Are you a Galileonist?

Posted on March 14, 2025 | 2 Comments

Another creationist video found its way into my YouTube feed. Professional-looking gentlemen having a professional-sounding discussion about the absurdity of evolution.

Darwin said this, and Darwin said that. Darwin believed this, and good old Darwin didn’t know that. And how wrong he was! And today’s Darwinists still cling on to this dying theory. How ridiculous is that!

The discussion is drenched with scientific-sounding words. There’re plasmids, endoplasm, centromere, codons, recessive allele, messenger RNA, genetic entropy, ….. These guys know their stuff! The viewer, not burdened with a lot of scientific knowledge, is impressed. It is easy to see where this discourse is heading to: Darwinism is dead, and today’s Darwinists are only flogging a dead horse because they can’t see, or don’t want to see the TRUTH. Darwin’s been dead for such a long time, for goodness’ sake, let’s move on!

Indeed, Charles Darwin published his main idea 166 years ago. That’s a very long time on the scientific timeline. He had no clue about any mechanisms which could explain his theory.

Let’s assume we can bring him back to life into the year 2025. Let’s give him a Biology 101 textbook to read. He would not have the foggiest idea what these guys are talking about. He recognizes a cell, and he understands the meaning of inheritance, but what is a ‘DNA copy error’? What the heck is DNA? And what on earth is a recessive allele??

In the end, he would look up and say, “I was right after all, all living things are related to one another.”

Let’s go back further in history. The year is 1633. Galileo has been hauled before the Chief Inquisitor. He has two choices: renouncing his crazy idea that the earth is moving or face the torture chamber. Galileo was 69 at the time (in itself an achievement in the 17th century), and he had no desire fighting it out with the Inquisition. So, he just lied under oath.

We’ll bring him back to life and bring him up to speed with 21st century astronomy. He would have no clue on what’s going on around him. What is a galaxy? What the hell is a Black Hole. Who is this Isaac Newton fella who thinks he knows more about gravity than me?

In the end he would say, “Well, after all, I was right, the earth is moving!”

Shall we call ourselves ‘Galileonists’, to distinguish ourselves from Flat Earthers and other Geocentrists? ‘Galileans’ doesn’t cut it, that term is already reserved for Jupiter’s largest moons. What about ‘Kopernicans’, or ‘Copernicans’? No, that sounds too ancient, even with the latinising capital ‘C’.

What do you think?

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Posted in Uncategorized, Science

On How to Break Bad News

Posted on March 8, 2025 | 1 Comment

If you follow the news, you can’t have missed the headline coming from SpaceX: ”During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost”. This is another way of saying that Elon Musk’s latest spaceship has blown up, for the second time in a row, and on its way out it has managed to disrupt dozens of commercial flights with falling debris.

This reminds me of my years of working in research in South Africa. At the end of every month, we had to summarise our work from the past few weeks. This had two purposes. It informed the people working in the production line if research has come up with any possible improvement for their workflow, saving them time or boosting productivity. Secondly, this was to reassure the shareholders that their money was well invested in our research department.

As the name suggests, these “Progress Reports” were expected to end on a positive note. As everybody who has ever worked in research knows, progress is generally patchy and hazy, assuming that there has been any progress at all. If you worked on a couple of projects at the same time, then there was a chance that you had something positive to report on. More often than not, especially if you only had one single project to work on, there was no progress at all, just setbacks, delays, complications, or outright failures. That was ok for a month or two, but became nerve-wracking if you couldn’t show anything positive for months on end.

That’s when the word ‘disimprovement’ was born. I came up with this term one day, hoping that the positive sentiment attached to the last three syllables would overwhelm the negative pull of the first syllable. I used it in the sentence “The results of the latest test series showed a slight disimprovement”. I think I got away with it, there was no inquiry from the readership for further clarification, only the editor of our Progress Reports hesitantly questioned if this word was part of the English language.

Back to our exploding rocket. The word ‘disassembly’ doesn’t sound that bad. It describes a useful process, when used in the right context. As to ‘unscheduled’, well, good things can happen, even if they are not planned. And who would object to ‘rapid’?

SpaceX Exploding – Big Sampson Kay, Bahamas, 7 March 2025 (reuters.com)

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Posted in Mis/Dis-Information

Global Warming Takes Us Into Uncharted Territory, or Does It?

Posted on February 20, 2025 | Leave a comment

Recently, I stumbled across this graph from the Smithsonian Institution, showing us the estimated global temperatures over the last 500 million years. I added some colour to highlight the difference between a world with ice caps, as we know it, and a warmer world without ice:

The sharp uptick at the right end is our doing by burning all the coal and oil, which took millions of years to form. You can see that all of human history, plus our evolution was spent in the cold, blue region. But for more than half of the 500 million years the earth’s climate was a lot warmer. So, what is the problem if we are heading back into an ice-free world?

The problem is the speed at which we are warming our world. This is unprecedented. Temperatures also rose at the end of the Permian period, 300 to 260 million years ago, probably due to extensive and widespread volcanism and subsequent rising CO2 levels, but that happened over hundreds of thousands of years. We are now doing the job over a few centuries, and who knows how quickly the warming will stop once we reached a peak in CO2 concentrations.

Looking at the diagram you might ask where are the recent ice ages? If you print the above graph in landscape on an A4 sheet of paper, one million years would be 1/2 millimeter (or 1/64th of an inch, for our British and American friends). In other words, all the ice ages are squeezed into one tiny dot.

