More Reason for Ya

If you are short of amusement this morning, be sure to check out the spectacle of a Neuroscience PHD student with a BA in Philosophy to his name, lecturing the scientific community on who can and cannot be 'a true scientist'. This would be like me attempting to lecture the academic community of historians on how 'you cannot be a Marxist and a proper historian at the same time'; except of course my MA is actually in the subject I would be addressing. Eric Hobsbawm would still be more than entitled to tell me to 'sod off' though.

Of note is his comment that:

While it is invariably advertised as an expression of “respect” for people of faith, this accommodationism is nothing more than naked condescension, motivated by fear. Mooney and Kirshenbaum assure us that people will choose religion over science, no matter how good a case is made against religion. In certain contexts, this fear is probably warranted. I wouldn’t be eager to spell out the irrationality of Islam while standing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. But let’s be honest about how Mooney and Kirshenbaum view public discourse in the United States: watch what you say, or the Christian mob will burn down the library of Alexandria all over again. By comparison, the “combativeness” of the “New Atheists” seems entirely collegial.

This would be a remarkable achievement, not least because a Christian mob never burned down the Great Library of Alexandria in the first place. See:

The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria - James Hannam
The Foundation and Loss of the Royal and Serapeum Libraries of Alexandria - James Hannam
Tim O' Neil's treatment of the New Hypatia Movie - The Great Library and it's myths
The (rather heated) discussion in the comments here
This discussion by Roger S Bagnall in 'Hellenistic and Roman Egypt'

Interestingly, Roger S Bagnall says that:

Passions still run high on this matter. When Glen Bowerstock first invited me to present this paper, I hesitated because of a traumatic early experience. I wrote an article on the Alexandrian Library on commission for a short lived magazine called 'The Dial', published for Channel 13. The editor did not like my caution about the accounts of the destruction of the library and , without telling me, rewrote the article to blame everything squarely on the Christians. Whether he hated Christianity or just liked a simple storyline I do not know'.

So far, that's all these much vaunted 'secular values' of The Reason Project' appear to consist of. Simple stories, long-winded rants and rapidly disappearing up one's own posterior.

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Ratramnus and the Dog Heads

Near a mountain called Nulo there live men whose feet are turned backwards and have eight toes on each foot. Megasthenes writes that on different mountains in India there are tribes of men with dog shaped heads, armed with claws, clothed with skins, who speak not in the accents of human language, but only bark and have fierce grinning jaws.....Those who live near the source of the Ganges, requiring nothing in the shape of food, subsist on the odour of wild apples, and when they go on a long journey, they carry these with them for safety of their life by inhaling their perfume..Should they inhale air, death is inevitable

Megasthenes’ Indica – Reported in Pliny

People in the Middle Ages inherited many esoteric ideas from antiquity, among them the belief that beyond the known world there are races of beings that look very different to humans. Although strange to the modern eye, this notion was widespread in the ancient and medieval world. In Pliny we find that Ctesias, a Greek physician, claimed that he had heard of tribes without necks . This resulted in the eyes being displaced to the shoulder. Others had eyes in the middle of the forehead. Some, like the Scythian cannibals, drank out of human skulls and used the scalps as napkins (at least they had some table manners). Still more strange were the Monocoli (Monopods), a tribe which had one leg and an enormous foot. In hot weather they would lie on their backs and protect themselves with the shadow of their feet. The Machlyes, according to Aristotle, performed the function of either sex alternatively, being equipped with the left breast of a man and the right of a woman. Some people in India would have sex with wild animals and produce children of mixed species. Other races had men with dog’s heads and tails.

Ctesias wrote:

‘In the mountains dwell men who have the head of a dog; they wear skins of wild beasts as clothing, and they speak no language, but bark like dogs, and in this way understand one another’s speech. They have teeth bigger than a dog’s...they understand the speech of the Indians, but cannot respond to them; instead they bark and signal with their hands and fingers, as do mutes’.

They attempt to cook their food, but lacking the ability to make fires, they have to cook it in the boiling sun. Their sexual activity is rather what one would expect of a canine:

‘All of them, men and women, have a tail above their hips, like a dog’s except bigger and smoother. They have intercourse with their wives on all fours like dogs, and consider any other form of intercourse to be shameful. They are just, and the longest lived of any human race; for they get to be 160, sometimes 200 years of age’.

