Anders Rasmussen Blog

Atheism 2.0 and an atheist sermon

2012-01-26T18:42:00.003+01:00

I noticed that I have recently started recommending things other do more than I produce new material myself (with regards to this blog). Nothing wrong with that I think!

Today I want to recommend one TED lecture by Alain de Botton who in beautiful English suggests that we can be atheists and yet steal the good things that religion has to offer. Don't accept the argument that if you are atheist you cannot celebrate christmas - I for one have always loved christmas - getting the family together and getting that Galaxy Nexus that I have dreamed about for a year (true story)!

Anyway, great speech about Atheism 2.0:

I also want to recommend, wait for it, a sermon. Yes, that is right a sermon (defined as an oration by a prophet or member of the clergy). However, this is a special type of sermon, it is an atheist sermon by Jeremy Beahan. Jeremy Beahan is one of the hosts for one of my favorite podcasts - reasonable doubts. In this sermon which is in a church Jeremy answers questions such as "from where do atheists get their morality" (and do they have any?).

Link to Sermon:
http://www.doubtcast.org/podcast/rd_extra_an_atheists_sermon.mp3

Thats it for now...

Exoplanets, Kepler 22b, and the speed of light

2011-12-15T10:02:00.000+01:00

About a week ago NASA announced the discovery of yet another exoplanet (so far about two thousand has been discovered and we are discovering more every week). What was special about this exoplanet which has the name kepler 22b, was that it was the most earth like discovered to date. Its radius is 2.4 times the radius of the earth and the orbital period is about 290 days. Depending on how much atmosphere the planet has its surface temperature would be either -11C or +22C (with atmosphere similar to hours). In other words, this could potentially be a planet that we could live on, just one problem, it is 600 lights years away from us... This means that it is hard to get to... Here is my calculation.

600 light years is how long light travels in 600 years

In one second light travels 300.000 kilometers or 7.5 times around the earth, or 3/4 of the way to the moon (384.000 kilometers)
In one minute light travel 60 x 300.000 kilometers = 18.000.000 kilometers, 18 million kilometers
In one hour light travels 60 x 60 x 300.000 kilometers = 1.080.000.000 kilometers, 1 billion kilometers
In one day light travels 24 x 60 x 60 x 300.000 kilometers = 25.920.000.000, 26 billion kilometers
In one years light travels 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 300.000 kilometers = 9.460.800.000.000, 9.5 trillion kilometers
In 600 years light travels 600 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 300.000 kilometers = 5.676.480.000.000.000, 5.7 quadrillion kilometers.

Some distances to compare this to:

The earths circumference is 40.000 kilometers
The distance to the moon is 384.000 kilometers
The distance to Mars from earth (when it is at the nearest point) is 54.000.000 kilometers
The distance to the sun is one AU which is 1.500.000.000 or 1.5 billion kilometers
The distance to uranus is 2.570.000.000, or 2.57 billion kilometers
Distance to nearest star, called Proxima centauri (which is not the sun) is 4.22 light years or 39.900.000.000.000 kilometers, or 39 trillion kilometers away

How long would it take to go to exoplanet Kepler 22b? Well, that depends on the speed of your spacecraft of course. According to wikipedia, the fastest spacecraft we have build so far is the helios probe (unmanned), which had a maximum speed of approximately 260.000 kilometers per hour or about 71 kilometers per second. If we assume that space research gets lots of money and manage to recruit clever scientists and we eventually get a spacecraft that goes more than 10 times as fast, say 1000 kilometers per second then it would take

5.676.480.000.000.000 / 1000 = 5.676.480.000.000 or 5.7 trillion seconds, which translates to 180.000 years, or about 6000 human generations. In other words, if you went not only would you have to spend the rest of your life travelling in space but your son or daughter would also have to spend their life on the spacecraft. Also your grandchild, grand grand child, grand grand grand child and grand grand grand grand grand grand grand (six thousand times), would have to live on the spacecraft. It seems likely that on the

In other words we need to find an exoplanet that is much closer and still earth-like, however, I am optimistic!

One way trip to Mars

2011-12-15T09:19:00.000+01:00

This week the Skeptics Guide to the Universe featured a fascinating interview with Lawrence Krauss, author of "the physics of Star Trek. The interview was about space exploration and human space exploration in particular.

Lawrence argued I think convincingly that if we want to bring humans to Mars it should be a one way trip. Reason? Bringing the fuel for the home trip to mars and taking all necessary safety precautions to bring the humans back to earth alive would probably cost 10-times as much as it would cost to simply send them there and then provision them with all necessities for the rest of their life.

Would anyone do this? According to Lawrence it was more difficult to find a scientist who would not do it. We should not see it as sending people to their grave, rather, think of it as building a permanent human coloni of Mars, and it suddenly sounds quite cool.

Lawrence Krauss published most of these thoughts in an NY Times article in 2009 which can be found here.

Could not have said it better myself

2011-12-09T20:51:00.001+01:00

While browsing the web looking for blog posts and articles looking at the happiness levels of religious and atheists I found the picture below on Atheists of Utah Valley. I really could not have said it better myself, so I guess that I do have things in common with somewhat extreme christians. Who would have guessed?

I looked at the church's homepage and I got the impression that they are a small rather typical american church filled with people with good intentions. Part of being a typical American church is also to believe that God wrote the bible, that armageddon will come and that all christians will rise again, among other things... A somewhat less charming belief is also stated on their unusually clear "What we believe page" (basically I am facing an eternal afterlife in the flames).

"WE BELIEVE... A Final Judgement Will Take Place for those who have rejected Christ. They will be judged for their sin and consigned to eternal punishment in a punishing lake of fire."

My Google Listen list - Good podcasts

2011-12-09T01:03:00.001+01:00

I have previously listed my favorite podcasts, however since that post I have found quite a few new podcasts that I really enjoy listening to. I thought I would simply give you my whole list of podcasts that I listen to. If I had to single out just a few podcasts that I look forward to a little more than the others it would be

Podcasts in English

60-second earth - Environment focused science news
60-second mind - "Mind" focused science news
60-second science - General science news
Astronomy cast - Good educational astronomy podcast with Pamela Gay
Brain Science Podcast - Good interviews with researchers, occasionally not the best sound quality
Common sense (Dan Carlin) - Interesting analysis of current global political situation
Dan Carlins hardcore history - Fantastic show focused on various historic episodes (often wars!)
Dr.Karl and the naked scientist - Another great science show that will give you a good feel for science
ESPN Soccernet podcast - My favorite soccer podcast, focused on the Premier league
Football Weekly - Another good soccer podcast
Global news (BBC) - Good news show, what you expect from BBC
Material World - Another science news podcast
Nature podcast - Good science podcast based on the journal
Neuropod - Science podcast focused on the brain, based on the journal Nature Neuroscience
Neuroscientist talk shop - In depth discussions with neuroscientists
NPR, planet money - One of my absolute favorite podcasts, analyzes global economics
Parenting within reason - Self explanatory, what advice is true about parenting?
Quackcast - Another one of my favorites, analysis of exactly what is wrong with alt.med
Rationally speaking - New York skeptics publication, general skepticism
Reasonable doubt - Critical analysis of religion and religious institutions
Science magazine podcast - Self explanatory...
Scientific American podcast - Another good science podcast
Stuff you missed in history class - Great history podcast, cozy
Stuff you should know - Also a very good and easy-listening podcast about stuff you should know
Skeptoid - 10 minute skeptical analysis of all kind of stuff
Techstuff - Good to know things about technology
The Economist - Analysis of the global situation the top class british journal
The Skeptics Guide to the Universe - One of my absolute favorites, the best skeptical pod
This American life - Very well produced stories about the United States
This week in tech - Weekly analysis of what is going on in technology
WNYCs Radiolab - Another well produced podcast that is focused on popular science

Podcasts in Swedish

P3 Dokumentär - Great documentaries, mostly about significant events in modern Swedish history - Swedish
Humanistpodden - Official podcast of Humanisterna
Godmorgon världen (P1) - Best weekly news summary in Sweden, by far - Swedish
Konflikt (P1) - Swedish radio program focused on cultural and military conflicts
Fysiopodden - Podcast that talks about training, fitness and health in general - Swedish
Medierna i P1 - Good swedish radio program about the media and its problems
Plånboken (P1) - Good program that talks mostly about private economy and consumer rights
Skeptikerpodden - The #1 swedish skeptical podcast, well produced with interesting conversations and interesting interviews

Backyard brains

2011-12-08T21:37:00.001+01:00

The Nature neuroscience podcast, also known as the neuropod had this an interesting clip about a company called "Backyard Brains". Backyard brains is a company who tries to bring neuroscience to the amateurs. In other words they try to make neuroscience instruments cheap. Cheap here means that they sell you a "spiker box" for 99 USD. What can a spike box do? A spiker box will let you record action potentials from live cells. Further increasing the "coolness" of their product is that they have iphone/android applications that will let you display the spikes in your smartphone. As soon as I get a little bit richer I will buy one and then publish recordings from whatever I can find right here on this blog. This is seriously cool (and a little nerdy) stuff. Go buy!

Backyard Brains hope that their endeavor will lead to amateurs going into neuroscience and expand the field just like amateur astronomers have made very important contributions to the study of astronomy.

To conclude, although I have never tried the spikerbox I just cannot conceive a scenario where I would not love this thing. I you are still skeptical, check out their video below, it will blow you away!

New Teaching Company Neuroscience series with Sam Wang

2011-12-05T11:20:00.001+01:00

Good news for everyone interested in hearing interesting and engaging neuroscience lectures. Sam Wang, who is in fact a big name in my own field (Cerebellum) has recently recorded a lecture series together with The Teaching Company. The lecture series is called Neuroscience in every day life and in the lecture series it seems (I have only read the titles of the lectures) that Wang touches upon basic neuroscience principles as well as the more sexy parts of Neuroscience (emotions, sex differences, happiness etc etc).

Although I have not listened to it myself I can testify that Sam Wang is a very good teacher. If you also take into account the fantastic quality of all productions from The Teaching Company I am sure no one will be disappointed.

Awesome TED lectures

2011-09-19T17:38:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to recommend two terrific TED lectures that I stumbled upon. First, the always fantastic lecturer Paul Bloom, from Yale University discusses what makes things valuable. Learn how much people would pay for George Clooney's sweat-shirt - and how much the price drops if it is "thoroughly washed" before you get it. I challenge anyone to listen to this lecture and tell me that you did not enjoy it.

The second video is also absolutely fascinating. Richard Resnick describes how genomic sequencing is speeding up and describes what this will do for you and your healthcare. Enjoy!

Catholic priests raping nuns...

2011-03-20T11:40:00.001+01:00

Ok, I know that all people can make mistakes and that there are many atheists who have done bad things, however, I must say that the priests belonging to the catholic church manages to make my jaw drop again and again. It was not too long ago that we heard about catholic priests (who are supposed to be celibate) abusing boys sexually. I personally don't mind that priests have sex as long as it is consensual (even though it strongly contradict their own moral teachings), but the way in which a large number of catholic priests have systematically abused boys in an inferior position, I think, is appalling. The fact that church leaders don't report such abuse to the authorities (e.g. the police) who are supposed to deal with it is likewise disgusting.

Now as if this was not enough, I just heard on one of my favorite podcasts, Reasonable Doubts, that catholic priests (primarily in Africa) have been raping nuns more or less systematically. The vatican has been receiving reports and of course, as usual, don't tell the authorities. In this article in the independent, you can find a description of one nun who was raped by a priest. The nun got pregnant, however, the "father" convinced (or forced?) her to have an abortion. You would think that is where it ends but its not. The nun actually dies during the surgery to remove the fetus, and guess which priest takes care of the funeral - yes you guessed it - the rapist.

This case may be particularly nasty but there are apparently many reports of nuns who have been convinced by fathers to take contraceptive pills. Again, personally I'am not against contraceptives but according to the catholic church the pill is a big no no. How these priests can live with themselves I do not understand...

