How could a good God have created a “nature red in tooth and claw”?
Evolution, intelligent design, divine psychology and what it means to be human.
‘Man Thou Art a Wonderful Animal’ is on display at Central Hall Westminster from October 21st – November 19th. This debate will take place in conjunction with the exhibition to allow visitors to explore the different issues arising from the topic.
I am delighted to announce that I will have the pleasure of debating Professor Steve Fuller.
Professor Steve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at Warwick University and is a Fellow of both the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts.
He has spoken in 30 countries and his writings have been translated into twenty languages. His book Kuhn vs Popper was named book of the month (Feb 2005) by the US magazine, Popular Science, The Intellectual was named a book of the year by the UK magazine New Statesman for 2005, and Dissent over Descent was named book of the week by Times Higher Education in July 2008. Professor Fuller has written several other books including: Social Epistemology (1988); Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge (1993); Science vs Religion? (2007); Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011).
My first full day in Berlin had begun well, after a nice breakfast I took a taxi to the photography rental shop that would be supplying my lighting for the shoot. Everything went smoothly bar a little rejigging of bags as the chap serving me struggled to put everything into manageable parcels. Struggled he may have but succeed he did not, in neither respect. The bags were not manageable nor did they have everything in, as I was later to discover.
At the museum I was shown around by the curator of fossil archosaurs, the appropriately named Dr Wings. I initially took photos of the specimens using the available light before tackling the more complex task of setting up the studio lighting. When I came to do so I discovered the stands for the flash heads were not in any of the bags. After a quick call I was informed a courier was on his way. The journey had taken me a little over 10mins by cab so I didn’t worry; I assumed I would be underway again shortly. Three quarters of an hour later my mobile rang, the courier said he had arrived and was by the security gate of the west entrance. Not having a compass to hand I had no idea which direction west was and rarely do in all honesty, which makes taking directions in America futile at best but that’s irrelevant; there could surely only be one security gate.
I should point out that I don’t speak German but English is spoken fluently by many and partially by almost all however sometimes there was just enough of a barrier to add a little hilarity. I got to the door where I thought he would be. He wasn’t. He must be outside, I thought, but just to check I enquired if this was indeed the west gate. The chap I asked was a lovely fellow but the question was not clearly understood, I used my wits to communicate where language failed me and we parted company having firmly established our corresponding terms for the four compass points but sadly I was still none the wiser about the mysterious west gate.
Several incoming phone calls later with the courier who’s mobile could not receive calls and the situation was not improving quickly enough for my liking; it was snowing and I had about $30,000 of loaned camera around my neck. I had had no luck discussing the west gate dilemma with anyone but returned to the nearest guy to clarify, on the first asking he had referred me to the chap I’d asked previously so I didn’t pursue it. On the second time of asking he seemed a little more direct “Ask ze man zere! He can help you! ”“No, he can’t” I informed him, “Vy not?!” he responded, an octave higher and sounding increasingly like a character from ‘Allo Allo’. Fortunately his English turned out to be more than a little good and, at length, once we were clear on the problem it was he who solved the riddle. The courier was at entirely the wrong museum but only 10 mins down the road; I was unable to contact him so walked with hope rather than expectation, coat-less into the blizzard, shielding the camera under my jumper as I went. I was pleased to finally meet him and although the whole thing had been dragged out so long that I was freezing, hungry and 2 hours behind schedule a coffee on the way back eased my worries and I remembered how lucky I was to be there at all. My rediscovered peace was short lived, however, as I finished my coffee to find myself in some sort of ‘Fawlty Towers’ tribute. With the flash equipment all set up and ready to go I reached for the very essential but non-existent sync cable. I had specifically mentioned the sync cable in store. I had watched him put it in the bag. But it wasn’t there. Cue frantic John Cleese moment that may have amused the audience of the CCTV but wasn’t what I’d had in mind for the day. I took my coat this time and went myself.
A share of responsibility for all this may well be mine but I feel in situations such as these it’s important to blame others wherever possible.
So after all the farcical elements of the day had passed the actual shoot went very well. It was a real treat to be trialling a Phase One IQ140 camera system and it enabled me to capture some of the most important fossils in the world in exceptional detail. The Berlin specimen Archaeopteryx is a renowned beauty and it didn’t disappoint; I was also able to capture its rarely seen counter-slab and the original isolated feather fossil. The museum itself is wonderful and being there for a day without the public to clutter it up was a fantastic experience that I’m very grateful for. Photos and a bit more on Berlin to follow in my next post.
After a very long journey that included an unnecessarily long pause in Dubai, and every traveller’s customary concession to be ripped off by a taxi driver upon arrival, I found myself at the reception of my hotel. Nervously venturing in English, my only option, I informed the attendant that I had a reservation for the night and showed him the saved email on my phone. Gesturing to an adjacent chair he exclaimed with a degree of forbidding urgency “Sit down!” I did. Choosing to be quietly amused that this was most likely one of those humorous cultural inconsistencies I would recall upon my return, rather than entertaining the alternate possibility that I was about to receive a stern talking to about some accidental trespass or other. Thankfully it was indeed the former and, barring the Chinese gentleman’s tendency to say thank you in a heavy Russian accent, the rest of my check in was unremarkable.