The existence or non existence of the dog-heads at the edge of the known world being somewhat hard to verify, the idea became popularised in the medieval period, a subject documented by Robert Bartlett in ‘The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages’. The dog-heads had passed into popular legend but also into the imagination of monks and clerics due to the great encyclopaedias and standard texts of the late Roman and early Medieval world. They were probably also used as bogeymen to frighten enemies and to represent virtues and vices in Church art. Hence according to a Welsh poem, King Arthur fought with the creatures:

‘On the mountain of Edinburgh; He fought with dog-heads; By the Hundred they fell’

A story of St Christopher from Ireland depicted him in these terms:

‘Now this Christopher was one of the Dogheads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh. He meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads. When he saw how much the Christians suffered he was indignant and left the city. He began to adore God and prayed. "Almighty God," he said, "give me the gift of speech, open my mouth, and make plain thy might that those who persecute thy people may be converted". An angel of God came to him and said: "God has heard your prayer."The angel raised Christopher from the ground, and struck and blew upon his mouth, and the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired.’

Having regretted his former pagan, human-eating habits, St Christopher became baptised. As a result he gained human appearance before getting martyred.

In the 9th century a churchman called Rimbert - who later became the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen – was planning to leave on a missionary journey to the northern reaches of Scandinavia. The idea of converting Scandinavia to Christianity had been enthusiastically pursued by the Emperor Louis the Pious and Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims in the 820s. In preparation for the journey Rimbert wrote to Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie in Picardy, asking for information regarding the dog-heads, whom he thought he might encounter. Ratramnus had been sent a dossier Rimbert had put together which informed him that the dog-heads lived in villages, practised agriculture and domesticated animals. In response Ratramnus wrote his Epistola de Cynocephalis a work which would answer the question of whether the dog-heads were worthy of evangelism. The issue hinged on whether the mysterious creatures could be considered rational. Ratramnus begins by describing their manner of speaking:

the form of their heads and their canine barking shows that they are similar not to humans but to animals. In fact, the heads of humans are on top and round in order for them to see the heavens, while those of dogs are long and drawn out in a snout so that they can look at the ground. And humans speak, while dogs bark.

And yet, despite their appearance, the information Rimbert had supplied clearly indicated they were capable of domesticating animals. ‘I do not see’ wrote Ratramnus, ‘how this could be so if they had an animal and not a rational soul’:

since the living things of the earth were subjected to men by heaven, as we know from having read Genesis. But it has never been heard or believed that animals of one kind can by themselves take care of other animals, especially those of a domestic kind, keep them, compel them to submit to their rule, and follow regular routines.

Ratramnus pointed to the way in which the dog-heads ‘keep the rules of society’ and recognised the rule of law. ‘There cannot be any law, which common descent has not decreed. But such cannot be established or kept without the discipline of morality’. Unlike Ctesias’s dog-heads, Rimbert’s report stated that they covered their genitalia. Ratramnus interpreted this as a sign of decency and these and others attributes convinced him they were human; in any case, St Christopher had once been one and converted. Hence, Ratramnus concluded that the dog-heads were degenerated descendants of Adam, although the Church generally classed them with beasts. They may even receive baptism by being rained upon. Here Ratramnus was following in the footsteps of Augustine of Hippo, who had written that if the monstrous races do exist, they were created according to God’s will and, if they are human and descended from Adam, they must be capable of salvation. This would extend the Churches missionary obligation to the farthest flung parts of the earth and make ‘monstrous missionising’ a necessary fulfilment of Christ’s charge.

Lest we sneer from our Modern standpoint, it has to be pointed out that Ratramnus is responding to what he thinks is good information from a man who was travelling to Scandinavia, the edge of the known world. In his reply he is using what are recognisably modern anthropological categories to decide whether the dog-heads are man or beast. His work covers issues which were to become extremely pertinent when Europeans came into contact with other peoples in the New World and the debate began concerning whether they had souls capable of salvation and were entitled to equal dignity and universal brotherhood.

In the event, according to Bartlett, one John de Marignollis travelled to the Far East in the 1330s and looked for the monstrous races the ancients had spoken of. Unable to find the one legged monopods he concludes that the travellers who had reported their existence must have been confused by the umbrellas the Indians carried. He tried to ask the locals about the existence of the dog-heads and other tribes but unfortunately the only response he appears to have got is ‘we thought they lived where you came from’.

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The Dragons of the Swiss Alps

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

Johann Jakob Scheuchzer - 'Itinera Alpina'

The early modern period was a time of revolution in intellectual thought which profoundly altered the European relationship with nature and human possibility. That’s certainly part of the story. It was also a time in which the Royal Society took seriously a plan for an expedition to the Alps to search for dragons, a scheme supported by Isaac Newton and prompted by the work of a Zurich based scientist called Johann Jakob Scheuchzer.

