It Could Never Happen To Us - Zombies Controlled By A Parasite.

The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis has a macabre life-cycle. It infects carpenter ants and takes over their brains, controlling their behaviour so that they leave the colony and find a leaf at the right height, temperature and humidity in the forest canopy. There they crawl round to the under-side and bite into the central vein. Then they are killed by the fungus which has been consuming their body.

The fungus then sprouts a fruiting body from the head of the ant and releases spores which fall to the forest floor to infect other foraging ants. The bite mark on leaves heals to leave a characteristic dumbbell-shaped mark on the underside of the leaf. These characteristic marks have been found on 28 million-year old fossil leaves from Germany, so this parasite had evolved at least 28 million years ago, even before the Himalayan Mountains had formed.

It's not just fungi that can perform this trick either. A parasitic flatworm called Dicrocoelium dendriticum does a similar thing. I'll let Oatmeal explain it.

The video on the left shows this behaviour in the unfortunate ants.

So, that's fungi and flatworms which can perform this trick. How about other classes of parasite?

Here we have a genus of barnacles, Sacculina, consisting of nine species, which take over the bodies of crabs and use them not to produce more crabs, but to produce more barnacles. Male crabs are even 'turned into' females by these parasites. The infected crabs go through the same motions they would perform when laying eggs to ensure their widest possible distribution, except that they don't lay eggs; they 'lay' barnacle lava.

Now, I'm not going to ask the obvious question here about why any compassionate intelligent designer would go to the trouble of creating these parasites which seem to serve no useful purpose other than to create more copies of themselves, and which give nothing back to the hosts they mercilessly parasitise. That would be too easy a point to score.

What I'm going to speculate on is whether another form of parasite can take over its hosts brain and use it not for the benefit of the host but for the benefit of the parasite. Could it happen to us? Remember, when considering organisms like parasites we are thinking about collections of replicators called genes which act together to build a machine for replicating themselves. This machine is the object we think of as an organism.

But why should this principle be confined to the objects produced by genes to replicate themselves? Why should it not also apply to other replicators like the memes which build cultures? Memes are units of cultural inheritance just as genes are units of genetic inheritance. Our cultures are meme machines built by memes to replicate memes. Through a combination of meme-gene coevolution we have arrived at where we are today - a cultural, civilised, ape with culturally evolved ethics and morals which enable us to work cooperatively together, at least within our local grouping.

What if a parasite could evolve the ability to take over this meme machine to produce more copies of itself by controlling the behaviour, beliefs, attitudes and even the ethics and morality of its hosts, not for the benefit of its hosts but for its own selfish ends? Indeed, in a Darwinian competitive environment where the only relevant test of fitness is the ability to produce the most copies, how else could such a parasite evolve? It is bound to evolve in a way which makes it better at controlling its host.

Apart from the possibility that the parasite has taken over even the rational thought processes of its victims, making them distrust evidence and even being afraid to consider it, it's hard to see why we don't regard religion as an example of just such a parasite. A combination of fear of a watching invisible thug and the hope of life after death for those afraid of it, seems to have done the trick. Protection from a non-existent threat and a promise which can never be delivered. Some reward for using our body and mind and taking away our freedom and independence, eh?

Yes, it could happen to us and very probably has.

The question now is whether we can rid ourselves of this malignant parasite and protect our children against infection by it. Probably the hardest part will be convincing its victims that they have been infected because, to them, just like the ants and crabs, it must feel entirely normal, otherwise the parasite wouldn't be in control.

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Simple Gifts

It might surprise readers of this blog and my followers on Twitter, but one of my favourite pieces of music, amongst many, is Aaron Copeland's arrangement of 'Simple Gifts', 'Variations on a Shaker Melody' from his score for Martha Graham's ballet, 'Appalachian Spring'.

As an aside: it's amusing that the title to the ballet was decided on after he wrote the score. It was taken from a poem by Hart Crane yet many people say how well it evokes the spirit of Spring in the Appalachian Mountains. This is even more amusing when you realise that the term 'Appalachian Spring' in Crane's poem referred to a water source, not the season.

Ah well! Such is the nature of human perception.

Anyway, what I was intending to talk about is the beautiful simplicity in Shaker artefacts and how they came about. To me, 'Simple Gifts' somehow captures this both in its words and in the beautiful simplicity of the tune. The words and music were written by Elder Joseph Brackett (1797-1882).

The basic philosophy is that a thing made with love is a thing of beauty and needs no adornment. The beauty lies in the application of skill and the fitness of form. The lily needs no gilding. Of course, the belief that skill is a gift from God is central to this philosophy but that's not what I'm talking about here.

What I'm talking about is the idea of simplicity itself and how this came into Christianity. The truth may surprise many Christians. It came from Islam.

The Old Testament forbids the making of graven images in the second of the so-called 'Ten Commandments'. This expressly forbids the making of "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth" (Exodus 20:1-17). This is normally completely ignore by even the most fundamentalist of Christians unless it suits them to condemn some image or other. However, the same proscription is found in Islam, where it is taken very seriously.

Islamic cultures tend to be free of figurative art, using only abstract designs and only occasionally plant-based designs and then in a highly stylised form. Wonderful buildings like the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (The Blue Mosque) in Istanbul and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain are decorated entirely in abstract designs or Koranic verses.

Contrast this to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the former Byzantine Orthodox Christian Church of Saint Sophia which stands opposite the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and was decorated in images and icons of saints which were plastered over when it became a Mosque but have since been uncovered and restored as a museum.

