Day 3186: There IS a God… Delusion!

Monday:


The Greatest Show at Conference is clearly Mr Professor Richard Dawkins.

Swoon!

Yesterday he was introducing a VERY important amendment to our Civil Liberties paper, saying we very urgently need to reform the LIBEL laws so that Scientists can DISAGREE and more importantly WRITE about disagreeing based on EVIDENCE and not fear the SLAPP of a gagging order.

Today he was reading from his new book, an exploration of all the wonderful evidence for the Fact of Evolution. I particularly enjoyed the [warning: facetious] March of the Penguins from Mount Ararat to the South Pole.



In other conference news, the hall was packed out for the speech by Mr Dr Vince "the power" Cable, raising Wealth Taxes on million-pound mansions to help raise thresholds to put up to £700 back into the pockets of low to middle earners.

But I was there from the start of business – did you KNOW that Conference opens with a crash zoom onto Bournemouth from SPACE… just like the start of Doctor Who? – so not only did I hear the excellent debates on Parliamentary Expenses and an Inquiry into British Complicity in Torture, but ALSO caught the less attended but also rather good speech by Mr Tim Far'n'away (performed Balloon-style without reading from his notes) AND Mr Brian's very excellent panel on crime and prison policy, with some really interesting guests.

Terrifying facts learned this week so far (from the Civil Liberties debate): the DNA database already holds samples for a quarter of all black men… and because of the way your DNA holds SIMILARITIES with that of your family, this means that the ENTIRE black population of Great Britain can now be profiled though the database. Just THINK about that for a minute.


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Day 2773: Darwin was a Genius… but these guys are plain NUTS!

Monday:


I hope you all watched my good chum Mr Professor Richard Dawkins on the tellybox, telling us about Mr Charles Darwin who started out wanting to become a quiet Anglican pastor before a sea voyage changed his mind and he set out to have the most HERETICAL idea in the history of human beings instead: EVOLUTION by NATURAL SELECTION.

Mr Professor Richard is awfully good at explaining evolution, and showing that it is FACT not THEORY. Though perhaps Channel Furore tempted him a little too much to put in the "this is why we don't need Mr God" stuff.

I read another review of the programme which says that the lady sex-worker in Nairobi has "evolved" an immunity to HIV. Salome, the lady sex-worker in question says that she thinks Mr God has blessed her. Nancy Banks-Smith, the reviewer in question, says she thinks that must have got up Mr Professor Richard's nose.

Personally, I think what would get MORE up his nose is the supposedly educated reviewer saying that Ms Salome has "evolved" an immunity. She most certainly hasn't.

In any population, some will be MORE resistant to a new virus – like AIDS – and some will be LESS resistant. That is just the chance factor of having different genes. EVOLUTION is what happens when those random differences give Salome a better chance of surviving to have descendents. If, in the future, MOST people were DESCENDED from Salome and her relatives, THEN the new humans with AIDS-resistant genes could be said to have "evolved".

Mr Darwin was not INSENSITIVE to the fact that his idea was going to kick over the apple cart. (And to be fair to the churches, they caught on almost at once to the implication that they were suddenly irrelevant. They weren't stupid. Just 100% totally wrong.) He sat on his findings for twenty years before being spurred into publishing when another scientist almost got the same idea. And apparently he lived in fear that SOMEONE would find a species that didn't fit into the pattern that he had seen, that just one would exist that required a separate creation.

And yet, ironically, that is the MOST brilliant thing about Mr Charles' idea. It only takes ONE counter-example to disprove it. Only ONE. And they still can't do it.


Later we caught a repeat of Room 101 with Mr Stephen Fry as the guest. One of his requests for casting into the room of worst nightmares was "New Age Guff", in part for its casual pillaging of random bits of ethnic cultures and adding them higgledy-piggledy to a melange of other ideas without a care for the ACTUAL culture, but also in part for using the word "energy" to mean something meaningless.

