Category: Uncategorized

John Horgan on The Templeton Foundation

I just came across John Horgan’s piece on The Templeton Foundation. In 2005 he was invited to be one of the first batch of Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellows in Science and Religion. This involved spending several weeks at Cambridge University, listening to scientists and philosophers talking (‘pontificzting’) about science and religion. As an added inducement he would receive $15,000 in addition to all expenses.

Understandably, he accepted. The article tells us what happened and also how he feels about the organisation now.

Although there were no conditions attached to his attendance at least one offcial thought that some reciprocation was implied.

She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that~— given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history~— I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

If, like me you’ve always wondered about the foundation, you will find this article interesting.

Horgan’s site has a lot of other interesting articles; well worth exploring.

 

New light on the origin of complex life?

The story of how the first complex nucleated cell (eukaryote) arose is a fascinating one – see Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of life. An article related to this has now appeared in New Scientist.

This describes the discovery of an archaeon (an organism that looks like a bacterium although it is really quite different) in deep water off the coast of Japan.  It lives in association with at least one and probably two other kinds of microbe.  The crucial event in eukaryote generation is thought to have been the swallowing of a bacterium by an archaeon, and the scenario described in the article looks like the kind of situation where this might occur. However, that doesn’t answer the really important question: was this a one-0ff extremely unlikely event or something that was more or less bound to happen sooner or later?

Given the fact that it eukaryotes appear only comparatively recently in the course of evolution, it still looks likely that it was a lucky fluke, in which case there is probably plenty of life in the universe but almost all of it is at the microbial level of complexity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Useful resource: Human evolution – an online journal

I’ve recently come across the online anthropology journal Sapiens which is well worth a look. Plenty of interesting articles, particularly on human evolution (click the three vertical lines at top left).  Thanks to John Hawks for alerting me to this.

Currently the topics covered include the discovery of a fragment of Denisovan skull in a Tibetan monastery and and a putative now hominin speces from the Philipines, Homo luzonensis, which may be connected with the so-called Hobbit from Flores.

 

Useful resource: Wikipedia’s Style Page

I’ve just been looking at  Wikpedia’s Style Page. Some of this is specific to Wikipedia but quite a lot has application to writing more generally.  See, for example, “weasel words”,  “expressions of doubt”,  “clichés and idioms”.  I think the late F.L. Lucas, whose Style has been my main guide for many years, would have approved.

Mona Siddiqui’s Thought for the Day on Trump’s visit

I’ve said in my previous blog that I generally like Mona Siddiqui’s contributions to ‘Thought for the Day’ and find them among  the best in this often rather irritating genre. However, I had reservations about what she said today in talking about President Trump’s forthcoming visit.

She though that Jeremy C9rbyn and the Speaker were wrong to refuse the invitation to a dinner given in Trump’s honour.  We might disagree with his views but he would be a guest and the demands of hospitality require that we welcome him courteously.

Certainly hospitality is an admirable tradition in Islam – I’ve benefited from it myself in the past – but Trump is not just any guest and his visit raises complicated questions. We are extending the invitation for our own (commercial) reasons and he is accepting it for his – presumably not unconnected with his forthcoming attempt to be re-elected. This isn’t something I’d wish to increase the chances of happening.

I don’t know what reasons Jeremy Corbyn and the Speaker have for refusing to meet him, but if they are motivated by a reluctance to demonstrate even tacit support for his political ambition I can see their point. I like the attitude of the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who initially said he wouldn’t meet Trump but then changed his mind and said he would, in order to tell him why he disagreed with him.

As to what members of the public can do, I’d vote, not for demonstrating in the street but for simply  ignoring the visit as far as possible, or alternatively lining the route of his ceremonial progress up the Mall and maintaining complete silence.

Mind you, none of this would have arisen without Mrs May’s ill-advised invitation to Trump made soon after she became PM; just another of her many mistakes, but that’s a different story.

 

‘Line of Duty’ spelling mistake?

In ‘Line of Duty’ on BBC1 the mysterious gang boss ‘H’ communicates his orders by text messages on a laptop. In Episode 3 one of these messages contained a spelling error, “definately”. Was this an oversight by the script writers or was it meant to be a clue to the identity of ‘H’ – a corrupt police officer who is lso semi-literate?

Our murderous ancestors?

As David Reich explains in his recent book, genetic studies provide  evidence for the westward spread into central Europe of the Yamnaya
people from the stepes of Central Asia about five thousand years ago. This event is credited with the introduction of Indo-European languages. But exactly how the Yamnaya spread is uncertain. New Scientist has an interesting article on this by Colin Barras, with a rather sensationalist reference to the Yamnaya as ‘the most murderous people’.

Drawing largely on work by the archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, Barras suggests that the arrival of the Yamnaya was a violent affair. The existing populations were already shrinking by this time, possibly as a result of epidemics of plague. The Yamnaya were probably physically stronger than the indigenous people and were more warlike. There is also a suggestion that they were mostly male.

This scenario reminds me of a poem by Robert Graves, who was influenced by the theory that an earlier matriarchal society had been replaced by a patriarchal one.

Swordsman of the narrow lips
Narrow hips and murderous mind
Fenced with chariots and ships,
By your joculators hailed
The mailed wonder of mankind,
Far to westward you have sailed.

As Barras remarks, these ideas are quite new and are based on evidence from only a few sites. But at present it seems likely that “the steppes migrants were largely male and violent”. This idea is supported bu a finding that mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, changedrelatively little at this time, while the paternally-inhrited Y-chomosome   changed a great deal.