Science Degree Zero

... available for all and sundry at my favourite Tory rag. No comment. The Mail's astute, differentiated and complex take on the Berlin study on our not so free will is self-explanatory.

Joy to the World ...

... Charles Darwin is online, completely!

Consciously Resisting the Temptation

I was tempted to write about the manifold media reactions to the recent study about the unconscious nature of much of what we like to think of as our free will, conducted by the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, but simply don't have the time right now. Good thing that Begrenzte Wissenschaft has already treated the issue in the well-balanced and thoughtful way that is typical for this excellent and highly recommended blog.

Has Spring Sprung?

Like John, I have been too busy during the past two weeks to post anything substantial and, given that our semester has just started, things might probably remain like that for a while. Thanks to a number of kind and flattering links here and references there, however, we've had quite a bit of traffic despite our silence. Thank you all for stopping by!

Obviously, there's enough interesting stuff out there to write about: the Pope is in the US, tête-à-têteing with the silly Texan, odd women looking like distraught extras on the set for Little House on the Prairie photogenically bemoan the liberation of their children from their polygamous homes, Angela Merkel's cleavage -- but all this exciting material will have to remain unglossed, uncommented and unranted about.

However, I at least wanted to share my general joy about the fact that the Redstarts have returned from their winter quarters to our own humble garden.


The Redstart is my favourite bird and a welcome herald (hopefully) of the end of what, right now, appears to be a never-ending winter.

Amidst the dusty archives

The relative silence on my part in recent weeks has had much to do with being preoccupied with doing some of the necessary ground work for a new research project that a colleague and I will be spending the rest of the year on.

I've been in London for the last week or so, busily -- if somewhat monotonously -- photographing some of the key records that we'll be using. (Said activity will be continuing through next week. Feel free to stop by if you want to see the truly glamourous life that historians lead.)

One of these sources involves criminal registers, which list information about all of the suspects tried for relatively serious crimes in London at the end of the 18th century. There's not a lot of detail about each case (this will be the basis for the quantitative analysis), but there are a few where you really wish there were.

One of my favourites so far is William Hudson, a London doctor who, in October 1793, was tried for sedition and 'calling the King [George III] a German hog butcher &c. and wishing success to the French Republic'. (Britain was at war with France at this point.)

Now, which one of us hasn't on occasion done something similar, eh?

For his impertinence, however, Hudson received two years in Newgate and a hefty fine.

Thanks to the wonderful Old Bailey Proceedings Online, I am able to point you to more details on this interesting little case (which, sadly, has nothing to do with the project we're working on) without you even getting your hands dirty.

Q. How far off was you from the prisoner? - I was in the next box, sitting in a chair at the end of the next box.

Q. In the course of this conversation was the King mentioned at all? - He was.

Q. By whom? - By Mr. Hudson.

Q. Be so good as to tell us what part of any thing was mentioned by Mr. Hudson? - He said, 'The King, what was he, George Guelph, a German Hogbutcher, a dealer of human flesh by the carcase, and sold his Hanoverian subjects to his British subjects for thirty pounds a piece.'

Q. Will you utter the words just as he uttered them? - I think it was, 'The King, what is he, George Guelph , a German Hog-butcher, a dealer in human flesh by the carcase, he sells his Hanoverian subjects to his British subjects for thirty pounds a piece, and that he was not satisfied with that, that he was partner with the Prince of Hesse Cassel.

Q. Speak the words in the manner he related them? - And not content with that he goes partner with the Prince of Hesse Cassel, and has fifteen pounds a head for each of his carcases.

Q. In what tone of voice was this said? - It was in a sharp tone of voice, and rather felt noisy by the gentlemen that were sitting along with him; it was louder than the common conversation.

Q. Do you know in point of fact whether it was heard by those persons in the neighbouring boxes? - It was heard very plain by the gentlemen that sat with him, and several others.