His best remark was his critique of "holistic techniques" that do NOT treat the WHOLE because they leave out the RATIONAL INTELLECT. Not that he wanted to REJECT the "spiritual" dimension of life – almost everything we do, love, hate, fear, desire, they are all "spiritual" in a sense. But for goodness' sake USE YOUR BRAINS! said Mr Stephen.

So with these two towering appeals for some proper THINKING, what do we find on the BBC's website a hundred and fifty years after Mr Darwin showed us that we don't NEED a superstitious story to explain our lives and origins?

An interview with the Flat Earth Society. No, really.

Never mind that we've known it was a sphere for two-and-a-half THOUSAND years. Aristotle knew it. Plato knew it. Pythagoras probably knew it. A bloke called Eratosthenes even worked out the Earth's circumference in 240 B.Mr.C. And he was nearly right – certainly near enough to have got a grade C GCSE out of it.

Apparently, they say that the Earth is a big flat disc (turtle optional) with the North Pole in the Middle. The reason that no one has fallen off the edge is because it's frozen and we call it "Antarctica".

Now just excuse me while I bash my fluffy head against a wall for a moment.

THIS is Antarctica.

Perhaps they can convince you that every single space mission ever has been faked. Because like Mr Darwin, it would only take ONE photo of a flat Earth to disprove the round Earth theory.

Perhaps they can explain how the magnetic South Pole works so that you can approach it from any Antarctic shore and still find the flag (because if you think about it, that flag is going to be literally on the other side of the world if you pick the "wrong" place to start).

Perhaps they can come up with a way to make GEOMETRY work differently so that the circumference of Antarctica is smaller that the circumference of the equator.

And perhaps they can come up with a way to explain how in AUGUST you can have a longer day in the MIDDLE of a circle than you have at the OUTSIDES? And how in JANUARY you can have a longer day at the OUTSIDES than you do in the MIDDLE?

Perhaps they can even explain how it can be day and night SIMULTANEOUSLY in different parts of a flat disc. (And nowadays you can phone someone in New Zealand to FIND OUT… if you don't mind being bawled out for waking them in the middle of the night!)

But REALLY, TRULY ships sailing out to sea do NOT disappear over the horizon because the sea is HILLY!

Day 2653: Expelled Exploded

Sunday:


Exciting news! My top chum, Professor Richard – husband of one-time time traveller Romana, who used to be in Doctor Who, and friend of the late Mr Douggie Adams, who used to write for Doctor Who (and some travel books) – is going to be in Doctor Who too!

This seems like an opportune moment to WARN you about another screen appearance for Prof Richard, the man rightly acknowledged as the Theresnosuchthingasgodfather of British Atheism.

It is a movie called "Expelled", which alleges that science is really a conspiracy by atheist Nazis to suppress Unintelligent Design and persecute teachers who believe in Mr God.

And – proving that even the brightest of elephants can be taken in some of the time – Professor Richard got fooled into appearing in it.

“The incredible thing about Expelled is that we don’t resort to manipulating our interviews for the purpose of achieving the ‘shock effect’,”

How did they fool him? Well, when they approached Professor Richard, and also Mr Professor PZ Myers and a number of other REAL scientists, they CLAIMED to be making a documentary called "Crossroads" about a cheap soap set in a Birmingham motel… no, that's not right. They claimed that "Crossroads" would be a dispassionate appraisal of the clash between scientific and religious thinking.

This – as you may have been able to guess – turns out to have been what is technically described as a HONKING GREAT FIB, or in religious language: breaking Commandment Nine.

But Professor Richard got his own back by getting into one of their "invitation only" screenings… though, at the risk of undermining my hero's reputation as a MASTER SPY, that's "invitation only" in the sense of "free tickets available off of the wibbly wobbly web".

In fact, Professor Richard happened to be in town for the American Atheists conference, and Professor PZ was the one who got the tickets…

…which it was probably why it was Prof PZ who the brave little STORMTROOPERS for Freedom of Speech picked out of the queue and EXPELLED from "Expelled".

Clearly not "intelligently designed" with an IRONY GLAND there then.

Professor Richard gives his review of the "movie" here.