Quirkology

2011-01-07T11:20:00.004+01:00

Just wanted to give a quick mention of Professor Richard Wiseman. If you are not already familiar with him I suggest that you go check out his stuff right now. He is always informative and entertaining at the same time.

If you have kids or just want to impress at a party I can highly recommend his top 10 quirky science tricks for parties and also ten more science tricks for christmas, both of which can be found on you tube.

If you like small puzzles and optical illusions then you should also check out his blog (a little teaser can be found below).

Why we should not base ethics on the bible...

2011-01-05T12:12:00.002+01:00

I am always amazed when christians question where an atheist can get his morals from. They always seem to explicitly or implicitly suggest that you need the bible to tell you right and wrong. The picture below is one example out of many where you would not want to follow your bible...

For more see http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (King James Version)

²⁸If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;

²⁹Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.

Difficult words:

Damsel = Young woman

Betrothed = Engaged

What it means to be a doctor

2010-11-30T19:26:00.003+01:00

Two nice quotes from one of my favorite podcasts: Quakcast

1. "Becoming a doctor mean learning to be comfortable with incomplete and changing information."

2. "Becoming a specialist is being ignorant... with style."

These quotes I think are funny and since I am also teaching at a medical school I can say that in my experience these quotes are also relatively accurate. I always get surprised at the many changes that can occur from one edition of a textbook to the next, although I must hasten to point out that there is a large proportion that does not change to. It gets even worse if you compare different textbooks or say journal papers.

Does this mean that doctors are merely shooting at random? No, they are (if they are good doctors) basing their decisions, diagnoses and treatments on the best available evidence - and that is the doctors which have the greatest success in terms of healthy patients (read Neurologica blog for more on this).

So if you are a doctor or becoming a doctor accept that there is rarely such a thing as perfect knowledge, and if you are a patient accept that doctors cannot always say things with perfect certainty...

Watch this if you are afraid of mobile phones or microwave ovens

2010-11-30T14:57:00.005+01:00

I have previously written about microwaves here and here. However, the fact is that even though I write about it sometimes there really isn't much to say except, fantastic technology, keep it coming. There are NO dangers associated with mobile phones or with microwave ovens (unless you stick your head in one and somehow manages to turn it on. Neither is there any reason to expect that these technologies could be dangerous.

If you want to hear this from a real expert there is a terrific lecture available on youtube which I admit, I found on the fantastic blog Bad Astronomy.

Here is the first part of the lecture.

The rest you can find here: part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

One statement that stuck with me was that the radiation you get from base stations (which many people worry about) is approximately equal to the radiation you get from the planet Venus (and as you know the radiation you get from venus is merely reflected sunlight).

Mystery explained? Why women live longer

2010-11-02T13:50:00.004+01:00

Since I started studying biology/neuroscience I have always been puzzled by the fact that no one has yet been able to explain why we age. This question may not have a simple answer. Perhaps it is one of those questions (like "what is life?") that will never really be answered, but rather re-formulated.

My own conclusion based on what I have read until now is that many different factors are involved in aging, including but not limited to 1) buildup of toxic materials in the body (from the environment as well as waste from your own body and 2) damage to DNA.

One related mystery is why women live longer than men? What is the cause of this unfair order? Until I read an article in Scientific American I always assumed that guys simply do more stupid things that sometimes kill us... The next explanation that comes to mind is that maybe our lives are just tougher, after all we always did all the difficult things while the women merely sits in their chairs, gossiping, problem solved, right?

Apparently not. It turns out that guys stupid behavior cannot account for the difference, and the latter explanation also fails because guess what, girls have been working to. Also, in the western world today men and women do pretty much the same things, and still we die earlier. Why?

The article in Scientific American suggests that the reason we die and the reason women live longer is that our self-repair mechanisms break down and that women's repair mechanism last longer and are more effective than men's. It is as if, after a certain number of decades, the body says that this body is now so crappy that it is no longer worth fixing, you will now be a burden for others so I will not repair you any longer.

Why would women have better repair? Because they give birth, and giving birth can be traumatic for many parts of the body. In order to recover from childbirth women need very effective repair mechanisms and as a side-effect of that, they also live longer...

Phil Plait - Don't be a Dick

2010-10-08T07:15:00.003+01:00

This will just be a short post about a 30min lecture I really recommend for all my fellow skeptics. Phil Plait is an astronomer, a blogger, a skeptic, and just a nice guy (I decided that after listening to him talk but I haven't met him so I guess I don't know that for sure).

In this video Phil Plait talks about skeptic manners. Which is the best way to get people to think more critically? Do you behave like a dick and call people stupid, laugh at their mistakes etc etc (which I admit, can sometimes be tempting), or do you try to take your time to calmly explain why you believe what you believe.

In Phil Plaits words - how many of you became a critical thinker because someone called you an idiot? I think one guy in the audience raised his/her hand...

Anyway - check out the video below, and if you are interested in astronomy, Phil Plaits blog is the place to go: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

Phil Plait - Don't Be A Dick from JREF on Vimeo.

Microwave Ovens

2010-09-14T09:56:00.002+01:00

Having grown up in Järna, which may be the most pseudoscience-dense place in Sweden I have learned that microwave ovens are dangerous and that it kills your food (yes that is the term you normally hear).

Their arguments, of course, rely heavily on the naturalistic fallacy i.e. they claim that heating using microwaves is somehow "unnatural", that is unlike conventional oven which they seem to consider "natural". It is as if electromagnetic radiation in the infrared spectrum is somehow more natural than electromagnetic radiation with microwave frequencies.

There are however also some more empirical claims used by people who are against microwaves. For example many people quote a "study" where they compared growth of plants which had received either microwaved water or water which had not been heated. It is claimed that the plants which got the microwaved water waned down and died. The plants which had just gotten normal water on the other hand flourished. According to microwave critics this shows that microwaving water takes out some sort of "life energy" out of the H2O molecules and therefore the plants die.

Snopes have tried to replicate this "study", but found out that it was impossible – they could not kill their plants with microwaved water…

Another empirical claim that microwave antagonists sometimes use is that microwaves are forbidden in Russia because they are so dangerous – this is just a simple lie.

One claim with some actual research behind it is that microwave ovens destroy certain vitamins in your food (see here for example). This claim is probably true but only if you compare microwaved food with raw food. The study quoted on health bulletin shows that meat heated in microwave ovens has 30-40% less vitamin B12 than raw meat. So if you start eating your steaks raw you can skip a glass of milk a day (which would otherwise compensate the loss).

In the same study you can find the following paragraph:

"Microwave ovens are widely used for cooking and food processing. Extensive studies (Cross and Fung, 1982; Hoffman and Zabik, 1985) have shown equal or better retention of some vitamins (B1, B2, B6, C, and folic acid) after microwave heating compared with conventional heating."

In other words, if you lack vitamins, cooking in your microwave can help you.

It is also interesting that otherwise environmentally conscious people are so against microwave ovens even though they save a lot of energy compared to conventional ovens.

So where does all this leave us? My conclusion is that microwave heating is a fast and convenient way of cooking. Don't put eggs or metal in there and don't overheat things so that you burn yourself. If you follow these guidelines a microwave oven will be a terrific assistant in your kitchen. Of course some things just taste better when you cook them in a conventional oven and in that case I am all for that…

If you want more on this topic I can recommend this episode on Brian Dunning's skeptoid.

My favorite podcasts - Best podcasts

2010-07-24T09:29:00.001+01:00

I have not been blogging for quite a while, however, this blog is not dead. The reason for my inactivity has been twofold. I have discovered podcasts (more about that in a moment) and I have become a father for the second time. These two "hobbies" of mine have consumed all my spare time and therefore the blog has suffered a bit, but I still feel I have a lot to write about and share with those who are interested.

If you have read any of my previous posts you will probably know that I am a great fan of The Teaching Company, a company that offers great courses for download (read my previous posts here.

Recently I have however mostly been listening to podcasts and I thought I would write a little about my favorite podcasts here. Unlike the teaching company courses, podcasts are normally free to download, although some depend on donations.

1. Skeptics Guide to the Universe - This is the podcast that I look forward to the most every week. Host, Steven Novella (a neurologist) and his fellow rouges discuss science news and discoveries from a skeptical perspective. You learn a lot of science by listening to this show and it is also highly entertaining in my opinion. Fantastic show really.

2. Skeptoid - Another excellent learning resource. Brian Dunning guides you through original sources on many issues including "was the pyramids built by slaves", "is asparthame dangerous (its not)", "organic vs conventional farming", "roswell" and many other topics. Dunning is also not afraid to admit that the jury is still out there if that is the case - he never makes conclusions that go beyond the evidence he has presented - great podcast.

3. Hardcore History and Common Sense - Reporter and excellent storyteller Dan Carlin is the man behind both of these two podcasts. In Hardcore History Carlin gives you some of the best accounts of various historical episodes that I have heard - I especially liked his four part podcast on "Ghosts on the Osfront" about operation Barbarossa - if you are the least bit interested in the second world war this is a must. In "Common Sense" Carlin sits and talks for himself about current events in the news, giving his perspective on things - and according to himself he always manages to piss of someone...

4. Dr.Karl and the Naked Scientist - Great science podcast. Although perhaps not as entertaining as the Skeptics guide to the galaxy this podcast is always very informative and it takes you through the biggest current science news in a way that most people can manage (unlike actually reading Nature and Science which many people find difficult). Some programs are Q&A where listeners can ask about any science question. I always learn a great deal from listening to this podcast.

5. This Week In Tech (TWIT) - This podcast is all about gadgets and new technology and is a great way for me to satisfy my need to hear about the most recent developments. If this is something you like too then I highly recommend this podcast.

6. 60-second science podcasts. "Scientific American" gives you three different 60-second long podcast where they take one news item and explains it very clearly in about 60 seconds, quite impressive if you ask me. Since I am into neuroscience my favorite is 60 second psych, but there is also 60-second earth and then there is the more general 60-science. They also have a longer show called Science Talk where they interview authors of important scientific publications. Also a great show.

7. NeuroPod - Official podcast of the journal "Nature Neuroscience". It simply takes you through their publications - much faster than it takes you to read the journal. Good resource for anyone into the field of Neuroscience.

8. ESPN Soccernet podcast - I am a science nerd and but I also love soccer and especially the Premier League. This podcast gives you all the analysis and transfer gossip you can handle.

9. Quackcast - Mark Crislip gives all medical quacks out there a hard time. If you think that vaccinations are dangerous or that conventional medicine is just one big conspiracy I hope that you will give this podcast a chance.

10. Rationally Speaking - Massimo Pigliucci has another another great podcast based on a skeptical approach. Because he is a philosopher he also gives a different perspective than Steven Novella from Skeptics Guide to the Galaxy. Another podcast which is also interesting and informative.

Swedish podasts:

1. SkeptikerPodden - Sveriges "Skeptics Guide to the Universe". Underhållande och informativ och med intressanta reportage. Min favorit är när ett Medium får kontakt med en död mor - bara det att modern aldrig var död... hmmmm. Bra jobbat SkeptikerPodden!

2. Godmorgon Världen - Enligt mig det bästa veckomagasinet med nyheter som finns.

The placebo response as a form of classical conditioning

2010-03-06T13:56:00.002+01:00

I have already written a few posts about the pros and cons of The placebo effect. The placebo effect can loosely be defined as the effects you get when you think you are receiving medical care, be it psychological counselling or an injection of some substance.

I have also written previously about classical conditioning (see for example Learning described at the cellular level: Finding from our laboratory in Lund). Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which you pair a neutral stimuli such as a tone, a light, a touch, a picture, a thought or something else with another stimulus that has an associated reflex such as a puff of air in the eye (causes you to blink), a punch in the face (also causes you to blink), an electrical shock (causes fear and pain), or a shot of morphine (causes you to enter heaven for a short while).

