YES! YES! YES!

Some pieces of writing are so powerful, so right, so full of air-punchingly 'YES!'.

I warn you now not to read Christopher Hitchens', "God Is Not Great" in public because people will think you're strange when you shout out and punch the air!

And I warn you now not to read this piece by Ayaan Hirsi Ali entitled "How (and Why) I Became an Infidel". She wrote it especially for Christopher Hitchens' book, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer".

First a little background on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

Born in Somalia she witnessed first hand female genital mutilation, clerical cruelty, and religion-inspired barbarism. After escaping to Holland she watched as her colleague Theo Van Gogh was murdered by Islamic extremists for satirizing Islamic repression of women and was told she was to be their next victim. She had initially believed that Islam could be reformed but soon realised that it's 'faith' itself which is the problem.

When I finally admitted to myself that I was an unbeliever, it was because I simply couldn’t pretend any longer that I believed. Leaving Allah was a long and painful process for me, and I tried to resist it for as long as I could. All my life I had wanted to be a good daughter of my clan, and that meant above all that I should be a good Muslim woman, who had learned to submit to God — which in practice meant the rule of my brother, my father, and later my husband.

When I was a child, I had a child’s revulsion against injustice. I could not understand why Allah, if he were truly merciful and all-powerful, would tolerate and indeed require that I stand behind my brother at prayer and obey his whims, or that the courts should consider my statements to be inherently less valid than his. But shame and obedience had been drilled into me from my earliest years. I obeyed my parents, my clan, and my religious teachers, and I felt ashamed that by my questioning I seemed to be betraying them.

As I became a teenager, my rebellion grew. It was not yet a revolt against Islam. Who was I to contest Allah? But I did feel constricted by my family and our Somali clan, where family honor was the overriding value, and seemed principally to reside in the control, sale, and transfer of girls’ virginity. Reading Western books—even trashy romance novels—gave me a vision of an astounding alternative universe where girls had choices.

Still, I struggled to conform. I voluntarily robed in a black hijab that covered my body from head to toe. I tried to pray five times a day and to obey the countless strictures of the Koran and the Hidith. I did so mostly because I was afraid of Hell. The Koran lists Hell’s torments in vivid detail: sores, boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels. An everlasting fire burns you forever for as your flesh chars and your juices boil, you form a new skin. Every preacher I encountered hammered more mesmerizing details onto his nightmarish tableau. It was genuinely terrifying.

Ultimately, I think, it was books, and boys, that saved me. No matter how hard I tried to submit to Allah’s will, I still felt desire — sexual desire, urgent and real, which even the vision of Hellfire could not suppress. It made me ashamed to feel that way, but when my father told me he was marrying me off to a stranger, I realized that I could not accept being locked forever into the bed of a man who left me cold.

I escaped. I ended up in Holland. With the help of many benevolent Dutch people, I managed to gain confidence that I had a future outside my clan. I decided to study political science, to discover why Muslim societies — Allah’s societies — were poor and violent, while the countries of the despised infidels were wealthy and peaceful. I was still a Muslim in those days. I had no intention of criticizing Allah’s will, only to discover what had gone so very wrong.

It was at university that I gradually lost my faith. The ideas and the facts that I encountered there were thrilling and powerful, but they also clashed horribly with the vision of the world with which I had grown up. At first, when the cognitive dissonance became too strong, I would try to shove these issues to the back of my mind. The ideas of Spinoza and Freud, Darwin and Locke and Mill, were indisputably true, but so was the Koran; and I vowed to one day resolve these differences. In the meantime, I could not make myself stop reading. I knew the argument was a weak one, but I told myself that Allah is in favor of knowledge.

The pleasures and anonymity of life in the clan-less West were almost as beguiling as the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers. Quite soon after I arrived in Holland, I replaced my Muslim dress with jeans. I avoided socializing with other Somalis first, and then with other Muslims — they preached to me about fear of the Hereafter and warned that I was damned. Years later, I drank my first glass of wine and had a boyfriend. No bolt of Hellfire burned me; chaos did not ensue. To pacify my mind, I adopted an attitude of “negotiating” with Allah: I told myself these were small sins, which hurt no one; surely God would not mind too much.

Then the Twin Towers were toppled in the name of Allah and his prophet, and I felt that I must choose sides. Osama bin Laden’s justification of the attacks was more consistent with the content of the Koran and the Sunna than the chorus of Muslim officials and Western wishful thinkers who denied every link between the bloodshed and Islam. Did I, as a Muslim, support bin Laden’s act of “worship”? Did I feel it was what God commanded? And if not, was I a Muslim?

I picked up a book — The Atheist Manifesto by Herman Philipse, who later became a great friend. I began reading it, marvelling at the clarity and naughtiness of its author. But I really didn’t have to. Just looking at it, just wanting to read it—that already meant I doubted. Before I’d read four pages, I realized that I had left Allah behind years ago. I was an atheist. An apostate. An infidel. I looked in a mirror and said out loud, in Somali, “I don’t believe in God.”

I felt relief. There was no pain but a real clarity. The long process of seeing the flaws in my belief structure, and carefully tip-toeing around the frayed edges as parts of it were torn out piece by piece—all that was over. The ever-present prospect of Hellfire lifted, and my horizon seemed broader. God, Satan, angels: these were all figments of human imagination, mechanisms to impose the will of the powerful on the weak. From now on I could step firmly on the ground that was under my feet and navigate based on my own reason and self-respect. My moral compass was within myself, not in the pages of a sacred book.

In the next few months, I began going to museums. I needed to see ruins and mummies and old dead people, to look at the reality of the bones and to absorb the realization that, when I die, I will become just a bunch of bones. Some of them were five hundred million years old, I noted; if it took Allah longer than that to raise the dead, the prospect of his retribution for my lifetime of enjoyment seemed distinctly less plausible.

I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I give my life its own meaning. I was looking for a deeper sense of morality. In Islam you are Allah’s slave; you submit, which means that ideally you are devoid of personal will. You are not a free individual. You behave well because you fear Hell, which is really a form of blackmail — you have no personal ethic.

