2013-05-24T09:22:19-04:00 David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=david-horton Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David Horton Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.638696 2010-07-08T16:30:36-04:00 2011-05-25T17:00:24-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that's just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500 years, was that it was the one aspect of human endeavor that constantly advanced, constantly improved, built on previous work, and earlier understanding, it didn't take a backward step. Each scientist stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton said.

Up until the Renaissance humans had taken one step forward and two steps back in their understanding of the world around them. Some glimmering of understanding about the nature of the real world would be smashed down again by religion or war or cynical politicians or charlatans. But once the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, modified hypothesis, became established by people focused on investigating the real world instead of accepting the imaginary world of wishful thinking, the human race never looked back. Or not for long anyway.

The age and structure of the universe was established; the form and relationships of different chemical elements; the development of life on earth (and the place of Homo sapiens in that development); the history and geology and climatology of the Earth; the anatomy and physiology and psychology of the human (and other animals) body. All of this was a long way from superstition, and folk medicine, and mythology, and religion, and the last vestiges of those early and primitive beliefs were gradually being swept away as the twentieth century came to an end. At last the human race was on the move into the twenty first century, after 500 years of steady advance, with a clear vision of reality unencumbered by the past detritus of failed human beliefs.

That was a scary prospect, it seems, for some people. It couldn't be allowed to happen. And suddenly all the junk thought from past millenia (with some additions) was back in the mix, spurred on by politicians and religious leaders and the media. Suddenly there were miracles, and magic remedies (homeopathy just the most egregious), and prayer, and creationism, climate change denialism, belief in ghosts and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, and mysterious forces, and supernatural beings, and faith healing, and magnets and crystals, and human domination over nature, and witches, and spirituality, all flooding back into human society and culture like an oil leak flooding into the Gulf. Just as poisonous to the human condition as oil is to seabirds.

Both of them need a big clean up effort. We need decent science education in schools again, free of the baneful influence of religious followers. And we need a media that again accepts the scientific method and its findings, and refuses to give air time or column inches or internet bandwidth to charlatans, and religious leaders, and the deliberate deceptions of the anti-science self-proclaimed mystics and healers, and the no-nothingism of those determined to let the corporations destroy the planet. Big task to clear all this rubbish out, but once it is gone science can again get on with the task of illuminating the real world. And after the damage that has been done by the charlatans and con men and crooks in the last few years we have lost time to make up, urgently. The answers have been blowing in the wind of nonsense and lies for a decade now.

You with me?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.618876 2010-06-21T14:28:20-04:00 2011-05-25T16:50:20-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
There, that was an easy stretch of the imagination, wasn't it? Ok, but now the challenging part - what happens next?

One of the problems in gaining public attention to our grim future is the slow (in terms of news cycles, and even in terms of human lives) pace of change. I know that a fraction of a degree per decade here, a fraction of a degree per decade there, pretty soon you are talking real high temperatures, but its hard for the average punter working in an air-conditioned office, living in an air-conditioned home, to sense that change personally.

The prospect of being hanged in the morning may concentrate the mind wonderfully, but the prospect of being fried, starved, or flooded, in say, 50 years time, turns the average mind to thoughts of ho-hum.

And so we come back to the mobilization of human effort. First year, fine, we are all in this together. So, higher prices on electricity, higher prices on petrol, higher prices on air travel? Grin and bear it, work out jolly ways around it with turning thermostats down, car-pooling, vacationing locally. Solar panels on the roof - a good investment; reducing household water use - easy, and makes sense; changing shopping patterns to buy local goods - sure, a bit more expensive, but satisfying; changing jobs from the coal industry to a renewable industry - good to have a challenge at my time of life. And so on.

But a few years of this kind of changed activity is going to make no discernible difference to global warming, which we know is going to continue to rise for many years with a built-in lag effect. And so we are into the reverse situation - people are called upon to make sacrifices, change behavior, for the common good of humanity. And things don't instantly get better.

How long would it be before the politicians of the Right, all over the world, would start telling people that there was no point to this? That the lack of instant improvement showed that they were right when they had opposed action on global warming, and that if they were voted back in they would instantly undo all of the measures that had been introduced (remember Reagan ripping solar panels off the White House roof) and people could go happily back to the way they were. Recipe for electoral success? You betcha! Recipe for planetary failure? Oh yes.



All David Horton's writing is on the new improved Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.588162 2010-05-26T17:00:44-04:00 2011-05-25T16:35:20-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
The truth is somewhere in the middle of all that primordial soup. The achievement has nothing to do with the origin of life (creating life now is considerably different to the origins of life 4 billion years ago), nor is it relevant to intelligent design (but nor is anything else). It has some relevance to how we view life -- life is just a bunch of chemical reactions, but we knew that already. And really, a wonderful new world isn't coming (at least from this cause) -- those claims are as baseless as the similar ones for nuclear power and GM organisms and geoengineering and prescribed burning of forests. And no, a disastrous new world isn't coming (at least from this cause), the Empire State building is safe from mutant monsters for a little longer.