If you present a neutral stimulus to someone and then, directly afterwards a reflex eliciting stimulus to the same person, and then repeat this procedure many times, then you will eventually notice that merely presenting the neutral stimulus can cause the person to perform the reflexive behavior that was formerly associated only with the second stimulus.

For example, play a tone just before giving an air-puff to the eye of your participant, over and over again, and you will eventually see that the participant blinks when he or she hears the tone. Show someone a picture just before you give that person an injection of morphine, and eventually (after a number of repetitions), that person will feel as if he or she was in heaven just from looking at the picture.

I don't know whether the relationship between the placebo effect and classical conditioning has become obvious to you yet, but if not, let me spell it out. Say that you have a spinal injury causing permanent and intensive pain. In some cases the only available therapy is regular morphine injections. You go to your doctors, enter the hospital, the doctor takes out an injection needle, and sticks it through your arm into a vein and injects a fluid which contains morphine. Notice that all these experiences leading to up the injection of the morphine can work as a neutral stimuli that is consistently associated with an injection of morphine. In other word, it is likely that one of these neutral stimuli such as seeing the injection needle (just like seeing a nice steak will cause an increased saliva production (at least for me)), will start processes in your body similar to the ones you experience when you get the actual morphine injection.

This was a hypothetical example for which I have no reference, however, you can find examples in the scientific literature which quite strongly supports the idea that placebo's sometimes are a form of classical conditioning.

For example it has been shown that people who are allergic to pollen, can get allergic reactions just from seeing a flower, even if it is made of plastic and therefore has no pollen.

In a more extreme example, a boy was getting chemotherapy to treat his cancer. The chemotherapy was paired with a specific taste and smell. Later on, the boy was presented with only the taste and smell and surprisingly (or not), the doctors observed the same effects as during the "real" chemotherapy...

These results have all but convinced me that there is indeed many parallells between the placebo effect and classical conditioning. Further these findings do suggest that you can help patients quite a lot without actually giving them "real" medicine. However, I also think it is wise not to go to far with this (see again: The placebo effect).

At the very least, this is a truly fascinating subjects that I, for one, will continue to follow.

Lund University Blog Portal

2010-01-19T15:44:00.002+01:00

My university (see picture) has recently started a blog portal on the web.

If anyone out there would like to read what other employees at my University think you should check out this page:

nyheter.blogg.lu.se

Our tiny planet in our huge Universe

2010-01-13T22:18:00.005+01:00

I have always been fascinated by astronomy and before I decided to go into neuroscience to study our amazing brain I had dreams about studying astronomy. I personally cannot understand how people can avoid being overwhelmed by our universe.

Our earth is a pretty big place, yet planets such as Saturn and Uranus are much bigger. Jupiter, however, is larger than all the other planets in our solar system combined into one planet - now that is big. Compare Jupiter to our sun and Jupiter looks like a pea next to
football, put another way - the sun is huge and massive! Still, our sun, which we rely on so intimately, is one of a hundred billion stars in our massive galaxy "the milky way". The Milky Way is a hundred thousand light years across - meaning that it takes light 100.000
years to reach us from the other end of the galaxy (yet the light can whizz around the earth 7 times in one second). Our sun, which is huge, is not even close to one light year across - rather it is about one light minute...

Our huge Milky Way galaxy containing a hundred billion stars and with a diameter of about 100.000 light years is small compared to the local cluster of galaxies (a small cluster of half a dusin galaxies), which measured millions of light years across.

I think you see where this is going... Our local cluster, which is absolutely humungous, is tiny compared to the observable universe. The most distant galaxies that can be seen are about 14 billion (that's 14.000.000.000) light years away - suggesting that the observable universe has a diameter of maybe 28 billion light years. Our local cluster of galaxies is tiny in comparison...

Still, theory suggests that our 28 billion light year observable universe is just a small fraction of the true size of the universe (we cannot see the whole universe because galaxies far away may be travelling away from us faster than the speed of light in which case their light will never reach us). Maybe the observable universe is just "one billionth" of the size of our true universe.

At last - many theorists believe that our universe, in which we are much smaller than a grain of sand in the Sahara dessert, is but one out of a large number of universes...

I don't know about you, but these numbers make my heart beat faster. I feel small and improbable, but also grand, lucky and inspired - it turns all my daily woes into experiences - I feel lucky for having experienced what it feels like to be sad, angry or happy - I feel
lucky for being able to study all the grand aspects of nature - from our huge universe to our fantastic brains.

Monkey's sacrifice their juice to watch "porn"

2009-12-15T00:00:00.003+01:00

It is no news that porn cosumption on the internet is huge. When researchers in Montreal wanted to compare students who did cosume porn on the internet with students who did not consume the same, they were unable to find and male heterosexual students who had not looked at porn on the internet at all. The average age at which these students first saw porn was ten(!). Recent, unconfirmed estimates in Sweden suggests that more around 80-90% of male students consume porn over the internet.

There are also some interesting "cultural differences" this article (in Swedish) claims that the mormon dense state of Utah, consumes much more porn than for instance Montana. Perhaps most amazingly, when a county in Sweden investigated how their employees used their work computers they found that to a large extent they were used for activities such as file sharing and pornography. One employee actually spent 75% of his working hours looking at porn...

Now, it turns out that getting excited by 2D depictions of the other sex is not one of the uniqly human traits. Monkey apparently like porn too. In fact this scientific article shows that monkeys are willing to give up some juice (which they like alot) if they then get to watch pictures of the perineal area of female monkeys (perineal area is scientific name for the anus and vagina area.

Thiomersal

2009-11-27T23:07:00.002+01:00

To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, that is the question. At least in Sweden, an intense debate has been going on recently due to the new influenza H1N1. Here I will not discuss whether or not it is a good idea to take the vaccination, rather I would like drive home another message - Thiomersal, which can be found in the H1N1 vaccine is not dangerous.

Thiomersal is an ingredient in the new swine flu vaccine. Thiomersal contains 50% mercury - a substance that is indeed very toxic. Drink a 10 grams of mercury and you will die from mercury poisoning. Unless you have a deathwish it is not normal for people to drink 10 grams of mercury, however, some traditional chinese medicines contains a few grams of mercury and taking these regularly might give you mercury poisoning. Indeed, a recent study found that for 64% of a sample of different traditional chinese medicines, taking the recommended weekly dose would result in mercury or arsenic intake significantly above the safety limit. What is the safety limit for mercury? It is around 1700 micrograms weekly.

Ironically this means that taking these so called "natural" chinese medicines can give you mercury poisoning. How much mercury is there in a shot of swine flu vaccine? Judging from the number of articles this issue has produced it has to be alot right? Five micrograms is the answer! In other words, take the natural medicine and you will get more than 1700 micrograms of mercury, take the highly controversial vaccine and you get 5 micrograms... By the way, fish is allowed to have as much as 500 micrograms of mercury per kilogram. So eating a fish will give you much more mercury than taking a shot of the vaccine.

I talk to a lot of people who are extremely skeptical towards the medical industry, WHO, and doctors in general. Fair enough, the medical industry wants to make money, and the WHO propably have some sort of agenda and perhaps they do not want to put focus on potential side effects on a vaccine that can potentially save a lot of lives. Doctors, well maybe they are to some extent indoctrinated by the medical industry and WHO. My advice is don't trust the expert, but trust the evidence and take the numbers I have just presented into account. Everything is toxic if you get too much of it, but small amounts of something (even mercury), is rarely dangerous...

What should you believe in? Shermers Baloney detection kit

2009-07-26T13:04:00.007+01:00

When someone makes a claim, how do you decide whether to believe in that or not? If you believe everything anyone has told you, then you will soon have many many contradictory beliefs. Even if you only listen to people around you, you will still get contradictory information - all claims cannot be true. So how do you decide who to believe in?

Micheal Shermer, a famous sceptic suggests that we ask ourselves the following questions when we decide whether to believe in something. Why should you trust Shermer? Don't! You should question him just like everyone else, he is certainly a man with an agenda, so listen to someone who does not agree with Shermer and decide for yourself. Anyway here is what Shermer suggests you ask yourself when you hear a claim.

How reliable is the source?
Does the source often make similar claims?
Has the claim been confirmed elsewhere?
Does the claim fit with the way the world works?
Has anyone tried to falsify the claim?
What does the majority of the evidence point to?
Is the source basing their claim on science?
Is there positive evidence in favour of the theory (or is it only negative evidence)?
Does the new theory account for as many phenomenon as the old theory?
Are personal beliefs or ideologies drive the claim?

Carcinogens in natural foods - the Ames test

2009-07-24T23:09:00.005+01:00

I have previously written about the difference between natural foods and "unnatural foods" in terms of how much carcinogens they contain. I did one post on "Irrational fear of pesticides", and another post that I called "natural foods contain more carcinogens than unnatural foods".

Just now I found a video clip from Physics for Future Presidents, a UC Berkeley lecture series that you can watch for free online, in which Richard Muller, an entertaining physicist explains what this is all about. Watch and enjoy.

Cognitive dissonace, therapy, UFO's wine and how to get loyality

2009-07-21T09:11:00.008+01:00

Imagine you are a college student who has agreed to participate in a psychology experiment. When you come to the lab you are asked to perform the most boring task you have ever tried, you are extremely bored but you still complete the experiment so that you do not have to come back another time to do another experiment.

After you are done the experimenter tells you that there is another participant waiting outside and that it would be terrific if you could try to convince him or her that the task is fun and interesting and thereby increase motivation a little bit. Since you are a nice person and don't want to block psychological research you agree to this.

Alternatively, after the experiment you are asked whether you would like to convince the next participant that the experiment is fun and interesting and (crucially), you are offered 20 dollars for agreeing to this...

Now how do you think the average person would think and act in the two situations described above? Would you put in more effort if you were paid than if you were not paid? Interestingly, most participants put in a lot more effort in convincing the next participant that the experiment was fun and interesting if they had been given no money! Why? The reason is "cognitive dissonance" (a term first coined be Leon Festinger forces the participants to actually believe that the experiment was fun and interesting. After all, why would I stand here and convince a stranger that an extremely boring task is actually fun and interesting...? Do I get paid...? No! Well, I guess it is because I did in fact enjoy the tasks a little bit... hmmm... yeah, it was indeed great fun... and very interesting as well... that must be it.

Cognitive dissonance refers to the unpleasant state in which your behavior is in dissonance (does not agree) with your beliefs or thoughts. "This experiment was extremely boring (belief)" and "convincing someone that it is fun and interesting (behavior)" does not go well together. Either you have to change your behavior (which is sometimes impossible if you have already done it), or you change your beliefs (which is what most people does). The third alternative is to live knowing that you acted in a way that contradicted your beliefs - hypocrisy.

Indeed when participants were later asked whether they enjoyed the experiment or not, the ones who did not get paid claimed that it was much more fun that the participants who received payment. After all, the paid participants only tried to convince the next participant because they were paid - no dissonance there...

What does this have to do with loyalty? Here is a lesson. If you are going to start an organization or a political party or whatever, and if you need some people who are loyal and energetic about the business, do not pay them... If you pay them, then in their head they can say to themselves that I am doing it because of the money. If they do not get any money, they can only say to themselves that I am doing this because I like it - and that is the best type of employee or member.