Still today Orthodox Churches of both Greek and Russian traditions are richly adorned with icons and statues as are to a lesser extent Catholic Churches. However, there was a period when the Catholic Church became Iconoclastic and some see this as the fundamental difference between Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Iconoclasm - the act of breaking or destroying icons - was influenced by Islam when it became the dominant force throughout the Middle East including former Christian strongholds like Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria and then Constantinople.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia admits, in an article on iconoclasm on the question of Islamic influence, "It is true that, in a sense, the Khalifa at Damascus began the whole disturbance, and that the Iconoclast emperors were warmly applauded and encouraged in their campaign by their rivals at Damascus." So, influenced by Islam, the Catholic Church briefly became Iconoclastic and a movement against icons entered Western Christianity.

Later, following the Protestant Reformation, with its fundamentalist offshoots like Calvinism, this move against graven images in churches was taken to extremes, emphasising as it does a fundamental difference between Protestantism and Catholicism, so that in England and Calvinist Scotland, especially following the Parliamentarian victory in the civil war, led by the Protestant Puritan Oliver Cromwell, almost all churches were stripped bare of any adornment with even crucifixes, stone crosses and stained-glass windows being destroyed in an iconoclastic fervour.

This resulted in the stark simplicity now found in most English country churches with bare stone or plastered and white-washed walls and bare or brown wood. The same can be found in Methodist and Baptist chapels. Ornamentation is normally now only found in minster churches and cathedrals and nothing on the scale of even the smaller Catholic and Orthodox churches where, to someone like me, brought up in the austere Protestant tradition, the churches appear vulgar and almost obscenely ostentatious. To a secular humanist though, this reaction has nothing to do with blasphemy and blind obedience to the capricious whim of gods, but to the thought of the good that could have been done had the money spent on this ornamentation been spent where it could have done something useful.

And of course, this austerity and stark yet beautiful simplicity reached its most developed and purest form in the Shaker tradition of simplicity of form, in furniture and buildings and in tunes like Simple Gifts, an example of evolution of culture through cross-fertilisation.

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One Step At A Time

Were Jews ever really slaves in Egypt, or is Passover a myth? - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

Reading the above excellent article by Josh Mintz who describes himself as a Jewish World Blogger, it reminded me of a metaphor Richard Dawkins used in one of his books concerning his disagreement with Stephen Jay Gould about Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium theory of how evolution progresses.

As this article points out, there is absolutely no archaeological evidence to support the story of the escape of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt and, more relevantly for Dawkins' metaphor, none at all to support the story that they wandered about in Sinai, taking forty years to cross it to reach 'the promised land'.

So, what has this got to do with Gould's 'Punctuated Equilibrium'?

Gould had suggested, following his study of the Burgess Shale fossils, that evolution did not proceed by a gradual accumulation of small changes over a long time but that species had long periods of stasis, followed by periods of rapid - in geological time almost instantaneous - change. He called this 'Punctuated Equilibrium' and relied almost entirely on fossil evidence to support it.

The fossil record is inevitably rarely better than a series of randomly spaced snap-shots of the organism's evolutionary history and in any case, there is nothing in Darwinian evolutionary theory which requires a species to evolve at a constant rate. Indeed, if the environment remains unchanged for a long period there is nothing to drive evolutionary change apart from genetic drift. (I have previously blogged in Show Me The Transitional Forms on how the fossil record can give a misleading picture of evolution.)

Dawkins illustrated this with the biblical story of the Hebrews wandering about in Sinai and taking forty years to cross it. Supposing there had been some archaeological evidence that they had camped over-night or for a few days, built camp-fires and cooked food (so leaving wood ash and maybe the bones of the animals they had eaten) and buried their dead. What would archaeologists make of these finds, scattered as they would have been with several miles between them and not even progressing in any particular direction?

Supposing they had found these artefacts and had been able to date them accurately. Would any rational archaeologist suggest that they proved the Hebrews stood still for a long time and then jumped in one huge stride to the next camp-site? Would they conclude that they had proved that the Hebrews had not walked across Sinai one step at a time but had used some other novel form of locomotion involving flight or teleportation?

Of course not. Mind you, that would explain why they walked for 40 years yet had no obvious material or opportunity to make new shoes to replace old, worn-out ones, but that's another matter.

Why then conclude from a snap-shot of evidence of a species evolution that it had not progressed one step at a time but had used some other form of evolution? With no obvious mechanism by which this could be accomplished, and when the Darwinian idea of accumulating small change is perfectly adequate, why insert a hypothetical mechanism for what appeared to be nothing more than a desire to come up with a different theory of evolution?

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What? No Afterlife? Is God A Nihilist?

Browsing my trusty KJV Bible today I came across the following astonishing passages - well, astonishing that is to anyone who believes that the god of the Bible gives their life purpose and reason and promises an eternity in Heaven (or Hell):

So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God’s hands, but no one knows whether love or hate awaits them.

All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean, those who offer sacrifices and those who do not.

As it is with the good, so with the sinful; as it is with those who take oaths, so with those who are afraid to take them.

This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope — even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!

For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten.

Ecclesiastes 9:1-5:

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Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

Job 14:1-12:

Blimey! So God tells us in his inerrant book that there is no afterlife and it doesn't matter what you do in life, it'll all count for nothing in the end! No purpose and no meaning to life whatsoever. What a forlornly depressing thought, unless you find a purpose for it yourself and so give your own life meaning...

It's a pig. In a poke! On my life! Would I lie to you?

Talk about Nihilism.

Where on earth did all the later stuff about Heaven and Hell and having a grandstand seat to watch everyone who disagrees with you suffering in eternal agony for that heinous crime come from? Surely it can't have been made up to give sanctimoniously self-righteous people something to look forward to, or so preachers could pretend to be selling us something useful, like a pig in a poke, could it?

Mind you, it was a master stroke any snake-oil salesman would have been proud of: it'll only work after you're dead - when it'll be too late to come looking for me, even if you are aware of the con, which you won't be, according to Ecclesiastes 9:5.

Still, at least the Bible has nailed that lie and agrees with Atheists, eh?