In 1723 Scheuchzer, who was a correspondent of both Newton and Leibnitz, wrote a detailed study which detailed all the species of dragon which were known to exist in the Alps. He felt compelled to do this after having seen a ‘dragon stone’ in Lucerne, a type of rock which you can cut out a dragon’s head if you catch him sleeping. Scheuchzer had learnt that the technique for doing so was to first catch a dragon asleep, then scatter soporific herbs about him and cut the stone out of his head, all the while taking care not to wake him up since this will ruin the stone (luckily, in the case of the Lucerne stone a dragon had dropped it when flying past and it was picked up by a farmer called Stämpfli). This was said to cure a range of complaints including bubonic plague and nose bleeds. Having seen the empirical evidence, Scheuchzer felt that the existence of Dragons was not just common folklaw and could be logically inferred. He had reason to doubt the authenticity of the ‘dragon stone’ but decided it was genuine, firstly because a dishonest man would never have invented so simple a story, secondly because the finder was of good character, and thirdly because the stone could cure simple haemorrhages.

Scheuchzer set about collecting witness reports in the mountains, including that of one Johann Tinner of Frumsen, who had seen one of the beasts:

" Its length, he said, was at least seven feet ; its girth approximately that of an apple tree ; it had a head like a cat's, but no feet. He said that he smote and slew it with the assistance of his brother Thomas. He added that before it was killed, the people of the neighbourhood complained that the milk was withdrawn from their cows, and that they could never discover the author of the mischief, but that the mischief ceased after the dragon had been killed."

A Johann Bueler of Sennwald reported seeing " an enormous black beast," standing on four legs, and having a crest six inches long on its head. Another credible testimony came from Christopher Schorer, Prefect of Lucerne, who reported that:

‘In the year 1649, I was admiring the beauty of the sky by night, when I saw a bright and shining dragon issue from a large cave in the moutain commonly called Pilatus, and fly about with rapidly flapping wings. It was very big; it had a long tail ; its neck was outstretched ; its head ended with a serpent's serrated jaw. It threw out sparks as it flew, like the red-hot horse-shoe when the blacksmith hammers it. At first I imagined that what I saw was a meteor, but after observing it carefully, I perceived that it was a dragon from the nature of its movements and the structure of its limbs.’

Scheuchzer added these accounts to his detailed study in which he described several distinct subspecies of dragon. In writing this , Scheuchzer claimed that his sole objective was to create a ‘historical description of the dragons of Switzerland’. Some were ‘winged, windless, without feet and many footed’. There was also ‘one who had the body of a snake and the head of a cat’ (see the illustration on the right). Some of them had ‘bats wings’, elaborate crests and ‘two pronged tails’. One variety reached only two feet in maturity. Others were said to ‘breathe so hard as to draw in not merely air but the birds flying above them’. The best specimen, Scheuchzer reported was the ‘ginger tom’ which lived in Graubunden. 'This region' wrote Scheuchzer, 'is so rugged with so many caves that it would be strange not to find dragons there'. One of the questions puzzled over by Scheuchzer was whether the crest on the dragons was to be taken as a specific distinction or merely characteristic of the male. This curious work was printed in England in the 1690s and entitled 'Proof of the existence of dragons'. Members of the Royal Society in London paid the cost of publication.

In Scheuchzer’s defence, he is now considered one of the founders of paleobiology. While he believed in dragons he also spoke out vehemently against the practice of burning witches which was then very widespread. Witches and other minions of the devil were apparently all over the Alps, spreading plague, manipulating the wind and making the glaciers expand. A series of witch trials in Swiss cities were held and hundreds of suspects were tortured and executed. They were said to be spreading the plague using a potion ‘made of the flesh of a hanged person, the grease of the dead, cow’s blood, pigs’ blood and arsenic’.

These and other examples serve to remind us that the early modern period was as much a time of superstition and magic as the medieval period; in fact probably more so.

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'God's Philosophers' by James Hannam is available now from Amazon

God's Philosophers is Available NOW

God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science is now being sent out by Amazon.co.uk. It will hit the shops next week, but if you would like your copy as soon as possible (and probably cheaper than in the High Street), you can order it now.



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Futurology and the Brain

One of the more curious works of recent times was a book called ‘The Singularity is Near’ by the futurist Ray Kurzweil. In it Kurzweil claimed that between now and the year 2050 technology will have reached such giddy heights that homo sapiens will have reached a new stage of evolution and develop into cybernetically augmented humanoids with self improving artificial intelligences as sidekicks. At this point, as it is so often predicted, ‘history will end’ in a Fukuyama-esque fashion and human/civilisation will explode across the cosmos and develop into a universal super-intelligence.