Another example: Say that you are a therapist or some sort of advisor. If you want people to value your service, take high fees! If you do this your patient or client will think to themselves "why am I paying so much money for this", well I guess that it is because it is so damn good, after all, who pays a lot of money for therapy that isn't really working or an advisor who does not give good advice? Some people do of course, but it will be very difficult to admit that to yourself, it is easier to think that the service you got was worth the money, that way you avoid cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger, the inventor of the term "cognitive dissonance" in his book "When prophecy fails" used the example of a doomsday cult who was expecting the end of the world. Festinger infiltrated this group lead by Mrs.Keech. The group believed that the earth would end in a great flood before 21st of December, 1954. Everyone on earth was going to die except this little cult of true believer who was going to be picked up by a flying saucer on the 20th of December 1954. Before midnight the group gathered outside, waiting for the flying saucer. When the clock turned 12AM, nothing happened... but wait, there was another clock which was only 11.55. So they wait another 5min, but still nothing happened... Mrs.Keech cries... The groups’ waits outside until 4AM when suddenly Keech receives a message saying that this little group of true believers managed to change God's mind - and that therefore he (or she) would not flood the earth after all... A nice solution to the dissonance that would otherwise make them feel very very stupid. Rather than admitting that they were simply wrong, the group decided to believe in an ad hoc story that would make sense of things

One last example (apparently this is true only for trained wine tasters and not for lay persons):Experiments show that expensive wines taste better than cheap wines, even if the different bottle contains exactly the same wine... Why? Because no one wants to be the person that goes out and buys an expensive bottle of wine that is no better than a cheap bottle, that would be stupid and no one wants to be stupid...

When is butter no longer butter?

2009-07-11T21:08:00.007+01:00

In Steven Pollock's TTC course on "particle physics for non-physicists" he asks: how many times can I cut a piece of putter and still have butter?

If I take a package of Bregott (the typical swedish brand of butter) and cut it once I think that most people would agree that I will get two pieces of butter. But what happens if I cut it again and again and again - after a certain number of division I may have a piece that is a couple of nanometers in width - is that butter? I can make it even smaller and I will end up with a piece that is one angstrom across - the size of an atom and as far as I know butter is not in the periodic table...

The point I guess is that everything around us that we can touch is made up of protons, neurtrons and electrons - or if we go further down the reductionist tree - quarks and leptons. Butter is simply quarks and leptons arranged in a certain pattern with certain forces acting on it, and the same is true for us - we are also just quarks and leptons arranged in a particular pattern. In other words we are made out of the same building blocks as butter. Since our quarks and leptons respond to the forces of nature the same way leptons and quarks in butter does - we should have as much free will as my package of Bregott in the fridge...

2,5 Billion(!) dollars spent on search for alternative therapies...

2009-06-28T13:00:00.004+01:00

Often when I debate alternative therapies or remedies with people they claim that there is no evidence in favor of alternative methods and therapies because no one bothers to investigate (and find the amazing effects), or that no money is given to investigators who want to test these remedies i.e. that the grant managers are against alternative therapies. These excuses are now no longer valid since the American government has spent 2,5 Billion dollars testing alternative therapies.

As was known and not unexpected from my point of view is that some alternative therapies do show minor benefits. Acupuncture works for certain things, yoga helps you relax which also results in other spin off effects. However a large majority of the therapies tested proved to be no better than placebo (if you think that placebo is "good enough" read my post here).

Also remarkable is how easy it seems to be to get a grant if you wan't to study alternative therapies (which by definition do not have a solid scientific theory behind them). In one instance 2 million dollars were given to study whether accupressure could help people loose weight. Now this large sum of money was given despite the fact that a pilot study on 60 participants had failed. The grant was given even though no scientist have ever found any evidence of meridians (in accupressure you are supposed to press on these meridians). I could go on, but the essence of the matter is that these 2 million dollars were given to a study that, judging from the evidence, had extremely low plausibility - I would even go as far as to say that if accupressure would prove to have an effect (beyond placebo) we would face a paradigm shift in biology.

There are of course some positive aspects of this endeavour. I suppose that it is normally good to test whether a really popular type of therapy works. However, the question is whether the people using a particular therapy cares about the outcome of a scientific study - my guess is that they will only care if it gives them a positive results, otherwise it is just biased scientists. I also have trouble seeing where to put the line, there are some really crazy ideas out there and if we would start to research everything that is getting popular we would end up spending huge amounts of money on evaluating pure nonsense.

I would personally prefer that grants are given to those who have good reasons for studying whatever it is they want to study, today that is not the case...

Norwegians going to hell...

2009-06-20T07:12:00.005+01:00

A few stats about Norway from this cartoon...

1. They are the most peaceful nation in the world

2. They have the highest standard of living

3. Unemployment is below 2%

4. They are the best educated people in the world

5. They have the highest literacy, and...

6. 70% of Norwegians are atheist

See also my post on religiosity and welbeing of a nation here, or read the post where I found this picuture here.

Truth about the Atkins diet...

2009-06-01T20:07:00.015+01:00

Would you like to be able to eat dishes such as the one above, and get thin at the same time? According to Robert Atkins, the man behind the infamous "Atkins diet", you can. I have quite a few acquaintances who have tried the Atkins diet and quite a few of those say that it has worked rather well for them. I also know of people on whom the diet did not have a huge effect, but perhaps they have not been very disciplined?

By nature I am skeptical of anything that sounds extraordinary, and when someone comes and claims that you can eat as much meat,fat sauce, cream, chicken etc etc as you like, AND lose weight, that, to me, is an extraordinary claim! Sometimes such radical claims turn out to be right, however most of the time they are wrong...

The bottom line of the Atkins diet is quite simple: avoid carbohydrates, especially fast carbohydrates, anything else is pretty much alright. To be a bit more precise you are supposed to avoid foods that have a high "glycemic index" or GI. Products that increase your blood sugar fast have high GI (examples would be sugar, white rice, pasta, beer, etc).

According to Atkins (see picture below), his diet works because the body requires carbojydrates to store fat, in other words, if there are no carbohydrates the fat will go right through the body. This is also why, according to Atkins and his followers, you can eat as much as you like, be it the ordinary 2000 calories or even 4000 calories in one day, and you will still loose weight.

So what is the truth here? I am of course no expert on these matters, but it seems to me that accumulating evidence clearly suggests that although the Atkins diet may work, it doesn`t do it the way Robert Atkins thought it did. Rather, the Atkins diet works because you eat less when you are on it. It turns out that when the brain decides whether we are hungry or not, and in extension whether we should crawl over to the fridge and get a slice of pizza, one factor that is taken into account is peptide YY. If there is a lot of peptide YY in the body then you are full, if there is little you should eat. What causes the release of peptide YY? You guessed it, proteins does, but not carbohydrates. This means that if you eat say 1500 calories of protein then you get a lot of peptide YY and therefore you feel full and stop eating. However, if on the other hand you eat 1500 calories worth of potatoes, little peptide YY is released and therefore will still feel hungry and unless you are one of those people with amazing self control, you will keep eating... Read more about this in this article from the economist.

The conclusion that the Atkins diet works because you eat less and not because you stop storing fat has been further confirmed by a recent large Harvard study. In this study they had their subjects eat the same amount of calories, but varied the source of those calories. Some subjects were given mostly carbohydrates, some were given mostly fats, and some were given mostly protein - but all got the same number of calories. Who lost most weight? According to Atkins theory, the fewer carbohydrates you eat, the more you should loose in weight, but this was not the case. The results showed that all the different groups lost equal amounts of weight.

So the bottom line of all this is that if you want to loose weight, eat less calories. One way to achieve this is to eat a lot of protein and little carbohydrates, because you will not be as hungry...

Lecture with Philip Zimbardo - How good people become evil

2009-05-31T14:17:00.000+01:00

I just came home from a brilliant lecture by Philip Zimbardo, a professor in social psychology at Stanford University, US (see picture). Rarely do I attend lectures that are as informative and above all inspirational as his, if you ever get the chance to listen to him, don't hesitate.

The lecture today which was held in Lund, where he is going to receive an honorary doctorate, had three parts in it. The first, and the most shocking was about evil and the psychology of evil. Zimbardo's hypothesis is that evil act are often a result of situational factors (rather than say the personality of the individual). He provided a detailed account of the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) that he conducted back in the 70s. In this experiment ordinary healthy youngsters were assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a fake but realistic prison setting. The original plan was that the prisoners would be incarcerated for two weeks, however, after six days the guards abusive behavior had completely broken down the prisoners and the experiment had to be halted (see video).

In todays lecture more focus was put on another episode which lends support to Zimbardo's hypothesis, namely the horrendeous abuse that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The night shift which was never supervised by superior officers abused prisoners in a truly creative and sadistic fashion. Furhtermore, as is evident when you look at pictures from this episode (you can simply google "Abu Ghraib" if you want to see them) the guards appeared to take joy in these acts. Some pictures shows smiling guards giving thumbs up over a pile of naked and tormented prisoners...

What are the situational factors that contribute to this type of evil? Well accoring to Philip Zimbardo one factor is deindividuation - making peope anonymous. In the stanford prison experiment guards were dressed in uniform and were asked to wear reflective sunglasses, and prisoners were referred to by number - never name. Also important was the absence of checks, which was especially evident in Iraq. No superior officers ever came to check on the night shift - had someone done so it is likely that the abuse would have been reported. To further drive this message home, Zimbardo points out that anthropological studies show that cultures were it is custom to change the appearence of soldiers (normally assimilating them into some sort of standard), are much more aggressive and lethal than cultures were you are the same person when you are home with your familiy and when you are a warrior - such cultures show less aggression in conflict.

Despite these insights into the darkness of humanity - Zimbardo wants to give us an optimistic message - namely that it does not take alot to become a hero. Forget about Batman, Superman and also forget about Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa (who may not have been a very nice woman after all). Sure, these persons and superheros are great, but according to Zimbardo most heroes are ordinary folks who find themselves in an extreme situation and then decide to act the way they ougth to. In Abu Graib the heroic act occured when Joe Darby saw the pictures and decided that he had to stop the abuse.

Consciousness is a byproduct

2009-05-22T08:00:00.000+01:00

Intuitively most people think that what we do is mediated by our consciousness. In other words, when I decide to raise my arm it is because I made some sort of conscious choice in my brain which then resulted in signals going down my corticospinal motor pathway and out to the muscles in my arm.

I think that this is wrong. What is going on rahter, is that after the signal telling my muscles to contract have left my brain, then we become aware that this is the case. In other words being aware of what you do is merely a sort of byproduct, or epiphenomenon if you want to use a more academic language.

What is the evidence for this you might ask and I may answer what evidence do you have to support that our conscience can move an arm? However, I can do better than that because it turns out that there is indeed experimental evidence, produced by Benjamin Libet, suggesting that our consciousness is a byproduct. Benjamin Libet's subject were asked to do a very simple motor task, namely flex their index finger, they could to this whenever they wanted to. Libet wanted to measure the timing of three things, first when the muscle activity in the finger started, he did this using EMG electrodes which has high precision. The second variable he wanted to measure was when the brain activity leading to the action started, this was done using EEG scalp electrodes which like EMG has high temporal precision in the millisecond range. The third and perhaps most crucial variable Libet wanted to measure was when the conscious intention to flex the finger came. To do this he had a type of clock in which one arm would go a full revolution in 2,5 seconds. His subjects were told to report where the arm on this clock was when they first intended flex their finger.

One would expect that if indeed we first intend to do something and then do it (which is a very intuitive scenario I will admit), if this is so then the flexing of the finger should occur subsequent to when the subject reported their intention. However, this was not the case, rather the flexing of the finger occured quite a while (approximately 500 milliseconds) before the conscious intention. The conclusion from this is that the brain knows that it is going to do something before the person does, or to be more precise, the part of the brain that handles motor initiation first do its thing, then after that the information is given to the part of the brain that mediates conscious awareness.

Many people when they hear this draw very radical conclusions, such as, why should we punish people if they do not have free will, or why should I care about anything, or do anything, what prevents me from becoming a nihilist. I one thinks about it, these conclusions are (at least in my opinion), unwarrented, but nevertheless interesting. I have touched upon these subjects before Perhaps they will be the topic of a later post...

The pope: condoms don't help against HIV

2009-03-20T08:24:00.013+01:00

It is perhaps old news that the Catholic Church is not a fan of condoms; however, they are rarely as blunt about it as the other day. Pope Benedictines, a man who seems to be dreaming of past times (medieval times), has now publicly announced that condoms is not the way to go if you want to stop HIV. Indeed, the pope is even claiming that condoms make the problem worse because people have more sex.

