Oh behalf of RDFRS US, I am immensely proud of the videos that Sean is now putting out. They are truly superb, and I especially like the way he ends them with an appeal for action. In this case, please respond to his appeal for information about the infamous "Liberty" University. It surely deserves to lose its accreditation to award degrees – in biology at least. Otherwise, the degrees given by real universities are devalued.

Richard

This is exactly the kind of image I love to use in presenting science, because it is counter-intuitive, yet very easy to check the calculation. Just note the diameter of the 'droplet' of water (a substantial fraction of the width of North America), then remember that the volume of an object goes up with the cube of the linear dimension, then smear the volume (4/3 pi r cubed) of water out over the available surface area and it all makes sense.

It's valuably counter-intuitive in the same sort of way as those calculations that show that every time you take a breath you are inhaling at least one molecule that went through the lungs of . . . name any historical character you like.

Of course, I am not an evolutionary biologist so what do I know ?

Indeed.

Am I suffering from déjà vu, or didn't we post this quite a long time ago?

Comment 160 by guwest :

Great programme and who was the left wing commentator who thought Dawkins' work led to Thatcher's election, as mentioned in it?

The following is from A Devil's Chaplain

I should be allowed a personal word here because I am tired of being identified with a vicious politics of ruthless competitiveness: accused of advancing selfishness as a way of life. Soon after Mrs Thatcher’s election victory of 1979, Professor Steven Rose wrote, in New Scientist, as follows:

I am not implying that Saatchi and Saatchi engaged a team of sociobiologists to write the Thatcher scripts, nor even that certain Oxford and Sussex dons are beginning to rejoice at this practical expression of the simple truths of selfish genery they have been struggling to convey to us. The coincidence of fashionable theory with political events is messier than that. I do believe though, that when the history of the move to the right of the late 1970s comes to be written, from law and order to monetarism and to the (more contradictory) attack on statism, then the switch in scientific fashion, if only from group to kin selection models in evolutionary theory, will come to be seen as part of the tide which has rolled the Thatcherites and their concept of a fixed, 19th century competitive and xenophobic human nature into power.

The ‘Sussex don’ was John Maynard Smith, and he gave the apt reply in a letter to the next issue of New Scientist: What should we have done, fiddled the equations?

Irritating, headline-seeking rubbish. This creature may be our most distant eucaryotic cousin, but that makes it a very close cousin compared with bacteria.

Richard

As a PS to Orwell's Rules of Writing, Samuel Johnson said, "'Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'" I can't believe he really meant it as a general rule, but occasionally I kind of get it.

Richard

No they are not a clone. and no the colony doesn't behave as a single organism. It's much more interesting than that. It's the middle of the night and I must try to get back to sleep, but it isn't hard to look up. It's all in The Selfish Gene and lots of other places.

Good night.

Comment 13 by Steven Mading :

Doesn't an ant colony all share the same DNA? The workers, the soldiers, the queen - they're all the same genes, and differentiate only based on what they are fed - is that true?

If so, then I don't see what the difference is between group selection and kin selection in an ant colony. They're the same thing. If you're an ant, then your whole group you interact with is the tightest sort of kin you can have - they're your clones.

Could it be that someone who studies ants primarily would mistake kin selection for group selection because of this?

Sean is one of the most electrifying speakers I have ever heard. No wonder audience members regularly shout "Faircloth for President!" He not only gives great prepared speeches but is extremely quick on his feet too. On our previous joint tour, I recall one reporter in Detroit – actually from Fox News, which makes the story even better – who asked me a challenging question. I wasn't confident of my answer, so I deflected the question to Sean. Sean battered the reporter into the ground and the reporter then turned to me and said, "I want this guy as my lawyer."

Also, he knows how to punctuate, and how to spell criticism.

Richard

On the question of the stacking of the audience by Catholics, the following interesting comment by mitchgarside is reproduced from Pharyngula:

I can shed a little light on the audience, I’m a politically involved uni student in Aus and I heard about this from a few contacts: First some context, the show Q&A is on the ABC, a publicly funded channel, and is principally a political show that attempts to find real balance by having the best of all sides involved (not like the faux balance of many news programs, especially in the US). Hence the audiences are vetted by political leaning to attempt to produce a balanced crowd of right and left leaning, the way they do this is by asking which party you support/vote for when you apply to be in the audience.

This week the Catholic groups on campus discussed plans to stack out Dawkins appearance by applying as both Coalition voters (which would be true, they are our conservatives, yet still closer to the Democrats really, heh) and also as Green party voters (the most left wing party that has seats in Australian Parliament). So they managed to stack out both sides of the audience.