Q. After he had made use of these expressions what followed then? - There was some conversation took place between Mr. Pigot and him, Mr. Hudson took up the paper, and read of the King's going a hunting, and seemed to reflect much on his Majesty's doing so, at the time that his country was in such calamitous war.

As you might have suspected, alcohol was involved.

Q. Was there any toast given by any body? - In the time of conversation they had drank two glasses of punch each, they called for a three penny glass, and hurried it.

Q. Were they tumblers or small glasses? - Large glasses such as they charge sixpence a piece for; as soon as they had got them Mr. Hudson drank aloud, The French Republic or Constitution! I cannot say which exactly, and Mr. Pigot said, I will join you in that with all my heart, on the doing that, the gentlemen in the room got up on their feet, except them two men, he and Pigot, and The King! The King! was called from all quarters of the coffee room, to my knowledge it was; when that was the case Mr. Hudson got up his glass and in a very loud voice called out The French Republic, and may it triumph over all the governments in Europe!

Q. In what tone of voice did he call out that? - In a very loud tone of voice, much sharper than he had said any thing before.

So, watch out, please, for those sixpenny glasses of punch. They might be smooth going down, but before you know it you'll be condemning German princes and uttering revolutionary slogans.
I'm also intrigued by one David Ferrand, a French hair dresser who was accused of 'neglecting to depart this kingdom as an alien'.

It may be that hair dressers were seen as a particularly fearsome potential fifth column in the war against revolutionary France.

For whatever reason, however, his case never came to trial.

Back to the files...

Breaking Hedgehogs on Humans

You ... just ... don't ... do this kind of thing.

Feel the Liebe

This week in the 'I wasn't expecting that' file: Germany topped a recent poll as the world's most popular nation.

As reported by Der Spiegel:

According to a new BBC World Service survey of international opinion, Germany is held in higher regard than any other large country when it comes to influencing global politics.

According to the survey which was carried out in 34 countries, the global view of Germany's influence is predominantly positive. On average, 56 percent of people questioned had a positive opinion of Germany, compared to only 18 percent who did not.

A more detailed version of the report itself is available here (pdf) which provides information on the world's perceptions of several countries (including Israel, Russia and the US).

German Joys provides some analysis:

A few longer-term factors come to mind, in no particular order. First, Germany's deeply integrated into the EU and no longer presents any military threat to anyone. Second, Germany gives a pretty significant amount of foreign aid (this explains a lot of Japan's popularity as well). Third, the German diplomats I know personally tend to be smart, well-trained, and well-disciplined. They are actually diplomatic. They keep a low profile and talk about reconciliation, compromise, mutual interests, peaceful means, etc. Fourth, German leaders are routinely seen on the international stage taking responsibility and sincerely apologizing for their country's past misdeeds. Fifth, Germans are renowned for being the least nationalistic large nation there is. Sixth, aside from the beer-swilling package tourists, Germans abroad generally leave a good impression. Some of the phrases I've heard: "diligent", "polite", "speak good English", "diplomatic", "don't ask awkward questions", "seemed interested in our local culture", "ate the local food."

These are all part of it, sure.

But it may be that one powerful factor has been overlooked.

(More info: German/English.)

Just cruising

Et voilá the hilarious German spoof of Tom Cruise's infamous promotional video for "The Church":



I admit, the German adds a further dimension of satanic obsessiveness to what was a piece of monomaniacal madness to begin with.

Wilful Misreadings

An article in Die Zeit is making my blood boil. Under the title "Alles nur die Gene" (which one might liberally translate as "My Genes Made Me Do It"), the irate Tanja Dückers rants about the current omnipresence of neuroscience in public debate, which she considers a mere fashionable bandwagon upon which unthinking and manipulable stars and starlets are jumping by the score.