But nor is everything as rosy as some of the all-knowledge-is-good, science-can-do-no-wrong, yaysayers for every scientific breakthrough. Trouble is, Craig Venter isn't Charles Darwin. Organisms in nature have genes, and combinations of genes, honed into fitness by the white hot heat of natural selection. What is more, we forget, sometimes, what Alfred Wallace knew, that selection takes place not one species at a time in a kind of natural test tube -- too hot, too cold, ah just right -- but within ecosystems. Within enormously complex sets of organisms that have to inter-relate just so or the whole house of straw will come tumbling down, each species being vital for the whole structure.

We can't predict how an individual organism will fit into an ecosystem, how it will affect the running of that complicated machinery. We do know, from examples all over the world, that introducing species into new habitats in which they did not evolve in is a process assured of disaster. Australia is rife with examples -- rabbits, foxes, rats, mice, cane toads, starlings, sparrows, mynahs, carp, thistles, serrated tussock, each bringing its set of disastrous consequences -- but every continent has seen similar misguided or accidental introductions. These introduced species bring no natural predators or diseases, and other species have not evolved into niches that allow for their presence.

So the idea that an invented species, alien to all environments, can be casually introduced in large numbers to, say, clean up an oil spill, or produce oil, without any unintended consequences, flies in the face of hundreds of years of experiments. Furthermore, once released, whatever is said in advance about the organism being designed for only one purpose and being unable to thrive in the wild, doesn't carry any guarantees with it. Much the same was said of the cane toad. Once species are released from test tubes they will rapidly adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves, and it would be a brave geneticist who could predict what the end point of that process will be. Cleaning up a massive oil leak may turn out to be a doddle compared to putting genetics back in a bottle, getting rid of billions of organisms infesting a Gulf.

And there is still more to set the mind worrying. We know from the initial careless releases of genetically modified organisms that genes don't stay neatly within their skins. Genes can leak out into related organisms. An obvious example is inserting genes for herbicide resistance into a crop, only to find that the gene can be picked up by weed species which, as a consequence, can no longer be killed with herbicide. Whatever chunks of DNA are carefully inserted into a bacterium to do some job apparently important for mankind may well leak out into other organisms who are not mankind's friends. A similar process in geopolitics is called blowback, where funding the Taliban to beat the Russians results, twenty years later, results in terrorists targeting you.

Look, I think this is a great achievement. Along with cloning and stem cell work, creating artificial organisms is going to lead to huge advances in our understanding of how genes work in the body. But the hubris of thinking we know enough about ecology to start improving on natural selection has already got us into trouble, and could get us into a lot more.

Hubris on The Watermelon Blog? You be the judge.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.582344 2010-05-21T12:49:00-04:00 2011-05-25T16:30:24-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
To be a greenie concerned about the future of the planet, you have to, well, be concerned about the future of the planet. Religious people, even putting aside the Left Behind loonies, aren't really concerned, because they have an imaginary friend who will look after them if they are good and pray hard and wear the right clothes and don't cut their hair. Only atheists understand, deep down, that there is no divine Lone Ranger out there coming to the rescue; that if we don't save our own planet, no one else will. It is odd that the Libertarians among the religious, so big on self-reliance for individuals and communities, don't apply that principle to the Earth as a whole.

And religious people wear blinkers that prevent them from being greenies. To be a greenie means to wholeheartedly embrace the concept that we are part of the natural world; that we are just one species among tens of millions that have evolved over billions of years (one of the more abundant species, sure, and one of the most destructive, but there are certainly no special arrangements applying uniquely to our species); and that we are very closely related to many of those species, quite closely to many others, and related to all of them to some degree. Greenies really understand the proposition that all these species are in it together, that we are all cousins, that we all come from a common ancestor, and that all have either a complete right to exist or no right to exist, not some of one and some of another.

To be a greenie means to be fully aware of the complexity of ecology. The intricate web of life ties together the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in China with a hurricane in Florida; keeps the Amazon rainforest and the African desert functioning; is affected by an oil spill off the coast of Louisiana or acidity on the Great Barrier Reef; provides fertile soil and clean water and clear skies, free of charge; is best helped by those who understand that these ecosystems have evolved naturally over tens of thousands of years, not by those who think the Garden of Eden was a real place and that the Biblical Flood was a real event. Unless you really feel, in your bones, that you are part of the grandeur of life, as dependent on functioning ecology as an ant or an eagle; unless you really feel the wind and the sun and the smell of marshland or grassland rather than driving in your air-conditioned car from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned megachurch, blissfully unaware of being part of nature, blissfully believing that you are somehow above all that, that you have have shucked off your animal nature because you clutch an old book that says something about your species being created on a different day and being given dominion over the others; unless you really feel part of the natural world, then you can't really help.