But why take HIS word for it, when you can LAUGH and POINT at their own propaganda.

"But even worse, along the way, Stein uncovers a long line of biologists, astronomers, chemists and philosophers who have had their reputations destroyed and their careers ruined by a scientific establishment"

What the movie is ACTUALLY about is pushing the assertion that believers in Mr God the entirely scientific and credible (I say SARCASTICALLY) "theory" (likewise) of Unintelligent Design, that has nothing to do with Mr God at all honest injun, are being PERSECUTED: i.e. kept out of teaching jobs and even fired just for no other reason than that they want to ignore the set curriculum (not to mention the Constitutional separation of Church and State) and fill their pupils' heads with religiously motivated brain-bilge instead.

Remembering that this is the country where, when the President's DAD was Vice-President, he said:

"I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under Mr God."

is it COMPLETELY believable that it is the SECRET ATHEIST CABAL who are doing the persecuting, as opposed to, just for example, the blatantly out-in-the-open religious theocrats who make it difficult-verging-on-the-impossible for anyone to get a job in public service in Americaland without expressing a deep and abiding lurve (but not in THAT way) for Mr Jesus?

And anyway, it turns out that their "evidence" doesn't stack up. As this review by Mr Dan Whipple from Colorado shows, the cases of "discrimination" that they cite just don't stand up to examination. Claims that Mr Richard Sternberg was removed from the Smithsonian prove problematic when you learn that he never worked for the Smithsonian. The allegation that Mr Guillermo Gonzalez was denied tenure because the faculty of astronomy at Iowa State University "unfairly" based their decision on his book about Unintelligent Design collapses when you know that he HIMSELF submitted the book for their consideration. And so on.

"an elitist scientific establishment that has traded in its skepticism for dogma… that allows absolutely no dissent from Charles Darwin’s theory"

Their OTHER "theory" is that knowing about Mr Darwin automatically turns you into a Nazi.

This is their equation:

"Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany."

which is said in HILARIOUS spoiler tags in this review on the movie's own website.

If you don't want to know the ending look away now… "Adolf did it!"

So, I know, Godwin's Law, but they mentioned the Nazis first so they lose.

Thing is, Mr Adolf WASN'T an atheist. He was some sort of weird cross-breed between Norse Mythology and Roman Catholicism, neither of which are RENOWNED as Atheist belief systems.

And Mr Adolf did NOT base his ideas on evolution.

For that matter "eugenics", which is selective breeding applied to human monkeys rather than pigs or dogs or cows or sheeps or other animals, does NOT follow from evolution either.

Selective breeding had been going on for AGES and AGES before Mr Darwin realised that it was going on in nature TOO. About TEN THOUSAND years, in fact since the agricultural revolution and people started farming crops (your mileage may vary if you believe the Earth was created in 6000 BC).

To say that something is happening in nature is NOT the same as saying that that is a good reason for people to do it too.

It is a FALLACY to suggest that just because a person ACCEPTS a FACT about how something works in one part of nature it means that they believe that that way of working should be IMPOSED universally.

In fact, Professor Richard often says that he is passionately AGAINST Darwinism being APPLIED. He believes in social services, universal education, health care and support for the unemployed. If ANYONE is a "Darwinist" in the area of public policy it is the right-wing Mr-God-bothering THATCHERITES like Mr Balloon with their "get rid of the failures" policies.


Suggestions that "evolution is racist" or that "Mr Darwin was a racist" are just as FALSE. If anything, evolution and genetics show that, for all of your different colours, human monkeys are one of the LEAST differentiated species on the planet. Famously, there is MORE genetic differentiation between two tribes of CHIMPANZEES on opposite sides of a river than between any tow humans ON EARTH. (You can thank a near miss with extinction in the last Ice Age for that, by the way.)

To point at "the Origin if Species" and hoot about the rest of the title being "…or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" is to show DRAMATIC IGNORANCE. Mr Darwin talks about races of CABBAGES, or PIGEONS and all sorts of things. He is talking about VARIATION within species. He's not recruiting for the KKK.

