Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Last month, myself and Elina attended a One Life session on Ethics, to tell the young people why they are wrong.

Specifically, about why I believe morality is objective, rather than subjective.

For many years previous to this I had argued that morality must be subjective – after all, without a god, what universal source is there to say what is right or wrong? This is the position that most non-believers take and ultimately forms quite a coherent world view – but does mean that you have to admit that in some ways, you can’t say what Hitler did was wrong because that’s only your subjective point of view and from his point of view, he was doing the morality right thing.

Of course, they should automatically lose the argument by resorting to Godwin’s Law, but it is something that has never sat particularly well with me.

However, after reading The Moral Landscape, the new book from Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith – the book which really got me passionate about atheism, it presented to me for the first time a worldview which makes coherent sense with objective morality without a god.

I didn’t entirely buy into it at first, but after a few months mulling the topic over, I have to hold my hands up and say that I believe Harris puts together the best argument and so I will hold my hands up and say I now beleive I was previously wrong about the nature of morality.

To give you an overview, Harris’ argument is this:

Morality is a human construct, but it’s actually about an observable fact.

When it comes down to it, the field or morality is about welfare. If you do something which is good for the welfare of others, it is a moral act. If you do something which is bad for the welfare of others, it is an immoral act. And if you do something which has no impact on the welfare of others it is an amoral act. Of course others actually includes yourself, and isn’t limited to humans, but it seemed like a more poetic term to use.

So, if we work on this basis, every act can be measured by it’s impact on welfare and then judged to be moral or immoral accordingly. How you define welfare is of course very complicated – but although it’s a hard concept to define, we all really know what we are talking about when we use the term.

Based on this then, we have an objective way to measure an action as moral or immoral. If it does more harm than good overall, it is a immoral action and if we did more good than harm then it is a moral action. Objectively.

This is great because you can now say “Hitler’s actions were objectively immortal” rather than just “I believe Hitler’s actions were immoral, in my subjective opinion.”

In fact, it’s clearest to see at the edges. Take an action, for example throwing acid in a woman’s face without cause – that is clearly wrong, not wrong in our Western society but OK in the correct cultural settings – it’s just wrong! Indeed, another advantage of objective morality is you can tell the cultural relativists to go fuck themselves when they say it’s OK for certain cultures to practice beating wives, stoning homosexuals and the horrific practice of genital mutilation because that’s their tradition.

Of course, the next question is, “well how do you know what is right and wrong? Surely there are too many variables to take into account – it’s never that simple.” You’re right, it never is as simple as my example above, but that is beside the point. Just because it’s very tricky to work out what whether an action causes more harm than good, doesn’t mean it’s inherently subjective – it just means it’s very difficult to work out!

A lot of physics is also extremely difficult to work out, but it’s definitely objective (and I will be so bold to insist that that does include quantum mechanics). Similarly, just because we don’t have all the information just yet, it doesn’t mean that eventually we won’t be able to find the objective answers to the question or morality, and until then, we can give it our best educated guess.

And if we’re wrong, then we’re wrong. It’s not that it was moral to keep slaves when the slave trade was thriving – it was immoral back then as well, but people were just wrong about it. We still don’t have to blame them, because they didn’t know, just like we don’t blame people for being wrong about the world not being flat, but never the less, the world wasn’t ever flat, even when everyone knew it was.

Another common criticism is that if morality is objective, it can never change. This seems inherently wrong because morality has to change depending on circumstances – killing is wrong in cold blood, but acceptable in self defence. Another example would be that killing animals for food was acceptable thousands of years ago when you had to to survive, but now that you don’t have to, it’s not acceptable.

But this is a misunderstanding of the kind of objective morality Harris puts forward in his book. Objective facts can change. For example, my age is 25. That is an objective fact. But next year, my age will be 26 and that will be the same objective fact about my age – it’s just that time has moved on and things change. My age still remains objective.

Finally, another potential criticism of this somewhat utilitarian view is that it supports ideas that we would not agree with – as the old joke goes, nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape. That is to say, of course, the nine rapists enjoy it, and the one victim does not – the greatest good for the greatest many and all that.

This doesn’t hold up to any kind of examination of course – none of us actually want to live in a world where we could get gang raped at any time, even if nine of out ten times we would be the rapist and enjoy it (not that any of us actually would enjoy it of course, but hypothetically), we would spend our lives living in fear and so overall welfare would in fact decrease. Therefore such nonsense is not by any stretch of the imagine, tolerated under a utilitarian system.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. Please give The Moral Landscape a read, it’s £12 on Amazon and I’ll happy lend you my copy if you’re too cheap to buy it. It really offers some fantastic food for thought and challenges an area of debate which I think many of us considered closed – of course nothing is closed given we claim to be the freethinkers and all.

My friend Stuart Ritchie, who is currently working towards his PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, was recently involved in a writing a paper looking at the relationship between IQ and religious adherence.

While you will find a far more in depth write up on Stuart’s blog, the key points found that there is a correlation between higher IQ and lower scores in five of the six measured used to gauge people’s religious belief.