Except perhaps to help fend off some of your brethren who believe that hurricanes are God's punishment for sin; that if we choose to cut down every last tree, it will bring on the End Times; that oil spills don't matter. Maybe you can run interference while atheists get on with trying to save the planet.

Anyone disagree?

Check out David Horton's new Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.574040 2010-05-13T18:41:23-04:00 2011-05-25T16:25:21-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
I'm a science fiction/fantasy fan, and it is clear that climate change deniers are not. But let me try this on them. What if a space ship suddenly arrived in orbit around the Earth, and communicated with the people of this little blue planet. They said - hey, you insignificant little grubs, we want your planet, want to take one of your rare Earth elements. If you don't give up all your stocks of it now we will use this heat beam to begin warming up your planet.

What would our response be? Go for it you nasty little green bugs, do your worst, no chance of warming up this planet, but even if you did, through a technology that seems like magic to us, so what? Be good to have it warmer.

Or would there be an instant call to battle stations? Red phones ringing on desks of presidents and prime ministers around the world. Old enemies reconciled, wars ended, terrorists de-bombed. Radio shock jocks would rally their listeners to support the UN, conservative politicians would join hands with progressives in unity governments, giant corporations would put their factories on a war footing, universities and think tanks and computer companies would put their best brains to work. And solutions would be found, space shuttles launched, shields erected, wavelengths interfered with, heat beams reversed until the aliens were turned into so many fried green tomatoes. Phew, we would all say, wiping our fevered brows, missed a bullet by that much, now we can go back to business as usual insulting those commie fascist liberal egghead scientists. And threatening to blow up the United Nations building and the University of East Anglia.

So why not now? Surely we don't have Benedict Arnolds among us who are hoping to commercialise the heat beam, sell uranium to the aliens have we? Or does the fact that we are doing it to ourselves, without the help of aliens still riding around in 1950s model flying saucers, mean that it is somehow all right? Odd that, the effects would be the same, but the response, so far, oh so different.

I make it too warm for deniers on the new Watermelon Blog. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.563338 2010-05-04T17:24:45-04:00 2011-05-25T16:20:27-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
But in the last 40 years we have been heading for hell in an accelerating handcart. Undoing all the good of the Sixties brain nourishment. Symptoms of insanity erupting all over the world again. Religion coming back out of the dark cloisters it had been thankfully banished to and once again wrecking the ability of individuals and then whole societies to think rationally. And I asked myself, why is it so? Puzzled over it as I watched the evening news bulletins with an increasing sense of despair. Wracked my brains to discover the reason for the wrecked brains. Then it came to me in a blinding flash as I lay awake in the dark hours around 3am, the time sent to try men's souls if we had souls. What else had been increasing, unprecedently, in lockstep with the growing insanity in the collective brain? Why, Carbon Dioxide of course.

Oh we all know, have known for years, that it was having a bad effect on the body of Gaia. Been running a temperature in fact. All sorts of sniffles and sneezes, leading, unless we look after ourselves, to a much more serious pneumonia. But no one had realised that it was also affecting brains. Is driving them, us, slowly mad. And what is worse is that it forms one of those feedback processes, so familiar from the effects on the body of Gaia. You see the higher the levels of CO2 the stupider becomes the human race and the less able it is to do anything to stop the increase. Stupider and stupider, higher and higher.

But this was all just a theory - a convincing theory, of course, but it needed something more. Darwin needed natural selection, Hansen needed greenhouse effects, I needed some mechanism to explain the effect the rising CO2 was having on this mad mad world. And suddenly there it was. You will have heard of "Near Death Experiences" no doubt, the staple of evangelicals and insensitive new age guys alike. People report having wandered down a tunnel towards a bright light with or without heavenly angels with or without wings and then being pulled back to the real world just in the nick of time. For those to whom any irrational explanation, as long as it supports an imaginary friend, is preferred to any rational explanation for some phenomenon, this kind of experience is "proof" of the presence of heaven. Well, a brightly lit kind of heaven anyway. For those of us left behind in this vale of tears and sorrow, the real world, the near death experiences are, well, the result of your brain being near death and therefore subject to all kinds of odd chemical effects. People have suggested oxygen starvation before, but the new study brings our old friend CO2 into the equation. High CO2 causes the bright lights and other hallucinations in patients suffering heart attacks etc.

So, a mechanism. The rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing the rising levels of hallucination in the population. Fortunately if those of us who are resistant to its influence can manage to convince the world to turn down the valve on the CO2 cylinder, then we can go into a reverse feedback. Gradually, as the levels drop, more and more of our fellow citizens will return to the real world, blinking and looking confused, but in turn settling down to help us meet the crisis. And the near death experience for Gaia will be just that.


Carbon dioxide levels always low on the Watermelon Blog]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.541729 2010-04-17T16:40:09-04:00 2011-05-25T16:10:21-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
But I'm no expert on this, and I guess if gurus and consultants, motivated by nothing more than a desire for large amounts of money, think that people should get rid of toxins all the time so they don't accumulate and cause the body harm, then who am I to contradict them.