This kind of popular gene claptrap, she claims, is not only "irritating", it is dangerous. Neuroscience, she argues, denies the relevance of cultural influences on human experience, identity and behaviour. It is (of course), reductive -- a concerted effort by the science Mafia to boil down the infinitely complex web of human experiences and interactions to a simple formula. And it destroys any kind of morality by denying the possibility of self-control -- in the end, she implies, we can happily go around killing people and then point to our genes as the real perpetrators.

Alas, it seems that Ms Dückers has not done her homework, otherwise she wouldn't be writing such reductive ... stuff. (I wanted to write a different word, but my innate capacity for self-control intervened.) Apparently she hasn't read any cognitive science at all, only skimmed the intellectually dubious surface of the internet for appropriate information (and in a rather willy-nilly manner to boot).

Her main source is a Yahoo News release (investigative journalism at its finest) about the recent study on happiness performed at the University of Edinburgh. In this study of 973 pairs of twins, the researchers found out that "genes have a considerable influence on whether a person is happy in life or not."

No, guv, there is no sign that she read the study itself.

Hm. "Considerable influence." Hardly evidence for extremist and sinister genetic determinism, is it? It's a pity that Ms Dückers doesn't seem to have read to the end of the Yahoo-snippet (brief though it is -- time for Zeit journalists must be infinitely valuable), otherwise she would have stumbled upon the not insignificant piece of information that the Edinburgh researchers also emphasise the "considerable influence" of environmental factors upon personal happiness.

Her other source is the scandal-mongering German weekly Focus (once launched as a deliberate antidote to the leftish excesses of Der Spiegel), which last year ran a story titled "Scene of the Crime: The Brain" and sub-titled "The 'Evil' Within." (my translation).

Interestingly enough Ms Dückers seems to have misremembered the subtitle (where have all those googling skills gone, I wonder?), which according to her runs: "How Human Beings Become Criminals" (also my translation).

As far as the tabloidy style goes, she has a point, of course, but what kind of source for this kind of topic is Focus anyway? To conflate popular science journalism of this ilk with serious neuroscience (although common in the media, as Ben Goldacre has unflaggingly been pointing out) is childish, incorrect and insulting to serious scholars. Would neuroscientists use an esoteric category like "evil", I wonder?

Maybe her misremembering wasn't that accidental after all ....

The greatest clanger she drops is when she depicts the Frankfurt neuroscientist Wolf Singer as a latter day Rasputin ventilating his dangerous lore at Chancellor Merkel's 50th birthday party. She quotes (though without a link so that interested people might check for themselves): "There is no free will. Human beings are steered by neurons."

Well for starters, Ms Dückers, neurons are not genes (but given that your article is brimming with suchlike conflations, one gets the feeling that subtle distinctions of this kind are not your priority anyway). Neurons are electrically excitable cells through which information is processed and transmitted. Singer is therefore perfectly right in saying that we are steered by neurons.

And where exactly does the potential for self-control and "decency" ("Anstand") defended so vociferously by Ms Dückers originate, if not in neuronal activity? Is it not reasonable to think that genetic factors might have a "considerable influence" upon that activity?

How else but through genetic, neuronal and biochemical mechanisms do our bodies function? By divine intervention? Culture?

Ms Dückers's article resounds with the (possibly heart-felt) concern about the ethical implications of neuroscience and genetics. However, she should also perhaps consider more carefully the ethical obligation of journalists to present an image of science that is more than an assemblage of snide, superficial and panicked prejudices.

Some people blog ...

... others embroider.

To learn more about the Swedish artist furthering the beautification of public transport by clandestinely embroidering the seats in trains and busses with symbols and names of IKEA-furniture, klick here. If you feel like participating in her "Pimp my Bus" campaign, you can contact her: she will provide you with needle and yarn. If you see words like "Hensvik", "Henrik" or "Bosse" stitched on the gum-pasted polyester on which you are sitting, don't fret -- you're not going mad!

I ... don't ... think that this is an April fool's story.

Realsatire?