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion — which are to be a better and more generous person — without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.

After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heart-land often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - How (and Why) I Became an Infidel
From Hitchens, Christopher (2007-12-10).
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (pp. 477-480).
Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

copyright © 2007 by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

YES! YES! YES!

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More Einstein On Religion

If there is a scientist who religious apologists love to claim agreed with them it's Albert Einstein. Not only has Einstein become, in the popular imagination, the archetype of what the scientifically illiterate imagine to be a scientist (dishevelled, a little bit scatty, even slightly mad (which he wasn't) and absent-minded (again, not true)), but he is acknowledged as one of the all-time greats; a genius by any standard who showed us that reality can be decidedly counter-intuitive. But he has one outstanding quality from a religious apologists point of view: he is dead and so can't refute the claims they make about him and his views on religion.

Fortunately though, he was never shy to state his views when asked and did record them for posterity.

I have previously blogged about this with Albert Einstein On Religion but here is a much more extensive collection of Einstein's recorded religious views. I originally came across this collection in Chapter 22 of Christopher Hitchen's book "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever", compiled by Miguel Chavez, however the list is almost identical, save for the final two quotes, to one on "The Unofficial Stephen J Gould Archive", to which the bulk of the credit must go.

The list is numbered and tagged for ease of reference. To reference any one of these quotes, simply add a hash (#) followed by the appropriate number (e.g. #22) to the url of this page.

1. "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

Favourite 'Intelligent' Design Argument

Of course, all 'Intelligent Design' arguments are simple variations on the argument from ignorance and incredulity. Basically, the argument goes, "I don't know how this works and I can't believe it wasn't done by a god, therefore it was done by a god, and don't expect me to spoil my lovely argument by learning and understanding stuff."

There are a large number of people who make a handsome living supplying people with that level of reasoning ability and intellectual (dis)honesty, especially in the USA where fundamentalist Christianity is a multi-billion dollar industry.

One of the originators of the under-cover wing of the Creationist industry, 'Intelligent Design' was biochemist, Michael J. Behe, who wrote a book called Darwin's Black Box which claimed that there are certain structures which are 'irreducibly complex' and therefore could not have evolved by the small steps proposed by Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection. Michael Behe is a devout Catholic and talks almost exclusively to right-wing conservative Christian fundamentalist groups but denies his argument is merely biblical Creationism cloaked in a scientific-looking disguise which is intended to get round the First Amendment of the Constitution of the USA.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

'Intelligent Design' and 'Irreducible Complexity' are major planks of the 'Wedge' strategy whereby right-wing fundamentalist groups continually try to insert their religion into schools and other government-funded bodies in order to subvert the Constitution and overthrow the safeguard of separation of church and state which underpins freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in a secular society.

Behe's book was, of course, refuted within days of publication by proper biologists and he has never presented his ideas for peer review or to a conference of microbiologists, nevertheless it sold millions to creationists and is still widely quoted as if it is genuine science.

Ironically, one of the main structure he relied on was the flagellum of the motile bacterium Escherichia coli. This is ironic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the precursors of the 'proton motor' which powers the flagellum, and which is the nearest thing to a wheel known in nature, albeit it's the 'axle' which spins round, not the wheel, are known, so very plausible mechanisms for its evolution can be described. See also Evolution of the Bacterial Flagella.

But Behe's claim falls down in another area: the necessary 'complexity' to produce a flagellum is not in the component proteins and how they are assembled but in E. coli DNA. There is no record of Behe having investigated the 'complexity' of E. coli DNA to determine if it is indeed irreducibly complex in respect of the flagellum because he has never carried out that study.

The second irony is that E. coli and its related bacteria are a good example of evolution.

The genera Escherichia and Salmonella diverged around 102 million years ago (credibility interval: 57–176 mya), which coincides with the divergence of their hosts: the former being found in mammals and the latter in birds and reptiles. This was followed by a split of the escherichian ancestor into five species (E. albertii, E. coli, E. fergusonii, E. hermannii and E. vulneris. The last E. coli ancestor split between 20 and 30 mya.

Source: Wikipedia - Escherichia coli

See also Wikipedia - Escherichia coli Phylogeny of Escherichia coli strains.

Thirdly, there is the fact the E. coli is the subject of a long-term experiment in evolution which has already produced some interesting results after some 50,000 generations:

The E. coli long-term evolution experiment is an ongoing study in experimental evolution led by Richard Lenski that has been tracking genetic changes in 12 initially identical populations of asexual Escherichia coli bacteria since 24 February 1988. The populations reached the milestone of 50,000 generations in February 2010.

Since the experiment's inception, Lenski and his colleagues have reported a wide array of genetic changes; some evolutionary adaptations have occurred in all 12 populations, while others have only appeared in one or a few populations. One particularly striking adaption was the evolution of a strain of E. coli that was able to grow on citric acid in its growth medium.

Source: Wikipedia - E. coli long-term evolution experiment

But my favourite irony in Behe's choice of E. coli as his example of 'Intelligent Design' is in what E. coli can do. One strain is a normal, even beneficial part of our gut 'flora', i.e. the collection of micro-organisms which live in our digestive tracts, the dead bodies of which constitute a large part of the volume of our faeces. E. coli helps control some other organisms which, if they become too numerous may be harmful. However, some strains of E. coli are far from 'friendly' and even our 'friendly' ones are far from friendly if they get into our blood where they can become seriously pathogenic, even fatal. Some strains are highly dangerous and great care must be taken to prevent them getting into our food.

The supreme irony here is that this pathological tendency of E. coli is enhanced greatly by its motility, which depends entirely on its flagellum. If we are to believe Michael Behe we have to believe his intelligent designer designed a mechanism for helping a bacterium make us sick and even kill us, presumably, because it loves us so much.

Untrammelled by little inconveniences like facts, Michael Behe continues to push his brand of fundamentalism to credulous Creationists and sell them books full of long-refuted argument and falsehoods. Such is the level of integrity we find pervading the Christian fundamentalism industry, particularly in the USA where it also promotes extreme right-wing politics and pedals its creed to those at the bottom of the social ladder, and which the Christian conservative right seeks to keep there by feeding them ignorant superstition dressed up as hope.

