Tetherd Cow Ahead

Well, the Moon being in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligned with Mars, I’ve decided to use the conjunction to combine a few things that people have asked me about at one time or another. Jill was enquiring about our edible native animals, and jedimacfan and Universal Head have both shown an unhealthy interest in Australian ‘Big Things’.

So herewith, for your viewing pleasure, the scourge of The Great Southern Land, the Giant Rabbit.

Yes, I know, technically not native animals, rabbits, but by golly, they may as well be there are so many of them.

The rabbit originally comes from Spain, you know. I’m sure it is a darling happy little critter as it hops around Spanish meadows. Here, it is a hideous feral menace.

The rabbit was introduced to Australia very early on. Opinions as to dates vary. There were rabbits on the First Fleet (1788), but it is generally accepted that the real problem didn’t start until about 1859 when a small number of rabbits was released for hunting purposes.*

The introduction went something like this:

Englishman: Australia, this is the rabbit. Rabbit, this is Australia

Australia: Pleased to meet you Rabbit!

Rabbit: Howdy Do! (thinks: ‘Jiminy Cricket – the whole freakin’ place is EDIBLE!’)

Think Hansel and Gretel seeing the witch’s cottage, but with no witch.

Of course, while they were small, rabbits were hard to control and that was bad enough. But then the British, not content with just letting the jumping pests loose in the first place, carried out their atomic tests in Maralinga in the 1950s*, creating the first mutant bunnies, leading to the mega-Rabbit and all the disastrous consequences that followed. In the photo above you see a misguided attempt to usefully re-skill this Giant Rabbit, a government initiated project that was doomed to disaster from the first hop.

*Some things in this post are factual.

Unambiguous, I feel.

This snapped in Namibia by my friend Rebecca. Thanks Bec.

OK, now the last time I had a cat was about twenty years ago, I admit. And I want the best for my new little guy. But people, I’m telling you, somewhere during the last twenty years the pet world HAS GONE INSANE.

I’m giving Glitch a nice mix of all the catty foods – he gets raw kangaroo meat*, chicken wings, tinned fish and Science Diet for kittens. He likes all these things. And because I aim to be a good cat father, I also scan the supermarket shelves for other possibilities to keep his diet varied.

Today I found ‘Fancy Feast® Royale‘ Natural Whitemeat Seafood in Tuna Jus. This is what it says on the back:

A delicious delicacy for fish connoisseurs: we start by hand selecting the ocean’s finest filets of Tuna, then we mix the filets with Seabream and Whitebait and baste in a Tuna Jus.

Solely in the interests of blogging, I had to buy a packet so I could show you all. (He is seriously not getting this stuff in the normal course of events). Hand selected filets? Basted in a Tuna Jus? I haven’t opened the little foil sachet yet, but I’m betting that when I do, what I’m actually going to be squeezing out is a big blob of fish mush.

And if mealtime goes anything like last night, it will be a case of him gobbling it all down as fast as he can, licking his bum and then snacking on a nice crunchy black cockroach for dessert.

My cat is is pure class.

*People from other countries please don’t freak out; kangaroos are culled here for a number of reasons and the meat is not wasted. There are a lot of kangaroos. The meat is good lean meat, and sensible people will eat it. It tastes good. However, because the meat eaters of the world (including Australians) for some reason are obsessed with beef, instead of most kangaroo meat being used on the barbecue, it ends up as pet food. This is insane because one of the very worst agricultural things that ever happened to this country was the introduction of beef cattle.

UPDATE:Well, I have to confess that when I opened the sachet of Fancy Feast Royale, it didn’t look nearly as puke-making as I expected. There were obvious chunks of different kinds of fish, and even whitebait. The tuna ‘jus’ looked suspiciously like… aspic. In fact, wait a minute, the whole thing looked just like the tinned fish I’ve been feeding him anyway…

And I’m sure you are all dying with anticipation… yes, he did like it. A lot. He ate it all up. And then licked his bum and tried to eat a piece of uncooked spaghetti that I dropped on the kitchen floor.

After my post Clipping an Angel’s Wings, I received a comment from still amazed, which follows.

I welcome such comments about these big topics, and rather than let these thoughts disappear into the ephemeral distance of Blogger Comments, I hope still amazed will not mind that I have brought it back into a main post.

still amazed said…

Sorry to be so late in the day on this one, but would it really make no difference at all if there were a creator? Wouldn’t an objective scientific mind be the least be curious about how it all got started and from whence it all came — if it came from whence at all? Isn’t the Big Bang Theory an attempt to explain how and where it all started? Why would anyone have come up with such a theory except out of scientific curiousity? Has anyone ever calculated the probability that all that science describes in the universe (or is it a multiverse that we live in?) could have resulted from random interaction matter and energy?

