species, physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.
He said there were no similar planets to Earth in our Solar System so humans would "have to go to another star"
The saddest part of the interview came towards the end when he said, rather plaintively…
"My next goal is to go into space; maybe Richard Branson will help me."
I'm sure that the timing of his interview so close to Christmas is entirely coincidental.
Fans of classic 1950s sci-fi movies will note that Professor Hawking, lauded as one of the finest scientific minds in the country, is now trying to recycle the plot of When World’s Collide and hoping that no-one will notice.
Runners up include:
James Lovelock, the man who came up with the concept of Gaia, proving once again that a fair few environmentalists out there are not so secretly harbouring a hard-on for 90% of humanity being wiped out…
The earth has a fever that could boost temperatures by 8 degrees Celsius making large parts of the surface uninhabitable and threatening billions of peoples' lives,
"We are not all doomed. An awful lot of people will die, but I don't see the species dying out," he told a news conference. "A hot earth couldn't support much over 500 million."
Then there’s a retro-Darwinian basket-case called Dr Oliver Curry who spent 'two months investigating the ascent and descent of man over the next 100 millennia', rescuing some key elements of Nazi racial science from the dustbin of history along the way, and concluded…
The logical outcome would be two sub-species, "gracile" and "robust" humans.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative.
Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.
Men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women will develop lighter skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, even features and smooth hairless skin.
They would be a far cry from the "underclass" humans, who will have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
Now, admittedly, Dr Curry is not an Evolutionary Biologist but his fucked-up perception of how evolution is supposed to work is perfectly in tune with popularly-held, popularly-promoted misconceptions about the theory. His predictions also sound just a teensy weensy bit like the plot of The Time Machine, except for the part about the big penises and pert breasts which was probably ripped off from another movie that Dr Curry had seen. Though, as I recall, the Morlocks kicked, or rather ate, Eloi arse in the original work. Yay! Go Morlocks!
The Six Times a Night Machine ... Big meets Pert...
It’s a depressing fact of life these days that an increasing proportion of popular science is a shameless rip-off of 1950s creature features and old episodes of the Twilight Zone. So, hats off to one group of scientists who have really tried to bite into some genuinely original research...
There may be more meaning to the word "wisdom teeth" then previously thought. Dentists, psychologists and neurologists in Stockholm and Umea in Sweden and Tromso have been trying to determine why there is a link between tooth loss and memory loss...
Researchers in Japan reached similar conclusions in tests with mice and monkeys, with mice learning to find food in labyrinths without difficulty, but losing this ability when their teeth were pulled.
You sick wee fucks
Obviously, their findings are completely at odds with whole War on Terror/ Abu Ghraib/ Extraordinary Rendition thing where, apparently, pulling people's teeth out actually helps them to remember things.
-
And for a little balance and to demonstrate that I’m not some kind of closet religious fundamentalist, and because I currently have nowhere else to put it, here’s a link to a Manic Street Preacher video - are you going to be a sinner or a winner?
Blavius: They are not a logical race, Wise One! They go around chopping down trees for tables, when they have perfectly good tummies to eat on. How logical is that?!
Otter Leader:Yes! The great Dawkins said we cannot tolerate those who don't use reason! How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy?
Wise One:Well perhaps the great Dawkins wasn't so wise. Oh, he was intelligent, but, some of the most intelligent otters I've ever known were completely lacking in common sense. Maybe, some otters do need to believe in something. Who knows? Maybe, just believing in God makes God exist.
Handy Tips for Internet-based identity thieves: Mother's maiden name: Yamamoto,
Primary Education: The mean streets of Lambeth,
Secondary School: St Trinians,
Pet's Name: Zoltan! Hound of Dracula,
Memorable Date: Yesterday
This Blog approves of Economicians who sound like ducks
Michael Hudson
F W Engdahl
Proudly sponsored by:
This blog is also an Official™ Member of the Dame Pauline Neville Jones Fan Club
Fish of the Month
Piglet Squid
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome
In our first ever public health campaign, we seek to highlight the unexplained and deadly curse that stalks our world - and has left our greatest scienticians baffled! Please alert us to possible sightings and help eradicate this menace once and for all.
Armand Marie Leroi - currently locked in a fierce competitive struggle with Richard Dawkins
"Isaac was fucked if he knew what was going to happen next"