I need to share my bewilderment at the odd cover that Penguin chose for Jim Crace's novel Being Dead.


It's not so much the cover itself that bothers me (which is quite apt, though I hate the silly Blair Witch font), as the quote from the Guardian review they have chosen to add as a little marketing gimmick. These days, if a book is not encrusted with smartarse statements by Oxbridge-educated pen pushers it's apparently deemed worthless (which is why those random snippets from the Sunday supplements now make up a sizeable part of any serious publication. It's worse in the States, of course, what with The-Woman-Who-Doesn't-Have-A-Clue-About -Literature Winfrey).

I secretly hope that, like me, others don't bother to read them either.

In case you can't read this one:

Being Dead
Jim Crace
"A Joy to Read" Guardian

Don't get me wrong: it's quite an astute evaluation of this book, which, by the way, I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's a must for any committed materialist and contains beautiful passages like this one:

Judging by the modest blood-flow of her far from modest wounds, Celice’s heart had ceased pumping almost as soon as she was hit. Her skull was not as thick as Joseph’s. (That was something that she’d always known about the man. Her husband was curmudgeonly, distracted, timid and thick-skulled.) Her skull was weaker than the granite too, of course. The bone caved in like shell. Her brain, once breached and ripped, was as pale and mushy as a honeycomb, a kilogram of dripping honeycomb …. The blows across her face and throat cut off the blood supply and, though her brain did what it could to make amends, to compensate for the sudden loss of oxygen and glucose, its corridors of life were pinched and crushed. The signals of distress it sent were stars. The myths were true; thanks to the ruptured chemistry of her cortex, she hurtled to the stars (6-7).

But taken out of its context and placed next to the title in this blunt manner, the word "joy" in the Guardian quote seems a trifle ... flippant ... to me. Or is that just my sense of humour?

Tricks of the Theological Trade

Ario's migraine -- or rather the scholarly trigger of his ailment -- reminded me of something I had started to write a while ago but somehow never got around to posting. The comrade over at Altering Labyrinth was distraught by the following statement by the mathematician Detlev Dürr (who teaches at LMU Munich):

"[...] while everything is deterministic, the universe evolves in such way that the appearance of randomness emerges, and precisely as described by the quantum formalism."

Now, although my own reaction to this quote was slightly less ... vehement ... the statement affirmed the general suspicion that I have regarding all things quantum, especially when they are being applied to fields outside of the natural sciences. Some literary scholars love quantum theory because they think it fits their deconstructionist bill. Chaos theory was all the rage amongst English scholars in the 1990s (as was the habit amongst Shakespeare specialists to change the names of their cats from Cressida to Schrödinger). But like me, most English scholars don' t really know what they're talking about when they take physics on board (and when they do, results tend to be far from convincing).

The thing is: people in the humanities don't need to think on the subatomic level. The cultural artefacts that we're dealing with are one hundred percent middle world. Anything above and below is not relevant to our work. Stick with the here and now, people!

About a year ago I learnt that theologians, too, like to fiddle with the subatomic for their own purposes. This disturbing epiphany occured in a lecture by a professor of "Fundamentaltheologie" at a nearby university , entitled "Astrophysics and Creation" -- a bold notion, I thought, and went to attend.

This theologian was a very nice man indeed – as nice as all deeply defensive people tend to be who are somehow aware that their message may be disturbing to many. They tend to hide this awareness behind a hefty layer of charm, though in this case it resembled the grating charm cultivated by the forever youthful hosts of the folklore and umpah shows that haunt public television in this part of the world.

Granted, superficially our speaker was impressively competent: the polysyllabic idiom of the natural sciences passed his lips with a similar ease and fluidity as his copious quotes from the Bible did. In the end, however, all this amounted to the kind of scientific sell-out that you would expect from someone investigating the fundamentals of theology for a living.