In fact it strikes me that it doesn't go nearly far enough, this body cleansing process. You know what I'm thinking, yes, the mind. Good old Doctor David is going to give up blogging and set up an Institute of Mind Detoxing, and make an awful lot of money.

There are just so many people whose minds are full of toxic thoughts and ideas that they will be clamoring to get into my Institute. To each one, for a large fee, I will reveal the secret ingredient that will cleanse their minds, get them thinking straight again. Wanna know the secret? Don't tell anyone, but it's Atheism, that old, tried and true, remedy for madness. A good refreshing dose of atheism, thrown straight down, glass on the bar ready for another shot, will clean out all that toxic rubbish about imaginary friends, hatred of others, love of war and guns, belief in conspiracies, denial of climate change. Leave you feeling tuned up, your mind clear, ready to start learning and thinking instead of believing and following. And widespread use (government grant needed here, I'm only in it for the money) would detox whole societies, hell, whole worlds, get them caring and sharing, social justice for all, give peace a chance, look after the planet.

Oh I know there would be back-sliding, from time to time. People sneaking back in to those strange buildings for the smell of the incense, the roar of the crowd, the haranguing by some charismatic character full to overflowing with toxins, trying to sweat them out of his system. I get it, really I do, you call it spirituality, I call it mental pollution. But I'm not here to judge, there but for the grace of, whatever, go all of us. No, no being judgmental at Dr Horton's Institute. Just make a regular booking, every month or so, whenever the desire to clap hands and abuse congressmen becomes overwhelming, and I will arrange more treatment.

You will feel so good you will wonder how you ever managed without it.

Arrange today for a detox on the Watermelon Blog.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.532993 2010-04-10T17:02:12-04:00 2011-05-25T16:05:22-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/ Canterbury Tales as written by Geoffrey, or a speech by Sarah Palin as written by anybody, you will know that a language can look sort of like English but be completely meaningless. Words like "intelligent design," "Darwinism," "dinosaurs," "mutation," "fossils," "species," and "random" have conventional meanings to you and me, but to your average, ten-commandments-in-courthouses, Jesus-loves-AK47s, humans-rode-dinosaurs creationist, they have other meanings, and that confusion in language leads to much misunderstanding in the real world. But never fear, gentle reader. I am always available to attempt a translation for you.

Take a very common example. Whenever I or anyone else writes about evolution on Huffington Post or elsewhere, you don't need to be a psychic to know that some commenter will always say, "Huh, all very well to talk about Darwinism, but you atheists can't explain the origin of life with evolution, can you, now?" Now at this point most writers on evolution play with paper clips on their desk in an embarrassed sort of way and say something like, "Oh, dear, no, evolution has nothing to do with origins of life, quite a different department deals with all that, ahem."

I think this is a huge mistake. I have had a go at one alternative response which envisages a process of "natural selection" assisting in getting inorganic chemicals towards being organic and then self-reproducing, but back in those primitive days of my early attempts at translation I had misunderstood the question entirely, and other approaches are needed. You see, when someone talks about the "origin of life," a scientist has an image in mind of experiments aimed at reproducing possible conditions on Earth, say, four billion years ago: playing with combinations of organic molecules, different temperatures, different salinity, different substrates, with or without electric discharges, and so on. In addition, scientists think about the earliest life forms found as fossils, the age and type of rocks they are found in, the relationships between simple life forms in existence today, possible analogs for early ecosystems around submarine volcanic vents, or in deep caves, or in extreme environments, and so on. So faced with that sort of comment a scientist will say, "Yes, you are right, evolutionary biology doesn't have much if anything to do with the origins of life" -- but because it is so obvious, they leave unsaid, "But so what? That is a field of research involving geology and chemistry and cosmology and physics and paleontology."

On the other hand, our mentally fossilised creationist isn't in fact asking anything of the kind; this person knows nothing, and cares less, about the different disciplines that make up scientific research. Isn't checking on whether the evolutionary biologist has also studied abiogenesis. Has no mental image of the conditions on Earth four billion years ago, or of what early life forms might have been like. Isn't asking (and this is another misapprehension of the hapless scientist dealing, as gladly as possible, with idiots), "How do you know that God didn't get life going four billion years ago and then provided the mechanism of evolution to keep it all ticking along?" Isn't saying, "Huh, you think you are so smart studying your Darwinism, but God tricked you by creating life in the first place, and just let you think you were finding out something worthwhile. Try being an atheist now, Mr. Smartypants Scientist."

No, they are not saying these things, because those things would make no sense at all in their language. They don't think God started things off four billion years ago by "breathing life into" some simple unicellular organism that then began to speciate and evolve to produce all of the subsequent biodiversity of this planet. Of course not; what kind of a wimp do you think their god is? Does the Bible mention stromatolites? No, they think that their god created the life forms we see today. Intelligently designed all of them to fit into their own niche and serve humans. Wiped out a few, accidentally, when he somehow flooded the whole surface of the planet to more than the depth of the highest mountain, while saving others by putting them, each with the most limited genetic diversity possible, on a boat, and then, when the water somehow disappeared, putting them ashore to go forth and multiply. And all this happened not five billion years ago but 5000, give or take a king or two.

