The Tarkine is one of the great temperate rainforests on Earth. It is every bit as majestic as the traditional European forests that so dominate fantasy settings, but is also distinctly alien to anything in the northern hemisphere. As Margo promises, “the giants are not northern ogres but Tarkiner giants: myrtle, gum, sassafras and Huon pine. The birds, reptiles, mammals and insects that thrive in and among them; the fungi, ferns and smaller flora at their feet and in their branches; and the humans who have shared this part of the planet with them for about 30 millennia, will stretch your usual definition of ‘forest’ and ‘coast’, of ‘life’ and ’society’, in utterly new ways.”

The tour can only accommodate 10 people so book early. Information and bookings here.

The Tarkine wilderness (from Ken’s public Picasa gallery):

A quip sometimes called Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is cleverer than you are,” and evolution is apparently cleverer than Richard Dawkins, because kin and group selection do exist — and pay off.

Professor Shipman is arguing that the central premise of The Selfish Gene is wrong: that is, contra Dawkins, there is no doubt that group selection and kin selection exist. There are just two problems with this. Firstly, the evidence for group selection is far from certain. It is still a highly controversial subject and even its most ardent scientific supporters claim no more than that it is a minor adjunctive process to the “gene’s-eye view” articulated in The Selfish Gene. More importantly, Shipman has completely misrepresented — no, let’s be frank, she has lied about The Selfish Gene because in fact one of the the main arguments in The Selfish Gene is how altruism can arise in nature through the mechanism of kin selection. There are whole chapters of The Selfish Gene dedicated to explaining evolutionary observations with kin selection. So, instead of Dawkins dismissing kin selection, it was actually a fundamental part of his argument.

Thus Shipman has just taken the opportunity to write in the New York Sun (circulation 150,000 and picked up by Arts & Letters Daily , circulation unknown but enormous) and used it to spread lies. To rub salt into the wounds, she says this:

An ironic legacy of Mr. Dawkins’s work also deserves exploration here. Because his works are so lucid and so stunning, Mr. Dawkins’s ideas have assumed a life of their own. His powerful metaphor of the inherent selfishness of the gene was misunderstood by many and often taken deeply to heart. One reader wrote that reading “The Selfish Gene” triggered a 10-year series of depressions because “it presents an appallingly pessimistic view of human nature and makes life seem utterly pointless; yet I cannot present any argument to refute its point of view.” The picture of evolution offered by the book, and others by Mr. Dawkins, which many found bleak, also contributed to the growth and stridency of the intelligent design movement to undercut the teaching of evolution in public schools.

So now it’s Dawkins’ fault that one unnamed reader experienced ten years of depression and that the intelligent design movement sprung up. Well, you know, this is just more bullshit. The intelligent design movement is bankrolled by Christian fundamentalist billionaires who have never read The Selfish Gene. And one person blaming ten years of depression on a book that expressly observed that there is altruism in nature and that humans should find ways of overcoming our selfish urges says a lot more about the person doing the blaming than the book.

And finally, the ultimate in hypocrisy:

The benefit to science of “The Selfish Gene” in triggering a new understanding of the magnificent complexity of evolutionary processes must be weighed against the harm the book has done in provoking a backlash against science. I can only hope that, in the end, knowledge will triumph over ignorance.

Since The Selfish Gene triggered no backlash, this is wrong on its face. And even if it were true, and there are science books that have genuinely triggered backlashes against science, I fail to see how anyone who cares about science and truth can argue that they must be “weighed against the harm” they have caused. Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibis Orbium Coelestium, and Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems come to mind. Pat Shipman seems to think that these books need to be weighed not against whether they are good science or not, but in the counter-revolutions they have inspired in people who never had much regard for evidence in the first place.

And, of course, it astonishes me that an author who lies about the contents of The Selfish Gene, misrepresents the current state of group selection in evolutionary theory, and seeks to blame Dawkins for the sins of his enemies, and does so in a high-profile public forum, could have the complete lack of insight to call for knowledge to triumph over ignorance. A hint, Prof Shipman: if you wish to combat ignorance, you might try not spreading it yourself.

Thanks to boingboing.net for the link.

Remember that the banners will be changed, so try not to let them influence you. To see the pix in full, right click on each image and select “View Image.”