This is just one of several preposterous pieces of futurology I have read this year. The first was Susan Blackmore’s article on how the ‘gene machines’ (our DNA) have created ‘memes’ (the contents of our minds) which will all come to be enslaved by the ‘temes’ (the stuff we are putting on the internet). The other was a gleeful article in one of the British tabloids which argued that we shall all be proud owners of ‘robot sex slaves’ by the middle of this century; although, if Kurzweil’s and Blackmore prophesies come true I think we would be just as likely to end up being bred as sex slaves by the robots. Frankly I am not raising my expectations and would be happy just to get a TV remote that doesn’t get lost down the back of the sofa by 2050. I can’t say that becoming the 21st centuries equivalent of Robocop is top of my to-do list.

Not surprisingly Kuzweil has been the object of some criticism, the science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod describing his vision of immortal software-based humans as ‘the rapture for nerds’. The journalist John Horgan has described it as ‘a religious rather than a scientific vision’, an ‘escapist, pseudoscientific’ fantasy; he has also mocked Kuzweil’s ambitions to ”live long enough to live forever” and resurrect his dead relatives with nanobots.

A while back, Horgan followed up ‘The End of Science’ with a book called ‘The Undiscovered Mind’ which highlighted the ways in which the human brain currently defies explanation. In a recent article called ‘The Conciousness Conundrum’ he uses similar ideas to attack the idea of the singularity and the creation of humanlike machines. Horgan writes:

In spite of all those advances, neuroscientists still do not understand at all how a brain (the squishy agglomeration of tissue and neurons) makes a conscious mind (the intangible entity that enables you to fall in love, find irony in a novel, and appreciate the elegance of a circuit design). ”No one has the foggiest notion,” says the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. ”At the moment all you can get are informed, intelligent opinions.”

The problem apparently is the complexity:

A healthy adult brain contains about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons. A single neuron can be linked via axons (output wires) and dendrites (input wires) across synapses (gaps between axons and dendrites) to as many as 100 000 other neurons. Crank the numbers and you find that a typical human brain has quadrillions of connections among its neurons. A quadrillion is a one followed by 15 zeroes; a stack of a quadrillion U.S. pennies would go from the sun out past the orbit of Jupiter…..Adding to the complexity, synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken, and dissolve. Old neurons die and--evidence now indicates, overturning decades of dogma--new ones are born…..Far from being stamped from a common mold, neurons display an astounding variety of forms and functions. Researchers have discovered scores of distinct types just in the optical system. Neurotransmitters, which carry signals across the synapse between two neurons, also come in many different varieties. In addition to neurotransmitters, neural-growth factors, hormones, and other chemicals ebb and flow through the brain, modulating cognition in ways both profound and subtle.

It’s an interesting article and well worth reading , especially the speculation concerning the neural code (the rules and algorithms which govern the brains performance). I have recently become interested in neural plasticity, something which was dramatically demonstrated recently by the case of the girl born with only half a brain. Somehow her brain managed to rewire itself and retinal nerves that should normally connect to the missing right half of her brain have moved into two parts of the left brain, thus ensuring perfect vision. In a similar case back in 2002 a girl who had half her brain – including the speech centre- removed was able not only to recover but also master two languages. The comment at the time was that :

‘We should see the brain as a dynamic system fully capable of functional reorganisation to re-establish the most essential functions for independent survival, rather than the somewhat static collection of neurons it is often made out to be.’

Bear that in mind next time you can't remember where your keys are.

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The End of Civilisation

During the past couple of weeks I have been reading up on the 'continuity vs catastrophe' debate concerning the fall of the Western Roman Empire. There are some interesting articles online, including this dialogue between Bryan Ward-Perkins of Oxford University and Peter Heather of King's College London. Both of them are sceptical of attempts to portray the fall of the Western empire as a quiet transformation. Peter Heather's conclusion is that:

'the central Empire did not pass away quietly but was fought to extinction over a 70 year period of intense struggle. As the power of the imperial centre collapsed, local Romans had no choice but to make their peace with the new immigrant powers in the land, and their survival made it possible for some (but not all) of the successor states to use some Roman governmental mechanisms. But this kind of post de facto negotiation process absolutely does not mean that the Empire went peacefully. As all the recent evidence for fourth-century economic, cultural, and political vigour might lead us to suspect, the fifth-century Empire fought a long and determined, if ultimately unavailing, struggle for survival.'

Ward Perkins who wrote 'The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation' agrees with Heather on this point:

'neither of us have much time for the theory that the empire was quietly ‘transformed’, by the peaceful ‘accommodation’ into it of some Germanic barbarians. We both believe in invasions that were violent and unpleasant, rather than what I have termed the ‘tea party at the Roman vicarage’ theory of settlement by invitation. I probably share Peter’s views, because I have heard him lecture on the subject many times, always with great conviction! Anyway, the idea that the fifth century was more peaceful than violent, just doesn’t fit the facts. Some degree of accommodation between invaders and invaded was possible, particularly over time. But I argue that the horrors of invasion are undeniable, and were often protracted, and that adjusting to rule under Germanic masters was painful and difficult for the Romans, used as they were to lording it over the known world.'