So, it looks like the only thing left is to do what Atheists and Humanists advocate - enjoy life, live it to the full and try to leave earth a little better than the way you found it. No ambition could be more noble and worthwhile than that modest ambition.

It's probably easy to work out why this is never taught in Sunday-school or preached about from any pulpit.

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How? A Simple Easter Question For True Christians.

Christian god being sacrificed to itself

As Christians in the West celebrate the execution of an incarnation of their god in a strange fusion of the Jewish Passover and various Middle Eastern and European pagan spring/fertility festivals which they call Easter, something which is celebrated on a different date in the Eastern version of the Christian superstitious cult, it's maybe worth asking them once again a simple question to which they never seem to be able to give an answer.

The sacrifice of this legendary incarnation of their god was supposedly an act of atonement for something some legendary remote ancestors supposedly did, and for which their god had arbitrarily and apparently capriciously, and against any notion of natural justice, decreed us all to be responsible.

The legend goes that, although believed to be omnipotent, the Christian god lacked the power to remove this designation of guilt until it was empowered to so do by a blood sacrifice of an innocent human being. The problem was, having decreed us all to be guilty, the only way this god could think of to get an innocent human being to sacrifice to itself was to pretend to be one and have itself symbolically sacrificed because none of the humans measured up, by definition.

So the Christian festival of Easter is the celebration of this god having itself, as a simulacrum of a human being, sacrificed to itself, so it could acquire the power to remove this assigned guilt from us. Since this is perhaps the central tenet of the Christian superstition, I can't see this being a question any true Christian will have any problem answering.

The question is: how? How did this blood sacrifice empower an already all-powerful god and why was it unable to remove the arbitrary designation of guilt which it had itself imposed, without one.

(Note. An assertion that it did does not explain how it did it.)

Christians! Teach The Controversy!

Science is just the right tool for examining controversy.

Science classes should be where children are taught to evaluate different ideas by conducting experiments. Experiments are for testing ideas and deciding which are the best ones until we have a clear winner. Experiments test the predictions we make with hypotheses to see if they come true.

Take, for example, a claim made in the Christian Bible, in the Gospel of Mark. This claim would be an ideal thing for children to test in science class and should be something that no true Christian parent would object to. The claim is specific, unambiguous and makes an easily testable prediction. Moreover, it requires no fancy apparatus; no detailed knowledge to carry it out and observe the results, and the results wouldn't need sophisticated statistical analysis and interpretation. Even a five year-old could do it and evaluate the results.

The claim is:

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; ... They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them...

Mark 16:16-18

So the experiment is easy to design. All you need do is check that a group of children have been baptized and believe in Jesus, then you give them some normally fatal poison, or some rattlesnakes to handle, and observe the results.

If the children come to no harm the prediction made in the Bible will be proved true and the alternative hypotheses - that they will be harmed by poison or rattlesnakes - will have been falsified.

Which true believer in Jesus could object to their faith being so easily proved true? Which parents who believe that religious ideas should be taught and tested in science class could object to this being done? It's a sure-fire winner for Jesus, designed to dispel doubters once and for all. And we know it must be true because Mark said Jesus said so.

And it teaches children the basic principles of science. A win-win situation.

I can't think why no one has recommended this before and why no state school board has put this on the school curriculum. It surely can't be that they fear for their children's health and welfare, can it? There is not the tiniest risk involved for a true believer.

I think we need to petition the Discovery Institute requesting they campaign to have this very simple proof of biblical inerrancy and very simple demonstration of the truth of Jesus's claims taught in public schools. I can't think of any possible objection from their usual champions like Michael Behe and William Dembski. Even William Lane Craig would need to be paid a very considerable sum of money to come up with a theologically sound explanation of how this verse is literally true, metaphorical, and false, all at the same time.

(Home schoolers: Don't try this at home. You'll risk having any surviving children taken into care because no one in their right mind believes this stuff really).

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Ignorance Is Strength.

Try exchanging banter with a Christian fundamentalist on Twitter, or some other social media like the comments section on these blogs, and you very quickly discover that very many of them know next to nothing about their religion. It's hardly surprising that few of them know anything about science either, but you really would expect them to know about the thing they constantly wave in peoples' faces.

Take an exchange a few days ago with one such Christian. I won't identify her because I don't want this blog to become a vehicle for continuing things started on Twitter.

The exchange started with her asking me why I was so afraid of Christians (note the smug judgmentalism). So I answered in kind with "Because of what they would do to us Atheists if only they had the power. Jesus tells you to slay his enemies." I always try to play with a straight bat (a cricket metaphor, not a reference to the sexuality of flying mammals).

The reply was almost immediate: "Jesus did NOT say that. Where does it say that in the Bible? You're a liar"

So I gave her Luke 19:27 (But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me)

A long silence. I could almost hear her looking for a Bible and trying to find the chapter and verse. At one point, out of boredom, I tweeted that Luke was the chapter following Mark, if that would help.

I would love to have seen her face. Obviously, no Sunday-school teacher, preacher or televangelist had ever told her that verse. No one told her Jesus instructed her to slay his enemies. The Jesus she had been told about was the one who told her to turn the other cheek and forgive her enemies (and not to judge them either, though that seemed to have passed her by). Just the nice, kind, carefully cherry-picked and sanitized version of Jesus from the milquetoast Bible.

Eventually, about twenty minutes later, a tweet came back - "That is a parable, not Jesus telling us to do something". She had actually found and read it!

Me: "Indeed. A parable in which Jesus tells you to bring his enemies and slay them before him. Was Jesus right or wrong?"

Inevitably the reply was the fall-back "You have taken it out of context". Strange how every inconvenient Bible quote is always "out of context" yet random quotes from the Christian rent-a-proof Bible can be used to support whatever a Christian needs it to support, no matter what the context is.

And that was that. All my questions went ignored.

