I’ve been browsing Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll lately, looking for new interesting blogs, and found myself tagged by Disgusted Beyond Belief.

The meme goes like this:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the 5th Sentence.
4. Post the next 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

So here we go:

October 3rd and 4th - I was confined for these two days to my bed by a headache. A good-natured old woman, who attended me, wished me to try many odd remedies. A common practice is, to bind an orange-leaf or a bit of black plaster to each temple: and a still more general plan is, to split a bean into halves, moisten them, and place one on each temple, where they will easily adhere.

From my post yesterday you should be able to figure out which book this comes from!

Like DBB, I’m not very good at tagging, so I shall simply repeat what I read there: “Consider yourself tagged if you read this.”

In a depressingly alarmist article on BBC News UK, Finlo Rohrer encourages us to imagine an idyllic image of British countryside, complete with the harmonious buzzing of busy bees, and then asks us to fast forward ten years to this desolate vision:

The hedgerow is deteriorating, the birds are silent, the orchard is disappearing and the countryside is changed. Why? The hives are empty. Their once-buzzing occupants mysteriously vanished.

Excuse me?

I’ve encountered this idea before. I suppose it’s not entirely far-fetched; after all, I’m sure a lot of humans feel as though they would die without sex. But let me assure you, this is not the case for apple trees. An orchard in the absence of beehives might yield less fruit, and if all pollinating insects disappeared, perhaps none at all, but the poor trees, albeit sexually unfulfilled, wouldn’t die from it. Nor would the birds stop singing (that doesn’t make any kind of sense - would the birds go quiet in mourning?).

Although I love my bees and think they are fantastic little creatures, I don’t think they have a special place in the world. Although bees may be important for agriculture, I don’t really believe that the prevalence of our particular favourite species of honeybee is absolutely vital to the survival of plants. There are many, many other pollinating insects (and in some places other animals as well) out there - including a variety of bees other than Apis mellifera - and I suspect many of them would fare quite a lot better in the absence of bees. And I’m not aware of any predator that subsists primarily on honeybees (not even bee-eaters).

The rest of the article is marginally better. British beekeepers are complaining that unusually many hives died last winter, which may or may not be true, but at least the article includes a more reasoned voice, stating that “Beekeeping always goes through periods of prosperity and dearth. People do enjoy a good panic.” Someone complains that varroa mites are getting resistant to the chemicals we use to combat them, which is true, but usually this happens only when people use the chemicals wrong.

Case in point is Apistan, which is applied to a hive during a few weeks in the autumn in the form of plastic strips from which the chemical slowly leaks into the hive, and are then supposed to be removed. A lot of ignorant beekeepers reason that longer exposure to the chemicals will kill more varroa, so they leave the strips in, and/or reuse old strips, exposing the hives to gradually lower concentrations of miticide. Anyone familiar with how bacteria gain resistance to antibiotics can figure the rest out for themselves.

In short, when it comes to varroa, it’s entirely manageable if you’re smart and follow the proper instructions of whatever methods you’re using to battle the “infection”. If beekeepers actually started behaving rationally it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

The article also dwells on CCD, essentially saying that if beehives started to die in the UK … beehives would die in the UK. Oh, dear. In the end, the conclusion is that we don’t really know if the hives are all going to die, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, someone is writing a book about all the horrible things that will happen if bees disappear. Because people’s enjoyment of a good panic is, as we all know, quite profitable.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping, varroa, colony collapse disorder

Hello everyone and I’m sorry about the lack of a Friday Pic last week. I’ve been having some computer/internet issues lately which sort of ruined my will to blog. But, today is Darwin Day, which means I have to post something. Unfortunately, what I have to post is, at the moment, outrage - or at least annoyance.

Kevin Padian, president of the NCSE and expert witness in the Dover trial, has written an excellent essay in Nature about Darwin’s contributions to science. PhysOrg “reports” on it, and manages to grossly misrepresent both the author and Darwin:

“Perhaps no individual has had such a sweeping influence on so many facets of social and intellectual life,” Padian wrote in an essay published in this month’s issue of the journal Nature.

Padian wrote Darwin “has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety of heartless ills of society,” including atheism, Nazism, communism, abortion, homosexuality, stem cell research and same-sex marriage.

Among Darwin’s critics are creationists, who insist the Bible’s descriptions of the world’s beginning are literally true, and some scientists who argue that life is the product of intelligent design.