As Professor PZ explains, Mr Darwin was no more a racist than anyone else in the Victorian era… that is to say actually quite a bit racist, but only because he'd been taught all his life that the British were the Best. And certainly no worse than Mr "I freed the slaves" President Lincoln.


If by now you are worrying that I am only going to stop writing my fluffy diary in order to go back to my secret volcano base and polish my black leather jackboots before receiving my next set of secret instructions from Uber-Professor Richard, then I suggest you put on your best TINFOIL HAT and go out to see this movie.

Otherwise, I should look forward to some more EXCITING Doctor Who!

PS:

I am indebted to Uncle Alan for bringing this BUNKUM to my fluffy attention.

Day 2412: Sister Species

Thursday:


New fossil evidence has been dug up that suggests a change to our understanding of the human evolutionary family tree.

Until recently we thought that you monkey-people were descended from one species called Homo Erectus (or Upright People) who were in turn descended from another species called Homo Habilis (or People who shop at Habitat, er…)

But now archaeologists have found some new bones that suggest that both these species existed at the same time, and so one was NOT descended from the other. Instead they may have been distant cousins, like you humans were to the Neanderthals.

This is a little bit of a setback and shows that we have not quite got the whole picture yet.

On the other fluffy foot, this is a GOOD EXAMPLE of just how science is SUPPOSED to WORK. When you find new evidence that contradicts your theory, you start again and find a new theory.

Day 2396: Evolution of the Elephants – Let's See Those TEETH!

Tuesday:


Scientists working on my episode of "Who Do You Think You Are" have traced my FAMILY TREE.

We have discovered some exciting and interesting facts: AFRICAN elephants and ASIAN elephants are, as you all know, all descended from a COMMON GRANDPA elephant, but apparently their nearest common ancestor – "Gramps" – must have lived something like seven-and-a-half MILLION years ago!

This is at least TWICE as long ago as when you humans' monkey-esque ancestor Australopithecus afarensis is thought to have evolved. In fact, it is about that time that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was living in the African jungle trees.

Which just goes to show what a GREAT and NOBLE family I come from!

Even more interesting, this article seems to suggest that Asian elephants are more closely related to FLUFFY MAMMOTHS than they are to African elephants!

(By "more closely related", evolutionary biologists – like my CHUM Professor Richard – mean "have an ancestor in common more recently". For example, humans and chimpanzees and bonobos all have an ancestor in common, but chimpanzees and bonobos have a more recent common great-great-great-etc-great-grandparent so they are more closely related to each other than they are to you!)

Mammoths were in fact NOT mammoth, but about the size of Asian elephants, so African elephants are BIGGER. Also, according to their genes, Mammoths could be brunette or even BLONDE!

I myself am of course a PLATINUM BLONDE as my many pictures show!

Only recently I was REALLY UPSET to read about a FROZEN fluffy baby mammoth who was discovered in SIBERIA!

The mammoths lived through the last ICE AGE and are thought to have survived until about five thousand years ago.

And they could have lasted even longer if your MURDEROUS ancestors hadn't EATEN THEM ALL! Yes, I have seen "Walking with Beasts"! I hope you are all PROUD of yourselves!

Still, at least SOME scientists seem to be tying to make up for this by trying to CLONE new Mammoths using FROZEN DNA. While in Russia there have been attempts to recreate the Mammoths habitat by turning part of Siberia into a "Pleistocene Park" (which is like "Jurassic Park" but with cuddly mammals instead of BERSERK DINOSAURS!)


A much more distant relative – although apparently ALSO ON THE MENU! – is the giant MASTODON, like this one that archaeologists have just dug up in Northern Greece.

This kindly, harmless herbivore with the most SPECTACULAR tuskage to be seen in the animal kingdom apparently lived between five million and ten thousand years ago… and was SERVED WITH A GOATS'-CHEESE AND YOGHURT SALAD!


Elephants clearly need some LOOKING AFTER.