Someone who proclaimed her love for Jesus and had came rushing onto Twitter to defend him had not actually read the Bible and seemed to have just swallowed a version handed out to her by someone else. Her Jesus was was a Jesus of her own or someone else's creation, yet she felt empowered by it to wave her holier-than-though judgmental moral superiority in our faces and would no doubt welcome the opportunity to force-feed our children with her 'faith' and have our laws based on her notion of Christianity.

Obviously, when you know it all you don't need to look in the books, where it stands to reason that God and Jesus will just be agreeing with you. Hardly worth the bother of opening it really. Just display it where visitors can see you have one and marvel at your piety and devotion to Jesus.

No wonder that many people who DO read the Bible are Atheists and many of those who profess to be Christians have only read selected passages if any, and are much more likely to be just going by what they've been told is in it or even what they assume is in it.

So, Christians, risk Atheism and read the Bible if you fancy your chances in debate against an Atheist. The chances are they will know it far better than you do. The nasty, inconvenient bits won't go away if you ignore them. Your ignorance really does not trump knowledge, and your 'faith' won't tell you what's in there. For that, you need to read it.

That goes for science too, by the way. Ignorance is not your strength; it's your weakness.

Debating from ignorance is like running proudly out onto the pitch and finding, when the pitcher throws the ball, that you don't have a bat. Hilarious for the watching crowd...

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If It Wasn't For Evolution We Wouldn't Have Science

No, you read the title correctly. It isn't science that gave us evolution; it is evolution which is giving us science. It was science which discovered evolution of course, because science is all about discovering things that have always been there.

For evolution you need three basic things:

1. Competition between different versions
2. Selection based on a test of fitness.
3. Replication.

And the 'winner' is the version which produces the most copies and eventually vanquishes the other version.

Of course, this is normally thought of in terms of genes and biology, but genes are not the only things which meet these three requirements. Another is scientific hypotheses.

Science can (should?) be seen as a body which consists of hypotheses which are either still in competition or,  for all practical purposes have played out the competition and determined the winner.  As the hypotheses compete and emerge as winners, they give rise to new hypotheses and so the whole body of science progresses and develops and tends toward a closer approximation to the truth.
I'll take a simple idea to illustrate this.

The competing hypotheses. There was once a time when most people in the West believed the earth was flat, despite the fact that Eratosthenes had shown it not to be in about 240 BCE. The two ideas - flat earth and spherical earth  - both existed in the ideas pool. The flat earth idea predominated but never entirely exterminated the spherical earth idea. The flat earth idea had been useful to an extent but it meant that people were afraid of falling over the edge, so progress in exploration was limited.  These were versions of the 'shape of earth' idea.

The test for fitness. Gradually, as more and more knowledge was accumulated more and more people came to hold to the spherical idea. Even Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) seems to have accepted that the earth was spherical. He went so far as to argue that there could not be people living on the far side of earth because, since they must have been descended from Adam they would have had to build ocean-going ships to take them there.

He said, "It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man", but I won't dwell too long on Saint Augustine's inadvertent ridiculing of the idea that everyone is descended from the biblical Adam.

The point here is that in the competition for ideas, the spherical earth idea was winning because, with more information, more people became convinced it was the best explanation of the evidence. For a scientific hypothesis, this is the only real test for fitness.

So, by 1492 Christopher Columbus not only knew the earth was round but was prepared to prove that sailing West was the quickest way to China, thinking earth was much smaller than it turned out to be.  In so doing he not only failed to reach China but thought he had missed and was in India; and so misnamed the aboriginal inhabitants of the Caribbean and the New World which he had accidentally discovered in the process.

Replication. That just about convinced all but a few remaining die-hards that earth is spherical, but a few lingered on until we were able, with science, to go out into space and look at earth from a distance and see that it is spherical. Now belief in a flat earth is more likely to be a symptom of delusion and insanity than of a rational thought process. The idea of a flat earth is now replicated in the minds of just about everyone who ever took a basic geography lesson or saw a photograph of earth from space. No one in their right minds would think of telling their children anything but that earth is spherical. (Actually an oblate spheroid, just to deter hair-splitters and creationists looking for something to distract attention with).

We now have what amounts to a scientific 'Law'. The Spherical Earth Theory is not seriously disputed by anyone with any knowledge of the facts. It is a comprehensive, falsifiable theory to explain the observed facts, supported by evidence, able to make and test predictions, and it has not been falsified.

So the body of science was changed by a Darwinian evolutionary process in which one idea won in a test for fitness and came to dominate the ideas pool to the almost total exclusion of its rival. The body of science has so progressed, making other hypotheses like plate tectonics, weather system generation and ocean currents possible.

Exactly the same principle can be applied to any scientific ideas and competing alternative hypotheses, whether it's about the best fuel for a rocket motor to get the the moon, the best rubber for a car tyre, the best Internet Transfer Protocol or the best explanation for the origin of living things.

Without this Darwinian evolutionary process, 'science' would be a primordial soup of conflicting and contradictory notions none of which could be said to be any better than the other, and there would be no basis for using new knowledge that competitive selection of ideas produces, to develop new hypotheses, and so no progress would be possible. Indeed, there would be no basis for even describing a 'body of science'. Science and scientists could not exist.

So, if you imagine you don't believe in evolution you have to explain why science knows more now that it did before; why it can give us modern technology like radios, television and telephones where previously it could not; why we have better medicine now than we used to have and why I can post this blog on the Internet for you to read on your computer or mobile when, just a few years ago, this would have been literally unthinkable.

Where did that idea come from?

It evolved by Darwinian evolution out of earlier, less complex and less well defined ideas built themselves on earlier hypotheses.  The fossils of this evolutionary process can be found in old science books and journals, in museums of technology and maybe in the minds of old, retired scientists.  Deformed and mutant forms of these ideas can frequently be found in the minds of creationists, priests and religious apologists and their followers.

If you dispute this, you have to explain why the process I outlined is not a Darwinian evolutionary process. Good luck with that.