The charming man began with a brief jeremiad about the deepening incommunicado between science and theology. What a shame, he said, that science has left the comfort zone of big bang theory -- whose fundamentally ontological nature allowed it to be appropriated easily as an alternative version of the Genesis story -- to pursue its relentless search for a mathematical theory of everything. It seems as though the idea that the universe is meaningless, coincidental and purely material has triumphed for good. Wouldn’t it be nice to return a dash of the divine spirit to it?

Well, actually, I though, no -- but kept silent.

Instead of supporting the comforting notion of a divine pyromaniac in the sky, quantum cosmological killjoys like Hawkins present us with the terrible concept of a timeless, infinite space that may eventually be captured with a formula but a formula that leaves no room for a creator. As a result, human feel lost in a universe whose coordinates they will probably never fathom.

By way of a segue into the heart of the matter the charming man dropped an old argumentative chestnut: science might explain how things function, it doesn’t explain why they function in this way at all (Yawn). Here, he claimed, creation theology may provide a “reasonable alternative explanation” to those offered by the natural sciences.

Poor atheistic self that I am, and quite happy to lead a life with no purpose in a universe that simply is, I remained undisturbed by this epiphanic promise and instead focused on the how of his argumentation. And I sat there increasingly aghast as I listened to this charming man perverting the insights of rational science in order to conclude on a note of religious triumph by turning science (or parts thereof) against itself.

First of all, our charming speaker said, the reason why we should feel the need to explain the creation of the universe is given by science itself. Taking his cue from such fringe theories as string theory (only one of the more esoteric branches of contemporary physics, championed, it seems, by Trekkies hooked on the good old “Beam me up Scotty” fantasy), he emphasised that life, really, is far more complex than a silly little theory of everything would suggest.

Didn’t Gödel himself (yes, the Gödel who suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life, was hospitalised several times for his mental imbalance and spent his later years trying to come up with an ontological proof of God’s existence based on formal logic) challenge the ideal of the world formula? And doesn't string theory reveal to us a world of such disturbing complexity that one single formula could never do it justice? We are multiple! (This is the point where Deleuze and Guattari ought to have made an appearance, but didn't. Maybe next time.).

Even “mere matter” (like, uh, me and you and all other living organisms on this planet – among many other things) possesses such a complicated structure, urging us to challenge the supposition that everything that exists in the universe is coincidental -- a term which he rather glibly equated with the trivial during the talk. But isn’t the coincidental nature of this planet and all life forms on it what makes it so awe-inspiring?

The fact that despite this complexity this world makes sense, he proceeded, suggests that this might be a trace of a divine signature in this mathematically readable universe. At this point he pulled out a lovely fifteenth-century book illustration of God in the act of creating the world in an elegant gesture of benevolent authority and absolute freedom, while an equally benevolent posse of angels smiled on him. And this world, he suggested, is beautiful in the near-mathematical perfection that its forms and operations take.

To prove the wild speculations supported by this uncommented conflation of a late medieval literalist image and mathematical graphs illustrating the time-space relation, the charming man shifted from the as yet unexplained singular to the plural. In addition to being free to create one world, God of course is perfectly capable of creating other worlds, he reminded us – worlds to which our cherished world formula might not apply (however, why this argument should counter the validity of a formula for this world – which we are stuck with whether we like it or not– is beyond me).

This plurality, according to our hero, can be discovered in contemporary quantum cosmology, which, he emphasised with a discernible note of triumph, has long ceased to believe in only one universe. Instead, the inflationary view of the universe proposed by physicists since the 1980s, which entails the possibility that our solar system is merely one tiny pocket in a huge accumulation of universes, can illustrate the idea of God’s freedom. "His" eternal omnipresence reveals itself in the ability to create multiple universes – an ability documented in odd religious tracts and texts throughout church history (for instance by Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake for his blasphemous Renaissance scepticism, and to this day unrehabilitated by the Catholic Church) …

… and, of course, in the natural sciences. Because really, the charming man said (on whose uncannily smiling lips I hung by this time like a rabbit mesmerised by a black mamba): doesn’t all this support the findings of contemporary physicists? Christianity was right all along – and really, the scientific model of the multiverse was an appropriate alternative model to theological conceptions of creation.