These are people who not only have less sense of time depth than a two-year-old child but who have absolutely no ability to imagine a world any different to the one they see now, looking out the back door in, say, Kansas. The vision of the past that I have -- where an ever-increasing, ever more diverse range of plants and animals evolves through time in various directions, suffering major setbacks along the way with massive extinction events, succeeded by new bursts of speciation, and all occurring against an ever-changing backdrop of different plant communities, different climatic conditions, and different arrangements of continents and varying sea depths -- would be a vision as likely to be had by a creationist as the vision of America having a decent health care system or sane gun laws.

So when you are asked whether evolution accounts for the origin of life, don't think bacteria, or stromatolites, or yeast, or amoebae, and say, "Oh, no, of course not." Think cats and dogs, birds, worms, frogs, snakes, pine trees, gum trees, petunias, and, yes, great apes and humans, and be the worm that turns -- say, "Yes, of course it does." Your average, barely-literate creationist hears the first answer as "scientist admits evolution didn't happen, accepts creationist proof of reality of God." The second answer would come as a shock, and it may be a second or two before they totally reject it, but in that time you can reiterate how evolution (combining, of course, natural selection and speciation), not creation, gives rise to those life forms. And one day, maybe, you can educate a creationist so much that they will accept the reality of evolution (and pigs may have evolved wings) and begin to explore with you the fascinating investigation into the origins of life on Earth.

Next week's translation: "How did the first male dog that evolved find a mate?"

I make monkeys of creationists every week on The Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.524321 2010-04-03T16:05:44-04:00 2011-05-25T16:05:22-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/ clerics in Australia. We've obviously got them worried. All the usual kind of nonsense, The fundamentalist Anglican said "It's about our determination as human beings to have our own way, to make our own rules, to live our own lives, unfettered by the rule of God and the right of God to rule over us. What we're really seeing, once more [is] an example of the contest between human beings and God over who rules the world." The catholic said "Last century we tried godlessness on a grand scale and the effects were devastating: Nazism, Stalinism, Pol Pot-ery, mass murder, abortion and broken relationships - all promoted by state-imposed atheism, [It's] the illusion that we can build a better life without God." Elsewhere other foolish people queued up to denounce atheism as a "religion". It is as if all of these bits of nonsense are being said for the first time, thoughts arising anew from a careful contemplation of science and philosophy. Instead of course they are like the tired old refrains of the climate change denialists, swallowed whole from the communications of the mother ship, repeated endlessly to anyone who will listen.

The first two need little comment. The Anglican seems to have missed the point I think - has no one told the good man that atheists don't believe there is a god, and his lot haven't proved there is? But if it's a contest between an imaginary fellow in the sky and real human beings here on Earth, hey, I'm on the side of the Humans, what a pity the Anglican isn't. And really, the catholics have a bit of a nerve talking about Hitler, don't they? And whatever was motivating Mr Stalin, it clearly wasn't his membership of a humanist society. What rubbish, how any one, unblinded by their own ideology, could possibly suggest that the nastiness of the twentieth century (and earlier centuries) was the result of atheism is beyond me. There may be some alternative universe where the religious are kind and tolerant peace loving people and atheists are rampant psychopaths who cause wars, but it isn't the one I'm familiar with.

And so to the final one - unsurprisingly trotted out when the religious perceive that rational thought might be gaining ground among the public. The sight of 2500 atheists in a convention centre for the World Atheist Conference last month must have really spooked them. Let's bury it now, once and for all. Human beings do all sorts of odd things - go to NASCAR races, secretly cross-dress, buy guns and more guns, go to Lady GaGa concerts, attend church, grow long beards and moustaches, watch Woody Allen movies, visit Disneyland, work out in gymnasiums, drink homeopathic water, go on holiday cruises, support football teams, collect stamps, tattoo their bodies - I recognise that these are all hobbies, quirks, interests, pastimes. I don't want to do any of them myself, but I am quite happy for others to wander off and do things like this among crowds of like minded people, or do them in the privacy of their own homes. You do them, I don't, both happy. I'm a very easy going fellow. I have my own interests, collecting old books and prints, for example, but I have absolutely no interest in getting anyone else to follow my example. In fact the fewer fellow collectors there are, the better, and cheaper, for me. I'm not going to knock on doors, bundle of books under my arm, to convince people of the merits of collecting early editions of Dickens books. Nor will I lobby my local politician to make collecting compulsory, or my local school principal to have book collecting become a core curriculum item.