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Founded On Christian Principles?

Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

I have a problem.

I have in front of me a copy of the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. Firstly, I have to say I think it is one of the most significant documents in the English language, laying down as it does a fundamental framework for the basic principles of democracy, government and civil liberties; a magnificent product of the Age of Reason and of thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, etc, etc.

It is remarkable also in another respect: it is probably the first, and maybe the only time, a revolutionary committee (and provisional government in waiting) has not only not immediately sought to establish itself in power in perpetuity, but specifically made it constitutionally impossible for it to do so. Having taken power in the name of the people, they immediately handed power to them, including the power to remove them from office if the need arose. This is a testament to their sincerity, their honourable intentions and to their good faith with the people they served. It rightly still serves as a model for democratic government of the people, by the people and for the people.

However, my problem lies not with the Declaration but with claims that are made about it today. It is claimed by some to be based on Christian principles; a claim which is used to justify the assertion that the United States is a Christian country, founded on Christian principles.

My problem is that I just don't see the Christian principles in this remarkable document and can find no biblical justification for that assertion. I'll go though the relevant statements of principle one by one:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

This looks very much like Deism, a belief subscribed to by many of the signatories to this document, but again I'm open to persuasion. Where in the Christian Bible is there a reference to 'Laws of Nature and of Nature's God' and their determination of an entitlement to 'separate and equal station' for different peoples?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

These look remarkably like Humanist principles to me but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise. Where in the Christian Bible is this egalitarian principle established and where is this entitlement to 'Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness' spelled out? Nowhere in the Bible is there even a hint that 'all men are created equal'.

— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

This clause establishes the purpose of Governments and the principle that their power is derived from the consent of the governed. From which passages in the Christian Bible is this purpose of Governments and principle of democratic accountability and permission to govern derived? There is no allusion to democracy or elections in the Bible and without exception, all Judaic governments in it were absolute monarchies or despotisms.

— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This passage establishes the right (the duty even) of the people to overthrow a Government which is destroying the basic rights established above and especially if the Government is becoming despotic.

Which passages in the Christian Bible establish the right of the people to overthrow their government if it damages their rights and/or is becoming despotic? Which biblical prophets and teachers ever urged the people to overthrow a despotic government and replace it with a democratically accountable one? Indeed, which democratic states are approvingly referred to in the Bible and which despotisms are ever condemned for despotism per se? In fact, it appears to be in direct opposition to the directive from Paul in Romans 13:1-7 that all governments are ordained by God and Christians should therefore always obey and support them.

There then follows a list of grievances and outlines the measures taken to have them redressed, without success, so establishing the justification for the revolution as a last resort in the face of an indifferent colonial administration. I won't list these but a list may be found here. If there are any Christian principles as established by the Bible in this list, please spell them out and cite the relevant biblical passages.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This passage is the actual declaration of independence and of the formation of a provisional government with authority to make war and peace, to make treaties and carry out trade and 'to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do'. I can see no basic principles being established in this paragraph, but if you can see any Christian principles and can show the supporting passages from the Christian Bible, please do so.

So, if the United States of America was founded on Christian principles, it should be possible to find those principles in the Christian Bible and to show how they formed the basis for this founding document - the document upon which the entire constitution and form of the United States is founded.

Conversely, if the Declaration of Independence was not based on Christian principles derived from the Christian Bible, what basis is there for claiming the USA was founded on Christian principles?

---

Gospel Of Judas

Codex Tchacos, page 33 - The Gospel of Judas

Page 33 of Codex Tchacos, the first page of the Gospel of Judas.

Nope. This isn't an April Fool joke. There really IS a Gospel attributed to Judas Iscariot.

It was written before 180 CE, when Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons, wrote a document railing against it. The only known existing copy - a Coptic version which seems to have been translated from Greek and which was discovered in 1970 near Ben Masah, Egypt - has been carbon dated to between 220 and 340 CE.

It is an account contained within the so-called Codex Tchacos, in which Judas relates how Jesus taught him the secrets of Gnosticism because he alone was capable of understanding them, hence his separation from the other disciples. Judas also relates how he was carrying out Jesus' instructions when he identified him to the Roman soldiers, so ensuring the planned crucifixion went ahead. This would explain the curious paradox of it being Judas who ensured that the 'divine' plan for Jesus' crucifixion happened, whilst Simon Peter tried to stop it, yet Judas is despised and reviled as the archetypal traitor and Simon Peter is the 'rock' upon which the Catholic Church is built.

One thing which is interesting about this document, the so-called Euangelion Ioudas (Gospel of Judas), is that it is one of the earliest recorded extra-biblical mentions of Jesus, and yet it's never cited as evidence for the historicity of the biblical Jesus, at least not the traditional citations.

Christian Democracy.

Have you noticed how a few words just never seem to crop up in the Bible at all. Words like:

• Democracy
• Vote
• Equal/Equality (as it applied to humans one with another)
• Consensus
• Parliament
• Election (as it applies to the selection of representatives

Why Should I Be A Vegetarian?

This will no doubt surprise my readers and followers on Twitter, but there is something I'm not sure about.

I'm not a vegetarian, but should I be?

You see, I know all living things are related and I can make a case for all living things being respected and having the right to life. I understand and can follow the logic of Richard Dawkins' illustration of why we should accord our great ape cousins at least some of the rights we grant ourselves. For those who haven't read this, it goes as follows:

Help! What Should I Do?

You know, you'll never believe this but the other day in Oxford I met someone who said he had heard about a man who could do amazing stuff. Some of the things he could do included:

• Flying. He can just rise up into the air at will and fly about, so he can walk across water without even getting wet feet.
• Turning things into other things. He can turn water into beer or anything else like wine.
• Curing sick people. He can tell what's wrong with people, even when they don't know they're sick, and can cure them just by touching them. They even get better just by touching his clothes.
• Letting people live for ever. Apparently he said if you believe in him you'll never die.