Here’s a probability argument, only in relation to the probability that a single living cell could result at random. (The argument is not mine mind you; I am obviously not smart enough to advance this one): The probability of the chance formation of a hypothetical functional ‘simple’ cell, given all the ingredients, is acknowledged to be worse than 1 in 10 raised to the 57800th power. This is a chance of 1 in a number with 57,800 zeros. It would take 11 full pages of magazine type to print this number. To try to put this in perspective, there are about 10 raised to the 80th power (a number with 80 zeros) electrons in the universe. Even if every electron in our universe were another universe the same size as ours that would ‘only’ amount to 10 raised to 160th power electrons. (Read that last sentence carefully.) That makes 10 raised to the 57800th power a very big number.

still amazed: Thank you for your considered response. There’s a good question there, and some bad science.

Would it make a difference if there was a creator? That’s a reasonable question. We should ask that question. As a question.

But there are many problems associated with just supposing there is a creator and trying to make your world view fit in with that. For one thing, there are hundreds of different creation stories from all over the world and from all periods of history. Even Scientology has a creation story. So which creator is the real creator? From where do we derive the tools to make that decision? (It doesn’t count to say your creator told you so; everyone can say that).

Science, if practiced properly, doesn’t negate a creator; scientific reasoning just says there’s no evidence to suggest that it is necessary to make that assumption. Mystery is just not enough. There are a lot of mysterious things that we don’t feel the need to attribute to supernatural beings. And many things that were once considered mysterious, we now understand better because we’ve thought rationally and carefully about them. (That reason alone should make you wary of attributing mystery to God.*).

Another problem with just supposing there is a creator has to do with where you stick that creator on a timeline. Once upon a time people believed that the world was created pretty much ‘as is’ a few thousand years ago. We can now easily demonstrate that that just isn’t so. So the creator has moved back through the mists of time, to keep in step with scientific observation. The latest incarnation of this is the rather erroneously-named Intelligent Design, which accepts that, yes, there is such a thing as evolution (an admission that would have once been heretical) but claims that it only works to a point. The perceived ‘slack’ is taken up by the creator. All this re-arranging of the goal-posts just completely smacks of human-ness.

Now, your bad science: the statistical example you use is flawed on many levels, not the least of which is a smoke-and-mirrors trick with the big numbers. Yes, it sounds impressive, but you’re using a very faulty piece of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. It is often offered up to impress people.

Where does your logic fail? With the assumption that because this is the way things are, that this is therefore the only outcome. Calculating the odds of one exact outcome of a series of events is very explicitly not the same as calculating the possible outcomes of a series of events. This is an example of how people get easily confused by probability, and why slot-machine manufacturers and lottery companies make so much money.

To use numbers to say “Wow, look at what a whole lot of random events produced! Us!” is wrong in at least two ways.

In the first case, lots of evolutionary experiments, over a time period unimaginable to our human way of experiencing time, have produced literally billions of outcomes, and those are only the ones we know of. Evolution has enabled everything from slime-moulds, through trilobytes, allosaurs, water beetles, termites, coral reefs and wildebeest, to humpback whales. Your single cell example is meaningless – there have been, through the millennia, countless numbers of different kinds of cells, and cell-like adaptations. Not just one. And that doesn’t even include the probably billions of billions of failures. Evolution is an imperfect tinkerer. Your example is like pointing at a person on a bicycle and saying “Wow, what are the odds of seeing that particular guy, wearing that exact red scarf, on that exact model of bicycle riding down this exact street in London on a Tuesday in December?” Of course, they are ENORMOUS odds. You would not put a wager on such an event happening. Nevertheless, when you see that guy on his bicycle zip past, you don’t scream “It’s a miracle!” Why? Because it isn’t a miracle unless you consider it out of context and after the fact.

Another way in which your example is imperfect is subtle and needs some knowledge of mathematics and chemistry to grasp well. It is also a fairly cutting edge idea but evidence is accumulating rapidly which speaks in its favour.

It is this: evolution (both physical and biological) has a high degree of randomness inherent in it, but it is not entirely random. Very clever people like Ian Stewart, Stephen Wolfram and Paul Davies have suggested that evolution (and indeed, many other kinds of natural processes) is expedient and exploits certain kinds of physical properties inherent in the mathematical structure of the universe. In other words, evolution conserves effort by making use of atomic properties and simple rules, and for reasons we are only just now starting to understand, complexity arises from these simple states.