The second part of this interview is available here. I also came across a fascinating podcast by Ward-Perkins here in which he endeavours -by reference to archaeological findings - to describe the changes that took place in this period (with particular reference to Anglo-Saxon Britain).

The lifestyle of the Barbarians can’t have been so far below that of the Romans can it?

No it’s not that far below. And in fact the barbarians when they come in and find flourishing ways of Roman life, they very, very rapidly adapt. And for instance, people like the Ostrogoths in Italy happily live in marble palaces. It’s not that they are culturally ill attuned to using the Roman ways. But the collapse of the Roman state with its taxation system, which did redistribute wealth within the empire, and the disruptions caused by military invasion radically interrupt economic life; and basically economic life unravels. It’s a difficult process to understand because we are used to things growing all the time and we are used to economies becoming more and more complex so that, every single year, new bits are added on. But, I think what happens at the end of the Roman world is that economies start to unravel, and in fact it’s a very salutory thing to study because it makes one realise that things like this can happen. Our assumption that things are going to get more and more complicated, more and more sophisticated, and in a sense perpetually better, might be wrong.

How do you chart these incremental changes when there is not very much evidence for them?

Well, the best evidence certainly comes from archaeology because we don’t have, for the immediately post-Roman period, the great runs of documentation you might have for late medieval times or early modern times. We don’t have any data on population or the longevity of life. Archaeology can provide some of that data. It will go on providing better and better data. For example, as more and more skeletons are studied we will get better ideas about the health of population, size of population and the longevity of population. At the moment that’s all quite difficult, partly because people can’t quite agree how you actually age bones. The archaeological data will keep getting more and more all the time.

What I have worked with mainly is pottery. Pottery fortunately has two huge advantages. Firstly, everybody uses pots and secondly pottery survives extraordinarily well in the soil. It breaks very easily but once it’s in the soil it is almost indestructible. A vast mass of pottery have been excavated by archaeologists all over the Roman and post Roman worlds and that shows an extraordinary change. In the Roman period, even at a low level, a peasant might have access to a whole range of pots from a widely different set of kilns, and of very good quality. In the post Roman period, almost all pottery is very local, rather badly made and porous. There is just a huge contrast, most marked in places like Britain but also very noticeable in places like Italy.

So - I’ve argued, and I think I’m right – that if you can see this sort of change in pottery, it probably also happens in all sorts of industries where thinks don’t survive that well, like clothing industries, footwear, metal tools, domestic building; virtually everything.

Presumably that’s not because of a lack of skill. Was it because people were pre-occupied with living more basically?.

To be honest it’s a bit of a mystery....I mean I can show you that a pot made in Britain in 500AD is very different to a pot made in Britain in 400AD, but the pot of course isn’t telling you why. One has to hypothesise. Actually quite a number of technologies do disappear. For example in Britain in 500AD, nobody was making wheel turned pottery. The use of the wheel – which is a very basic technology – completely disappears from the whole British Isles during the 5th century. Equally, for example, the burning of lime to make mortar. There is no mortared building, no new mortared building in 500AD. It’s re-introduced at the very end of the sixth century, particularly from the continent with the return of Christianity. Another technology if you think of it is writing. Writing disappears in Anglo-Saxon Britain in the fifth century. Again this comes back in with Christianity in the sixth century. I find it very puzzling, particularly with something as basic as the use of the wheel for making pottery. It has to be really that the market has collapsed. The market doesn’t exist for people to be specialised enough to invest in the basic things like a potter’s wheel which would enable them to make more pots, because in order to do that they would have to be able to sell more pots. Apparently the market just implodes so that everyone is effectively just making their own. Technologies do depend on a market in order for people to put the investment into buying the tools to make things in a specialised ways and also the investment to train themselves to make them that much better. It is puzzling, and I wouldn’t like to say I am very happy with this explanation, but that’s what it looks like.

Is it accurate to say that when the Western Roman Empire fell we moved into ‘The Dark Ages?’