Pull The Other One Matthew!

Michaelangelo, Isaiah

One of the core beliefs of Christianity is that the birth of Jesus was foretold in the Bible. By circular reasoning, they say this:

1. Proves Jesus is the Messiah
2. Proves the Bible is their god's word because it makes accurate prophesies

This neatly ignores the fact that the stories of Jesus' birth were written by people who knew the prophecies and wanted us to believe Jesus's birth was prophesied by the then well-known prophets. The prophet they quote is of course Isaiah.

Let's take a look at this prophecy.

And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to war against it, but could not prevail against it. And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

Then said the LORD unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shearjashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field And say unto him, Take heed, and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted for the two tails of these smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin with Syria, and of the son of Remaliah. Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have taken evil counsel against thee, saying, Let us go up against Judah, and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the midst of it, even the son of Tabeal:

Thus saith the Lord GOD, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people. And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established.

Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD. And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her kings. The LORD shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy father's house, days that have not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria.

Isaiah 7:1-17

Isaiah
(Love the prickly pear cactus not introduced to the Middle East from the
Americas before the Sixteenth Century. Another prophecy?)

Isaiah then writes a lot of dire apocalyptic stuff about flies and bees and shaving (honestly!) and a man rearing a cow and some sheep. In the next chapter he takes a couple of paragraphs to boast about impregnating a prophetess (no ordinary woman for Isaiah!) claiming God told him to write in her with his 'man pen' (Isaiah 8:1-3). But let's not delve too far into Isaiah obvious ego mania here but just stick with this particular prophecy of a virgin conceiving and bearing a son who will be called Immanuel.

Firstly, this is quite probably a mistranslation. The original Hebrew text uses the term almah meaning 'young woman', that is, a girl who had not reached puberty. The Hebrew for virgin is bethulah. It has been argued that these two terms are synonyms but they are not. Almah would not be used to describe a sexually mature virgin and an almah may not necessarily have been a virgin. Almah clearly refers to the girl's physiological state and bethulah to her physical condition, or more precisely whether her hymen is intact or not.

So, when we see:

But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

Matthew 1:23

we can be sure that Matthew was using a Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, in which the Hebrew alma had been wrongly translated as παρθένα (parthenos). And this is a fairly good indication that he was trying to make sure his story had some scriptural basis and also that he was more familiar with Greek than with Hebrew.

Another problem with Matthew's use of this 'prophecy' is that nowhere else in the Bible is either the Messiah or Jesus ever referred to as Immanuel or Emmanuel.

But that is not the main problem with this prophecy.

The 'prophecy' very clearly, in the context of Chapters 7 and 8 of the Book of Isaiah is dealing with immediate events. Indeed in Chapter 8, almost casually, Isaiah refers to what seems to be his son by the prophetess whom he impregnated with his 'man pen', as O Immanuel. But the entire point of the prophecy seems to be that while this child is still young the enemies of Jerusalem will be defeated. And surely, for the supposed son of the Christian god, there would never be a time 'before [he] shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good' (Isaiah 7:16) would there?

But even that is not the major objection to this being a prophecy about Jesus, whom, so it is claimed, was sent to Earth to provide mankind with henceforth the only way to salvation and eternal life in Heaven.

The main objection is: if God had already decided that a Messiah was what mankind needed, and that this was the way he was going to do it, why did he wait so long before providing that means? Biblical scholars date the 66 books of Isaiah as written by several authors between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE with the relevant Chapter 7 written in the eighth.

We are expect to believe that, having decided what mankind needed was a saviour Messiah to be sacrificed for our sins, and having told Isaiah to tell us about it, this 'omnibenevolent' god then waited another 800 years before providing it!

But i the supposed need for a saviour goes right back to the notion of Original Sin by Adam and Eve, so why, if God knew it was going to need the sacrifice of his son, Jesus, to empower him to forgive us for that 'sin', why didn't he just impregnate Eve, have Adam kill her baby and have done with it? Why wait all that time, during which, presumably, tens of thousands, even millions of people had died without accepting Jesus, so were condemned to hellfire by God's indolence. Pull the other one...

God's Body

What's this strange passage from the Christian Bible all about?

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27

Think about this for a moment. Oh, I know die-hard Christians will say this refers to some sort of 'spiritual' image or likeness, whatever that is, but that can be easily dismissed. The word 'image' refers to something you can see. At a stretch it can mean a mental picture of something. So it very clearly means in the physical likeness of this god; looking like it, and whoever else it was referring to by 'our image'.

Memes And Genes: A Small Difference

Reading the introduction to Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" by Richard Dawkins, I came across a superb illustration of how memes can act just like genes and can give rise the a different phenotype.

Supposing a Martian geneticist visited Earth and carried out a study of humans, one thing would almost immediately recognised as a phenotypic difference between males. He would notice that some males have foreskins and some do not.

This set me thinking about how said Martian might interpret this and how this could lead to scientific discoveries maybe new to Martian science, some of which might be counterintuitive and hard for a Martian to believe.

To avoid some people's delicate sensitivities in these things, let's call these Type A and Type B males.

If this Martian geneticist knew nothing of human cultures and religions or about the memes by which we inherit these things, it would appear exactly as though this condition was genetically inherited. By and large, Type A males would have Type A fathers and, in those instances where they were not, looking at their grandparents might show interesting patterns of inheritance:

1. Maternal grandfather has the same Type as the grandson but the paternal grandfather has the other Type.
2. Paternal grandfather has the same Type as the grandson but the maternal grandfather has the other Type.
3. Neither of the grandfathers has the same Type as the grandson.

Moon's Origin. Have I Missed Something Here?

Findings Cast Doubt on Moon Origins - ScienceNOW:

I confess to being puzzled by the above article from Science NOW. The argument goes:

Most scientists believe Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon.
...