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Creationism's Laughably Absurd Hypothesis

One of the most dishonest and yet probably the most frequent arguments religions use in support of their own particular creator god is the argument from improbability.

Briefly, the argument from improbability says that such-and-such an event is so enormously unlikely that it couldn't just happen by chance, so there must have been a creator, or, in the words of Creationism's under-cover wing, 'Intelligent Design', an intelligent designer (i.e the god they are trying hard not to mention). Events such as the origin of life, the origin of the first cell, a human body, the human brain, a tree, etc, etc, etc, will be cited ad nauseum. This argument is, of course, used for any god by any religion which has a creator god. The actual god doesn't matter; you're just expected to assume it's their favourite one.

The appeal of this argument seems to depend on both ignorance and arrogance for its success. It seems to give its proponents the spurious satisfaction of having an argument which simultaneously circumvents and dismisses the need to bother with all that learning and yet enables them to present themselves as knowing more and having greater insight and understanding than those who do so bother. And yet, as Richard Dawkins pointed out in "The God Delusion", properly deployed, the argument from improbability comes close to proving that God does not exist.

But it is, of course, invariably a straw man argument combined with a false dichotomy. Biology does not make any claim that cells or bodies, brains or trees, or even the first replicators spontaneously self-assembled by chance. So the choice is not between random and hugely unlikely chance or design/intent. It is between random chance, intelligent designer or a process of natural selection over a very long time. For some reason, religious apologists and Creationists conveniently forget to include Natural Selection either because they don't understand it or don't want you to.

I'll let Richard Dawkins, quoted from "The God Delusion" in Christopher Hitchin's book, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer", explain it:

The Ultimate Boeing 747

The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favor of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument — but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.

The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle, or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist’s favourite argument—an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas—in the relevant sense of chance—it is the opposite.

The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy dress of “intelligent design” (ID). Some observed phenomenon—often a living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the universe itself—is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a measure of improbability or “surprise value.” Or the argument may invoke the economist’s hackneyed motto: there’s no such thing as a free lunch — and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

The argument for improbability states that complex things could not have come about by chance. But many people define “come about by chance” as “a synonym for come about in the absence of deliberate design.” Not surprisingly, therefore, they think improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world — cosmology, for example — it raises our consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.

A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn’t imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.

Hitchens, Christopher (2007-12-10).
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings For The Non-Believer (pp. 288-289). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

So:

1. We can agree with Creationists that random chance is far too unlikely to be the explanation. No argument there; it's just too daft for words. Invoking random chance as the explanation for anything of very much complexity is probably the daftest argument you can come up with. Let's call this 'The Laughably Absurd Hypothesis'.
2. We know that there is a perfectly well described and understood process called Natural Selection which we can observe, and which is probably the most tested, robust and evidentially supported theory in the whole of science and which we know is quite capable of producing huge complexity over time. Let's call this 'The Very Probable Hypothesis'.
3. We have a vague, very incomplete and poorly described Intelligent Designer Hypothesis. The problem with this is that it collapses immediately under the weight of the very problem it purports to solve. It requires us to abandon the idea that hugely complex things are very unlikely to spontaneously self-assemble - the thing we were trying to explain - and adopt instead the notion that 'The Laughably Absurd Hypothesis' is not only not too daft for words but that somehow it's now the best explanation available and a vastly complex intelligent designer, complete with all the information necessary to create the universe and everything in it, spontaneously self-assembled and did so before there was anything out of which it could be assembled - which is of course logically absurd on so many levels - and Creationists themselves are forever assuring us that you can't get something from nothing. Let's call this 'The Logically Impossible Hypothesis'.

Now, the task for those Creationists who have managed to get this far before closing the page in embarrassment is this:

Explain please, why your 'Logically Impossible Hypothesis' should be taken seriously by anyone with an IQ higher than that of a thick plank, and in what way it is superior to either of the other two.

If you can't, which of the other two competing hypotheses do you think is most likely to be the true description of how complex things arise: The Laughably Absurd one or The Very Probable one?

Take your time.

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Rapid Evolution Makes Creationists Crabby

Blue mussel (Mytlius edulis)

Here's a nice example of evolution occurring not over the millions of years that we normally expect with a slow accumulation of small changes over time but in as short as fifteen years. And it not quite as straightforward as we might expect either.

It involves our old friend, the evolutionary arms race, this time involving the American East Coast population of the blue mussel (Mytlius edulis) and an invasive species of aggressive Asian crab (Hemigrapsus sanguineus).

In common with other bivalve molluscs, mussels close their shells at a hint of danger and so predators have had to evolve a strategy for opening them. One of these predators is the green crab (Carcinus maenas) which has adopted the strategy of simply breaking the shell of the blue mussel with its pincers.

In response to that strategy, the blue mussel has evolved a neat trick. The obvious way would be to evolve a thicker shell but thicker shells are a drain on the mussels' resources and are not always needed because green crab are not always in sufficient numbers to pose a serious enough threat to invest in a permanently thick shell, so the blue mussel has evolved the ability to detect a chemical in the water given off by green crabs, and only thickens it's shell when the population reaches a critical threshold number.

Neat, eh?

Asian or Japanese shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus

But, in 1988 the Asian or Japanese shore crab was reported in New Jersey into the Atlantic and by 1991 had started to invade the southern parts of the US East Coast where it found a population of blue mussels which had no effective defence against them because they were unable to detect their presence. The Asian crab quickly spread north as far as southern Maine, but no further.

However, fifteen years later, in 2006, two researchers, Aaron S. Freeman and James E. Byers, made an amazing discovery, published in Science. They found that blue mussels had already evolved the ability to detect a different chemical produced by the Asian crab and were now using the same defence strategy as they did for the native green crab.

By contrast, the 'control group' of blue mussels from the northern shores of Maine showed no such ability.