What evidence does he have for this claim? None, of course, the Catholic Church does not seem to know what evidence means. Their method for finding the truth is asking the pope and whatever he says is the truth, never mind that there are numerous studies showing that the pope is simply wrong in his statement.

Rarely does the distinction between the scientific method and the catholic (or religious) way become so clear. Do you want to trust what the pope says just because he is the pope, or do you want to trust people who have actually gone out and looked at the effects of condom use? Know that choosing the latter will make you a heretic in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Religion or Science? Irrationality or Rationality? Your choice...

States in bad shape = religiosity

2009-03-16T20:19:00.004+01:00

A recent Gallup poll has shown an impressive positive correlation between how religious the inhabitants are and how bad they are of. In other words, this means that if you have a nation that is in a poor state, then your people are likely to turn to religion for guidance, or meaning or whatever you would like to call it. There is of course another possibility namely that first a people become religious, and then the state starts to tear apart. I personally don't believe in the latter possibility, rather, as I have argued here, I think that religion is where people who have lost meaning try to find their answers.

This gallup poll should also be seen as an important piece of information in the debate on whether religion makes people happier. There are indeed a few studies that have looked at this, and they tend to show that people who have religion, everything else being equal, are happier than people who are not religous.

This gallup poll shows, however, that on a global scale, religious people are not happier than non-religious people (assuming that the average citizen in Bangladesh or Congo kinshasa are not as happy as the average American or Swede).

Good, free, applications for Nokia N95, symbian & java

2009-03-16T14:27:00.000+01:00

Here is another post which may not exactly fit the profile of my blog however I know that many people are looking for good programs to their mobile and I have tried many different programs.

Below I have listed my favorites (some I have mentioned previously).

From Beta labs (free programs from Nokia)
1. Sports Tracker (application can be found at beta labs). This program I have written about before here. Basically it lets you record all of your training activity and it works very nicely with the GPS - allowing you to see exactly where you are. The most neat features you will detect when you run the same track more than once. When you do this you can compete with yourself, see how far ahead (or behind) you are compared to last time (or another time if you prefer). For me this is a great motivator...

2. Audiobook player. I have briefly mentioned this application before as well. It allows you to reduce the size of an audiobook to about one fifth, and the audiobook player that you install on the phone can keep track of where you are in many different books simultaneously. I use this application to listen to all my teaching company courses in the car or in the kitchen. Well done beta labs!

3. Wellness Diary. Yet another application from beta labs. This little program will keep track of and plot graphs on any health related variable including but not limited to, hours of sleep, steps per day, calori intake, waist circumference, weight, hours of exercise, stress etc etc. This app also works great with both sports tracker (see above) and step counter (see below). When you start wellness diary it will automatically import data from step counter and sports tracker.

4. Step counter. This is a very simple app which consumes very little energy. It simply counts every step you take and keep track of the records. This will alow you to see when you are getting lazy which, I have to admit, I have been the last couple of weeks.

From m-google.com
1. Gmaps mobile (can be found a m.google.com). This application is absolutely amazing. It works like google maps and you can easily search for a company on the selected region and then get the number and adress. It also provides a navigation function (without speech), however, you have to pay for traffic fees. The program also is fast and convenient in every way imaginable.

2. Gmail mobile (also at m.google.com). Good applicaiton which will make it easy to check your email if you are using gmail.

From other sites (see for instance getjar or freeware symbian)
1. Fring. This program is a bit slow and seem to have a few bugs however, it has allowed me to do skype calls directly from my mobile phone (an internet connection is required). This makes it affordable to call to my family in Denmark. Also integrated is msn messenger but I cannot write very fast on my mobile phone.

2. Energy profiler. This program lets you see, in real time, how much energy the phone is consuming. It also shows the total capacity of the battery and an estimation of how long the battery will last if the average energy consumption remain the same.

Stop watch. Good to have since it is not on the phone when it comes from the store.

Smarshopper. This is another very simple but very useful piece of software for people like me who like to use their memory resources on philosophical speculation rather than remembering to buy toilet paper. When you have entered something you want to buy it will remember that item. You can then make a mark next to all the items that you want to buy which then results in a list. Click on the items in the list and they will dissapear again.

Skyfire. This is my favorite mobile internet explorer. It is superior in that the experience is much more similar to surfing the net on a PC, and you are able to watch pretty much any video on the net.

Getjar apps. Good application for finding other applications.

Chaos Theory - Not a problem for a deterministic world view

2009-02-07T09:05:00.005+01:00

I believe that our universe is deterministic, everything that happens has a preceeding cause, including our thoughts and behavior. Now many people object to this view on the basis of pure intuition i.e. it certainly feels as if I have free will therefore it must be so, but for reasons I will not write about now this is really a poor argument...

There are other less non-sensical arguments against the idea that the universe is determined and that there hence is no such thing as "free will" (depending on how you define that of course). One argument that I would not be able to meet completely is that at the quatum level there is the uncertainty principle according to which we cannot know the speed and the position of an electron simultaneously. All I can say is that I don't think this uncertainty translates into free will for human beings...

Another argument against free will is based on chaos theory. Chaos theory states that there are systems in the world which are unpredictable. At least that is what many people think chaos theory states, but this is not entirely true, rather chaos theory states that in some systems, more information about different variables will only make your predictions a tiny winy bit better... Let me explain.

The last couple of decades computers have become alot better and a lot faster. In spite of this fantastic development we have not seen a marked increase in weather predictions even though weather predictions are made by some quite powerful computers. This is because weather is a chaotic system. Very subtle differences in certain variables (humidity, winds and what not), can have huge effects in how the weather turns out. The old way of predicting the weather, "the weather tomorrow will be like the weather today", still comes close to the predictions of the best supercomputers.

Nevertheless, if Laplace's demon did exist i.e. if we knew the exact position of all particles in the universe and their velocity, if we did know that we would be able to predict the weather for as long as we wanted to and thus there is really no contradiction with a deterministic world view. All that chaos thery really means is that some systems are very sensitive to initial conditions and we are not well enough equipped to see these differences...

I have as some of you may have noticed not written for quite some time, the reason is that I have become a father. My daughter Lola was born on january 13th and me and my wife have been very busy taking care of her. We will see how much I write the coming months but my blog is not dead...

More Teaching Company Reviews

2008-12-07T13:21:00.002+01:00

"Imagine how much you could learn if you spent just 30 minutes a day for the next year in the best college classrooms in the world".

I have written quite a lot about the Teaching Company which is a company that I genuinely love. They have completely revolutionized my life and the amount I have learned by listening to these lectures is absolutely staggering, no doubt about it. Forget about boring high-school teachers who cannot explain their subject and who have no desire to give you knowledge and wisdom, the teachers recruited by the teaching company are absolutely top-notch.

Here I thought I would just add a few reviews of courses that I have been listening to since last time:

Wisdom of History 5: I am currently listening to this course taught by Rufus Fears. In it he goes through many episodes in history in a very entertaining fashion and he tells us about the lessons that can be drawn from history such as "Freedom is not a universal value, power is".

Famous Greeks 4: If you get one of the courses taught by Rufus Fears you can expect terrific entertainment as well as many moral lessons. His story telling ability is marvelous and he even makes voices to some of the characters. In this course you will learn about many fascinating ancient Greeks

Famous Romans 5: This course is very similar to the one about famous Greeks and it is also taught by Rufus Fears. For some reason I think that this one is even better, perhaps because I find Ceasar, Cicero, Hannibal, Scipio and the like even more fascinating than the Greek personalities, fantastic course!

Sensation and perception 5: I may be somewhat biased in judging this course since I have been using it when I am myself teaching – reviewing different sensory systems. Professor Coalvita turns a subject that I recall as not very interesting into a subject that is extremely interesting. Perfect for me as a researcher in neuroscience.

New Testament 5: I could not have asked for a better book about the New testament. The professor goes into depth about the content of the New testament as well as other sources of historical evidence. Highly recommended

Great ideas of Psychology 5: Great Great course! Daniel Robinson is one of the very best teachers in the teaching company series and this course goes through pretty much everything you learn in an introductory psychology course.

Foundations of Western civilization P1 3: Although this is a very good series of lectures with a lot of content, the teachers was unable to hold my attention for some reason, perhaps it is just me…

Foundations of Western civilization P2 5: This course which covers the period from 1500-2000 approximately is truly great. Unlike the teacher in the first part of this series, the teacher here never loses my attention, highly recommended course if you want to understand why the world looks the way it does today!

Free will vs determinism 5: I am also currently listening to this one and the first few lecture have been great so I will go ahead and just recommend it. It may be however, that I am biased here since the topic is one that I find very interesting.

Positive psychology and the hedonic treadmill

2008-10-16T13:00:00.009+01:00

How happy are you on a scale from 1-10, with 5 being the average individual? If you are like most people you think that you are happier than most people (7-8 is the average answer you get). But what factors affect your life satisfaction?

This post has been inspired by yet another fantastic professor that everyone with an internet connection can (and should), listen to. His name is Paul Bloom and his course in introductory psychology can be found at Yale's open courses site. In the last lecture of this series Bloom discusses "The Good life: Happiness". The first 15min or so is about therapy and whether it really works, an interesting topic on its own, however, it is with happiness that I will be concerned here.

A few years ago (summer 2004) I went to summer school in Cambridge UK. I attended a wealth of different lectures on everything from astronomy and climate change to genetics and ladybird sexuality. One of the most memorable lectures was one held by Nick Baylis which was on the just born branch of psychology called "positive psychology". The general outline of the lecture was something like the following. Since psychology was born in the 19^th century it has merely been focused on the sick and abnormal. How do we deal with crazy and depressed individuals? Now does that seem a bit skewed to you? Should we also not study happy people and see how they differ. What makes them happy? Or is happiness simply not being abnormal or insane (not to far from the truth perhaps…)? What Nick said was basically that we should investigate happy people to see if there are any lessons to be drawn from them, and that I think seems to make an awful lot of sense.

Since this lecture which positive psychology has become a very hyped subject and vast sums of money are being pumped into this field of research with highly variable gains. Some experiments which I will share here are however, highly interesting and also hilarious. In what is perhaps my favorite experiment, random people at work were asked to go to the photocopier and make some copies of whatever. For half of the participants a dime had been planted on the photocopier, as if someone had forgotten it. Now we all know what a great feeling it is to find money on the street but I think that what happens next will surprise you. After having done the photocopies the participants were approached and asked something like the following: "how happy would you say you are with your whole life". What happens? The group that found the dime on the photocopier reported significantly better life satisfaction!!! Conclusion: when we estimate how happy we are we are extremely susceptible to factors in out immediate environment. In a similar experiment participants were asked when the weather was sunny or rainy, and like in the previous experiment, bad weather caused people to say that they were just not particularly happy with their entire life!!!

In fact, the picture that has emerged from research in positive psychology is that our life satisfaction goes up and down. We have some sort of average happiness which we basically stick to, whatever happens, throughout or lives. The nice thing about this is that whatever happens in your life you are not likely to become less satisfied with your life. Even people who have been paralyzed neck down tend to recover, after about a year, in terms of overall life satisfaction.

The more depressing conclusion from this research is that there is nothing you can do to increase your overall life satisfaction. This is where the term "hedonic treadmill" comes from. You can fulfill all your dreams and fantasies, jump from an airplane, win the nobel prize, become a karate champion, become a Mormon and have sex with ten partners simultaneously, buy your dream house, visit exotic places, etc, etc. Whatever you do, your life satisfaction will stay the same. Of course all of the above may give you temporary happiness and some people suggest that this is how to proceed in life, always do new things that make you happy and don't stick to one because the happiness will disappear. The fact of the matter is that we are able to adapt to even the most luxurious lifestyle.

