Workers' Liberty

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press).

The march of the creationists into our kids' schools must be getting bad when even other Christians are complaining about it to the Government.

Christian thinktank Ekklesia and the British Humanist Association have jointly written to Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education, calling for science teaching to be based on, er, science.

I have been watching the TV series "What makes Us Human?" I haven't made my mind up about it yet.

In the first programme it looked at genes which whilst separating us from other animals by allowing us to operate in complex ways within a social environment could explain some social problems, because it was found that the optimum social grouping for a human community was around 250 people. As the day before, I had nearly had to kick the shit out of three youths on the way home from the gym who for no good reason decided to throw something at me, and then objected to me throwing it back, I was sort of sympathetic to the idea that something is definitely going wrong in the ways humans relate to each other.

I WAS glad to see Solidarity celebrating the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth in Thomas Carolan’s article (3/93) and Lynne Moffat’s rejoinder (3/95), though I feel there are problems with both their positions.

Thomas Carolan is far too generous to Freud (Solidarity 3/93). Freud was insightful, and drew attention to the field of psychology; he had ideas that led others after him to develop theories and methods that have helped people since.

By Thomas Carolan

After his mid-day meal Trotsky would “Relax on the sofa for an hour or two, and there… take a nap or… read for relaxation some German or Russian or French literature… novels sent to him by friends in France, some new editions of Sigmund Freud, whom he read very extensively and whom he admired enormously. I noticed that he would mark off and annotate page after page of Freud during this siesta period, and after an hour or two would resume work at his desk…”

In Solidarity 3/89 David Broder started a discussion on animal testing and the broader issue of “animal rights”. Here Clive Bradley and Janine Booth take issue with David. His reply and other debate can be found at: www.workersliberty.org/node/5802

God, the Devil, and Darwin: a critique of intelligent design theory by Niall Shanks (Foreward by Richard Dawkins) Oxford University Press.

Last December, a US federal judge ruled against the teaching of so-called ‘intelligent design’ in schools – at the end of the biggest public trial, in effect, of Darwinism since the infamous Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in the 1920s. But ‘intelligent design’ (ID) has not, and will not, go away, either in the United States or in Britain. Already, in the UK, there are schools which teach religious alternatives to Darwinism; and with the government-led growth in faith schools, and religious involvement in schools, there will surely be more. This book, by a professor of philosophy, biology, physics and astronomy (which is quite a resume), is a valuable attempt to provide detailed responses to the arguments of this rehashed creationism.

David Broder, a former animal rights activist, assesses the the issues behind scientific (and not so scientific) tests on animals

Sacha Ismail spoke to Tom Ogg, an Oxford University student involved in Pro-Test, which campaigns in favour of animal testing for research and medical purposes.

Should we support the right for scientists to do experiments on animals? The socialist scientist Steven Rose, who experiments on chicks in basic research into human brain function and memory, writes about this in his book The Making of Memory...

Les Hearn contributes to our debate about nuclear power

Earth’s climate has changed many times throughout its four billion year history and it seems beyond doubt that it is changing once again. But this is the first time that a single species has been responsible for the change.

By Les Hearn

Opposition to nuclear power has become a shibboleth to some on the left, its birth tainted by the original sin of the atom bomb. But the idea of nuclear power to help cut emissions of “greenhouse” gases has recently gained more support, including from a few environmentalists.

Les Hearn marks the centenary of Albert Einstein's confirmation of the existence of atoms

Martin Thomas says there are ways to make nuclear power pollute less (Solidarity 3-67). Maybe so. I dare say this might be taken into consideration when the US government starts building new nuclear power stations, as it look sets to do. (And they may be followed in that enterprise by the UK government.) On the other hand it might not.

Solidarity’s recent discussion of the dangers posed by global warming raises the question of how we find alternative energy sources to burning fossil fuels.

Hardly a day goes by without news of research involving stem cells. It is also a subject of hot political debate: the Swiss recently voted 2 to 1 in favour of allowing it, while the US forbids the use of government money in some stem cell research.

Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and science writer, who died in 2002, wrote on a bewildering series of subjects. Clive Bradley assesses his legacy here.

(from the new issue of New Politics magazine)

Opposition to genetic modification (GM) owes more to superstition than to science and I am sorry to see Solidarity going along with this (Tony Jeffreys, 3/38). So public opinion is against it. Ninety-three per cent believe GM technology is driven by profit, not public interest. How does that differ from any other technology? Why don't we demand that it be applied to problems that affect poor people? In fact, many scientists in this field work in universities and are keen to see their discoveries benefit people. One group has come up with rice genetically modified to contain Vitamin A and is trying to make this available to populations prone to Vitamin A deficiency. The anti-GM lot think this is some insidious conspiracy to... what?