So here is a NICE STORY about the Earth's largest living land animal – it is BRIAN BLESSED visiting the Millennium Elephant Sanctuary in Sri Lanka.

(You remember: the one that now comes second to my Very Fluffy Diary in Google Searches!)

Day 1889: Evolution

Sunday:


This is yesterday's diary, a day late AGAIN. Obviously this is Daddy's fault and NOT MINE!

It is late because Daddy was watching his new DVD of SERENITY. This is one of the best films ever that doesn't have cars in.

The good news is that we also watched the last STAR TREK which means that we have finally, finally, finally finished!


Meanwhile, on the telly, Mr Blair has said that he expects GOD to judge him.

Daddy says this would come across better if Mr Blair didn't say that HE was acting on his CONSCIENCE and everyone ELSE was being OPPORTUNIST. Actually, Daddy Richard said some other things too, but I think that they were rude.

I must look up SANCTIMONIOUS.

If by "god" Mr Blair means an imaginary person who lives in the sky, you can see why he would rather be judged by him than by a real judge!

The only god that I know is CUDDLY CTHULHU, so I have asked him for his judgement on Mr Blair. Let's just say Mr Blair need not bother with HARP LESSONS!

However, this has reminded me of something.

My Daddy Richard has been listening to CDs by Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and his wife Romana.

(CDs are like DVDs with no pictures – I know this sounds silly, but they are much better for in the car because the pictures would distract Daddy from driving and he might crash and hurt Penfold.)

Anyway, Professor Richard's CDs are called THE ANCESTOR'S TALE. They are very good. Professor Richard and Romana get into their time machine and go on a journey backwards in time, meeting their ANCESTORS along the way. As they go – and this is the clever bit – they meet up with other time travellers from all the other species on Earth.

This is because of a thing called EVOLUTION.

EVOLUTION means animals (and plants too!) change into new animals. Some animals are better than others at surviving in the place where they live – so they tend to have more babies and so animals like them become more common.

Suppose you do lots of walking – animals with big, flat feet do better. And suppose you are somewhere very hot, animals with big flappy ears for cooling down do better. HOORAY! Elephants evolved!

This takes LOTS AND LOTS of time (LONGER than watching all of STAR TREK!)

Now, and this is the REALLY clever bit, when the animals go to a new place, it might be DIFFERENT things that are better for surviving. So the animals in the new place change into a different sort from the first lot.

For EXAMPLE, a long time ago, some of YOUR ancestors lived in a forest and decided to come out and that’s when you started to change into PEOPLE.

BUT some of them STAYED in the forest and they became CHIMPANZEES.

Isn't that EXCITING! It means that you and chimpanzees have a great, great, great, great, great, great, and then some grandparent in common!

So when Professor Richard and Romana set off on their time trip, the FIRST people who aren't people that they meet up with are chimpanzees, because they are your nearest relatives in the WORLD!

But that is not all! You are also related to gorillas and to rats and mice and to whales and hippopotamus and GUESS WHAT! You are related to ELEPHANTS TOO!

(Apparently we are also related to lions and tigers and potatoes too, which is much more DUBIOUS. I can believe that RHINOS are related to POTATOES, but I am not sure about ELEPHANTS.)

Professor Richard says that some people do not believe in EVOLUTION. They are silly! If all the animals had been created at the same time, then the DINOSAURS would have eaten all the PEOPLE. I have seen JURASSIC PARK!





I should also say that today I feel SAD for a lady called TESSA JOWELL.

She is a friend of Mr Blair, which is not why I am sad for her, but she has just lost her husband because he might have been a bit dodgy. I am sure that SHE must be feeling SAD too; I know I would be.

I wish that the Conservatories and the telly people would just LEAVE HER ALONE for a bit until she feels better. I know the Conservatories are supposed to be the nasty party and I am only a soft, fluffy elephant but this just seems MEAN.

I think that they are just cross because Mr Balloon made a speech yesterday and nobody noticed because they were all much more interested in Mr the Merciless. Here is a clue to help you out, Mr Balloon: SAY SOMETHING INTERESTING!