I think so. Although it’s not necessarily a very fashionable view. The term Dark ages has gone out of fashion, and in many ways rightly so because the problem about it is that it is in many ways morally loaded. The idea that people were in many ways nastier and more brutal, and I think that is in many ways straightforwardly wrong. Not because I think they were terribly nice, but just because I think people have always been extremely unpleasant, and one only has to look at twentieth century to realise that people with more complex technologies can be even more unpleasant to each other than people with basic technologies. So in that sense I think Dark Ages needs to go. I don’t actually use it myself. But in terms of a) availability of evidence - which is one of the reasons they are ‘dark’- yes, definitely. The evidence just disappears, or virtually disappears. In places like Britain you do literally return to pre-history. There is no history. There are no dates for the part of Britain taken over by the Anglo Saxons from about 410 and the return of Christian missionaries in 597. So for 200 years we really don’t know from written records what is going on. So in that sense it’s very dark. And, in cultural and economic terms there is a remarkable simplification. Simplification is a neutral term, but if you want to call it a regression, I don’t think that’s being too judgemental. So yes, I think Dark Ages do happen, although I think the term is too loaded.

According to Ward-Perkins, recovery in Britain was very slow, but by the late eight century AD we begin to see the re-emergence of towns, particularly coastal settlements such as Hamwich (Saxon Southampton) and London as a trading centre. Complex native industries gradually begin to re-emerge, particularly in East Anglia and coinage was slowly re-established from the 7th to 8th centuries. By 800 Britain was roughly similar to what it had been in 1AD in the immediately pre-Roman period.

I would also recommend Tim O Neill's review of Chris Wickman's 'The Inheritance of Rome' and James's short post 'How Dark were the Dark Ages?' for a synopsis of the debate. It's great to see that, despite everyone agreeing that the term 'Dark Ages' is no longer appropriate, no-one can quite bring themselves to stop using it. Unfortunately the unfair, loaded and derogatory terms for historical epochs are usually the most catchy.

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By Jove

A week ago, scientists noticed a black spot on Jupiter. Apparently the gas giant was struck by a sizable asteroid. CosmicLog has the details. Jupiter functions as a guard for the inner solar system, deflecting asteroids and comets out of Earth's path. Were it not for Jupiter, the Earth would be struck by asteroids a thousand times more frequently, enough to prevent the possibility of advanced life evolving. Or to put it the other way round, in order for advanced life to exist on a planet, its solar system will require a planet the size and distance of Jupiter. If it were smaller or further, it wouldn't have enough gravitational impact to protect the inner planets; but if it were closer or larger, its gravitational effects would disrupt their orbits. It has to be exactly the size and distance it is. This is one criterion of the Anthropic Principle. Thank God for Jupiter.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we're still vulnerable and need to take the threat of an asteroid strike seriously. Part of the story here is that no one saw this asteroid before it hit Jupiter. It was a complete surprise. Of course we don't have as many electronic eyes out there as we do closer to home; but to give Jupiter as big of a black eye as it did, it must have been big enough so that it should have been seen beforehand. It's only a matter of time before something that big comes our way.

I know some people will not take seriously the claim that the Earth is in danger of being hit with a large asteroid or comet. It doesn't happen that often, it's just a doomsday scenario, etc. I'm reminded of a Dilbert cartoon about pessimists and optimists. If it's been a long time since anything bad has happened (an asteroid strike in this case), the optimist says, "We're safe forever." The pessimist says, "We're due."

(cross-posted on Agent Intellect)


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The Cleverest & Oddest Woman in Europe

‘Struggle, war and not peace is the inescapable law of life. Species struggle against other species, varieties against varieties and within each variety, in the social group, the tribe, the family itself, individuals struggle against other individuals’

Clemence Royer

The Theory of Evolution is arguably the most powerful idea in human history. In light of this it was pretty much inevitable that right from the very beginning it would be used to prop up utterly loony ideologies. As Denis Alexander describes in ‘Rebuilding the Matrix’, when ‘The Origin of Species’ was translated into French by Clemence Royer, she attached ‘an anticlerical harangue’ as a preface (Darwin’s first choice of translator had been Louise Belloc, but she had declined his offer as she considered the book to be too technical). This presented the reader with a ‘stark choice between the “rational revelation” of scientific progress and the “obsolete revelation” of Christianity.

‘The doctrine of Darwin is the rational revelation of progress, pitting itself in its logical antagonism with the irrational revelation of the fall. These are two principles, two religions in struggle, a thesis and an antithesis of which I defy the German who is most proficient in logical developments to find a synthesis. It is a quite categorical yes and no between which it is necessary to choose, and whoever declares himself for the one is against the other. For myself the choice is made: I believe in progress’.

She then ranted on for another 60 pages in much the same vein, taking sideswipes at the idea of charity.

‘What is the result of this exclusive and unintelligent protection accorded to the weak,the infirm, the incurable, the wicked, to all those who are ill-favored by nature? It is that ills which have afflicted them tend to be perpetuated and multiplied indefinitely; the evil is increased instead of diminishing, and tends to grow at the expense of good.'