So is there really nothing that will make you happier? There is actually one interesting exception that I want to end with. Individuals who have undergone plastic surgery report that they have greater life satisfaction after the surgery, and amazingly the gain remains. In other words plastic surgeons have done what no-one else in history have ever managed to do, make people happier (I don't know if this statistical conclusion is true for the woman in the picture who want's to become a cat)…

Apollonius of Tyana

2008-10-04T12:51:00.007+01:00

About 2000 years ago a pregnant woman got a visit from a heavenly agent who told the mother-to-be that her son would be the son of God. His birth which was associated with some supernatural signs and as a boy he made himself a name among the religious leader. When he got older he left his home to walk around from town to town and convinced people to give up on their material belongings and instead focus on the spiritual dimension of life.

His followers were convinced that their teacher was divine, and indeed he was able to heal the sick as well as casting out daemons. Towards the end of his life he was prosecuted by the roman authorities, and then he disappeared. However, even after he were gone, his followers continued to believe in him and there are even reports of him showing up after he was dead. He came down from heaven to convince the spectators that there is a life after death.

Does this man sound familiar to you? Who am I talking about? Many books have been written about this pagan philosopher. His name is Apollonius of Tyana and his historical existence is not disputed due to the fact that there are several independent sources. These survive in spite of the fact that the catholic church actively tried to destroy all records of Apollonius existence. Apollonius followers had heard about Jesus and they believe he was a fake.

I did not hear about this man Apollonius until recently and I must admit that I was quite surprised to hear that Jesus is not unique at all, at least not if you go by historical documents which is really the only proper way to go about if you do not want use subjective arguments such as "I feel (or know) that Jesus existed and that he did all those things written about in the gospel".

I have found a number of webpages claiming that a lot of what is written in the New Testament was really about Apollonius and that only later was names changed. This could explain some of the discrepancies between different books of the bible, but I guess it is very hard to tell one way or the other. I am no historian so I will merely say that I find it unlikely that those who wrote the New Testament had not been influenced by the books or tales about Apollonius in any sense. The stories of Jesus and Apollonius of Tyana simply have too much in common with each other for everything to just be random chance

Here is another blogpost from "atheism and happiness"

The New Testament and “Russian scandal”

2008-09-29T13:52:00.006+01:00

There are many ways in which The New Testament is a great book. It has been read by many people (to say the least), it gives many people guidance in their lives and has done so for many years, and it also serves as historical evidence for the character named Jesus.

It is on this last point that I want to expand here. Having recently listened to two different courses from the always fabulous "Teaching Company", one exclusively about The New Testament, and one on "The foundations of western civilization P1", I have been fueled in my skepticism towards these books as any more than a fiction which one can interpret and then depending on who you are, help you do good things or bad things. (By the way, feel free to send comments and point out if I make any blatant mistakes – I have never read the book in their entirety)

Jesus was never famous during his lifetime it seems. Apart from the bible he is barely mentioned in any historical documents. So what we know about Jesus we know mainly from the gospels in The New Testament.

Mark, which is generally regarded as the earliest of these gospels was written, according to most historians, about 70AD, that is almost 40 years after the death of Christ (the exact year of this event is also very uncertain). 40 years in an age where very few people had access to any written sources and where perhaps even fewer could read. This means that the story of Jesus must have been passed on verbally for about 30 years or so.

Anyone who have ever played Chinese whispers (I just saw that this game also goes under the name of "Arab phone" or "Russian scandal" =)), knows that this is a problem. In Chinese whispers a message is passed along in a ring eventually coming back to the person who formulated the message. The final message is compared to the original message and there is invariably an astounding difference between the two.

The normal way to play this game is to have a group of children passing along a short message, say ten words or so, with little personal significance and hence little motive amongst the children to change the message in any way. In contrast, The New Testament is a rather long message, and the people who have passed it along have had every reason to alter the story to make Jesus sound better and greater than he actually was (does anyone seriously believe that he can turn water into wine?). What would 30 years of Chinese whispers with people who would have a strong interest in changing the story do to tales about Jesus? Well, let's just say that it would be no less of a miracle should the story be accurate and precise.

Popular fallacies of alternative and complementary medicine

2008-09-07T15:19:00.006+01:00

In the most recent issue of the magazine "Skeptic", Harriet Hall, also known as "SkepDoc" writes about three fallacies that you will encounter very frequently if you engage in discussion about alternative or complementary medicine. I will of course not plagiarize Hall's article, but what I am writing here is her article, filtered through my brain (I have written about related matters here and here)...

The fallacies that you will inevitably hear are the following three;
(1) It is "natural" (and hence better for you)
(2) It has been used for a long time (and if it didn't work people would have stopped using it)
(3) It works for me (or a friend or a spouse or a friend of a friend...)

So natural is good by default ehh? In this form the statement sound very categorical, and hence, put in this fomr, the claim can be falsified by a single unambiguous counter-example, and there are plenty... Curare, a compound extracted from nature (and thus a natural compound?) will paralyze you and hence is not recommended unless you need to be still during a surgery. There are many different, naturally growing mushrooms, which will kill people who try to eat it. There is also the fen-phen scandal where a product which was advertised as an alternative medicine was later shown to have severe side effects, despite the fact that the active ingredient was "natural".

Ok, sure, there are a few extreme counter-examples, but still, isn't natural products better in general? Well this is certainly debatable and I would not jump to verdict just yet, however, the evidence to date actually tells the opposite story, namely that natural is often worse than "synthetic" (or whatever you won't to call it). Plants which are sprayed with pesticides are protected from potential predators and therefore they can use all their energy to grow. Now that I think of it, it is rather similar to us humans, in peacetime we can spend our energy on building schools and being nice to children and that sort of stuff... Plants which are not sprayed are not given their protection and therefore they have to use allot of energy on chemical warfare (or the plant-equivalent thereof). Basically they produce chemicals which will make the predator (us), sick.

But don't synthetic pesticides make you sick too? In large quantities they might (just like natural pesticides). However, pesticide control is rather strict and the chemicals used are tested so that they are of minimal danger to us... I have written more about this issue here.

The second argument says that if something has been used for a long time then it is because it is good. Again there are many counterexamples. Some people persist in using astrology even though it has been falsified over and over again. Astrologers cannot do what they claim to be able to do, and add to that the fact that their quackery is based on an astronomical model that is very out-dated. Still people are still using it… If we would have strictly gone by the "old is good" rule we would still be drilling holes in people's head to relieve headaches (here you can buy your own drill kitJ), and what about all new techniques and medicines that are developed? Are we to discard them because they are new? The fact of the matter is that we cannot rely on tradition. The way to test whether a therapy is good or bad is to do a proper, scientific test where it is possible to isolate the effect of the medicine from other factors such as placebo.

The last argument (it works for me), is the one that I have most sympathy for. In my opinion we should have respect for individual differences as well as the power of people's belief to cure them or at the very least make them feel better. If someone starts taking extra vitamins to bolster their immune system and then they do not get sick for a long time then everything is great (as long as they don't overdose which could be dangerous). Similarly, when I tell people that I am studying the brain I am often told about some therapy or mental training that I have never heard about before but which has changed their life. In those cases I normally just say that I am happy for them. However, the mistake that is often made is to assume that just because you have experienced miracles everyone else will too. Even with most conventional medicines which have a proven effect that is greater than placebo, it doesn't work for everyone. The point is that what works for you might not work for other people. Most alternative therapies have not been tested (or they have been tested with no effect). The responsible policy if you ask me is that doctors advocate therapies which have a proven effect, but do not prevent people from spending their money on other therapies (as long as they are not harmful)…

Religion as refuge

2008-07-30T07:51:00.007+01:00

Christianity as well as most other religions are, I believe, false in the sense that their view of the world do not agree with the world as we perceive it. However, one might ask why false theories flourish so much. Would so many people believe in something which is false? My answer to this is obviously, yes they would! Here I want to propose one explanation of why there is religion.

Last time I wrote about Plato who grew up in wartime. I do not think that it is a coincidence that his republic, his utopia, is a state which would be very static. Everyone has their role, and there is left no room for progress, scientific or otherwise, in this state. Could it be that Plato somewhere desired something lasting and permanent? His idea of ideas similarly refers to something which is constant albeit not in our world.

Stoicism is another example of a philosophy which seeks something permanent beyond the world that we perceive. This philosophy advice us that the path to happiness is to ignore all calamities in your life. Do not let people irritate you. If your wife dies then there is no point in grief, after all what good does it do that you are also unhappy?

I am not entirely sure how the concept of philosophy and that of religion is connected. However, in this case I see religion as just another instance of the search for something permanent. I do not know whether there is any data on the hypothesis that I am just about to spell out, I was not able to find any when I did a google search, however, if true it would fit perfectly with where I am going here. I think that as hardships disappear from a society, more people become atheist, and vice versa. When life is rough people rely on religion or philosophies of endurance such as stoicism to achieve something permanent. Religion is in other words just an expression of people longing for a safe haven, something they need to cope with the hardships around them. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so, many people really do need religion, however, some of the consequences of such beliefs have been devastating as I have indicated in other posts (I think).

Some personal experience can also be used as evidence of the point I am trying to make. I remember when I was little and did not know whether I believed in God or not. Perhaps this is an after construction, but as I remember it, I used to pray to God about only when I was in some sort of trouble or when I needed something, not when everything was going well for me. It was as if God was some sort of last resort when I could not handle the situation myself. I do not think that I am the only young boy exhibiting this type of behavior. Further I do not think it is even limited to boys. In Denmark where I was born and lived until I was seven, the most religious part, traditionally, is western Jylland. Coincidentally, this is also where people have traditionally made a living of fishing. Many people who went out a random day to catch fish never came back. What can you do about this (in the absence of supercomputers that predict the weather)?, not much except pray to God , who will in most cases answer your prays...

Much of the inspiration to this post came from Bertrand Russell and his book ”History of western philosophy”, a book that I highly recommends. He sums up the point I tried to make above in these words:

”The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no doubt, from love of home and desire for a refuge from danger; we find, accordingly, that it is most passionate in those whose lives are most exposed to catastrophe. Religion seeks permanence in two forms, God and immortality. In God is no variableness neither shadow of turning; the life after death is eternal and unchanging. The cheerfulness of the nineteenth century turned men against these static conceptions, and modern liberal theology believes that there is progress in heaven and evolution in the Godhead. But even in this conception there is something permanent, namely progress itself and its immanent goal. And a dose of disaster is likely to bring men's hopes back to their older super-terrestrial forms: if life on earth is despaired of, it is only in heaven that peace can be sought.”

Plato and totalitarianism

2008-07-13T17:30:00.001+01:00

Plato (see picture) was a philosopher born at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war which raged from about 430BC to 400BC. Plato is correctly given a lot of credit for being a very influential philosopher, indeed he thought and wrote about most areas of philosophy during his lifetime. For this he is very much admired, so much in fact that critical voices tend to drown in this ocean of admiration. However, since I started reading "History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell (one of my favorite philosophers by the way) I have gained a new perspective on Plato, one which I will share here.

In "The Republic" Plato writes about Utopia, that is, the ideal society. It is indeed a very charming and interesting book, much more engaging then many contemporary books that I have read. Socrates, the protagonist in The Republic is a man of great charisma and charm, and as a reader it is difficult not to be seduced.

Nevertheless, if you take away the the charm that is undeniably great in this book, what you are in essence left with is a state that would have made Josef Stalin and Hitler envious, had it ever been created. Society, we are told, is to be divided up into three different classes of citizens, guardians who are to rule, soldiers who will fight and workers who will (you guessed it), work. The guardians decide who, in the next generation, will become the guardian and who will be the worker/soldier. In other words, what Plato is advocating is that we decide at birth whether a child will be ruling over others, fight for the state, or carry out all the dirty work. We have A, B, and C citizens i.e. what we have is fascism, in its most pure form.