By Tony Jeffreys

The government decides soon whether or not to allow commercial growing of Genetically Modified crops in Britain. If it heeded public or scientific opinion it would say no to GM.

by Kim Stanley Robinson

For most of September, Mars will be closer to Earth than at any time in the last 60,000 years. Since "closer" means a little more than 36,000,000 miles, the practical result is basically a tiny orange blob visible in the southern sky on clear nights, but the phenomenon has nonetheless provoked a wave of interest in our nearest planetary neighbour.

In this context, socialists who want to know more could do worse than read American author Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy of novels about the colonisation of the red planet. Robinson has a flair for character and dialogue and keeps the story rattling along over one hundred and fifty years and almost 2,000 pages, but two things really mark these books out from other reasonably intelligent science fiction. The first is the fantastic detail and vivid language with which KSR describes the Martian landscape; apparently the project took seventeen years to research, but it's still astonishing that it was written by someone who, well, hasn't been there.

Starve or accept GM blackmail

Fourteen million people are now facing starvation in southern Africa, according to new United Nations figures. The organisation had previously put the number at 12.8 million. In Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique, droughts and floods - combined with political crisis in Zimbabwe in particular - have led to disaster. The impact of the crisis is made worse by the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the region. The UN has so far received only a third of the aid it says is needed.

In Zambia opposition to genetically-modified food has led to the government rejecting donations of corn from the USA because it might be GM.

by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane/Penguin, £25.00)

At one point, discussing whether human beings have an innate moral sense, Steven Pinker lists hypothetical examples where we 'feel' something is morally wrong, but can't precisely define why. One of them is consensual sex between siblings that produces no offspring. Another is using the American flag as a duster.

Clive Bradley looks at the work of Stephen Jay Gould, who died in May 2002.

Stephen Jay Gould, who has died aged sixty, after a twenty year battle with lung cancer, was one of the world's best known, and often most controversial, writers of popular science. Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University, Gould introduced thousands of non-scientists like me to Darwinism, with books like Ever Since Darwin and An Urchin in the Storm - collections of essays originally written for Natural History magazine. A palaeontologist (an expert in snails), he was himself a chief figure within Darwinist debates. He was one of the authors of the theory of 'punctuated equilibria' - that evolution goes through (relatively speaking) rapid periods of change after long eras of 'stasis', rather than just bit-by-bit gradualism. But his work covers an astonishing range of subjects. One of his best books, The Mismeasure of Man, was not about evolutionary theory at all, but an impassioned criticism of the whole racist history of intelligence testing.

David Bodanis was inspired to write this book when he heard that the actor Cameron Diaz had said in an interview that she’d really like to understand what “E=mc squared” means. He decided to tackle the task himself, not by explaining how the equation came to be derived, but by treating it almost as a person: he decided to write the biography of an equation.

In 1610, Galileo Galilei, as Bertolt Brecht put it, “abolished Heaven” — by proving the Earth was not the centre of the universe and that the Church’s entire theory of the cosmos, based on Aristotle and Ptolemy, was false. By pointing his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he proved the celestial spheres were not immutable. Some Church astronomers refused to look. Eventually he was accused of heresy.

Alas, Poor Darwin, assembling articles from biologists, sociologists and others, takes exception to the excessive claims of evolutionary theory (EP) — the theory that human behaviour must be understood in terms of adaptations caused by natural selection (so that we are, basically, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers).

The movie Amadeus sees the precocious Mozart through the eyes of his rival, Salieri. For their first proper meeting, when Mozart arrives at the Court, Salieri has composed a little piece of music. Mozart thanks him, plays back the thing from memory, and then, having commented that a particular chord change “doesn’t really work”, proceeds to improvise on the theme, vastly improving Salieri’s original. Salieri turns to the audience and tells us: “I think it was then that I first decided to kill him.”

Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, runs the old joke. Unfortunately, the result of the Kyoto climate summit does little to prove this wrong. Five years ago, at the Rio Earth Summit, the developed countries agreed to return their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2 ), the major “greenhouse” gas, to 1990 levels by the year 2000. Since emissions have been increasing since then, mainly due to the USA, the target is already starting to look ambitious. Nevertheless, the Kyoto summit of signatories to the UN Convention on Climate Change met in December to consider how to achieve reductions in CO2 emissions to below 1990 levels.

Is there a ‘gay gene’? Does it matter? Evidence has been building that there is a genetic basis, on some level, to sexual orientation. Chandler Burr’s well-researched, readable book* goes through this evidence in detail, and looks with commendable fair-mindedness at both sides of the debate.