Bearing false witness being a sin doesn’t seem to have come across in this plan.

I too was disappointed in this so-called debate. I don’t want to put all the blame on my jet lag (I had spent the whole night on the plane from Los Angeles and, incidentally, missed the whole of Easter Day crossing the Date Line). The two things that really threw me were, first, the astonishing bias of the audience and, second, the interfering chairman.

Right from the start when we were introduced, it was clear that the studio audience was dominated by a Catholic cheer squad. The cheered whenever the Cardinal said anything, however stupid and ignorant. To be fair to the ABC, I am confident that they were not responsible for stacking the audience. I believe it was genuinely first-come-first-served, and I can only think that the Catholics must have got off the mark very swiftly and rallied the troops. Our side just isn’t very good at doing that: perhaps it is one of our more endearing qualities. It was encouraging that the vote of viewers at large came down heavily on our side, to the evident surprise and discomfort of the studio audience.

Such an extreme audience bias was a little off-putting, but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the chairman had allowed us to have a proper debate instead of continually racing ahead to get in another dopey question. There were times when the Cardinal had doled out more than enough rope to hang himself but then, in the nick of time, the chairman blundered in and rescued him with yet another samey question from the audience. The only time the chairman did a good job was when he pressed the Cardinal on what seemed perilously close to anti-Semitism.

More and more, I am thinking that discussions of this kind are positively ruined by an interfering chairman. That was also true of my encounter with the Archbishop of Canterbury, which could have developed into an interesting conversation but for the meddling chairman who, to make matters worse, was a ‘philosopher’ with special training in obscurantism.

Cardinal Pell had evidently been well prepped, formally briefed (for example with his alleged fact that Darwin called himself a theist on page 92 of his autobiography). I knew it wasn’t true that Darwin was a theist and said so, but I obviously couldn’t counter the “Page 92″, which duly got a cheer from the touchline. I’ve since had a chance to look it up and, as expected, it refers to the way Darwin felt earlier in his life, not his maturity when he said he preferred to call himself ‘agnostic’ because the people “are not yet ripe for atheism”.

Another missed opportunity on my part was when the Cardinal nastily insinuated that I had not read to the end of Lawrence Krauss’s book having written the Foreword. Actually I didn’t write the Foreword, I wrote the Afterword, which suggests that the Cardinal hadn’t read the book. Indeed, the content of what he said suggests that he (or whoever briefed him) had read only the infamous review in the New York Times, again by a philosopher not a scientist.

Altogether an unsatisfactory evening. Much better was the radio interview the following morning, which served as a kind of postmortem, after I had had a night’s sleep and had my wits more properly about me:

Richard

The whole film is long, but well worth watching. One highlight, for me, was the spectacularly stupid woman around 0:22:40. She begins by denying that God could ever sanction slavery. Scott then gets her to read aloud the relevant passage from Leviticus and she then completely changes her tune, saying that homosexuality is worse than slavery. That's right: homosexuality is WORSE than slavery. Why? Because the Bible condemns homosexuality and (as she has just that minute learned from Scott) it doesn't condemn slavery.

Even more horrifying is the section (starting around 0:59) labelled "Following Orders": a covert allusion to the Nuremburg Defence. Scott asks people to put themselves in the position of Joshua, ordered by God to slaughter the native peoples already living in the promised land, or of Abraham, ordered by God to sacrifice his son. One after another, the faith-heads say (reluctantly in the case of the young man with glasses and curly hair, but with something close to relish in the case of the odious man with a bald head and little beard) that yes, they would commit genocide and infanticide if God ordered them to. This is as clear an illustration of the evil of religion as I have come across for a long time.

Richard

It's Monday morning in Sydney and I've just landed from Los Angeles where I took off on Saturday. By crossing the International Date Line, I managed to miss Easter Day completely, but it has left me rather jet lagged on the morning of the day I am to encounter the Cardinal Archbishop. I'll try to sleep during the day.

Richard

Comment 1 by mordacious1 :

When I saw Richard in Berkeley, I was very happy to be 3rd in line with some other very ardent fans. We got good seats just a few feet from Richard (just had to show up early). It was obvious to me that no one there had big bucks, just common working people and some students. With this talk in San Diego, I see it would cost $50 to be in the two front rows, and $25 for reserved seating, probably the next several rows. So people with money get to show up late and get the best seats.

I understand the need to raise as much money as possible, but think this should be balanced with allowing poor fans (like students) to be able to get good seats also. I wonder if this is going to be the policy in the future.