Abstract

Invasive species may precipitate evolutionary change in invaded communities. In southern New England (USA) the invasive Asian shore crab, Hemigrapsus sanguineus, preys on mussels (Mytlius edulis), but the crab has not yet invaded northern New England. We show that southern New England mussels express inducible shell thickening when exposed to waterborne cues from Hemigrapsus, whereas naïve northern mussel populations do not respond. Yet, both populations thicken their shells in response to a long-established crab, Carcinus maenas. Our findings are consistent with the rapid evolution of an inducible morphological response to Hemigrapsus within 15 years of its introduction.

Freeman, A.S., Byers, J.S.; Divergent Induced Responses to an Invasive Predator in Marine Mussel Populations,
Science 11 August 2006: Vol. 313 no. 5788 pp. 831-833 DOI: 10.1126/science.1125485

Full article (registered members)

Now, if you're a creationist and have had the courage to read this far, you've almost certainly been looking for an excuse to reject this examples as an example of evolution, or otherwise pour scorn on the idea. You've probably by now decided your best tactic is to dismiss it as an 'example of microevolution' but not of 'macroevolution' and are going to rely in the creationist mantra, 'macroevolution is impossible'.

So, just suppose whatever genetic change involved in this evolution had inhibited the ability of the carrier to breed with non-carriers and produce fertile offspring. We would now be classifying the evolved blue mussels as a different species which appeared to have replaced the non-evolved species along the coast of New England, with the more 'primitive' form maintaining a toe-hold in northern Maine.

What would have been impossible about that?

In fact, this scenario is not at all unlikely given what we already know of the distribution of Mytlius edulis and the hybridisation and subspecies we know about.

Systematics and distribution

The Mytilus edulis complex

Systematically blue mussels consist of a group of (at least) three closely related taxa of mussels, known as the Mytilus edulis complex. Collectively they occupy both coasts of the North Atlantic (including the Mediterranean) and of the North Pacific in temperate to polar waters, as well as coasts of similar nature in the Southern Hemisphere. The distribution of the component taxa has been recently modified as a result of human activity (invasive species). The taxa can hybridise with each other, if present at the same locality.

• Mytilus edulis sensu stricto: Native to the North Atlantic.
• Mytilus edulis platensis ( = Mytilus chilensis), the Chilean mussel: Temperate waters in the Southern Hemisphere.
• Mytilus galloprovincialis, the Mediterranean mussel: Native in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and Western Europe. Introduced in the temperate North Pacific, South Africa and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. A distinct lineage native to the Southern Hemisphere also exists.
• Mytilus trossulus: North Pacific, northern parts of the North Atlantic, Baltic Sea.

Mytilus edulis, strict sense

The Atlantic blue mussel is native on the North American Atlantic coast, but is found intermixed with M. trossulus north of Maine. In Europe It is found from the French Atlantic coast northwards to Novaya Zemlya and Iceland, but not in the Baltic Sea. In France and in the British Isles, it makes hybrid zones with M. galloprovincialis, and also is sometimes intermixed with M. trossulus.

A genetically distinct lineage of M. edulis is present in the Southern Hemisphere, and has been attributed to subspecies Mytilus edulis platensis. This includes the Chilean mussel.

Source: Wikipedia - Blue Mussel

So, which creationist of those who have got this far is going to volunteer to explain how this is not an example of rapid evolution over a space of some fifteen years?

Further reading: Understanding Evolution
Musseling in on evolution

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All In The Name Of Jesus

Carl Sagan

Ever wonder why we do this; why we campaign to reduce, and hopefully abolish altogether, the influence of religion on our societies? Why we seek to avoid above all else the re-establishment of theocratic governments?

We do it because we have learnt what they are capable of doing should they ever again get the power to do so.

Be under no illusion that religions have reformed in some way and now realise the error of their ways. The only error they would acknowledge is the error in allowing us to take their power away from them; in preventing them from doing what they used to do and what they still demand the right to do again if only they weren't so unfairly persecuted by the 'Satanic forces' of liberal secularism.

Following on my blog post on the 'Witches' of Salem, I came across this piece of writing by the wonderfully eloquent, and sadly late author and cosmologist, Carl Sagan, from "The Demon-haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark". It was quoted by Christopher Hitchens in "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer".

Read this to be reminded of what Christians did and what Christianity justified with scripture and even advocated when they had the power to do so. And be thankful for those liberal humanists and secularists who took away those powers from a kicking and screaming church and forced them to behave in a civilised way.

And be afraid. There is nothing to stop them doing the same again if ever they regain the power to do so.

No Requiem For Dead Gods

H.L. Menchen
Sep 12, 1880 – Jan 29, 1956

How are the mighty fallen!

No one mourns for dead gods. Once mighty, omniscient, omnipotent, deities, feared or loved, worshipped and eulogized, are as nothing once they take their place in the trashcan of history and become just those laughably silly, mythical gods simple, ignorant people of times gone by used to believe in before they knew any better.

I read this in Christopher Hitchen's must-read collection of Atheist writings, "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever".

Memorial Service

H. L. MENCKEN

No Way Noah!

What a ridiculous story the tale of the biblical flood and Noah's Ark is. It beggars belief that grown adults can believe such patently absurd nonsense. People who do believe it are probably capable of being persuaded to believe almost anything, such is the credulity and suggestibility of some people.

I went to a Church of England primary school in the 1950's in Oxfordshire, England and even then, in a school with close links to the local church, where the local vicar came and told us superstitious nonsense every Monday morning, the story of Noah's Ark was thought of as just another childish fairy tale. "She still believes in Noah's Ark!" was a playground taunt. It meant you were still a baby.

Let's look at some of the stupid things we need to believe to believe the Noah's Ark story:

1. That there is water above the sky and below the earth and that rain is made when the water comes through holes in the sky.

That in fact the bible is correct when it says:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

Genesis 1:6-7

Which is the only way to make sense of:

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

Genesis 7:11

2. That somehow a six hundred year-old man and his three centenarian sons could make a wooden boat large enough to take two (or seven) of each of the millions of species complete with all the food and the special conditions in which many of them, especially the extremophiles, need, and robust enough to put to sea on an ocean with no land-masses to moderate the waves.