Velocity

Velocity is my current favourite. It looks great and has lots of space for content. My only quibble is that the links are not highlighted. This makes the text look very stylish but it completely undermines the purpose of hypertext. Mind you, it should be an easy fix.

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Victoria

This is the most gorgeous of the layouts I like, but its magazine style is not (I think) quite right for a blog. Also, as you can see from the screenshot, the theme did not pick up on the existing blog entries and I suspect an awful lot of work will have to be done to get the theme tweaked to a functional level.

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Big Blue

Big Blue is nice and clean. But, you know, maybe a bit too clean. It looks like a wall of text.

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Cutline 3

Cutline 3 has Big Blue’s clean text but is more inviting to the reader. On the downside, it looks astonishingly like the front page of a small regional newspaper. For some reason that bugs me a little.

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InSense

Nice and clean again, InSense has a bit more character. There’s a little too much colour in the text for my liking but that can be tweaked easily. InSense has a very welcoming feel to it.

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In the Kitchen

I like In the Kitchen’s warm colours. Ignore the godawful banner.

[I]n comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison.

Now, naturally, I agree completely with this statement, and I also agree that Dawkins warrants the criticism. I was flabbergasted when Dawkins hosted a television series on religion called The Root of All Evil? Now it seems to me that calling religion the root of all evil is about as silly and unhelpful as the Biblical quote that love of money is the root of all evil, thereby neglecting such crimes as rape, negligent homicide, and suicide bombing–although to be fair to St Paul, he was probably mistranslated.^[1] Dawkins himself claims that the title was not his choice and that the only concession he wheadled out of Channel 4 was the question mark. But, you know, as the writer and presenter, it was Dawkins’ name and face emblazoned on the DVD cover, and I find it hard to believe that Channel 4 would not have acquiesced to a principled stand.

But that is as far as my agreement with Robinson goes. Behind this fair criticism, Robinson hides a cohort of fallacies and misrepresentations and it irks me to see Norm Geras quote her at length on matters of which she is clearly ignorant and intellectually dishonest. For instance,

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil “in the name of… an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.” But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point.

I’ve now read at least a dozen critics of The God Delusion complain that Dawkins did not expand at length on their particular pet subject. I can only surmise that had Dawkins done what his critics wanted of him, The God Delusion would have been 1,200 pages long and as gripping as an oiler’s handshake and nobody would have read it. Exactly what Dawkins’ critics would have wanted.

And how exactly is totemism “in error?” I can only assume that totemism is in error because Robinson doesn’t believe in it. By any sensible measure, totemism is a form of religion. It is practised in Japan’s Shinto temples, and although the Catholic Church would deny it, the concept of patron saints is totemism in a monotheistic wrapping.

But more to the point: Dawkins is absolutely right about eugenics. Eugenics was not and never was a science. And Hitler’s version of eugenics had even less to do with science than anyone else’s. I’ll come back to this point later, but it should serve as notice of Robinson’s poor intentions, especially as Robinson counters Dawkins’ one-sentence dismissal of eugenics as science with a one-sentence assertion that it is too science. More on that later. Robinson actually ought to have stuck to blind assertion because her problems really come out when she tries to explain herself, no more starkly illustrated than by this:

If the only bad effect of the notion to yield a highly selective reading of the past by dismissing the modem horrors as anomaly, that in itself would he grounds for objection. But it enables a misreading of the history it chooses to acknowledge. For example, Dawkins quotes a passage from an essay by T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s contemporary and champion, in which Huxley says the black man will not “be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival [that is, the white man], in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.” Dawkins cringes at this, but, he says, “good historians don’t judge statements from past times by the standards of their own.” He finds evidence for his advancing moral Zeitgeist in the crudeness of Huxley’s racism: “The whole wave keeps moving, and even the vanguard of an earlier century (T. H. Huxley is the obvious example) would find itself way behind the laggers of a later century.”