No, no change in policy; indeed no particular policy to change. The local group hosting the event in San Diego needed to charge, in order to pay for the theatre. Large venues of this kind are not free. Perhaps the event in Berkeley that you attended was subsidised by my publishers, but this event in San Diego is not part of a book tour. You could say the relatively rich people paying premium rates for the front row seats are subsidising all the other seats, which would otherwise have had to be more expensive.

Comment 27 by AspieFred :

Mockery is a good counterpart to that what people call holy.

. . . we can mock any sports team, compare presidential candidate to toys. So why shouldn't we do the same with crazy rituals and world views?

This is funny: "Marxism no longer corresponds to reality" says Man in Giant Hat who speaks to Invisible Cloud People.

Thank you, Cartomancer, for your typically valuable contribution. Next time Michael Ruse, or any other faith-loving atheist, invites me to study 'sophisticated theology', I shall know what to say to him.

I am extremely pleased by Daniel Fincke's article, which says exactly what I SHOULD have said and, to my regret, didn't make sufficiently clear in my Reason Rally speech. The best way to summarise it would be to modify the quotation from Johann Hari. Johann said, "I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs". From now on, my version will be, "I respect you too much to accept that you really believe anything so ridiculous as you claim. Please either defend those beliefs and explain why they are not ridiculous, or else declare that you do not hold them and publicly disown the church to which you claim loyalty."

Politicians who curry favour with voters by claiming religious affiliation should learn the downside of such self-serving claims. They should be made to defend, in public, the ridiculous beliefs of the religion to which they pretend loyalty.

Richard

Comment Removed by Author

Comment 1 by sycorax :

Love the picture !

I don't. How has something beautiful (fucking) become debased, in our language, in the service of an insult? Suppose you translated the words of the sign into their literal meaning: "Copulate with this guy." Yuck. Yuck squared.

Now let's forget the stupid picture, which might have been deliberately designed to turn people off the Reason Rally, and talk about the article itself. I suppose it's mildly encouraging that the rally found its way into the British press.

Richard

Michael Aus's coming out is very good news. And the very next day, at the American Atheist conference in Bethesda, Maryland, another reverend member of our Clergy Project took the same brave plunge. Teresa MacBain, known to her Clergy Project colleagues as 'Lynn' came out as a non-believer. Teresa, who says she feels elated and 'great', will be joining the Humanists of Florida.

That's two brave ex-clergy in two days. Congratulations to both and welcome to the world of sane reality. You are both among friends.

Richard

Suppose a political candidate has sensible enough views on economics, taxation, foreign policy etc, but lets it be known that PRIVATELY he believes he is a poached egg. I wouldn't vote for him. Would you? Believing that a priest, by blessing a wafer, can turn it literally into the body of a first century Jew is of the same order of lunacy as believing you are a poached egg. I would not be impressed by this politician's promise to be scrupulously careful never to let his belief that he is a poached egg influence his policies. He believes something ridiculous and should be called out on it, because a voter might reasonably doubt the judgment of a man who thinks he is a poached egg.

What about Jack Kennedy, you say? Well, he claimed to be Catholic and that commits one to the ridiculous transubstantiationist belief. I don't think for a moment that Kennedy did believe in transubstantiation, but I think he should have been publicly challenged to deny it and therefore to deny his Catholicism. Actually, I doubt that somebody as intelligent as Kennedy believed in God at all. Again, I think politicians should have their religious beliefs publicly challenged: should not get away with hiding behind the convention that it is somehow not polite to ask about somebody's religion.

Richard

What a devastatingly brilliant speech. Please pass it around, and also recommend Katherine Stewart's chilling book The Good News Club.

Richard

Comment 7 by Stafford Gordon :

Comment 1: mgjinich.

"I would love to read Richard's opinion."

My first thought; is group selection back in the frame?

What a maddening, infuriating, enraging talk, a talk as badly misguided as it is well delivered (albeit with a style of slick, adman showmanship that rubs me personally up the wrong way). I have to go and catch a plane, so no time to spell it out. But, briefly:-

1. No, group selection is not back in the frame. E.O.Wilson, for all his merits, has never understood kin selection. Even in 1975, in Sociobiology he was treating kin selection as a kind of group selection, which it utterly is not. Maynard Smith coined the phrase 'kin selection' precisely in order to distinguish it from group selection.

2. The social insects work entirely by kin selection. The theory is well-worked out and it works. Sterile workers contain copies of genes that are also in reproductives. The worker phenotypes are driven by those genes to work for their copies in reproductives.