Admittedly, this was a monstrous boat, judging by what we can deduce from the Bible:

Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

Genesis 6:14-15

So how big is a cubit? Experts differ, some say it was from the tip of the nose to the tip of the middle finger of an outstretched arm, but again the Bible gives us a clue:

And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.

Genesis 7:19-20

Mount Everest, 29,029 feet.

So there we have a measure we can use to translate a cubit into today's measurements. The waters rose to fifteen cubits and covered the highest mountain. We know that Mount Everest is as near as makes no different to twenty-nine thousand feet so a cubit must have been a shade under two thousand feet, which means, at thirty cubits high, the Ark was twice as tall as Mount Everest at fifty-eight thousand feet.

So, the Ark then was twice as tall as Mount Everest at fifty-eight thousand feet (11 miles), one million one hundred and sixty thousand feet (two hundred and twenty miles) long and ninety-seven thousand feet (just over eighteen miles) wide.

I assume Noah and his centenarian sons used special equipment to work at that stratospheric height but, having mastered the art of deep-sea diving in water near boiling point to get the giant pacific tube worms and other sulphur-based extremophiles from around the black smokers, this shouldn't have been too difficult.

I expect they had some elaborate means to find enough trees to cut down, saw up into massive planks, transport them to the construction site and lift into place, then fix them somehow into a structure that tall, and robust enough. Though how such a massive structure, which was twice as tall as the water was deep, managed to float, remains a mystery. Maybe the laws of physics were suspended for the duration of the flood.

Great Buddha Hall, Eastern Great Temple, Nara, Japan

But, though that might solve the problem of where to keep all the different animals in their specialised environments ranging from Arctic to tropical rain forest, from deep oceans to arid deserts, etc, it just raises the problem of just where all the wood came from and the technicalities of making a wooden structure which can not only support its own weight without crushing itself but then stand up to the rigours of ocean voyages.

There is a reason mankind never managed to build very large wooden ships or wooden building of more than a few storeys. The world's largest known wooden building was, until 1989, the 8th century Great Buddha Hall of the Eastern Great Temple in Nara, Japan. The modern building, which was built in 1709 following a fire, is 30% smaller than the original. It is forty-nine feet tall. Noah's ark would have been one thousand two hundred and twenty-four times taller. The Anglican church in Georgetown, Guyana, at one hundred and forty-three feet, claims to be the tallest wooden building. Noah's Ark would have been a mere four hundred and twenty times taller.

Unless, of course, the Bible is wrong about either the depth of the water or about it covering the highest mountains...

And if so, we're back to the problem of where to put all the animals and how to create those specialised environments. It also raises the question about just how high these people thought the highest mountain was. With usual estimate of the length of a cubit being about three feet, fifteen cubits puts this at about forty-five feet! Not so much a mountain as a very low hillock... and a very small boat.

So how many animals were there on this boat?

With typical ambiguity, the Bible says:

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

Genesis 6:19-21

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Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

Genesis 7:2-4

So, is that two of each, one male and six females of 'clean' species, three males and four females or what? And what about the hermaphrodite species, or did the author not know about those?

And what's all this about 'clean' species anyway? How was Noah supposed to know which of all the millions of species which were 'clean' and which weren't? This list wasn't announced until the Exodus.

How many species are there? According to Explore Biodiversity:

This is a very good question, but the truth is, its very hard to know, or even estimate. Currently there are about 1.4 million species described. Yet, we're probably far from being close to the actual number of species.

Take this into consideration. In a famous study conducted in Panama, 19 trees were "fogged" with insecticide and the dead were collected as they fell through the canopy. In this study, nearly 1,200 species of beetles alone were collected. Of those, 80 percent were not known to science. While it may be dangerous to extrapolate numbers like these to other places, it gives at least a high estimate of the number of species that could exist on earth - that high estimate being around 100 million species. A low estimate is 2 million. The best estimate might be around 10 million. But even if that’s the case, it means we've only known about a small fraction of what is presently there.

Explore Biodiversity - How Many Species?

Let's go with the best estimate of around ten million different species. We won't bother ourselves about how Noah knew all these species and where to find them back then. I expect he had some help.

To load these onto the Ark, and only allowing for one pair, assuming they went in two abreast at the optimistic rate of one species per second, twenty-four/seven, that would have taken a little over one hundred and fifteen days to load. With the upper estimate, it would have taken about three years, so let's not be too hard on poor old Noah and his small family of geriatrics. Besides, all those protozoans could probably have been carried on in a box - apart from the extremophiles which need special conditions of course. I wonder if the estimated half a million different species of beetle walked or flew?

Lastly, so far as the logistics of getting all these animals on board, not to mention checking all those microscopic ones to ensure there were only two of each (just how do you sex an amoeba?) it must have been a nightmare ensuring that all the species, like the giant tube worms, ruminants, lagomorphs, and termites, which rely on bacteria and other micro-organisms in their gut to digest their food, only brought two of each along between them!

Of course, part of the microbiology problem would also be in deciding which humans carried the specimens of sexually-transmitted diseases like syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes and chlamydia. Was it just one or was the task shared out amongst the family? And then other obligatory parasites on all the other species would have had to be apportioned each to his host. There are so many species of flea alone. Who hosted the tapeworms, hookworms and liver flukes?

Enough of that. I could go on but you've probably got the point by now. I won't even mention the problem of whales. (Oh! I just did!)

3. That the earth could be repopulated from a mere handful of surviving specimens without any supporting biota or ecological niches in which to live.

Admittedly the Bible is typically ambiguous, even contradictory about what exactly survived outside the Ark. On one hand it talks about God killing breathing things and then talks about everything, and twice refers to every living substance:

And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

Genesis 6:17

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and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

Genesis 7:4

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And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

Genesis 7:21-23

It seems to me that, despite the ambiguity, there is little doubt that the author thought all living substance was destroyed, which includes plants, micro-organisms, fungi, etc. It doesn't seem possible that the stuff about breathing, breath and nostrils limits the list to just animals with skeletal respiratory systems, otherwise why bother with the 'every living substance' phrase?