One way to test the hypothesis is to look at the isotopes of particular elements in rocks returned from the moon. Atoms of most elements can occur in slightly different forms, called isotopes, with slightly different masses. Oxygen, for example, has three isotopes: 16O, 17O and 18O, indicating differences in the number of neutrons each nucleus contains. Compare any two samples of oxygen found on Earth and you'll find the proportions of 16O, 17O and 18O isotopes are almost identical in the two samples. The proportions found in samples from meteorites and other planets like Mars, however, are usually different. So if you find that a sample has the same oxygen isotope composition as one from Earth, then it's very likely the sample came from our world.

Previous research has established that the oxygen isotope composition of lunar samples is indistinguishable from that of Earth. Since 40% of the moon is supposed to have come from Theia (which presumably would have had a different isotope composition), this might spell trouble for the giant impact hypothesis. But it's possible that Earth may have exchanged oxygen gas with the magma disk that later formed the Moon shortly after the collision, explaining why the results are the same.

In the new research, published online today in Nature Geoscience, geochemists led by Junjun Zhang at the University of Chicago in Illinois, together with a colleague at the University of Bern in Switzerland, looked at titanium isotopes in 24 separate samples of lunar rock and soil. The proportion of 50Ti to 47Ti is another good indicator of whether a sample came from Earth, and, just as with oxygen, the researchers found the moon's proportion was effectively the same as Earth's and different from elsewhere in the solar system. Zhang explains that it's unlikely Earth could have exchanged titanium gas with the magma disk because titanium has a very high boiling point. "The oxygen isotopic composition would be very easily homogenized because oxygen is much more volatile, but we would expect homogenizing titanium to be very difficult."

I'm no cosmologist, but to me it makes perfect sense for the resulting planet and the accretion disc of resulting magma to be fairly well homogenised on impact rather than the accretion disc being derived mostly from one or the other planet, so I would have thought a result showing the the proportions of 50Ti and 47TI being indistinguishable between the lunar and earth samples was a good indicator of a common origin rather than evidence against it.

But maybe I've misunderstood something...

'via Blog this'

C.S.Lewis, You Cannot Be Serious! 3

The Argument From Objective Morality.

The third in a series looking at C.S.Lewis' arguments for the Christian God.

This argument can be dismissed fairly easily. In essence it goes as follows:

1. Objective morals can only come from God.
2. Objective morals exist.
3. Therefore God exists.

Objective morals can only come from God.

Of course, Lewis was writing and broadcasting before the discovery of memes as units of cultural inheritance. Like Paley with his watch analogy, which he devised before Darwin had discovered a far more vicarious and logical explanation for the appearance of design in living things, Lewis was not aware of a perfectly rational explanation of a cultural origin of morals and of their evolution and the evolution of cultures containing them.

C.S.Lewis, You Cannot Be Serious! 2

Young Jew as Christ

Rembrandt c.1648 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Trilemma. The second in a series looking at C.S.Lewis' Christian apologetics.

The trilemma argument says you must choose between believing Jesus was one of:

1. Lunatic.
2. Liar.
3. Lord.

It would be doing Lewis an injustice to blame him for thinking up this appallingly dishonest argument all by himself because it was used at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century by preachers like Mark Hopkins, John Duncan, Reuben Archer Torrey and others, but his or not, C.S.Lewis found it to be a nice little earner, and got a BBC Radio series and a book, Mere Christianity, out of it.

It has been described as "The most important argument in Christian Apologetics" by other Christian apologists like Peter Kreeft. No! Seriously! I have certainly heard it delivered almost verbatim by some Anglican bishop or other on BBC Radio 4's Thought For Today; a religious interlude which is inserted for some unknown reason in an otherwise serious morning news programme. Nice work if you can get it.

Of course, all Lewis is doing here is producing an extended version of the false dichotomy fallacy. This fallacy is where the proponent of an otherwise unsupportable idea tries to present it as a choice between that and something completely absurd, or as the only reasonable choice. You see this used a lot when creationists attack science expecting you to believe that if science is wrong about something, the only alternative is to believe their favourite locally popular god must have been responsible. It only works if you fall for the idea that: a) science is wrong and; b) there is no other possible explanation, like a different scientific explanation, a different god, etc.

All the 'Trilemma' does is present a third option, a false trichotomy, in the hope that you won't think of a fourth, fifth or sixth, or more.

For example, there are at least two more which could (should?) be added:

4. Made Up.
5. Legendary.

Reading the Bible, which is, after all, the primary (indeed, only) source of any information about Jesus, and which Lewis himself used as his source of information, and seeing the several confused and often contradictory accounts of his life and teaching in it, the most vicarious explanation is one of these two, not one of the three Lewis presents as the only choices. I have previously written about these muddles and contradictions here and here.

This is also borne out by biblical historians, few, if any, would argue that: a) the Gospels were written by four different eye-witnesses to the accounts they describe; or b) that they were written contemporaneously with those events. There is very clearly development of a legend either based on a real figure or on one derived from several Jewish activists and teachers onto which the idea that he was a manifestation of the Jewish god Yahweh seems to have been grafted using old prophecies, mistranslated where necessary, to give it credence.

C.S.Lewis must have been aware of these possibilities yet chose to ignore them and present us with a narrow choice, the first two of which were almost unthinkable in those days - and indeed I know of no Atheist arguments that proposes that Jesus was mad and/or a liar, although suffering from some sort of psychosis can't be ruled out as a visit to practically any psychiatric ward can testify.

In effect, Lewis was arguing that Jesus must be God or you must be stupid. Only stupid people don't agree with Clive Staples Lewis!

And this is a person who earned his living as a thinker!

C.S.Lewis, You Cannot Be Serious! 1

Clive Staples Lewis
(29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963)

C.S.Lewis' renowned 'Argument From Desire' is one of Christian apologetic's more popular arguments for the existence of the Christian god.