That is pretty much all of what they write that in any way reflects what the original article is about, and it completely misses the mark. Padian obviously doesn’t in any way endorse Darwin as the cause of Nazism (or atheism as an “heartless ill”). Padian does mention that Darwin has been used for various ills in the introduction to the essay, but then goes on to discuss what’s actually interesting in the context - his scientific contributions. The original quote reads:

In the past century and a half, Darwin’s ideas have inspired powerful images and insights in science, humanities and the arts. Meanwhile, countless commentators ignorant of his meaning have borrowed his eloquence to plump their own chickens — from capitalism to ‘evolutionary psychology’. Darwin has been invoked as the demon responsible for a variety of perceived heartless ills of society, including atheism, Nazism, communism, abortion, homosexuality, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, and the abridgement of all our natural freedoms. One can scarcely imagine the horror that Darwin would feel at the misunderstanding, misappropriation and vilification of his ideas in the 125 years since his death. (emphasis added)

What the hell went wrong, PhysOrg? Are you creationists, or what? It’s one thing to neglect to mention that Padian (and the rest of us) consider it wrong to “invoke Darwin” as the cause of bad stuff, but when you also remove the very important word “perceived”, putting homosexuality, abortion and atheism on the same level as Nazism… And on Darwin Day? This is like decapitating Santa Claus in a public square on Christmas.

Towards the end of the essay, after having listed some of the many important contributions Darwin made, Padian writes:

Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences of biogeography and ecology. His work is still actively read and discussed today, inspiring new students and scientists all over the world. Few authors can claim so much.

Personally, I am celebrating Darwin Day by immersing myself in Darwin’s book “The Voyage of the Beagle”. His writing is, to use his own two favourite adjectives, singularly wonderful. The awe he expresses as he explores an unfamiliar world so different from the English countryside is both inspiring and endearing, and the way he meticulously observes and notes down everything he sees is absolutely incredible. Sometimes I wish I had been born in a different era, when valuable natural science could easily be conducted just by going out into the world and writing down everything you see… Of course, I would have needed a Y chromosome to have mattered, but time travel’s a little more difficult than sex change.

darwin, biology, evolution, nature

This time it’s wikipedia that’s the culprit. And the pictures aren’t even offensive cartoons but medieval depictions, in some of which the dear prophet doesn’t have a face. New Humanist Blog reports here, linking to the NY Times.

Sometimes I really just want to tell every muslim who ever complained about other people’s transgressions of their arbitrary rules that their entire holy book offends me, as a freethinking human being, and that I demand it banned. Yeah, let’s make it an eye for an eye - I promise to stop drawing pics of Muhammad if you just get your religion off this planet. Argh!

Wikipedia to their credit explains on a FAQ page:

Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia with the goal of representing all topics from a neutral point of view, Wikipedia is not censored for the benefit of any particular group.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! And please stand by that decision!

Depressingly it seems wikipedia has more integrity than certain European politicians. Also depressingly, a friend points out that there seems to be more people upset about some Muhammad drawings than about Sayed Pervez Kambaksh being sentenced to death for distributing some material critical of Islam. Quoth my friend Dologan:

Sad that basic, human, secular empathy doesn’t seem to elicit a similar response [as religious fervour]… A 23-year old is going to be KILLED for simply reading the opinion that the Quran maybe doesn’t really tell you to oppress women, and most people simply just don’t fucking care.

So far this day hasn’t really done wonders for my faith in humanity.

islam, muhammad, kambaksh, wikipedia

Today’s picture barely needs a description. This beautiful little bumblebee I rescued from drowning in a jar of newly extracted honey, and undaunted by her near-death experience she simply proceeded to gorge herself on the sweet stuff.

With such a bountiful harvest, little wonder she had trouble lifting off afterwards!

bumblebee, honey

So I just listened to the “debate” between PZ Myers and one Dr Simmons on christian talk radio, which PZ links to here. I’m not going to provide any extensive commentary nor even recommend listening to the debate - sure, it is rather hilarious to hear PZ state matter-of-factly that Simmons has just, and I quote, “made stuff up!” - but since stupid MIGHT be contagious I wouldn’t recommend assaulting your ears with the drivel of an obviously extremely ignorant man.

Really all I wanted to say here is that what I found possibly most amusing in the whole “debate” (and I put those ironic quotation marks there since only one side actually provided any factually true arguments, so it was more of an execution than anything else) was that Dr Simmons actually admitted that his whole reasoning’s based on a gigantic argumentum ad ignorantiam. On talking about the workings of the brain, he ejaculates the following pearl of wisdom:

It’s beyond my comprehension that this could come about by trial and error.

Yes, Dr Simmons, I imagine it is.

In his closing statement, he finally resorts to that which he at at least two points in the interview whined that PZ was doing - insults. To his credit he doesn’t level those insults at PZ, but instead slams Darwin with a big fat ad hominem, calling him a bigotted, misogynistic racist. As if those things (were they even true) had any bearing on the theory of evolution at all. It’s especially ironic since PZ opened the whole debate stating that Darwin’s really out of the picture by now, and Dr Simmons desperately tried to save face by claiming “Darwin” is really just a good name to put on the theory because it’s so well known, even though of course he knows that current evolutuionary theory isn’t the same as Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

Hoooo-boy. I think I’ll go read a biology textbook to purge my mind of the obtuse, infantile nonsense I was just exposed to.

science, biology, evolution, intelligent design, pseudoscience