Let’s use a logarithmic timescale to see what is going on in more recent history:

Graph by Glen Fergus

Up to around 800,000 years ago we get reliable data from ice core samples (O16/O18 and H/D ratios), and there is good agreement from samples taken in Antarctica and Greenland. Data from further back in time are derived from seafloor deposits and geological features.

The next graph shows the last 800,000 years in more detail:

Are we heading into uncharted waters? Well, the earth will survive, it has been through this before. People will adjust and survive. Unfortunately, man-induced climate change will trigger a mass extinction of plant and animal life. Will it cause a runaway hothouse planet that will see our planet ending up like our sister planet Venus? This seems highly unlikely.

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Posted in Climate Change

It is true for Me – But is It True (True with a Capital ‘T’)?

Posted on February 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

At the time of writing (February 2023), the TasteAtlas food website has just released their compilation of the “100 Best Rated Cheeses in the World”. A total of 8 Italian cheeses made it into the top 10. Unsurprisingly, this verdict sent the French cuisine into a meltdown. Sacre bleu! The first French fromage appears in the 13th spot. Camembert lovers will be interested to know that their favourite was ranked 91 out of 100.

This is an obvious example of ‘true for me’, or in this case it is the truth for a group of cheese lovers who shared their preferences on the TasteAtlas website. Nobody seriously believes that Parmigiano Reggiano, which made it to number one, really is the best cheese in the world, not even the cheesemakers in the Italian province of Parma, although you can bet that they will use this ‘fact’ in their marketing campaigns. You can’t blame them for that.

So, it seems that we can’t get to any absolute truth in matters of food tasting. The same will apply to our sense of smell, put to test in any perfume competition. What about our hearing? Physics can tell us why certain chords sound pleasant to our ears, whereas others sound unpleasant, but there is no ranking of musical compositions according to their beauty. At least not one we all agree on. The same goes for moral truth. Torturing of babies is reprehensible. We all agree on this truth, but all the discussions raging on animal cloning, designer babies, euthanasia, death penalty, etc. tell us that there is no universally accepted truth on these topics.

The quest for absolute truth, Truth with a capital ‘T’, has kept philosophers busy for millennia. Probably the best-known example is the French philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century. In his search for absolute certainty he argued that his senses could fool him (as they have done many times in the past), or he may well be dreaming, or some evil spirit might be trying to deceive him. But of one thing he can be absolutely certain about: He exists. He reasoned that because he is thinking, he can conclude that he must exist. In French “Je pense, donc je suis”, or he might have said it in Latin “cogito ergo sum”. Latin manages to express it in three words only. Also note that I used here ‘certainty’ instead of ‘truth’. But that’s ok in this context.

Descartes was one of the so-called Rationalists amongst the philosophers. He was happy to sit in a warm quiet room, in a comfortable chair, and contemplate on how to get to some absolute certainty, just through thinking alone. He set himself a very high bar. Can we get to some absolute truth, despite our frail senses that might deceive us? Yes, thankfully, we can declare certain things as absolutes. But we need to restrict ourselves to the physical world around us. And how do we get to these absolute certainties? It is through science. Science can tell us what is universally true, and what is false. A simple example: we live on a planet going around the sun. The statement ‘the sun goes around the earth’ is false. Philosophers will tell you that science does not give us absolute certainties. We’ll discuss that when we look at scientific facts and scientific theories. But for now, don’t listen to the philosophers. They question everything. That’s their job. Note that there is another discipline which gives us absolute certainty – mathematics. Seven is a prime number, that is an absolute truth. But it doesn’t tell us anything about the physical universe.

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Posted in Science, Philosophy

How we Access New Knowledge – Back Then and Now

Posted on February 19, 2025 | 1 Comment

When I grew up in central Europe in the 1960s and 70s, life was a lot simpler than it is today. No internet, no computers (although we had an IBM 360 mainframe at the University of Vienna, which took up a couple of rooms), not even cell phones. It was a peaceful time. With the two World Wars only in the distant memories of parents and grandparents, our knowledge about the world increased exponentially. Science was riding high. Getting access to this knowledge was more cumbersome than it is today, but it was straightforward.

Say, for example, you wanted to know how new stars are forming. You first had to find your way to a library and look for a book, something like Astronomy 101. Today it would be called Astronomy for Dummies. And that would tell you all you need to know about the process of star formation. Or, you could have invited a professional from a nearby university to give a talk to your group, to your club. After the talk and after having answered all your questions, you would say thank you professor, and that would be that. Back in those days, misinformation and disinformation were foreign words. The phrase ‘alternative facts’ had not yet been invented.

How do we go about looking for new information today? Well, that’s a whole lot easier nowadays. You grab your phone (in case you’re not holding it already) and ask your question. Or you type it in, if you are still from the old school.

Let’s take a question which is slightly more controversial than star formation (at least for some people): climate change. Typing these two words into Google Search, just now, got me 1.77 billion hits. Narrowing the query down to ‘climate change explained’ still gave me an impressive 539 million links, all competing for my attention.

If you are of a curious nature, the internet can provide you with thousands of articles, discussions, comments and even academic papers on the topic of climate change. There are hundreds of informative videos, in case you don’t like reading. A great time to be alive! Is there a problem?

Yes, there is. You will also come across websites which downplay, or simply deny that climate change is happening. To the credit of the internet, it took me quite a while to find such a site. It depends on your preferences. Google looks over your shoulder and quickly learns about what you like to see. This is particularly true for social media.

The challenge today is to sift through the morass of information on offer, and find what is really true.

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