tonyhaile.com » Science/Religion

Scenes from an unfortunate dinner party

tony — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:57:41 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

More from the incredible Tim Minchin, well worth a listen

Science

tony — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:31:57 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

tony — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:15:26 +0000

This could be handy if Ben or I get frostbite. . .

To understand and protect our home planet

tony — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 21:54:10 +0000

Nasa has quietly changed its mission statement to eradicate any mention of its original responsibility to understand and protect our home planet.

Old Version

“To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

New Version

“to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

Not only does the government doubt that important changes might be happening to our planet, they want our best scientists to stop studying it completely. This seems to be just the latest in a series of interventions aimed at subverting the work of Nasa and I have to say it makes me a little mad. Nasa should be the crucible of our learning and our inspiration, it should be our vehicle for understanding not only space but our unique place in it, Nasa should be the last place we should try to corrupt with political machinations and supression. To do so is to corrupt our future.

World Changing has more.

Religion round up

tony — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 10:41:04 +0000

Taking a leaf from the Daily Show I thought I would point you towards some interesting articles. Prospect magazine has a great article on the rise of Islamic rationalists who are seeking to pursue change from within Islam. Over at the unintentionally hilarious conservative voice, Rob Hood explains that you can only be a Christian if you believe that the earth was created shortly after the Babylonians invented beer (he has a list of nine such gems), and Zimbabwe, in a move for tolerance and plurality, has legalised witchcraft and acknowledged that supernatural powers exist.

tony — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 03:02:39 +0000

Continuing with Everest, University College London is looking for 200 volunteers to climb to Everest base camp as part of a study into how scarce oxygen resources affect the human body. Any takers?

tony — Tue, 16 May 2006 18:11:43 +0000

The Simpsons do evolution.

My friendly local evolutionary biologist

tony — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 20:24:31 +0000

Professor Steve Jones lives down the road from me in Camden Town and this year was invited to lecture to the Royal Society. His talk was forthrightly entitled ‘Why Evolution is right and Creationism is wrong‘. It’s bloody brilliant. Jones contrasts Western and Chinese creation stories (the Chinese one sounds more fun) but doesn’t spend too much time on this. Instead he offers a very clear explanation of evolution as fact. Much of his talk is taken up with an example of evolution that we can see occurring in the course of our lifetimes, namely the story of the HIV virus.

Jones shows how the virus has been modified through descent over the last few years, so much so that some variants seem completely different to others. It is also interesting to note that people with multiple variants of HIV seem to be affected less than those with a single strain, and that primates who originally gave us the disease and seem fairly unaffected by it in fact have many more copies of this disease than we do. Jones contends that we are currently going through a process that Chimps went through millions of years ago and that at some point in our future, if we hadn’t the drugs and intelligence to combat HIV anyway, we would have evolved a way to live with HIV in the same way that primates have.

Jones’s speech is always interesting with a great example of natural selection in industrial processes beating out intelligent design and the best George Bush slide I have ever seen. He is not the ardent atheist that Dawkins is, and sees no problem with the late Pope’s approach to evolution that human beings evolved and then at one point obtained a soul. This seems a curious acceptance of wild speculation as postcript to a talk based on fact verified by experiment, but who am I to judge. If you have an hour to spare watch the video, it won’t be a waste of your time.

tony — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 05:17:18 +0000

Huge news for those interested in evolution. Scientists combing Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic have found Tiktaalik, the missing link between marine and land-based animals.

tony — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 22:27:58 +0000

Robert Sungenis is on a mission. In a bid to dislodge that uppity duo Galileo and Copernicus, he has just finished a book in which he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth is at the centre of the universe, that it does not rotate and that the sun goes around the earth. Ah bless. (Via).