The only factor which did not see this pattern was people who just described themselves as “spiritual.”

Interestingly, another of my friends is currently researching this area, and the results so far suggest that there is a link between describing yourself as spiritual is correlated with bad parenting – but I can’t comment further on this until the research has been completed.

Last week, the Space Shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth from it’s final mission. The Space Shuttle programme was over.

Arguably this is another step backwards in the exploration of space. We haven’t put a man on the Moon since 1972 (39 years ago now), and now we’re not evening flying Space Shuttles. Did we just get really lucky in 1969, when we first walked on the Moon, and now we can’t replicate that success?

Actually, according to Dr Jim Wild, it was a good job that they missed some of the solar activity around at the time, which between some of the Apollo missions, reached fatal radiation levels. But that isn’t really a problem for quote unquote simple Earth orbiting.

The problem with the Space Shuttle programme was it was just too big, complex and expensive to run. Each mission cost around half a billion dollars and required an army of over 6,000 people to prepare for it. They also weren’t the safest of things – of the 135 missions flown, two of them didn’t come back – Challenger and Columbia.

I would probably argue that such a record isn’t too bad – we are still pushing back the boundaries of scientific exploration when it comes to space travel and the unfortunate fact is people die in accidents in the common workplace from time to time, let alone when exploring new frontiers.

However, despite its huge cost and army of safety engineers, the Space Shuttle can’t live up to the standards of its rival – the Soyuz. Russia’s Soyoz spacecraft has been in service since 1966 and in the entire time has only suffered four fatalities in a combination of two accidents.

Indeed, the Soyuz is now the sole manned space shuttle which will continue to send people into space to allow crew rotation of the International Space Station. So it’s not hard to see why the Space Shuttle programme is being brought to an end so a cheaper, easier craft for putting man into space can be developed.

But the one thing that the Soyuz has failed to do (this could be entirely inaccurate, I’m writing from a Western perspective and maybe millions of people elsewhere have been inspired by Soyuz) in the same way is to become an icon of space travel that has inspired a generation during its 30 year service.

I remember watching a Space Shuttle take off from Kennedy Space Centre in 1998 and remember thinking it’s magical. Actually, I thought, “wow, we sat in the boiling heat all day to see a little spec in the distance,” but I’m sure you can appreciate that would be a far less dramatic ending to this blog post.

This month at Leeds Skeptics, Dr Jim Wild made the trip over to talk about weathering solar storms – how coronial mass ejection from The Sun has a significant impact on The Earth and given it has the power to knock out our electricity grid, is something we need to be taking seriously.

It was one of the best talks we have had a in recent times with great feedback coming from those who attended. Big thanks to Jim for making the trip over, you can find out more about him on his website.

I’m currently in the process of re-reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near and having read the section about how the brain rewrites itself as you learn got me thinking. This is nothing new of course, it’s basic brain biology, but chancing on the subject again made me wonder.

If you can reinforce a pattern in your brain simply be repeating the activity over and over again, and this doesn’t even including physical actions but can also be done by thinking a certain idea, can you by mere repetition, implant a false idea in your head?

If you can, the consequences are obvious.

But this seems to be a hypothesis that is quite testable. What would happen for example, if we all collectively decided to believe a lie. If say, all the members of the A-Soc circle, picked a false statement to collectively believe, spent all their time thinking it was true and telling each other it was true for social reinforcement.

Of course, it could well fall flat on it’s face. Because you would know it wasn’t true, you could well spend all your time thinking “I’m pretending to believe this, even though I know it isn’t true” and therefore strongly reinforce the pattern that you know it secretly isn’t true.

Still, it might be an interesting project for someone to undertake.

Earlier this year we announced the creation of a new fund designed to support public of understanding of science. The idea was to provide funding for an annual lecture on such a topic, hosted by a local group. The first of which took place this Tuesday at the University of Leeds.

Hosted by, Leeds Atheist Society, the first annual Worfolk Lecture was presented by Dr Terrence Kee on the subject of “did life on Earth originate on Earth?”

Dr Kee delivered a fascinating talk, discussing just how resilient and hardy some bacteria are – some can survive extreme cold (such as space), some can survive extreme heat (such as entry into an atmosphere), some can take being crushed, some can survive exposure to high levels of radiation – it’s very, very hard to kill some bacteria! it is therefore conceivable that some may have traveled through space in meteors before making this planet their home.

Much discussion was provoked with almost an hour of questions and answers taking place after the talk – not one to have missed! You can see more photos from the event on our Facebook page.

Less than 24 hours after I was in the BBC Radio Leeds studio talking about UFOs I was asked to make a return the airwaves this time to talk about psychics.

I was actually surprised as I didn’t feel my previous interview went that well though this one went much better, I think because I was actually invited on to properly rubbish the claims rather than just add a one line counter voice to the Exopolitics conference.

The item was surrounding the recent news that Joe Power – the man who sees dead people – has had his show pulled from the Edinburgh Fringe because it’s rubbish. Watch him totally miss on Derren Brown Investigates in this clip.