The only way to resolve this is to assume the author muddled 'living' with breathing and believed that only breathing things were alive. Echo's of the 'breath of life', and 'breathing life into...' superstition there.

But that's a bit hard to swallow for those who also believe the author created everything and especially created life itself. Perhaps, to believe in Noah's Ark, one has to believe in a creator of life who thinks plants and non-breathing things are not living things.

So, I'll assume that the Noah's Ark story is based on a belief in an omniscient creator who would not have made such a silly mistake and knew perfectly well that even non-breathing (as opposed to respiring) life is alive, so when the Bible talks about every living thing being destroyed, it means just that.

In any case, very few plants can survive total immersion in salt water for very long, especially at depths sufficient to cover Mount Everest so, even if God didn't destroy them, there would have been very few survivors, if any.

And that leaves the little problem of the olive tree that the dove reputedly found. How did it manage to survive the flood and why would it have been growing atop a mountain in the first place? No doubt there is a simple explanation for that, other than the author being hopelessly muddled...

So what world did the survivors discover when they left the Ark?

A world with no food and no means to get any, and a world with no oxygen being produce by green plants and in which carbon dioxide is increasing due to animal respiration.

At least a world with no food for the herbivores; the carnivores would have been okay for a while, or did the Ark contain enough food for the surviving herbivores to live on while they were waiting for plants to evolve again, and enough fresh meat, dried insects, meal-worms, etc. for all the various carnivores, insectivores, etc.?

Then there is the problem of all those simian species, like humans, who, due to a mistake in their genes, can't metabolise vitamin C and need it in their diets or they die eventually? Where would they have got the fresh fruit and vegetation they need to avoid scurvey?

You see, there are little problems like shrews and moles with such high metabolic rates that they consume practically their own body-weight in protein-rich food every day, or they die of starvation. The moles, for example, would have just one earthworm each then they (following closely after the earthworms) would have gone extinct. The bats would have quickly mopped up the surviving flying insects then died. The few surviving herbivores would have quickly starved to death, if they had been lucky enough to escape the clutches of the increasingly hungry lions, wolves, stoats, bears, eagles, snakes, etc., followed of course by the carnivores which had exterminated them. To try to repopulate a barren planet with just a few of each species would be doomed to certain failure, as anyone with the slightest inkling of ecology could tell you.

Quite simple, and quite obviously, there is no way earth could have been re-populated by a few surviving members of each species. Living things don't live in isolation but as part of an interdependent, dynamic and complex, evolved ecosystem which is dependant on all its component parts and which is irreducibly complex, with all its components having co-evolved. Taking away any part of the system will render the entire thing unworkable.

And all of that pales into insignificance when put against the problem of no oxygen when the animals had turned it all into carbon dioxide.

Then of course there is the missing fossil evidence of this massive extinction event. Fossilisation would have been the norm in an environment free from scavengers and bacteria, and in which dead things would have been covered in marine sediment, unlike in the real world, where it is an exceedingly rare event, especially on land. We would see a massive fossil layer in the geological column yet there is nothing like it to be seen anywhere in the world.

So, Creationists! Just were exactly are all those fossils, eh?

Whoever wrote the Noah's Ark story obviously knew nothing of irreducibly complex ecosystems which can only be accounted for as being built slowly over time by an evolutionary process. It is quite clear from the Noah's Ark story that the author of Genesis was as ignorant of biology as he was of other science and actually thought the absurd tale was even remotely plausible.

This really isn't very surprising when we take account of the low level of science and technology of the people who had this as part of their origin myth, living as they did in an insignificant part of the Middle-eastern desert in the Bronze Age, when human technology hadn't yet invented the wheel. In fact, it is a rather touching insight into the infantile thinking of humans in the infancy of our species as we were beginning to come to terms with our curiosity and a desire to understand what must have seemed an infinitely complicated and mysterious, magical world before we had the tool of science.

The surprising thing is that there are still grown adults living in technologically advanced societies with all our scientific knowledge and readily available information, who still believe it. Even more surprising perhaps is that these unfortunate people consider themselves to hold superior knowledge and understanding and demand the right to tell normal people how to behave.

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I Have More Mail [Updated 03-Nov-2012]

Readers may remember my email from the Education Minister for England, Rt.Hon. Michael Gove, MP concerning his granting of permission to Creationist organisations to set up 'Free Schools'. (Scotland and Wales have devolved responsibility for education).

Briefly, Free Schools are outside the control of elected local authorities and are accountable directly to the Department for Education at national level. There are real fears that this will open the door to Creationists groups seeking to pursue the US Christian conservative right's 'Wedge Strategy', which seeks to subvert and circumvent secular education and insert fundamentalist Bible literalism into mainstream education, especially science curricula disguised as genuine scientific theories.

As well as the email to Michael Gove, I had also emailed my MP, Nichola Blackwood, MP (Oxford West & Abingdon) with a similar pro forma email. This was during the summer recess so Ms Blackwood's delay in replying is understandable.

From: *************
Sent: 17 July 2012 18:47
To: BLACKWOOD, Nicola
Subject: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013

Dear Ms Blackwood

I am writing as your constituent to express serious concern about the Government's decision to 'pre-approve' for opening three Free Schools from groups intending to teach creationism - two in 2012 and one in 2013:

• Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland was approved to open last October, and are due to open this September. In the 'Creation Policy' on their website, they 'affirm that to believe in God's creation of the world is an entirely respectable position scientifically and rationally', and say that 'We will teach creation as a scientific theory and we will always affirm very clearly our position as Christians, i.e. that Christians believe that God's creation of the world is not just a theory but a fact with eternal consequences for our planet and for every person who has ever lived on it.'
• Exemplar - Newark Business Academy was approved to open last week, and is due to open from September 2013. The plans are from the same people who proposed Everyday Champion's Academy last year. Everyday Champion's Academy, which was formally backed by Everyday Champions Church, was rejected last year because Michael Gove was 'unable to accept that an organisation with creationist beliefs could prevent these views being reflected in the teaching in the school and in its other activities.' However, in spite of this statement, the subsequent bid has now been approved. Since gaining approval, the group behind the bid has said that it still intends to teach creationism - only in RE instead of science.
• Sevenoaks Christian School was also approved to open last week, and is also due to open from September 2013. On their website, they explain that they, too, believe God created the world, but have identified that they can't teach creationism in science, so they will teach it in RE instead.