A short defense of Plato may be in order here. I do not think that he was being selfish when he advocated this fascistic society, it was not to make life comfortable for himself and other philosophers. Rather, his argument is that rulers should be chosen according to how good they are at ruling, not according to how many people like that ruler. Just like you want a shoemaker to make your shoes, or a soldier to fight your wars you would like a ruler who is educated in his/her profession. The problem with this, as Bertrand Russell points out, is that it is all but impossible to decide who is a good ruler, and if we get a bad ruler who we then cannot get rid of (in a democracy you would typically replace a bad ruler), then the consequences can be very serious indeed. I believe that there is no education that you can give a person that will ensure that he or she will be a good leader, therefore democracy is to be preferred.

Plato was also a fan of positive eugenics in which you arrange the society so that men judged as having desirable traits get more children as well as negative eugenics in which you prevent "inferior" people from getting children. We are told that when a child is born it is to be taken away from its mother so that she will never know which child is hers. If the child is judged by the doctors to be deformed or if it simply has inferior parents, it will be put away in a mysterious place "as it ought to be". Is it just me who thinks this sounds uncomfortably similar to Nazi Germany? Like I said, Hitler and Plato would have had a lot of ideals in common.

Strict censorship of information is another policy dear to Plato. We are told that any book that portrays Gods doing something un-virtuous are to be forbidden because Gods only do acts that are good (yeah right). This of course meant banning all works of Homer where you finds Gods that are jealous, envious, evil, cheating, you name it. As if that was not enough, Plato also want censorship of every book in which people are fearful or afraid to die. The reason is that the soldiers could be affected in a negative way if they read about the horrors of war.

To sum up, if Plato had been given free hands he would have created a fascist eugenic society society with very strict censorship. Hardly utopia for a modern person (I hope). Such a society, like the Christian-based societies that existed in the dark middle ages would also have a detrimental effect on creative thought and on science. All such a society can hope to achieve is success against other societies of roughly equal size (as long as that society does not start to encourage progress). Bertrand Russell suggests that Plato may have been influenced by the fact that he grew up during war-time. There is a clear tendency among people who live in turbulent times to desire stability, and as just mentioned, that is what Plato's Republic may potentially achieve.

How to square any number between 1 and 100

2008-06-12T08:32:00.003+01:00

In my post on magic mathematical tricks I claimed to be able to easily square any number between 1-100. Later I got a comment enquiring about this claim, according to my reader there is only a calculation "fast track" for numbers ending with 5, i.e. 5, 15, 25, 35, 45, 55 etc, and not for all the other numbers between 1-100.

The fact of the matter is that numbers ending with 5 are particularly easy to square, but there is a more general rule which works for all numbers. Here is how you do it…

Take any number between 1-100… 67, ok, lets square 67. First you find a number close to 67 that is easy to multiply such as 70. Next you move the same number of steps (there are 3 steps from 67 to 70) in the opposite direction giving you 64. Multiply 70 and 64 (4200 + 280= 4480). Then add the square of the number of steps that you took in either direction i.e. 3, giving you 9. Now simply add these two numbers to get 4489, which is the square of 67.

Ok sure, multiplying 64 and 70 does require some mathematical skull but is not that hard and most people can do it with a little bit of training I think. The trick is much easier for smaller numbers such as 18. For 18 you would multiply 20 and 16, giving you 320, plus the square of 2, which is 4, giving you a total of 324. Here is an illustration of the method taken from the teaching company course "The joy of mathematics".

The very easiest cases are numbers ending with 5. Take the number 45 and apply the previous rule. You go five steps in either direction giving you 40 and 50. Multiplying these gives you 2000. Add the square of the number of steps that you took i.e. 5, giving you 25. So the square of 45 is 2000 + 25 = 2025. For numbers ending with five you can simply multiply the number below and above the first number and then write 25 behind that number i.e. 4*5 = 20, and with 25 behind that gives you 2025. For 65 it would be 6*7 = 42 and then 25 behind that giving you 4225, for 15 it would be 1*2 = 2, and then 25 behind giving you 225.

This trick seems to work well with higher numbers as well. The only limitation is your multiplication skills. So go out and impress your friends. Next time I write about math I will explain how you can pull of the almost autistic feat of telling what day of the week it was or will be at any date in history or future

Magical mathematical tricks

2008-06-08T11:23:00.000+01:00

Parallell to working on forthcoming articles I have been listening to the Teaching Company series called "The joy of mathematics", taught by professor Arthur T. Benjamin (see picture).

It is a truly great series of lectures which has allowed me to fresh up my math as well as to learn som impressive new skills. For example I can now square any number between 1-100 very fast (perhaps I will reveal the trick in a subsequent post). The lecturer has also perfomed two "magical tricks". The first one I think most people will be familiar with, I recall hearing it in 3rd grade, it goes as follows:

1. Think of a number between 1-10
2. Double that number
3. Add 10
4. Divide that number by 2
5. Subtract the number that you first thought about

Ok, now concentrate on the number that you are left with, a little bit more... I think I am getting... wait for it... yes, I almost have it... 5! Was that the number that you were left with? If not, it is because you did an error. Some simple algebra will prove why you are always left with 5.

x*2 = 2x,
2x+10 = 2x+10,
(2x+10)/2 = x+5,
x+5-x = 5

If you want to end up with a different number you can merely swap out the 10 with something else. Your answer will always be half of the number that is added in the second step.

The second magical trick is somewhat more complicated and also more impressive if you ask me. It goes as follows:

1. Think of a number between 1-10
2. Triple that number
3. Add 6
4. Triple the number again
5. Now add the individual digits in your numer
6. If you still have a two digit number, add the individual digits again

Now, concentrate again. Unless you have done a mistake you are thinking about the number 9. The following algebra plus some explanation shows why this trick works.

x*3 = 3x
3x+6 = 3x + 6
(3x+6)*3= 9x+18

Now 18 is a multiple of 9 and adding x number of nines to that will always result in a multiple of 9. Multiples of nine always consists of digits that add up to 9, or to another multiple of 9 which will then add up to 9. You can check this out for yourself. The multiples of 9 are 9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90, 99, 108, 117, 126 etc

Adding the individual digits of any of these number will give 9 except 99, which gives 18 which you then add again and get 9.

Debunking christianity

2008-06-06T19:00:00.004+01:00

In this post I would like to promote another blog which I have just been reading. It is called Debunking Christianity (http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/) and it seems to be high quality posts. Here is the authors (there are several different contributors) own description of their blog:

"This Blog has been created for the purpose of debunking Evangelical Christianity. We are ex-Christians, ex-ministers, and even ex-apologists for the Christian faith. We are now freethinkers, skeptics, agnostics, and atheists. With the diversity of our combined strengths we seek to debunk Christianity."

The reason I stumpled upon this blog was that I was investigating the birth date of Jesus Christ. In a lecture I listened to recently I heard that historical records indeed confirms that there was a census in Bethlelem. However, the census was not in year 0, but in 8BC, and it was only for Romans. And I thought that Jesus was born in year 0?

Apparently this is not the only problematic detail concerning the birth of Jesus, I qoute again from debunking christianity. The authors deserves alot of credit for the fact that they have extensive references to other texts, including the bible.

"Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, if Luke is taken literally, according to E. P. Sanders [The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin Press, 1993, pp. 84-91)]. What husband would take a nine-month pregnant woman on such a trek from Nazareth at that time when only heads of households were obligated to register for a census when the census would’ve been stretched out over a period of weeks or even months? But if he did, why did he not take better precautions for the birth? Why not take Mary to her relative Elizabeth’s home just a few miles away from Bethlehem for the birth of her baby? According to Luke’s own genealogy (3:23-38) David had lived 42 generations earlier. Why should everyone have had to register for a census in the town of one of his ancestors forty-two generations earlier? There would be millions of ancestors by that time, and the whole empire would have been uprooted. Why 42 generations and not 35, or 16? If it was just required of the lineage of King David to register for the census, what was Augustus thinking when he ordered it? He had a King, Herod. “Under no circumstances could the reason for Joseph’s journey be, as Luke says, that he was ‘of the house and lineage of David,’ because that was of no interest to the Romans in this context.” [Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things, (p.10)]. The fact is, even if there was a worldwide Roman census that included Galilee at this specific time, there is evidence that Census takers taxed people based upon the land they owned, so they traveled to where people lived."

MIT open courses

2008-04-10T12:22:00.006+01:00

Nobody could have missed that I love to listen to audio and video lectures on my spare time. In particular when I am doing something where I do not have to concentrate (such as doing dishes or walking the dog). I recently wrote about The Teaching Company which is probably my favorite company in the world. I have also mentioned Berkeley webcast and in particular the lecture series called physics for future presidents taught by professor Richard A Muller.

When reading Lunkens blog I saw some really good news. MIT, one of the most prominent Universities in the world (particularly in physics, technology, and computer science), have been inspired by Berkeley and have now made a good deal of their courses available online for free, hurray for that! For example, here is a lecture series on introductory biology taught by Eric Lander (see picture above), a key figure in the human genome project.

So, make use of these fantastic resources. With a few clicks on your mouse you can enrich your life by learning about anything you wish from world leading experts, who are also in my experience fantastic teachers.

Dangers of radiation in the home

2008-04-05T12:07:00.005+01:00

The best Swedish site for news on technology, in my opinion, is www.idg.se. Today they have an article on radiation in the home. The article is based on an interview with Maria Feychting professor in epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet. The article discusses the danger of the radiation associated with products that are becomming increasingly common in ordinary homes. I am speaking of mobile phones, routers, wireless keyboards and mice, bluetooth headsets and dect phones.

The conclusion of the article, briefly put, is that there are no scientific evidence that this radiation causes any harm. It is a fact that studies showing potential dangers of radiation get much more attention than studies which show zero effects, even though the latter type are much more common. Furthermore, most of the studies which have shown slight biological effects of radiation have subsequently been replicated with contrasting results i.e. the latter studies did not find any effects.

I think that one of the reasons why some people are so afraid of these things is the fact that they radiate, and we all know that radiation is bad right? No, not necessarily so. Radiation can be your friend to. If it were not for the radiation from the sun we would not be alive. Similarly, seeing involves the capture of radiation by photoreceptors in the back of your retina. In fact we are all rich sources of radiation which you can see for yourself if you have a camera that pick up infrared wavelength.

But isn't that different? Sure some sorts of radiation are more dangerous than others. Cosmic rays which arive from outer space are extremely rich in energy, and alot of that type of radiation would be bad for you. Similarly, X-rays will slightly increase the risk of cancers because it is rich in energy. But what about the radiation from all those home devices? This radiation is lower in energy than normal visual light, so you are very unlikely to get cancer from this type of radiation. These devices actually emit microwaves, just like your microwave oven. The difference is that the radiation is not contained within a box, and also the power is 10,000 smaller than in an ordinary microwave oven (for a dect phone it is 100,000 times smaller). If you want a different point of view on these issues, you can visit this page.

The article also gives some quick answers to the following questions:

1. Does radiation from mobile phones cause cancer: False

2. Will using a bluetooth headset reduce the amount of radiation you are exposed to: True (because a bluetooth headset has a much lower effect than the mobile phone)

3. A dect phone emits more radiation than a mobile phone: False

4. A 3G phone radiates more than a GSM mobile phone: False

5. More wireless devices in the home will make it more dangerous: False

6. A new router radiates more than an old router: False

7. It is dangerous to have your mobile lying next to you when you are sleeping: False

8. The mobile will emit less radiation if you hold your hand over it: False (actually it will radiate more becuase that is necessary in order to communicate the station.

9. Even the good old cable hardware emits radiation: True (anything with a current in it, a cable for instance, will generate a magnetic field which is also basically a form of radiation.