To relate it to your example, a cell forms because, over a long period of time, certain kinds of inherent physical tendencies (like surface tension, molecular lattice structure and forces inside atoms) are exploited by random processes. Complexity builds rapidly from these simple conditions in a perplexing way. But it’s only perplexing because the calculation capability of our brains is not able to comprehend it, in much the same way as you or I can’t really imagine ten million years of time, or three hundred light-years of distance. Crucially, though, we are slowly beginning to understand more of the mechanism by which life evolves by careful observation and study. Where there was once ‘God’, there is now more understanding. And this pattern gets repeated through the ages. No wonder gets removed by this understanding, nor amazement. Just superstition.

Now, the really Big Question. Why should the universe be striving toward life? That’s a mystery. A big mystery. Science doesn’t know. Science doesn’t pretend to know either. Science says “Let’s find out! It’s a great adventure!” And we move forward and find out more.

You can, if you wish, stick God in right back there and say – God made all those laws and that’s why it’s so. But it’s a barren thought. Why not say, instead, that God made everything yesterday including all your memories up until that time? It’s just as valid a speculation. There is no way that we can usefully process either of those things. If it makes you comfortable to believe that the mathematics of the universe was written in stardust-peppered ink on a coal black nothingness in the very beginning of time, then that’s OK. It’s just that there is no reason to suppose that it’s so.

still amazed: May I suggest you read some of the writing of Paul Davies, a scientist who has won the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religious Thought. Professor Davies is a thoughtful, erudite and deeply philosophical scientist. A proper scientist. He is a scientist who is asking the questions you want scientists to ask. And coming up with some answers. That might be the hard part for some people.

*Some things that were once considered mysterious and in the realm of gods: the Sun’s movement across the sky; epilepsy; the regular flooding of the Nile Delta; dinosaurs; sneezing.

So, anyway, the lock on the security grill on my front door* has slowly become harder to open over time and I decide that I need to consult a locksmith.

There is one a couple of blocks from me. I give them a call. Dave, the locksmith, is very helpful.

You should be able to undo two screws and pull out the lock pretty easily. Bring it down tomorrow and I’ll take a look. We shouldn’t need to come out and it will save you money. We’ll possibly need to replace the escutcheon†, the lock, or maybe cut you a new key to the lock. We can probably do it while you wait.

I think it might be that my key is just worn and I need a new one.

Yep, that’s possible too, I’ll be able to tell you straight away.

The next day I take out the lock – Dave was right, it comes out easily.
I walk down to the shop. A buzzer sounds when I open the door. A little fat man comes out.

Hi. Dave?

No, Dave isn’t here today.

Oh, OK. Dave told me to bring my lock down and you could tell me what’s wrong with it. I think maybe I just need a new key.

The guy examines the key and lock.

Nothing wrong with the key. You need a new escutcheon.

Oh, OK, fine. Can you do that for me.

Sure.

He disappears into the backroom. There is some tapping and clunking and a little bit of grinding. He comes back.

There, that’s better.

He turns the key. It looks good. I pay him $13, take it home and put it back in the door. It sticks as soon as I try it. Oops, I think, it’s actually something wrong with the door. Maybe it’s misaligned or something. I take the lock out and turn the key. Nope. It’s still sticking – just like before. I go back to the shop.

It’s still sticking.

The little fat guy peers at the lock and wobbles the key. It sticks. I show him how it works from one direction and not from the other.

I think I might just need a new key – see how badly this one’s worn?

He wobbles the key again.

No, it’s not the key. It has to be in straight and it works – see?

He wobbles the key and it opens.

Yes, I know I can wobble it around and it will eventually open, but I want it to work properly – no wobbling and jiggling. Just open and close.

He sighs. He goes into the back room. There is some sawing and grinding. He comes back. He wobbles the key in the lock.

Ok, now that’s better.

I try it. It sticks two times out of three.

Look, I don’t want it to do this. I don’t care what it takes – do I need to replace the lock? Whatever. I just want it to work properly. Maybe I need a new key made?

He takes the lock into the back room. There is clunking, grinding and more grinding. And more grinding and some tapping. For fifteen minutes. I walk around the shop thinking about how crappy the security is for a lock shop – I could steal a bunch of padlocks, keys and miniature surveillance cameras.

The guy comes back.

There, it’s better.

He wobbles the key to show me. It sticks.

Now look. I don’t want any more of this. I just want it fixed. Do you have a replacement lock. Whatever it takes. I don’t want any sticking. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

He shakes his head and goes into the backroom. I can see him rummaging around in cabinets. Another guy turns up and there is conversation I can’t quite hear, and they both start rummaging. This goes on for another five or ten minutes. Then there is silence. Then, oddly, some more grinding and tapping and clunking. He’s working on the lock again! I stick my head around the door.