I repeat: the model of the multiverse is an appropriate alternative to theological conceptions of creation.

Not the other way round.

At this point it dawned on me that the slur in his otherwise clear elocution whenever he said “creation theology” – making it sound a bit like “creation theory” – might have been more intentional than I'd initially thought. I declined the invitation by the speaker to join him and the rest of the audience to talk things over over a glass of local wine, and instead stumbled out of the room in a state of cosmic bewilderment. Had all this really happened or had I briefly slipped through the membrane into an alternative universe?

Have I already mentioned that this was a public lecture at a state-funded university?

More Hun Faults

One day it's polythene, the next day it's British Summer Time ... I wonder which astounding historical secret uncovered (and blamed on the Germans) by The World-Famous British Investigative Journalism we're in for tomorrow.

Cult Following

For those of you interested in the psychodynamics of cultish behaviour, The Sueddeutsche has a rather disturbing feature (in Deutsch) on the Jehova's Witnesses, who demand to be officially recognised as a religious denomination. Of course, we all know about sectarian psychoterror, but it's chilling to read nevertheless.

Posh prickdom

How do I put this diplomatically (and non-actionably)?

I could comprehend the actions of someone who might (though via no encouragement from me or anyone else associated with this blog) wish to kick the head in of this particular individual, aka, Master Nicholas De Lacy Brown:


Not that I'm advocating any form of violence whatsoever. That's just plain wrong.

The evidence for the prosecution.

And this:

Here's Me, Trembling With Terror

No comment.

Le Petit (President) Nicolas

Is it just us, or is there an uncanny similarity between these two charming little chaps?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy:


(Via, The Guardian)

Le Petit Nicolas, drawn by Sempé:


We leave it up to you.

A local perspective

Two recent, unconnected, comments suggest the value of stepping back from the keyboard and taking a look around.

Peter Ryley, on vacation in Greece, discovers the joys of narrowed horizons:

The lack of broadband reduces my contact with my favourite blogs and so my world shrinks further into the parochialism of the Greek village. Today it was Argalasti market and a plant sale in Lafkos. Previously, it was the big news about someone leaving his job and moving to Promiri. Then there is Iannis giving us eggs, Chrisanthi feeding her goats, and Stavroula (no teeth, gum boots and dubious personal hygene) coming to the gate to tell us about goats in our garden, our insecure wood pile and then to weep over her 'broken heart' - she tragically lost her son - and the pain in her leg. All this matters; the rest fades.

And Shuggy, in reflecting on his support for the Iraq war, makes a very good point that, to me anyway, seems related to the above.

I astonished and disgusted many people who know me by my support for this war. I astonished myself. I'm no stranger to self-disgust either but I'd have to say that this never has anything to do with the positions I take on this or that issue. For this is part of a wider problem we have on the left - the idea that morality is a function of the stands we take on big geo-political issues. As if what we think matters a damn, as if this was important compared to how we quit ourselves as men and women in relation to our families, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

It's not, obviously, that those positions on larger issues don't matter.

But it may be useful to remind ourselves that the imagined struggle of world-historical importance that we often feel we're involved in (a sense that blogging only amplifies) is, in most cases, just two people arguing.

Chop off his ear!

There's only one way to deal with the kind of hooligan behaviour recently exhibited by a Finnish tourist visiting the Easter Islands.

Article in Deutsch, I'm afraid. Oops, no -- here's an English version, too.

So it's us again, or wot?

More cheese and wine party info that you don't really need from The Independent. Is it just me, sensitive me, who detects a hidden anti-Hun agenda in Rob Sharp's article on polythene?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead -- blame your bloody national rubbish problem on us.