Grindon Hall's intention to teach creationism in science is a classic example of the so-called 'teach the controversy' approach, often used by American creationist groups to get creationism taught in schools. Creationists do not argue that evolution should not be taught; they simply argue that there is genuine scientific debate over the origins of the Universe and the Earth, and that therefore creationism should be taught alongside evolution as a valid alternative theory. However, there is no scientific controversy over evolution and creationism: the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly in favour of evolution. Creationism should not be taught as a valid scientific theory because it is not one. The Department for Education has been clear on this, so it is surprising to see the school gain pre-approval.

Both Exemplar and Sevenoaks intend to teach creationism, but not in science lessons. It is quite common for primary schools to teach about the Christian, Jewish or Muslim creation narrative, as it is a prominent story in the Bible. But it is extremely rare for a secondary school to do likewise, and this raises concerns that these schools are intending to promote creationist views to their students as scientific theories.

Furthermore, I cannot see that it is worth the risk of funding to run a school a creationist group that promises not to teach creationism. This seems like a recipe for disaster.

This matter is of the utmost importance to me, and I would like to ask if you would make representations to Michael Gove on my behalf and work more generally to ensure the Free School programme does not lead to pseudoscientific groups running state-funded schools.


Yours sincerely,
*************

From: BLACKWOOD, Nicola [mailto:nicola.blackwood.mp@parliament.uk]
Sent: 03 September 2012 15:48
To: ********************
Subject: RE: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013

Dear **********,

Thank you for contacting me about the issue of Creationism and Free Schools and I apologise for the delay in my response over the Parliamentary recess.

I appreciate your concerns on this issue. However, I hope you may be reassured to know that Ministers have been very clear that Creationism should not form part of any science curriculum or be taught as a scientific alternative to accepted scientific theories such as evolution. The Department for Education expects to see evolution and its foundation topics fully included in any science curriculum.

I would also like to assure you that all free school proposals are subject to due diligence checks by a specialist unit within the Department for Education, to ensure that the people that are setting up the school are suited to this very important task. Every application approved, including for the schools that you have highlighted, has also had to demonstrate that the new school will provide a broad and balanced curriculum.

I would assure you that Free Schools are subject to Ofsted inspections in the same way as all other schools and the Secretary of State has powers to intervene in a school where there is significant cause for concern.

I have written to the Education Secretary to pass your concerns on this issue to his direct attention, and I shall of course be glad to pass on any substantive response I receive in due course.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact me on this issue and I hope this response is helpful.

Kind regards,
Nicola

From: ****************
Sent: 04 September 2012 19:24
To: BLACKWOOD, Nicola
Subject: RE: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013

Dear Ms Blackwood,

Thank you for replying to my email and taking time to forward my concern to Michael Gove.

Could you obtain answers to the following questions, which I have numbered for ease of future reference:

1. Have any specific assurances have been requested by the Department for Education that Creationism will not be included in the science curricula of these three schools in any form, and if so, if they have been given, please? This is particularly relevant to Grindon Hall Christian School, Sunderland, in view of their stated intention to teach Creationism as a scientific theory and their view that biblical creation is a fact, not a theory.

2. If assurances have been given, what monitoring will be in place to ensure they are kept and what sanctions will be applied to offending schools should they not be?

3. Has the Department for Education put in place any measures to ensure that children at free schools are taught that there is a clear distinction between religious opinions and matters of scientific fact, and that, when being taught in RE classes opinions which conflict with the body of scientific opinion, pupils are given a clear understanding that what is being taught is not something accepted as factual by an overwhelming majority of scientists working in the relevant scientific fields?

4. If no such measures have been put in place, why not, please?

Thank you again for your time.

Yours sincerely,
***************

(Please feel free to use all or part of the above email should you wish to email your MP on this matter. You can find your MP and his/her contact details at www.parliament.uk)

From: BLACKWOOD, Nicola [mailto:nicola.blackwood.mp@parliament.uk]
Sent: 17 September 2012 15:06
To: ***************
Subject: RE: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013

Dear ***********,

Thank you for your further email regarding Creationist teaching in schools.

I have written directly to the Education Secretary to ask that he would consider and respond the points you have raised, and I shall of course pass on any substantive response I receive in the usual way.

Thank you once again for contacting me on this issue and I hope this is helpful.

Kind regards,
Nicola

From: ************
Sent: 20 October 2012 11:48
To: 'BLACKWOOD, Nicola'
Subject: RE: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013

Dear Ms Blackwood

I note that I have not yet received a reply from the Education Secretary. I wonder if you could pursue this matter on my behalf.

Thank you for your help.

From: HOLDENWHITE, Tamsin [mailto:tamsin.holdenwhite@parliament.uk]
Sent: 22 October 2012 10:54
To: *******
Subject: RE: Creationists approved to open Free School in 2013


Dear *******,

Thank you for your email.

I hope you will be pleased to know that the response from the Department For Education has been received in the office and that Nicola has written to you passing this on. The letter should, with any luck, reach you in the next few days though the post.

If it does not appear forthcoming, do please let me know.

Best wishes,
Tamsin

Tamsin Holden-White
Parliamentary Assistant ■ Office of Nicola Blackwood MP ■ Oxford West and Abingdon
House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA
nicola.blackwood.mp@parliament.uk
0207 219 7126 - Westminster Office
www.nicolablackwood.com

At last, a reply from a junior minister in the Education Department:

Text: Dear *************** Further to our recent correspondence regarding your concerns about the teaching of Creationism in Free Schools, I enclose a response I have received from Lord Hill of Oareford, Parliamentary Under-secretary of State for Schools. I hope the minister's response on this issue is helpful and thank you once again for taking the time to contact me on this issue. Do let me know if I can be of any further assistance of if I can raise any concerns to the attention of Ministers in future. Best Wishes Nicola Nicola Blackwood MP Member of Parliament for Oxford West and Abingdon.