My room was on the nice side of the sort of thing I’m used to but then I rarely travel in style. It was in possession of both a television and a kettle so I decided to make a cup of the available green tea and see what Chinese people watch for entertainment. I was only mildly surprised to be greeted by a tightrope walking dog on the very first channel; the programme seemed to bridge a gap between Crufts and Ninja Warrior that I had hitherto thought unbridgeable. After such glorious beginnings the rest of the exhausting number of channels delivered nothing but cold anti-climax in a language I didn’t speak.
Then the problem of an open rucksack pocket, inflicted upon me by an airport related zip breakage, was addressed through MacGyver-like use of safety pins from the complimentary sewing kit. And finally, still full of optimism for the trip ahead but with my excitement tempered by delirious jet lag, I went to bed.
Last week The Heritage Lottery Fund announced a £4.6 million grant towards restoration of Bletchley Park, the site credited with shortening the Second World War by 2 years through the work of its code breakers. Just a few years after the Allied victory Britain was again the location for a code breaking triumph, this time on an even more momentous scale. In February 1953 Francis Crick announced to his local pub “We’ve discovered the secret of life”. What Francis Crick and his colleague James Watson had discovered duly earned them a Nobel Prize and would become a cornerstone of modern biology; it was the structure of DNA and the essential mechanism for heredity.
Wiki commons / Apers0n
But only part of the problem had been solved; it was clear what DNA looked like, how it would be expected to unzip and align complimentary bases along its length but how this genetic information translated into amino acids remained a mystery. Crick correctly predicted that there must be an unknown adaptor molecule to associate each amino acid with the relevant coding portion of DNA. He then came up with what has been called ‘the greatest wrong theory in history’.
Crick devised a comma-free code where only certain combinations of letters could form a codon, the other combinations were nonsense codons. DNA has no commas or full stops so if an adaptor molecule began in the wrong place the entire ‘sentence’ would be mistranslated. Crick’s comma-free code was able to preserve meaning in sentences with ‘words’ written together without spaces #likeontwitter. The code gave exactly twenty unique codons and there are twenty amino acids to be coded for so it seemed a perfect fit. Sadly Crick’s elegant comma-free code was wrong; nature uses a code that is less perfect. The adaptor molecule, tRNA, can indeed start in the wrong place; mutations that cause this are called reading shift mutations and they can result in some very unpleasant diseases, such as infantile Tay–Sachs disease. Brian Hayes wrote of another effort to crack the code by a chap called Solomon Golomb; “it is not only comma-free and transposable but also can correct any two simultaneous errors in translation, and detect a third error. Life would be a lot more reliable if Solomon Golomb were in charge.” So what do Creationists make of this fact?
The inherent instability of DNA as a molecule may raise an eye brow or two but why should the universal genetic code be so badly flawed in its conception that mathematicians have no trouble at all in improving upon it? The capacity for mutation leads to disease and suffering but also to innovation; mutations are the raw material for evolution. If the language of genes point to a creator at all they point not to a controlling dictator but to one who has instilled free will at the most fundamental level. But if we allow too much room for random processes and blind chance do we not squeeze God out of the equation? Thomas Henry Huxley, often referred to as Darwin’s bulldog, coined the term agnostic to describe his position as a less than certain atheist; in one of his more faith-friendly moments he supposed “the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour; and that a sufficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the Fauna of Britain in 1869, with as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath in a cold winter’s day.”
Mostly when people think about evolution they think of a succession of small modifications over huge time scales. At any one point in time the biological picture should appear to be stationary, meaning evolution could never be observed first-hand and evolutionary relationships could only be deduced from genetic or fossil evidence. This is something that creationists cite when arguing that evolution can never be regarded as proven. There are, of course, many ways to establish truth outside of direct observation but nonetheless it is nice to see that sometimes we find evolution occurring within much smaller time scales.
The second largest family of lizards is that of the skinks. Being a very large family, over a thousand species, there is considerable variation in their appearance and habits but most are snake-like having a very short neck, long slender body and very short legs. Some species have no legs at all and it could be inferred that those which still posses tiny redundant limbs will eventually lose them entirely as natural selection strips them away. So skinks were already a good example of evolution acting now but last year scientists studying a species in Australia made a very interesting observation; individuals in one area reproduce through live birth whilst individuals in another area reproduce through egg-laying. Eggs don’t do well in very cold environments so live birth is a better option, this is such a strong selective pressure that evolution can occur quickly. Since the two populations are now distinct, in locality and in the pressures they face, mutations will occur independently in each population and accumulate until the two populations are no longer able to interbreed and can be considered separate species
To read the original article by Brian Handwerk in National Geographic click here
He has spoken in 30 countries and his writings have been translated into twenty languages. His book Kuhn vs Popper was named book of the month (Feb 2005) by the US magazine, Popular Science, The Intellectual was named a book of the year by the UK magazine New Statesman for 2005, and Dissent over Descent was named book of the week by Times Higher Education in July 2008. Professor Fuller has written several other books including: Social Epistemology (1988); Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge (1993); Science vs Religion? (2007); Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past, Present and Future (2011).