I’m very dubious about this phrase. I mean, surely there is only one sky? On Planet Earth at least, but then that is the only sky we’re supposed to be watching – surely we’re not supposed to be watching over planet’s skies?

In any case, I was invited onto BBC Radio Leeds on Wednesday morning for a debate with the organiser of the Exopolitics conference taking place in Leeds this weekend. It was only a 15-minute slot, including going over to the US to speak to Riley Martin – a man who has spoken to aliens (they tell him, “friend Martin…”) but was never the less interesting.

Anthony seemed a very well educated and smart guy (kind of like the good kid that falls in with the bad crowd 😉 ), he seemed very rational about the whole thing. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Exopolitics movement as a whole. A quick look at their website is very revealing.

The era of looped debating whether ETI [extra-terrestrial intelligence] exists and are engaging our species has pragmatically shifted to assuming this to be the case – until we can gather and validate further information.

Basically, they’ve given up trying to work out whether aliens are visiting Earth and just decided they will assume they are until someone proves them wrong. Because that’s how science works 😉 .

EDIT: Since the blog post was written, http://www.exopolitics.org.uk/ has closed.

Memes are incredible things. One good example I have noticed, is that there are quite a lot of fun facts that survive – despite not even being true, simply because they make a good story. Here are a few of my favourites…

You can see the Great Wall of China from space
Think about it. The United Kingdom is a dot from space, maybe a small blog at best. The city of Leeds is indistinguishable. It’s streets, rivers, buildings, Tesco Extras, all not even a speck. And you think you can see a wall four metres across? Didn’t think so 😀 .

The Americans spent millions developing a zero gravity pen. The Russians used a pencil.
This one is sort of true, but the Americans started out using pencils too. They just found they broke a lot and it’s irritating sharpening a pencil in zero gravity because the shavings go everywhere. It wasn’t like they just didn’t think to use a pencil.

If you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out, but if you heat it up slowly it will just slowly cook alive and won’t notice
Again, this is probably one of those that first makes sense but when you think about it is probably quite unlikely. To prove the point someone did it and found the opposite happens – if you heat the pot up slowly the frog soon jumps out when it gets too hot whereas if you throw it in a pan of boiling water it gets really badly scalded and dies.

On a hot day, it’s better to wearing white
This just isn’t true. This probably originates from the stereotypical image of Saudis wearing all white but many people in the Middle East wear black and are just fine. Actually there is no real evidence that light coloured clothes are any cooler in the warm weather than wearing all black.

Own brand painkillers are just as good as Nurofen
This might surprise the sceptics who read my blog, suprisingly. Actually research shows that Nurofen can often be more effective than own brand painkillers. Not because it is actually any better (they are exactly the same as own brand) but because a lot of people aren’t as sceptical as us and associate the fact that Nurofen has adverts on the telly box with medical efficacy. It is of course nothing more than a placebo effect but a measurable once none the less. Pat yourself on the back if you find the own brand ones just as effective because you know it’s the exact same ingredients – you’re one of us smart people.

In Australia, toilets swirl the other way round
It’s widely believed that when you flush a toilet in the Southern hemisphere it will swirl counter clockwise. But it doesn’t. The fact is the Coriolis effect simply isn’t strong enough to overpower other influences such as the way the drains are laid out, the way the jets are set up to go or even a draft in the bathroom.

Toffee tastes better when manufactured in high altitudes
I’ve tasted Lowland Toffee and it’s just as good.

Coca Cola made Santa Claus red
Smart people know that Santa Claus wasn’t always red. He used to dress in all kind of colours, often, green, until the Coca Cola Company re-branded him in red to fit with their advertising. Even smarter people know that actually, while the Coca Cola Company did go a long way to popularising Santa’s red outfit, the iconic modern image of Santa should really be credited to the American cartoonist Thomas Nast if anyone should receive the honour.

The death penalty still exists in the UK, but only for treason
This is something I hear from time to time although more people are becoming aware of it’s falsity. We actually did still have the death penalty in the UK until 1997 (not that it was ever used any more) but one of the first things New Labour did when coming to power was to see it out of law.

One of the guys in my office has been doing the Atkins diet for a while now. This caused me to take a look at the research carried out on low-carbohydrate diets to see if there was any basis for the misery he is putting himself through.

Most people including myself just kind of wrote off the diet because the pseudo-scientific explanation behind it didn’t make much sense. However in 2004 the flagship BBC science documentary Horizon broadcast an episode showing it probably does work for reasons differing from those that Dr. Atkins actually claimed.

In fact, looking into the evidence for low-carbohydrate diets, while there is a huge mixed bag of results, the overall consensus seems to be that while more research is needed in the area, such diets are generally safe and are effective in weight loss.

Of course this isn’t to say that everyone should jump on Atkins. Diets are no replacement for basic healthy eating and well all know this. We’re all well aware the way to be healthy is to eat a balanced diet, treat yourself occasionally, hit all the major food groups and avoid eating prepared meals, fast food or generally anything that doesn’t require you to put some effort in preparing yourself, as much as possible. However, if you are going to diet, Atkins at least isn’t any worse than any other diet.