Text: Thank you for your letter of 5 September, addressed to the Secretary of State, enclosing further correspondence from your constituent, ************* of **************, ******** about creationism in Free Schools. I am replying as the Minister responsible for this policy area. There is no place for the teaching of creationism as science in Free Schools. The Free School application guidance is clear: creationism, intelligent design, and similar ideas cannot be taught as valid scientific theories. In this instance, the Department defines creationism as a belief that a divine creation can be empirically proven. It is perfectly acceptable for a Free School, or any other state-funded school, to teach the belief that God created everything as a faith position in Religious Education (RE). At the same time, we expect to see evolution and its foundation topics fully included in these schools' science curricula. The teaching of creationism as science in any lesson, including RE, is forbidden by legal agreement that sets out the conditions by which all Free Schools receive their funding. Should there be evidence of a breach of this clause we would take swift action which would be likely to result in the termination of that funding agreement. This would mean that the organisation no longer had any role in running the school with state funding. We would not have approved any application to pre-opening stage if we believed these schools would teach creationism as science, or if we doubted their ability to teach a high quality science curriculum more generally. The Department will work with all projects over coming months to ensure they honour commitments they made in their proposal and interview. Free Schools are subject to Ofsted inspection in the same way as all other state schools. The teaching of creationism as a potentially valid scientific theory would clearly affect Ofsted's assessment of the quality of a school's teaching and would raise questions about the quality of its leadership and management. The Government also has powers to intervene in a school where there is significant cause for concern on these grounds. Your sincerely Jonathan Hill

So that seems to conclude this exchange. It's revealing that the Department for Education has no specific monitoring in place for these schools to ensure their compliance with their agreements beyond the normal Ofsted scrutiny used for local government-run schools, but it is reassuring that the risk losing funding should they be tempted to teach Creationism as anything other than a faith position.

It will be interesting to see if science teachers stick to the spirit of this legal obligation rather than the strict letter of the funding agreement.

"I'm not allowed to teach you that our Lord created the earth and all things on it. Instead, I have to teach you the atheistic views of Charles Darwin that even he recanted on his death bed and which are still only theories...."

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These websites may be of interest:

Grindon Hall Christian School.

Exemplar Academy (Despite this URL being given as their web address on Exemplar's Twitter page, it appears to be non-existent.)

Sevenoaks Christian School. Tucked away here on their website we find this statement: We will not teach ‘creationism’ or ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative to the theory of evolution; indeed Free Schools are prohibited by law from teaching this.

It would appear from their emails that neither the Minister for Education, Michael Gove, nor Nicola Blackwood are aware of this legal prohibition on teaching 'Creationism' or its under-cover version, 'Intelligent Design', since neither of them mention it. This Wikipedia article states that teaching evolution in science is a compulsory part of the science curriculum for state-funded schools, but makes no mention of teaching the various forms of 'creationism' being illegal.

I will keep readers posted.

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Jesus And The Witches of Salem

First, a little background on the Salem Witch trials, for those who don't know it, followed by a short quiz. (If you know the story, skip forward to the quiz).

The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province: Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, Andover and Salem Town.

The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town. One contemporary writer summed the results of the trials thus:

And now Nineteen persons having been hang'd, and one prest to death, and Eight more condemned, in all Twenty and Eight, of which above a third part were Members of some of the Churches of N. England, and more than half of them of a good Conversation in general, and not one clear'd; about Fifty having confest themselves to be Witches, of which not one Executed; above an Hundred and Fifty in Prison, and Two Hundred more acccused; the Special Commision of Oyer and Terminer comes to a period…

Robert Calef

At least five more of the accused died in prison.

When I put an end to the Court there ware at least fifty persons in prision in great misery by reason of the extream cold and their poverty, most of them having only spectre evidence against them and their mittimusses being defective, I caused some of them to be lettout upon bayle and put the Judges upon consideration of a way to reliefe others and to prevent them from perishing in prision, upon which some of them were convinced and acknowledged that their former proceedings were too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation … The stop put to the first method of proceedings hath dissipated the blak cloud that threatened this Province with destruccion…

Governor William Phips
February 21st, 1693

The episode is one of the most notorious cases of mass hysteria, and has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations and lapses in due process. It was not unique, being an American example of the much larger phenomenon of witch trials in the Early Modern period, but many have considered the lasting impressions from the trials to have been highly influential in subsequent American history.

Wikipedia - Salem Witch Trials

Okay, that's the background, now for the short quiz:

Gods Come And Go But Truth Remains

Minoan "Snake Goddess"

A few miles south of Heraklion, the main town and port of Crete, are the ruins of Knossos, a vast palace/temple cum town complex built by Bronze Age people of whom we know little. Their written language has not been deciphered so we do not even know what language they spoke and how it relates to any other Mediterranean or Indo-European languages. All we know of their religion is what we can deduce from their buildings, pottery, artefacts and art.

The Minoans seem to have worshipped primarily goddesses, which has sometimes been described as a "matriarchal religion". Although there is some evidence of male gods, depictions of Minoan goddesses vastly outnumber depictions of anything that could be considered a Minoan god. While some of these depictions of women are speculated to be images of worshippers and priestesses officiating at religious ceremonies, as opposed to the deity herself, there still seem to be several goddesses including a Mother Goddess of fertility, a Mistress of the Animals, a protectress of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld, and more. Poet Robert Graves has argued that these are all aspects of a single Great Goddess.

A major festive celebration was exemplified in the famous athletic Minoan bull dance, represented at large in the frescoes of Knossos and inscribed in miniature seals.

The Minoan horn-topped altars, since [Sir Arthur] Evans'