It is also one of his more laughable arguments, of which there were several, and it is of course, like all apologetics, dishonestly presuppositional in that is assumes the answer then inserts that into the argument to make it come out the way the apologist wanted.

And the sheer arrogance of it is breathtaking!

Briefly, his argument was, "Every desire is necessarily a desire for something, and every natural desire must have some object that will satisfy it. Since humans desire the joy and experience of God, therefore there must be a God that will satisfy our desires." And of course that god must be the locally popular one!

He stated it reasonably concisely:

A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called "falling in love" occurred in a sexless world.

C.S.Lewis; The Weight Of Glory (1949)

Why We Need To Understand Evolution.

One of the things a proper understanding of evolution teaches us is humility. When I say a proper understanding, I don't mean to the sort of depths to which a research biologist would go, just the sort of level of understanding that you can get by reading a book or two written by people like Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould for people who don't have degrees in biology.

One of the things you learn is just how wrong your pre-conceptions were. For example, I bet most people who thought they knew what evolution was about, and who hadn't rejected it out of hand on religious grounds, thought evolution was all about some sort of 'ladder of evolution' with life arranged in a hierarchy with less evolved creatures at the bottom, leading up through more evolved creatures like reptiles, then mammals with apes towards the top and humans sitting on the top rung as the most highly evolved, and therefore most superior, of all life. Animals which obviously weren't ancestral to humans, like elephants, giraffes or bears, were just left clinging to the sides of the ladder, looking like mistakes and having no useful purpose other than as food, clothing or ornaments for humans.

The 'social Darwinists' took this one step further and arranged human life in the same sort or hierarchy, with, of course, their own 'race', and even their own social class, being the most evolved, so, sitting right on the top-most rung of this ladder of evolution sat the ruling class of the superior race with the others arranged in descending order below them so the lower orders of the lesser races were little different to the animals below them.

A basic understanding of evolution changes all that. With a basic understanding comes the realization that evolution is all about life diversifying like a branching tree and not one species giving birth to a more highly evolved one which in turn produces another 'new improved' model.

A basic understanding of evolution shows us that all species evolve and that every one is at the top of it's own 'ladder' of evolution with the rungs below occupied only by its direct ancestors. Humans are nothing special at all in this respect and the idea that one human race has more highly evolved skin, hair, noses or brains is incomprehensible. Whatever shape or colour we are is merely the result of our particular evolutionary line. We have all been evolving for the same amount of time. And the same goes for every other species, no matter that it has features which were found in our common ancestors. A lizard is not just an under-evolved mammal; it is a fully evolved lizard. A fern is not a plant that hasn't yet learned to grow flowers and bear fruit; it is a fully evolved fern, no less perfectly adapted to its environment than a rose bush or a daisy.

This realisation is humbling. It is humbling to know that, in the grand scheme of things, you are the result of billions of iterations of the perfecting mechanism of natural selection; that you are the descendant of survivors who never failed the fitness test. But mostly, it's humbling to know that so is everything else.

But there is another way in which an understanding of evolution is humbling; and this form of humility is something we are sadly lacking but desperately need right now.

Evolution is not, at its fundamental level, just about evolving genes. All replicators in a selective environment will evolve. As writers like Susan Blackmore have shown, humans, and to a lesser extent other species, have another set of replicators in addition to their genes. We have memes. Memes are units of cultural inheritance which we pass on to the next generation and, like genes, they form mutually beneficial alliances and 'memeplexes' which can behave in many ways like genes for skin colour, hair type, shape of nose or epicathic eye flaps. And of course a component part of most human cultures is a memeplex we call religion.

Our cultures are inherited in our memes but, unlike our genes which are fixed at conception, our memetic cultures are changeable. We can actually change our memes at will. Maybe not easily but we can do it. We can, if we wish and if we make the effort, move to another country, learn their language and songs, adopt their traditions and superstitions.

And this is where a basic understanding of evolution helps us understand cultures. One of the inherited memes common to just about all cultures is that our particular culture sits at the top of a ladder of cultural development, just like the mistaken view of evolution I've just described. But of course we know that, since all cultures are the result of an evolutionary process, and that all cultures have been evolving for the same amount of time, that all cultures are equally evolved.

This means there is no such thing as a superior culture or an inferior culture. And this explains why people get upset when you tell them your culture is the best and that they should become more like you if they want to be fully developed and 'normal'. It also explains why other people get upset when you assume they would be like you if only they had the where-with-all or that they are just longing to be like you if only their corrupt government would let them. And it explains why people get upset when you tell them they have the wrong religion.

If we could really understand this quite simple fact, it would then be less of a shock to find, when you invade their countries to overthrow their government, they don't dance in the streets and greet you with wild enthusiasm, grateful that you've come to teach them better ways, but that they are more likely to try to throw you out at the earliest opportunity.

In fact it should be no surprise that they react in exactly the same way that you would if they invaded your country or told you you have an inferior religion and need their help to learn the right one.

But then, if we understood that we're are all as good and worthwhile as one another, there would not be these wars and invasions in the first place and people would not kill one another in order to find out who has the best imaginary invisible friend and who is the one who knows the real truth.

None of this should really be surprising since human culture is merely an aspect of human biology and human biology is merely biology, of which evolution is a fundamental principle.

If we could only grasp that simple idea which a basic understanding of evolution and of the memetic nature of human culture can give us, we could end cultural chauvinism. Just as we are beginning to understand that we are better than no one and no one is better than us; that our race and our species are better than no other and none are better than ours, we should be beginning to understand that our culture is better than no other and none are better than ours.

Like us and our species and all living things, our cultures are all winners in the fitness test of evolution.

An understanding of physics and chemistry gave us weapons of mass destruction. An understanding of biology might just prevent us killing ourselves with them.