But was Huxley in the vanguard? The essay from which Dawkins quotes, “Emancipation — Black and White,” published in 1865, is an explicit rejection of the belief in racial equality active in America before and for some time after the Civil War. Huxley dismisses “standards” that had long been salient among his contemporaries. He is saying that emancipation may well prove to have very mingled consequences — “emancipation may convert the slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperised man” — and that the egalitarian hopes the movement inspired should be rejected. This was the crucial period of Reconstruction and of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which established the full rights of citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in this country. Its passage was the work of emancipationists, and it was meant to create meaningful political equality for African Americans, among others. The vanguard in the period in which Huxley wrote were those Christian abolitionists whose intentions he dismissed as, of course, at odds with science. Huxley’s racism, like Hitler’s, is not a standard from which ineluctable progress can be inferred but instead a proof of the power of atavism.

Except that this is a complete misrepresentation of Huxley, and given Robinson has clearly read his essay, I am struggling to find a way to consider this an innocent mistake. To correct Robinson’s misrepresentation: Huxley was indeed a racist, like almost everyone of his era, including abolitionists. But rather than being opposed to emancipation as Robinson implies, Huxley was a firm abolitionist. His full argument, which Robinson doesn’t want you to know, is that slavery is immoral and blacks deserve full freedom even if they are inferior to whites. His point about the downside of emanicipation was not that emancipation was a bad thing, but that it was not enough. Simply freeing blacks would turn them from slaves into paupers, still at the mercy of the landowners by virtue of their poverty, and that what was needed was a “double emancipation” to protect blacks from economic pseudo-slavery. As the history of post-emancipation Confederate states shows, Huxley was rather insightful on this point. This is the last line of Huxley’s essay, pointedly unquoted by Robinson:

The duty of man is to see that not a grain is piled upon that load beyond what nature imposes; that injustice is not added to inequality.

Was Huxley racist? Indeed. Very much so. He was also very sexist. But note that nowhere in the essay does he claim that his view is more scientific, nor that abolitionists had unscientific intentions. His argument is that the issue of emancipation is a moral issue rather than a scientific one. That is, even though Huxley believed blacks (and women) were inferior to whites (and men), he pointed out that this was no scientific reason to oppose emancipation. He also argued that a mere legislative fiat was not sufficient to give blacks a fair chance of reaching their full potential.

Robinson also misrepresents the prevailing emancipation movement. Far from Huxley being a retrograde influence, his opinion that blacks were inferior and yet still deserved citizenship was exactly that of Abraham Lincoln, and indeed most other abolitionists. Lincoln not only held that blacks were inferior, but also that blacks should not intermarry with whites, should not have the vote (later he changed his mind and decided that some blacks could have the vote if they were considered up to it or if they had fought for the Union), and that freed blacks should be packed off to colonise Liberia so as to keep them separate from whites. While I am not aware of anything Huxley said about the Liberian experiment, he was most definitely in favour of universal suffrage. Thus Huxley was more modern in his views than almost anyone of his time, including his fellow abolitionists. Again, Robinson does not want you to know that. She wants you to think that Huxley was a source of friction to emancipation, slowing things down.

Huxley was, contra Robinson, an extremely active proponent of human rights, as evidenced by his role on the Jamaica Committee that sought unsuccessfully to have Governer Edward John Eyre tried for murder for putting down a slave uprising in Jamaica with savage violence and extra-judicial killings. Huxley wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886,

Sir–I learn from yesterday evening’s Pall Mall Gazette that you are curious to know whether certain “peculiar views on the development of species,” which I am said to hold in the excellent company of Sir Charles Lyell, have led me to become a member of the Jamaica Committee.

Permit me without delay to satisfy a curiosity which does me honour. I have been induced to join that committee neither by my “peculiar views on the development of species,” nor by any particular love for, or admiration of the negro–still less by any miserable desire to wreak vengeance for recent error upon a man whose early career I have often admired; but because the course which the committee proposes to take appears to me to be the only one by which a question of the profoundest practical importance can be answered. That question is, Does the killing a man in the way Mr. Gordon was killed constitute murder in the eye of the law, or does it not?