Royer then attacked the ‘mixing of blood between higher and lower races’. ‘Nothing is more self evident than the in-equalities of the various human races’ she wrote, proclaiming that there was a law in nature which ordained the replacement of inferior races by stronger ones. She even went so far as to change the title of Darwin’s book, calling it ‘On the Origin of Species, or the laws of progress among organisms’. Having received a copy of the publication, Darwin wrote to Asa Gray:

‘I received 2 or 3 days ago a French translation of the Origin by a Madelle. Royer, who must be one of the cleverest & oddest women in Europe: is ardent deist & hates Christianity, & declares that natural selection & the struggle for life will explain all morality, nature of man, politicks &c &c!!!. She makes some very curious & good hits, & says she shall publish a book on these subjects, & a strange production it will be’

He was particularly bemused by her habit of adding extensive footnotes, which had the effect of putting forward his theory a little less cautiously than he would have liked. Darwin complained:

‘Almost everywhere in Origin, when I express great doubt, she appends a note explaining the difficulty or saying that there is none whatever!! It is really curious to know what conceited people there are in the world’ In a letter to Charles Lyell he added that ‘the introduction was a complete surprise to me, and I dare say she has injured the book in France’

A second edition was released in which Royer toned down her eugenic statements in the preface, but added a new forward promoting ‘free-thought’ and complaining about the bad press she had got from Catholics. By the time of the third edition in 1870, Darwin was getting irritated by the outspoken Frenchwoman. In the latest version she had expressed her disappointment that Darwin was engaging into speculation about pangenesis. Seeing this Darwin wrote:

‘I must enjoy myself and tell you about Madame C. Royer who translated the Origin into French and for which 2d edition I took infinite trouble. She has now just brought out a 3d edition without informing me so that all the corrections to the 4th and 5th editions are lost. Besides her enormously long and blasphemous preface to the 1st edition she has added a 2nd preface abusing me like a pick-pocket for pangenesis which of course has no relation to Origin. Her motive being, I believe, because I did not employ her to translate "Domestic animals". So I wrote to Paris; & Reinwald agrees to bring out at once a new translation for the 5th English Edition in Competition with her 3e edition — So shall I not serve her well? By the way this fact shows that "evolution of species" must at last be spreading in France.’

Darwin had prudently decided to authorise a new French translation authorised by Jean Jacques Mouline, but by now his theories in France were indelibly associated with thorny issues such as spontaneous generation, atheistic materialism and sinister laws of ‘progress’.

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Sorting the Physics from the Metaphysics

Physics world has recently released a couple of interesting articles from sometime adversaries Lee Smolin and Leonard Susskind. Susskind’s article is an attempt to cheerlead for the String Theory Anthropic landscape by invoking Darwin and the science-religion 'conflict'. He remarks that:

In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”..... In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

Unfortunately Darwin merely appears to have evicted God into the cosmologist’s territory, a fact bemoaned by Susskind.

what is less noted is that physics and cosmology pose very similar questions, such as why the universe seems so incredibly fine-tuned for the existence of life. The only explanation, if we can call it an explanation, is that if it were less fine-tuned, intelligent observers like ourselves would have been impossible. I am, of course, referring to the cosmological constant, L. Theoretically, one would expect L to be unity in natural Planck units. But if it were anything bigger now than it is known to be — 10–123 — it would have prevented the evolution of galaxies, stars and us. Like Paley, we encounter what appears to be an extremely unlikely occurrence.........as Paley might have complained, accidents involving 123 decimal places are too unlikely.

Luckily, just as the ‘faith-heads’, ‘theocrats’, ‘fidophiles’ and ‘sky-fairy aficionados’ let out a triumphant yell of glee, the string theorists gallop over the horizon to save the day.

‘Just as the details of DNA determine the biological details of a living organism, so the details of the fluxes, branes and other elements determine the properties of the universe. Again, the numbers are so staggering that even if the world as we know it seems extremely unlikely, there will be many ways of arranging the elements to make the constants of nature consistent with life. In particular, there will be many configurations in which the cosmological constant will be fine-tuned to 123 decimal places......Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space, will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

The problem being that String Theory find itself in a lot of trouble with the publication of Peter Woit’s ‘Not Even Wrong’ and Lee Smolin’s ‘The Trouble with Physics’. Peter Woit on his blog was less than impressed, complaining that:

Lenny Susskind gives new depth and meaning to the word “chutzpah” with an article in Physics World on Darwin’s Legacy. It seems that Darwin’s legacy for physics is the field of string theory anthropic landscape pseudo-science. Luckily, I don’t think creationists normally read Physics World.