Similarly, I'm an atheist. I'm happy in my atheism, there being no god means the world is a much more interesting and challenging place. But again, I'm not going to preach the word of Dawkins on street corners, or insist that the country closes down for one day a week while I follow my atheist pursuits (if I had any). On the other hand, I get really cross when homeopaths, and stamp collectors, and cross-dressers, and churchgoers, and Lady GaGa lovers knock on my door and demand that I follow their strange ways. Lobby politicians to make their hobbies compulsory, have Woody Allen movies playing in courthouses, demand that hospitals serve homeopathic remedies, insist that schools teach a particular old creation myth. Abuse me and say I have no morals, that I am like Hitler because I don't collect stamps. Insist that I can't run for political office because I have no tattoos.

You want to do that stuff, fine, do it, but leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone. The day I knock on your door and start preaching print collecting and atheism, that's the day you get to call my lack of belief a religion.

Oh, and you want to start a war, invade a country, kill and torture people? Try my neighbor, he's into god and guns. I'm not.

I insist you read me on The Watermelon Blog, it's practically a religious obligation.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.516381 2010-03-28T16:54:46-04:00 2011-05-25T16:00:23-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
So I study them, much as a time traveler visiting the Dark Ages might, or a traveler to the deepest Amazon finding a previously uncontacted tribe.

And in the case of creationists, these strange throwbacks living still among us, I try to see the world through their eyes, wonder what strange shadows that imperfect organ is throwing on to the retina of these good simple people as they struggle to come to grips with the realities of several hundred years of scientific advances.

Here is one for you. What do creationists see when they look in the evolutionary mirror? What do they see when they look at Chimpanzee or Gorilla? Do they see both as just another mammal, like Cat or Dog, Kangaroo or Opossum, Platypus or Echidna? Do they not see the close resemblances to us in the face, the expressions, the hands and feet, the body, the behavior, the movement, the social groups, the young? Do they not say, well, my cousin is a hairy man, but he is still my cousin? Do they not say there but for the grace of Darwin go we? That these close cousins just traveled a different path from an obviously identical starting point?

And looking at the faces of their cousins, are they not inspired to investigate further, find that the resemblance is not just skin deep but extends through brain and skeleton and into the most fundamental unit of evolution the DNA?

I mean it is one thing to believe that the old silverback in the sky created beasts of burden and sheep and cattle, obviously different to, and, from an anthropocentric view, inferior to, humans, as part of his reward of dominion over all as long as you didn't eat of the "tree of evolutionary knowledge" scheme. But the bronze age sheepherders typing out the Old Testament on a piece of goatskin didn't know about the great apes, or even the monkeys, which did not live around what the desert nomads thought of as the centre of the universe but which we now call the Middle East, a kind of evolutionary backwater with barely enough species known to fill a boat.

If there had been a band of gorillas living by the Dead Sea, or a band of chimpanzees living on the Mount of Olives, do you think one of the sheepherders might have modified the relevant bit of his creation mythology to read, "And then Yahweh created the great apes, and he took a rib from a chimpanzee and it became the first human"?

With that kind of mythology, one of Darwin's early ancestors, say living in Ancient Athens, might well have been inspired to discover the reality of evolution long before Alfred Wallace. And in that case, would the primitive members of the Texas School Board still be demanding that creationism be taught? How long does it take for the blindingly obvious to be accepted?

Think of me as your distant cousin on the Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.507526 2010-03-21T16:35:09-04:00 2011-05-25T15:55:20-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
See these are people who apparently believe in government of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists. Believe in the economy red in tooth and claw. Believe in the devil take the hindmost. Believe that life for the poor, the lesser breeds without the law, was meant to be short, brutish and hard. Believe in fact that of all the things humans can do and think and achieve, the only one that has any role in society is money. That there is some fundamental universal principle involved, similar to the theory of gravity, or the theory of evolution, or the theory of the role of greenhouse gases in climate, by which money in society will, if left unchecked by actual human beings, magically distribute itself through society in the most efficient and equitable way to achieve the greatest good and the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Now I don't know why they believe this. Might as well believe in some invisible being in the sky for all the evidence they have of an invisible hand in the till (sorry, that should read "on the tiller"). I mean the most cursory knowledge of history of even the last 200 years would tell you that markets running riot have only the intended outcome of making the rich richer and the poor poorer to their credit. That after spells of free market madness in any country we the people have to come back in and adjust the clocks, sort out the problems, deal with the disasters, behave with humanity. That people, actual visible people, elected by us, have to work with all the aspects of being human in the multi-faceted human society. Have to sort out matters of health care, and education, and environmental issues, of art and culture, of infrastructure, of law and justice, of gender and race issues. Have to deal with all the things in fact that in a democracy we elect human beings to deal with in spite of the madness of money.

But let's take this another irrational step further. Let us suppose, just for a moment, that there really was an invisible spanner (sorry, supervisor) in the works, tinkering away, working like clockwork except when messed up by the clumsy hands of the peasants meddling with what they do not understand. And that if we kept the peasant's hands off the controls the economic sausage making machine would go on turning out sausages for everyone, no problem. If that was true, we might, those of us on the progressive side of the human condition, grit our teeth and say, ok, I wouldn't do it like that, all things considered, but I suppose it's the best way to make sausages, better leave it alone.