To me, it means something that the members who fought alongside Huxley on the Jamaica Committee included Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and they were generally vilified for considering blacks too deserving of freedom and equality before the law even by other emancipationists. Or to put it another way, contra Robinson, the most ardent proponents of scientific Darwinism were on the side of universal human rights, as opposed to the dignitaries who argued that the rule of Empire was more important than bringing a governor to justice, numbering among them such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, the fiery anti-atheist and anti-Darwinist John Carlyle, and even (against all expectations) Mr Charles Dickens. Now I don’t present this information to argue that scientists are better than non-scientists or that religion is worse than non-religion. There were clergymen on the Jamaica Committee and the opposing Eyre Defence Committee entertained at least one anti-clerical Christian in John Ruskin, and one defender of scientific Darwinism in Charles Kingsley. But it does show that Robinson has no knowledge of the history she draws upon, which is particularly egregious given the accusations of historical ignorance she launches at Dawkins. Talk about your “highly selective reading of the past.”

Perhaps most saliently, it should be noted that over time Huxley changed his mind about race. After 1867, he became increasingly concerned to point out in scientific meetings that most of the differences between groups of humans were due to environmental or cultural factors, and eventually came to the conclusion that there was little biological difference between the various races. Far from being an example of a racist and anti-abolitionist who used science to bolster his grandfather’s prejudices (that’s what “atavism” means), Huxley was a vehement abolitionist, a supporter of female suffrage, a leading figure in the opening of British universities and colleges to female students, and although undeniably a racist, a man whose views moderated over time in response to increasing weight of evidence against his prejudice. Huxley summarised his lifelong political passion as having three planks:

…equal freedom to share the necessaries of life; equal freedom of opportunity to advance; equal freedom to shape individual thought and action within the necessary limitations of political organisation.

Through Robinson’s pen, Huxley comes to stand square against himself. I find it illuminating to read about the criticism John Stuart Mill received when he was on the Jamaica Committee. From Utilitarianism and Empire:

Thomas Beggs, a contemporary of Mill, complains that Mill’s opponents took extracts from Mill’s books “which without the context, were made to read very differently to the author’s intentions. Nothing but blank pages could save an author under such treatment.”

Sadly familiar, no?

[1] St Paul probably said “the root of much evil is the love of money,” but due to contextual ambiguity in the original Greek this became “the root of all evil.”

Next: Was eugenics a science?

The performances throughout are spot-on. The script is tight with just the right amount of flourish to spark up the necessary slower, building scenes. It speaks volumes that the producers invited John Sayles to the screenwriting team. Sayles, for those who don’t know, is widely regarded as one of the great American filmmakers of the 1970s. He specialises in small-scale, low-budget independent movies (if I could recommend one of his films, check out Lone Star) and his skill in drawing big character out of small dialogue is second to none. Probably Sayles joined Spiderwick on the recommendation of his frequent collaborator David Strathairn (who plays Arthur Spiderwick), but the fact that the producers took him on shows that they were serious about making a good film with solid characterisation and were not willing to fob off the audience just because they are children and watching a fantasy film. And Spiderwick has a line that is destined to be quoted everywhere.

Vengeance or death! … Hopefully vengeance.

Quibbles: my only major reservation is the disservice the script does to the older sister in the movie. She starts as an intelligent young woman with moxie, but as her younger brother becomes more and more self-assured, she becomes less and less. It’s almost as if her brother’s rise is counterweighted by her own diminution. By the end of the film she is looking to her brother with big puppy eyes for her next instruction.

I am aware that the film has considerable divergences from its source books. For instance, the children in the book are shifted five or six years older than in the books. But not having read the books I can’t comment on the overall effect of these changes for good or bad.

I have a bigger quibble–although not with the movie itself but rather with the fantasy genre as a whole. The tropes of Spiderwick are drawn straight from the folklore of Europe and yet it is set in New England, USA. It seems myopically ahistorical to me to assume that brownies and sylphs and ogres have lived in America the whole time. Perhaps they stowed away on the westward ships–in which case there is a great idea to be had in the clash between the invading European mythology and the Native American. Who wouldn’t want to read about Puck hunting Coyote in the Columbia River Plateau after Chief Joseph’s surrender to take Coyote’s place as the trickster of the New World?

Granted, it is dated April 1st, and writer Xeni Jardin immediately admits that “Oh, alright, I made up the hippie-hating part”, but the rest is apparently true and rather scary.

I really should have put a person there for scale; the large fan-like plant fossil on the bottom row would come up to an average man’s shoulder.