Excuse me, what are you doing?

He holds up the lock.

It’s a bit better!

Look. I DON’T WANT YOU TO DO THIS. I’VE BEEN HERE FOR FORTY-FIVE MINUTES. I JUST WANT A NEW LOCK.

We don’t have any locks like that.

He comes back out into the shop and puts the lock on the counter.

That’s all I can do. See, the key has to be level – there’s too much movement. It’s not a good lock.

But it always used to work fine, and it works perfectly from one direction, just not the other. Maybe it’s the key – see the tine is worn and bent. Maybe it works on the tumblers one way and not the other. Maybe I just need a new key that isn’t worn like this one?

He gives me a withering look that says “What would you know about locks you stupid moron with the IQ of a squirrel?”, disappears for three seconds into the back of the shop and comes back with a key that is exactly like a non-worn version of my key.

He puts it in the lock. It works perfectly.‡

*I may live in the most wonderful city in the world, but we still have junkies.

‡This is an entirely true story. It happened yesterday.

Do not all charms fly
At the touch of cold philosophy?
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow…

So wrote John Keats. As many idealists and romanticists have done ever since, Keats was putting on his Smock of True Art, levelling his pistol at the ‘cold unfeeling heart’ of science and plugging away.

Once upon a time, many years back, I probably would have leant to the side of Keats. In fact, to this day I sympathise with Keats, and I understand, as only someone who has been on both sides of the fence can, his fear and from whence it comes.

But these days I disagree in a most profound way with his assessment that philosophy (by which he means science in keeping with the manner of his time), “empties the haunted air” by “unweaving the rainbow”.

See, the mistake that Keats makes, and one that I very nearly made in a desire not to lose a sense of mystery from my life, is to think that the intent of science is to explain everything, and by inference, trivilalise it; to pit the marvels of the universe against the measure of man. This is a view of science that is fundamentally and seriously wrong.

Science, as practiced by real scientists, is a tool with which we can examine the universe and make assessments that are not based on the way we would like it to be but on the way that it tells us it is. This is one of the most rigorous intellectual and philosophical challenges that any human can undertake. Religion can’t do it, art doesn’t feel the need to do it, and capital ‘P’ Philosophy sits on the fence. Only science seeks to look squarely at the truth and endure its harsh blows.

In a private email about my recent post on homeopathy, a correspondent suggested that I was ‘narrow-minded’ in my view. I explained that to the contrary, my open-mindedness about homeopathy was what convinced me it was bogus; I once used to think that it should be considered as a complementary medicine (and yes, I even used it myself), but my wide reading about it, my willingness to entertain both sides of the argument, was what led me to doubt its efficacy. I still read about research into homeopathic claims. If someone can give me some substantiation that homeopathy works in the manner in which it is suggested that it does, I promise I will change my mind. But you see, so far no-one has been able to do this. The support for homeopathy is anecdotal and diffuse and minimal at best.

On the other hand, if I want to demonstrate that clonal science effectively keeps millions of people healthy every day, it is a trivial exercise.

Is this any less marvellous, just because we understand exactly why it works?

Keats, like many artists, was afraid that science would strip our world and our lives of mystery. If he had been willing to spend a little bit of his time with science, he might have discovered, as so many scientists have, that the deeper you look into the universe, the more mysterious it becomes.

This does not mean that we need to invoke supernatural beings like gods and demons to explain it. It just puts us in mind of the one thing of which we should always be aware: we are tiny parts of an extraordinarily complex machine of which we know so very little. Only hubris in the form of bad science or bad religion even attempts to suggest that we can understand it all.

And if you want mysteries, try these:

★Why does the number phi (1.61803399…) appear in so many seemingly unrelated places, from plant structure to the event horizons of black holes?

★Where is your conscious self? Where does it go when you fall asleep?

★Why do we dream?

★Would the universe exist if we weren’t here to see it?

★Why do alcoholic drinks retain their aroma longer than non-alcoholic drinks?

★Is the string of numbers in pi completely random forever?

★Will the internet ever become sentient? Would we even know if it did?

★How does memory work?

★Why do normal body cells go berserk and multiply out of control in cancers?

★Why is it that some people can be hypnotized not to feel pain, and some people can’t?

No-one knows the answers to these questions. It is possible that someday, we might know something of some of them. But then again, we might not. The crucial thing to understand is that by asking questions about these things, we don’t diminish ourselves, or our dreams. Of one thing you can be sure: for every question we answer, another two will arise.