Except that's not the way things are in the real world. Not only is there no single wise invisible hand lightly caressing the fly wheels of the economy, there are in fact hundreds of invisible hands gripping the wheels and levers hard and turning the great ship of the economy in directions that will most benefit they and their friends. So when the libertarians say they don't want the elected representatives of the people to control the economy in any way, they are not saying they want no one to control the economy, but that they want only their friends the back room boys in the counting houses counting out their money to control it. The choice was never about control versus free, but about who was doing the controlling. With all due respect to the derivatives traders, I think I would rather elect someone who would represent my interests in a modern complex society than leave them to it.

Today New York, tomorrow the world. The same people who would rather be part of a plutocracy than a democracy are also, it seems, scared stiff of "World Government" by United Nations bureaucrats. They hate the very idea that, in dealing with universal issues such as climate change, poverty, war, hunger, the marine environment, trade, the nations of the Earth, through their governments, should seek universal solutions. They believe, apparently, that there is a kind of invisible hand which ensures that all the nations acting individually in their own selfish interests for their inward looking and nationalistic populations will magically achieve the best for everyone in the best of all possible worlds. That any agreements or concerted actions between nations will damage the interests of Joe Public in small town Ohio or Alaska.

Again, as a theory, this might, just, be included as part of public discourse at election time. I mean, the evidence for this kind of invisible supranational hand is also non-existent, its existence in fact being disproved by world history for the last 6000 years, or so. But just as at the national level, the imaginary hand is in fact these days replaced by a number of invisible hands (and no, I don't mean the Mafia, although now you mention it ...) operating at the international level. Multinational corporations, with the help of their people at the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, and the IMF, and various bilateral trade agreements, already largely control what goes on in the world. Decisions made by individual countries about their economy, their environment, their workplace laws, their customs and quarantine arrangements, and so on, are all being limited by those whose financial interests are at stake on a global level.

We have, to all intents and purposes, a world government now, but it isn't one whose operations are transparent, it isn't one whose activities can be influenced by democratic processes, and it sure as hell isn't acting in the interests of the 7 billion citizens of planet Earth. Again, the choice is not between no international cooperation and world government, but between a democratic world government and a plutocratic one. The ability of the latter to calmly watch the world warm up while preventing action to reduce greenhouse gases is just the most blatant example of how the system is failing us now.

I must have obviously misunderstood something here, misread the signs or the blogs, so if any tea baggers have time to drop by after trying to prevent government involvement in health care in favour of health care by the health care companies for the health care companies, perhaps they could set me straight.

No invisible hands at The Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.498474 2010-03-14T18:37:49-04:00 2011-05-25T15:50:25-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
And I felt like saying - "Hey, I'm an atheist, I'm off to the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, atheists don't blow up planes or anything else."

And then, in my spot a money making venture a mile away (eye on being part of next year's Forbes list of excessively rich people) mode I thought - how about flights for atheists only? Special treatment, no need for scanning luggage and body and handing over phones and being embarrassed by shaving cream, just walk this way Mr Atheist sir. Flights could be cheaper without all that security, and certainly quicker.

I reckon a lot more atheists would come out of the closet too. Come forward to claim yet another benefit of living the superstition-free life.

And so, just as special benefits for non-smokers encourage the giving up of the filthy nicotine habit, so special benefits for atheists would encourage the giving up of the filthy religion habit.

And eventually (after hell freezes over) all of us could avoid the embarrassment and delay currently caused by the potential, at any time, for some religious person to go bat-shit crazy.


All David Horton's writing is on The Watermelon Blog.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.483539 2010-03-03T03:51:17-05:00 2011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
But we stop, don't we, pretending about most of this stuff? Either when they ask a question, perhaps with some encouragement, or just let it slip away, embarrassed, when their friends spill the beans, one by one they lose belief in Father Xmas, Tooth Fairy and other fairies, Easter Bunny, witches and wizards, Superman, things that go bump in the night, and all the rest of the imaginary furniture of a child's world. And as parents, grandparents, we might regret the loss of belief in fantastic things, while appreciating more signposts, along with new teeth and pencil marks of height creeping up a wall, of a child maturing, growing wiser. Might in fact be a little worried if beliefs in unreality persisted too long, would drop big hints if a child was really still believing in obviously untrue things beyond, say, the age of seven, perhaps eight.

Except, in some cases, where the beliefs involve the obvious untruths of whichever religion the child has been indoctrinated with. Then the parents want the children to keep understanding as children, thinking as children, and never to put away these childish things.

Does it matter if grown people keep on believing in things that a seven year old child, given freedom of thought and action, would dump into the wastebasket along with the tooth fairy? Yes, of course it does, because if you can get an adult to keep on believing in untrue things in this area you can get them to believe untrue things in any area. Enter creationists, and tea-baggers, and climate change deniers, and birthers, and truthers, and WMD in Iraq, and death panels, and the global war on terrorism, and Obama is a socialist, and all the rest of this childish rubbish that is constantly being trotted out these days by children in adult bodies.