Perhaps Susskind’s article was prompted by last month’s article by Smolin entitled ‘The Unique Universe’ in which he argues against the excesses of String Theory Anthropic Reasoning and argues that the timeless multiverse does not lend itself to predictive models and effectively does not exist:

there has been a gradual shift, during which it first became acceptable to work on theories that described not only our universe, but other possible universes, universes with less or more dimensions, or universes with different kinds of particles and forces. In the last few years, we have moved further away from theories of our one universe, as these other worlds went from being logically possible to hypothetically actual. It is now common to hear about the multiverse — a quantum cosmology that takes for granted that the visible universe that we see around us is just one of a vast or infinite number of universes..... the combination of the multiverse assumption and the timeless assumption effectively gives us a static meta-universe. Even if our own universe evolves in time, at a deeper level it is part of a timeless, eternal, ensemble of universes.

This is part of the problem highlighted by Paul Davies in a 2007 article:

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn’t so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Smolin identifies the problems with this multiverse and meta laws. The first is that the relationship between the fundamental laws that would govern the theoretical multiverse and the effective laws we observe in our universe is fraught with difficulties:

...In a timeless world in which our universe is just one of many equally real universes, the laws of physics must be very different from those that most physicists can ever have conceived. This is because the laws of physics are no longer determinable by what we observe in our own universe, for they must apply to all of the vast en¬semble of universes. A fundamental law then no longer proscribes what happens in our universe; instead it gives probability distributions for properties of the ensemble of universes.... given that the characteristics of the ensemble can be postulated at will and are not subject to experimental tests, the result is that we cannot make precise and unambiguous predictions about anything observable in our own universe.

The second is that ‘without time, and without the assumption that what exists is the single universe that we observe, it is hard to make sense of statements about probability relevant to what we observe in our universe. Since quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory, we then run into trouble by trying to extend it to a realm where probability appears to make no sense’. In other words, theories that do not posit time to be a fundamental property fail to reproduce the space—time that we are familiar with.

To solve this problem, Smolin suggests positing a time as something fundamental, rather than seeing it as an emergent property. He also suggests that science should proceed with the following metaphysical principles:

1) There is only one universe. There are no others, nor is there anything isomorphic to it.

2) All that is real is real in a moment, which is a succession of moments. Anything that is true is true of the present moment.

3) Everything that is real in a moment is a process of change leading to the next or future moments. Anything that is true is then a feature of a process in this process causing or implying future moments – this would reject the idea of eternal laws and the existence of a platonic world of mathematical forms

4) Mathematics is derived from experience as a generalization of observed regularities when time and particularity are removed.

Smolin concludes by saying that the “notion of transcending our time-bound experiences in order to discover truths that hold timelessly is an unrealizable fantasy. When science succeeds, we do nothing of the sort; what we physicists really do is discover laws that hold in the universe we experience within time. This, I would claim, should be enough; anything beyond that is more a religious urge for transcendence than science’. He also plugs his cosmological natural selection theory by claiming that the laws of nature could evolve with time.

Whether Smolin's metaphysical edicts will be the modern day equivalent of the 1277 condemnations remains to be seen. While his principles will go some way to tidying up all the speculation rife in physics they are unlikely to satisfy those who wonder why this particular model of universe exists.

For those that are interested, there is an article about the theological implications here.

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I Just Like Completely Held My Book

I came back home late from the theatre last night (Phèdre at the National Theatre with Helen Mirren – tragic and gory) to find that the first copies of God's Philosophers had arrived. It was quite something to hold it, feel it and see it for real. It's been a long wait. Icon Books has done a great job. The cover is really good – bright and distinctive – so it should at least get a second glance from shoppers. Copies have gone out to all and sundry in the hope that it will be reviewed as widely as possible. Being a full-format hardback helps, although literary editors are notoriously difficult to predict. God's Philosophers will be in the shops in the UK in two weeks and in Canada a couple of weeks later. It should also be published in Australia although I don't have a date for that yet. Americans will be able to get it from Amazon.com while we see if a US publisher will pick it up. That will largely depend on how well it does in other markets and what sort of reviews it garners.

Because this blog should not get too cluttered with news about the book, I've set up a dedicated Facebook page so that I can easily link to reviews as they appear. I'll also post other book-related stuff there, reserving the highlights for this blog. Anyone who is a member of Facebook (isn't that everyone now?) can see the page and they can even become a fan if they wish (I see that this blog has acquired a few unsolicited fans, which is very kind of those who have signed up). Reviews and honorary mentions will also be listed at jameshannam.com which is due a revamp when the book is released.

PS: The headline is inspired by Ben Goldacre's blog from when he first received a copy of his book Bad Science earlier in the year. By all accounts, it has done very well.