The fossils are (L to R, top to bottom): a large trilobite, theropod tracks, some flying thing (a real Archeopteryx that size would need more than a lottery win!), a Jurassic fern, Paleohyrax reprobae, a leaf, a group of fish (probably Knightia from the Green River fossil fields), a large skull (I’d go for a sabre-tooth cat myself), a frond of river plant such as a Seirocrinus with an accompanying Knightia, a mammoth tusk, an ichthyosaur, a stromatolite section (the polished yellow rings), a pair of large eurypterids, a cluster of Vendian soft-bodied echinoderms, brittle starfish, a field of large ammonites, and lastly, on a mount, the hugest insect in amber.

12. Although not a Lutheran by denomination, he was a great admirer of Martin Luther.

A few days ago I was in Eisenach and stood on top of the Wartburg, where a great German once translated the Bible.

…and from another setting,

And we know that were the great German reformer with us to-day he would rejoice to be freed from the necessity of his own time…

11. Although not a Lutheran, he was commemorated in this carving of a baptismal font inside the Martin Luther Memorial Church (image pixelated to maintain the quiz; click here to see the original image).

10. He argued that Christians should unite by rising above denominational conflicts.

We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls…. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.

9. He urged people to live as one under the guidance of Jesus Christ.

So we have come together on this day to prove symbolically that we are more than a collection of individuals striving one against another, that none of us is too proud, none of us too high, none is too rich, and none too poor, to stand together before the face of the Lord and of the world in this indissoluble, sworn community.

8. He felt that religious faith was a necessary condition for a good life.

I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path… Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith.

7. Correspondingly, he rejected atheism in the strongest terms.

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

6. He railed against blasphemy, especially when used to support political agendas.

But he who dares to use the word “God” for such devilish activity blasphemes against Providence and, according to our belief, he cannot end except in destruction.

5. He warned against the dangers of occultism and paganism and even used the “some things mankind was not meant to know” argument.

We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement.

4. Although never inclined to promote unity of purpose with non-Christian churches, as a young man he was struck by the prevalence of anti-Semitism.

Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word ‘Jew,’ with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions…. For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.

3. He believed in fair distribution of wealth.

We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another.

2. He was reasonably talented as an artist and painted this glowing portrait of the Madonna and child in “naïve art” style. (There’s a really big clue in this painting, if you know what to look for!)

1. His most widespread motto (stamped on literally millions of belt buckles) was “God With Us.”

Answer after the break…

Who was this man? Adolf Hitler.

The “God With Us” belt buckle was standard issue for German infantrymen under the Nazis, and the material for this quiz is sourced from the website Hitler’s Christianity.

Now the purpose of this quiz is not to propose that Nazism was the godchild of Christianity. Hitler was, it should not need to be said, an egotistical megalomaniac psychopath with all the regard for truth and rhetorical fairness we commonly associate with egotistical megalomaniac psychopaths (see also Mugabe, R). If it suited him to conjure up Christ in his speeches, he would do so. If it suited him to attack church leaders, he would do so. It also should go without saying that many of the most admirable opponents of Hitler within Germany were Christians (think of Dietrich Bornhoeffer, the White Rose movement, and Admiral Canaris, all of whom paid with their lives).

I mention all this as a small matter of protest against the monstrosity that is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-evolution movie in which our host Ben Stein spends considerable time touring the death camps of Germany and drawing on his Jewish heritage while invoking Darwinian evolution as atheistic and the natural progenitor of Nazism. So while none of the information drawn on for this quiz should be used to attack Christianity, I present it to point out that Ben Stein and his financial backers are pathological liars who are trying to demonise Darwin and atheism by association with Nazism even though the historical record makes it quite clear that Hitler was raised a Catholic and remained a Christian all his life (albeit not one prone to doctrinal consistency), never criticised Jesus (although he often criticised other Christians for not being “True”), repeatedly attacked atheism, and never once in his writings or speeches referred to Darwin or biological evolution.

Why would Stein lie like this? Well, one can’t ever be sure how accurately one can gauge another’s motive from a distance, but three thoughts come to mind, to wit: unapologetic former speech writer for Richard Nixon; professional propagandist; the phrase “pieces of silver.”

And did you get the clue in the painting? Look again. Baby Jesus is a blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan cherub and most definitely not the child of Levantine Jewish parents (OK, for the sake of argument, one Levantine Jewish parent and one God).