3. Mitochondria and other 'membrane-bound' examples. As I have spelled out at great length in numerous places (e.g. The Extended Phenotype, The Selfish Gene, Unweaving the Rainbow) the key here is that groups of genes who share the same exit route from the present vehicle into the future have common interests and work together. My earliest attempt to explain this actually made use of exactly the same metaphor of rowing crews (developed at some length in two places in The Selfish Gene).

4. It is true that Darwin, in The Descent of Man, did uncharacteristically resort to a form of group selectionism for the particular example of humans. But I suspect that if Darwin had known of the later work of men such as Hamilton, Trivers and Maynard Smith, he would not have done so. The only good part of Haidt's talk, where he evokes the group solidarity of humans, for example in warfare, is beautifully explained in non group selectionist terms. For example, kin selection using 'fictive kin'. Consider the lengths to which military and paramilitary units go to foster notions of 'brotherhood'. Look it up in Andy Thomson's excellent book.

Got to rush, sorry

Richard

The four headings are indeed by me, from my open letter to my ten-year-old daughter. But I don't think the rest of the text is by me. And I do know how to spell 'navel'.

Richard

I hope lots of people will take advantage of the child care facilities that RDFRS US is providing in Washington.The purpose of this initiative, which was originally announced at TAM in 2011, is to enable people, who might otherwise be unable to attend events like this because of the responsibilities of child care, to do so. It seemed that an important and highly valued constituency was missing from our meetings, and that we should do something about it.

Richard

This is a text version of the excellent speech that Nick Cohen gave when presenting the awards at the National Secular Society's 'Secularist of the Year' lunch in London. Peter Tatchell, recipient of the main award, also gave a very good speech.

Richard

Poor artist? I think his drawings are brilliant. And I'm so glad the story about the ludicrous censorship of Doonesbury has led me to rediscover the strip. I'd forgotten how much I love it and I shall follow it daily from now on.

Richard

I'm listening now here and it works fine. You have to listen to a ridiculous commercial which lasts about 15 seconds first (and can't be bypassed as far as I can tell). Sean is doing a great job

Richard

In case anyone feels like writing a complimentary letter to the Rev Bryan Griem, the charming fellow who thinks an atheist soldier must be a "big fat chicken", you can find his contact details here: http://www.montrosecommunitychurch.org/PASTORBRYANGRIEM.dsp

His email address is montrosecommunity@sbcglobal.net

Please read this book, talk about it, tweet about it, recommend it to friends, review it on Amazon, name and shame the culprits, do everything possible to bring Katherine Stewart's shocking message to the attention of everyone in America. Truly, religion poisons everything, and when the poison infects elementary schools it's time to get seriously angry. These odious people, legions of zealous, born-again volunteers, descend on innocent schoolchildren, take over their school buildings (officially after school hours: I must have missed the explanation for why they pay no rent) even enlist the children themselves to infect other children. Here's a typical passage:

At the Vieja Valley Elementary School in Hope Ranch, California, parents reported an incident that began on the playground, when Ashley, a sprightly six-year-old, approached her first-grade classmate Chloe, near the swing sets and delivered the bad news: "You can't go to heaven."

Ashley had already figured out that Chloe, the only Jewish girl in her class, did not believe in Jesus.

Chloe protested, but Ashley persisted. "If you don't believe in Jesus, you are going to hell."

Their teacher overheard the increasingly heated exchange. When class resumed, she asked everyone to pay attention. People from different religious backgrounds, she explained, have very different perspectives on certain kinds of issues and beliefs.

Chloe, feeling good that she had stood her ground, seemed content with the result. But Ashley was crushed.

"You mean they lied to me right here in school?" she began to cry. "Because that's what they taught me here! How can they teach me things that aren't true?"

And there are lots more stories where that came from.

The point, for an American steeped in the Constitution, is that technically Ashley was not taught the lies in school. She was taught them by a completely separate organisation which was allowed, because of a legal technicality, to use school premises after school to run a 'club'. But these little children have no obvious way to distinguish the real teachers who properly belong to their school from the evangelists who swarm in, bearing tempting treats, the moment school officially finishes for the day. I understand the constitutional issue, but what matters more for me is the despicably loathsome tactic of setting child against child, corrupting young minds to go on and corrupt other young minds, indeed terrify them with threats of hell. Not only do these 'Good News Clubs' set child against child, they poison the whole atmosphere of a school, dividing parent from parent and teacher from teacher, causing friction and distress where previously there had been educationally productive harmony.

I can't help thinking of Luke 17, 2: "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."

The organisation behind the 'Good News Clubs' is immensely powerful, rich, influential, backed by Supreme Court judges, and revoltingly smug with it. Let's help Katherine Stewart wipe the smile off their stupid, born-again face.

Richard

How utterly contemptible.

Richard