Going to take a long time to turn around this barrage of unreality that is corrupting political systems designed in and for more enlightened times. A good place to start would be to let children dump religion when they dump all the other fairy stories from their mental furniture.

Only adult things on the Watermelon Blog]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.416938 2010-01-08T18:17:56-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/
Hey presto, a metaphor, and an explanation. Let us take homeopathy. The fundamental proposition is that less is better. A scientist would say that if a substance is good for treating something (having been tested and proved) then its effect (obviously within limits) will be proportional to the amount. Homeopaths believe the reverse, that if something is good for you (and these benefits are never tested) then the less of it you have the better the effect will be. Not only are ingredients diluted well beyond the point where they could possibly have an effect, but they are diluted to the point where they are not actually present at all. The only possible "benefit" could come from being told firmly by someone that there is a benefit, that faith is necessary, and that the greater the dilution the greater the needed faith; and having a disease or condition that can respond to the placebo effect.

Why would people fall for something so obviously unrelated to reality? Well, firstly they are being told that it is true, firmly and confidently, by people who they think they can trust (because they speak firmly and confidently). And second, there is a problem with scientific modern medicine - certainty of cure carries the corollary of certainty of failure. If I say to you I can cure A with penicillin, B with chemotherapy, and fix C with an operation; I am also saying that if you have X, Y, or Z, you are out of luck, can't help you, get your affairs in order, write speeches for your friends to give at your wake.

Much better to have someone say "Look, I know it sounds strange, but trust me on this, just sip the medicine twice a day for the next year and I guarantee to not only cure A, B, C, X, Y and Z, but all of the diseases in between. Guaranteed. If you have faith, of course, and follow instructions TO THE LETTER. Any failures, we find, are caused by either lack of faith or patient error". Well, you can see where this metaphor is going, can't you? Doesn't homeopathy sound just like religion (no, not A religion, though it may be that as well)?

And for the same reasons - science deals in reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality. Science tells you there is no imaginary friend in the sky, that we evolved like all other organisms on the planet, and that life has no meaning beyond what we choose to ascribe to it. If such reality sends you to an early grave, or makes you poor, or stops you achieving anything you desire, then you are likely to reject science and turn to religion. And of course there will be any number of snake oil salesmen telling you that you have made just the right decision, they guarantee supernatural help in your everyday life, and, just as a bonus, make the right financial investment in snake oil and you get a second life, white robes, harps, grapes and all.

We, those of us to whom reality has a liberal bias, thought that people, all people, could deal with reality. But we were wrong - reality? They can't handle reality. And so they turn to religion, and homeopathy.

Nothing but reality on The Watermelon Blog.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.398596 2009-12-20T14:43:34-05:00 2011-11-17T09:02:45-05:00

David Horton http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/ evangelical influence in American sports (players dropping to knees to pray after a touchdown, "prayer circles" on the 50 yard line, every team having a chaplain, a "Fellowship of Christian Athletes") I wonder if there are any areas of American life that are not infused with religion? Sport, politics, education, law, media, science, health, welfare - there seems to be no institution or activity not bent and twisted by evangelists. Given that America already seems a society raddled with religion, as much if not more so than any fundamentalist regime in the Middle East or Africa, one wonders how bad it would be if there wasn't a supposed separation of church and state.

But having read about the athletes - one said "his Christianity is part of who he is, and he can't separate it from his life as an athlete", another that there was "no intent to alienate people, only to share Biblical truth", another that "when athletes publicly talk about Christianity, it's often just a reflection of the joy of the faith" - another thought came to me. Not new, necessarily, but revisited. And that is what extraordinarily limited minds the fundamentalists have.

When Shakespeare said "There are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" he might have had American fundamentalists in mind. There seems to be just one tiny part of their brain, the god particle, that has been programmed to think and speak in a particular way, and ... and, well, nothing. That's all there is. No curiosity it seems about life, the universe, and everything; about art and literature; history and geography; politics and society; different cultures, different ideas.

I mean, so much for this great big brain, evolved over millions of years to be much better than the Chimpanzee's brain at thinking and analysing and discovering and debating and creating. And these people don't use it. Bit like having hundreds of functions on a DVD player and all you do is play pre-recorded discs.

Normally chimp's brain capacities are compared to those of scientists and atheists (a tautology of course), and Chimps don't do very well, once you get past painting and communicating, and opening ant nests with sticks, and nuts with stone tools. But I reckon if you put a chimp against an evangelical it would be a near run thing. Would the evangelical succeed in getting the nut open? I think the answer is clear.

What a waste of a brain in Homo sapiens almost as big as that of Neanderthal man. Time these athletes stopped praying, in a circle or otherwise, started thinking. Got a life.

Reading the Watermelon Blog would be a good start.

Oh, and happy Xmas.]]>