I want to end with a personal reflection on an issue which I think is highly relevant yet often forgotten. Mobile phones, which as mentioned is the device which has the highest effect and thus the highest radiation, has been around for about two decades now. In spite of their popularity, there has not been any increase in cancers in this timeperiod. This "natural experiment" shows that if mobile phones have any effect at all on the human body, that effect have to be very subtle. Pretend for a moment that there has been a slight increase in some obscure form of cancer, or other type of disease, that is a result of mobile phone radiation. Even such a necessarily slight effect would pale in comparison to the enourmous benefits of being able to call ambulances, fire fighters and the police from almost anywhere on this planet. Hurray for mobile phones!

Medical myths

2008-03-26T21:26:00.010+01:00

Rational as I may be I sometimes engage in superstitious behaviors because of advice I have heard a long time ago and then stuck. For example, when I have a flu I usually overdose on C-vitamin. I believe that this piece of advice was made famous by Nobel prize winning scientist Linus Pauling who asserted that C-vitamin could cure the common cold. According to other sources that I trust more on this particular issue, such as Harriet Hall, also know as the "Skep Doc", a C-vitamin overdose will at best shorten the common cold for a day, and that is for people who do not eat a lot of C-vitamin in the first place (I am one of them why I may perhaps benefit somewhat), at worst a C-vitamin overdose can make you quite sick.

Two other behaviors which I sometimes engage in is drinking coca cola when my stomach is upset, and eating garlic when I have the common cold. Quick google searches did neither prove or disprove the efficiency of these two questionable treatments. Perhaps someone out there know something about it (in which case I hope you will share your knowledge).

What I really wanted to write about in this post is an article published in the British Medical Journal in which widespread myths, often reinforced by doctors were punctured. Some of these myths I believed in firmly until I saw the article. For example I have thought for a long time that reading in dim light is bad for your eyes. Now, becuase of this article, I know that there is no good evidence to back this claim. I had been wrong, but now I have changed my provisional world model to fit the new data (I stand corrected to put that more simply).

However, I am proud to say that I never bought into the myth that you only use 10% of your brain. Then again, I am a brain researcher so perhaps I cannot brag to much about this accomplishment. The idea, though popular in books such as Uri Geller's "Little Mind Power Book", is completely absurd. Would evolution allow 90% of our brain just sit there and do nothing, I think not. By the way, the claim can be easily disproved by sending a person into an FMRI and watch how the entire brain lights up which is an indication of energy expenditure (maybe with the exception of people like Uri Geller). Furthermore, in contrast to predictions of the "we only use 10% of our brain" hypothesis, removal of almost any part of the brain will result in clear symptoms,

The entire list of medical myths which are debunked in this nice article are as follows. Take a look at the article if you are not willing to take my word for it (there are nice references as well).

1. People should drink at least 2,5 litres of water per day
2. We only use 10% of our brains
3. Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
4. Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster and be coarser
5. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
6. Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
7. Mobile phones cause electromagnetic interference in hospitals

The Teaching Company – My Favorite courses

2008-03-08T13:51:00.006+01:00

This is my second post in a short time when I am going to help a commercial business. Last time it was Nokia, because of their brilliant software "Nokia sports tracker". This time I want to take my hat off for The Teaching Company. I have mentioned them in previous posts here and here, but now I want to dedicate an entire post to this wonderful company.

Their concept is easy. They hunt down University professors who excel in their subject and in teaching skills. Then they ask these professors to record a series of 30-45min long lectures (on average about 30 lectures in each course) on their subject. Then they sell these lectures over the internet. You can download them as mp3's, have CD's with audio sent to you, or buy video recordings of the lectures. I normally prefer the first alternative since I can convert the files to the Nokia audiobooks (another terrific application from Nokia) format which use up very little space on my mobile phone, however, sometimes it is nice to have video also.

The lectures are normally equivalent to what you would expect from an introductory university course - rather detailed in other words. When do I have time to listen to these lectures? Well, on the top of my head, here are a few situations in which I normally put in my earphones and broaden my universe a little bit.

1. When I am riding my bike to work

2. When I am doing the dishes

3. When I am vacuum cleaning

4. When I am out jogging

5. When I am walking the dog

These situations actually correspond to a few hours a day, which adds up to a great many hours per year. Since I discovered The teaching company little more than a year ago I have been listening to an estimated 240 hours of lectures (a modest estimation, in reality it is probably more than that). It has really enriched my life.

If any of my readers are also fans of The teaching company then I am very interested in hearing which courses you liked and which ones you did not like, so that I know which courses I should get in the future. Here are a list of the courses that I have completed as well as my rating of them (5= Brilliant, 1=Not worth buying)...

Classical mythology: 3 - The teacher does everything you would expect, but not more. Mythology is exotic and interesting which makes this course very attractive

Second world war: 5 - I may be a bit biased because I think wars are interesting to study. I think that I finished this 30 lecture course in three days or so. Teacher is brilliant.

First world war: 5- Same rating as for the second world war

History of Russia: 4 - One of the first courses I listened to, very good lecturer, unfortunately I have forgotten a lot of what was said in this course

Argumentation: 3 - I remember this course as being engaging, but for some reason I don't remember so much of this course, and in addition I retoric has always been a little bit too abstract an inconcrete for my taste

Philosophy of Science: 3 - Good course which can get a bit complex every now and then, and that can make you loose focus

Books that have made history: 5 - Probably the most entertaining course of all, like listening to engaging stories. The professor even makes voices for the characters in the book which makes it even more entertaining

Biology and human behavior: 5 - Robert Sapolsky from Stanford (see above), may simplify a lot, however, a more entertaining course on human behavior will be extremely hard to find. Great, great course!

Science and religion: 3 - Seemed to me that the professor was very biased, and that he wanted to defend religion, however, you will learn a lot about interesting historical events

Biology: 3 - 80 lectures long course going through a huge amount of biology, works well to fresh up your memory, and the lecturer manages to put in a lot of details to, however, I would have liked some more jokes and stuff from him

Economics 3rd ed: 5 - Also a fantastic series from a lectures from a great professor. I thought economics would be boring but now I know it isn't so

Contemporary economic issues: 4 - Very similar to the course above, same lecturer, great stuff.

Utopia and terror in the 20th century: 4 - Takes you through genocides and massacres in the 20th century which is always interesting, greatly recommended.

Philosophy of the mind: 5 - John Searle's course on the human mind is simply brilliant. Many good illustrative jokes.

History of the United States: 5 - A massive 84 lectures on the history of the united states. Loved the part about the civil war, but everything was great in this course.

United State and the middle east: 5 - Manages to guide you through a century of conflicts. Gives you the facts without taking sides which is an impressive feat in an on itself.

Here are a few other blogs that have written about The teaching company as well.

Creative think

Cool tools

Learn out loud

Dihydrogen monoxide...

2008-02-28T19:38:00.006+01:00

Ever heard of dihydrogen monoxide? No? That is probably because your government has covered up all the dangers associated with this toxic chemical. Here are some of the reasons why you should be concerned (find more at DMHO fact).

Dihydrogen monoxide...

Is a highly reactive chemical
Is one of the main waste products from nuclear power plants
Is used in the production of pesticides and is an ingredient in spray oven cleaners (!)
Has been used by ALL students responsible for school shootings in the United States in the past
Is used by athletes to improve performace
Contributes to the greenhouse effect
Have been found in large amounts, in children who live near factories

Trust me, the list goes on and on. If you don't trust me, listen to this girl at you tube, or visit DMHO facts, or "Ban dihydrogenmonoxide".

Fooled? I hope not, though if you were you are certainly not alone. The common name for dihydrogen monoxide, or DMHO, is water (di=two, mono=one, two hydrogen and one oxygen makes H2O=water). This hoax which I rate almost as highly as the Sokal hoax which I have written about here, was popularized by a 14 year old american high school student as a part of a science project. He came up with this alternative name for water and listed statements such as the ones above, all of which are of course true. He then went around and asked fellow student to sign a petition to ban DMHO, 43 out of 50 signed it.

According to wikipedia more influential people have also been fooled. In 2001 A staffer at the New Zealand green party was asked to support the campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide, in response she wrote that she was "absolutely supportive of the campaign to ban this toxic substance". In New Zealand 2007 (are they lacking scepticism in New Zealand?) Jacqui Dean a member of parliment wrote to the health minister asking whether there were any plans to ban DMHO.

I think that this hoax illustrates that scepticism is more often than not a virtue. This hoax was very transparent compared to many of the stories that are circulating in the world which are also not true, and yet, people fell for it.

New circumcision study

2008-02-06T11:37:00.000+01:00

I have previously written quite a lot about circumcision. See for example (1) here, (2) here, or (3) here. Circumcision proponents use different arguments when they try to spread this surgical procedure. Sometimes they say that your hygiene benefits, which may be true if you never ever clean yourself under the foreskin - hardly a reason for removing the foreskin. Another rather medievil argument is that circumcision will make it harder for the child to masturbate, and after all sexual pleasure is something you should avoid!

The only potentially valid argument for the use of circumcision, an argument which has only been around for perhaps five years (before that circumcision was conducted for irrational reasons entirely), is that it may reduce the risk of getting HIV if you have unprotected sex. Based on this some people argue that we should use mass circumcision to prevent the spread of HIV. There are many arguements against this.

First of all, people normally don't make their sexual debut when they are still in diapers, so let them choose themselves whether they wan't to be circumcised when they have reached an age where they can actually make such decisions. Secondly, condoms work much better than having your penis circumcised, so why not spend all the money advocating the use of condoms and handing them out for free instead? Furthermore, people who have been circumcised may feel safer and therefore have more unprotected sex, thus cancelling the potential gain...

Another serious argument against circumcision is that circumcision may cause serious problems for the patient in terms of penile function and penile sensitivity. The foreskin has a lot of sensory nerve endings. According to estimates that I have read, 50% of the nerve endings in the penis are in the foreskin. Just recently a study investigating the consequences of circumcision came out.

The study seems to show that people who have been circumcised do not suffer from reduced pleasure, at least that is what they say. However, as Mary Crewe points out, studies like these do not take into account psychological biases which are very likely to be at work. If you go and have yourself circumcised (the people in the study voluntered of course), then you will want to justify that decisions afterwards. As a result, minor troubles are likely not to be reported. The patient will simply bite together and say "I am fine, and my sex life is great".

For this reason I think it would be a mistake to start circumcising people based on this type of questionnaire evidence. Some sort of medical examination of penile function (or dysfunction) would be preferred.

Nokia Sports Tracker

2008-02-05T11:31:00.001+01:00

I remember when I was little and my mother wanted me to go get some eggs in the store or just have me run off some excess energy. First I would not be so enthusiastic, "why don't you do it", or "no I don't feel like it" I would say. But then my mother uttered the magical words which would, without exception, cause me to dart of in my maximum velocity. The words were "I will time you"! Perhaps this is a powerful argument against the concept of free will, or maybe it is just evidence that I was a very stupid little boy. In any case, it was extremely motivating to know that I was being timed, and it did not matter that my mother probably just made up some number when I came back.

Now I am older and new synapses have been formed in my brain. Telling me that I am being timed when going to the store doesn't do it for me anymore, in fact, until recently it was hard to get me running at all. Throwing me a soccer ball has always worked and it still does, but my jogging career was all but over until I discovered a little piece of software which you can download for free onto your Nokia phone: Nokia sports tracker. It has been working flawlessly with my Nokia N95 8Gb which I got in Christmas present. I should perhaps make clear that I am not a Nokia employee…

Nokia sports tracker records your GPS position while you are running, cycling, walking or skiing. It also calculated your speed, altitude, calorie expenditure, number of steps, and a lot of other interesting statistics. When I have finished my run I upload my workout to Nokia sports tracker online and then I can see my workout online on a map (see picture). I can also export the route to Google earth and see the route in this wonderful piece of software.

But the wonders do not end there. Next time I am going to run the same route, I open Nokia sports tracker and I tell the program that I want compare my new workout with my old workout. When I start running I see myself as a little blue dot, and I see my opponent (me two days ago) as a little red dot. When that little red dot on my screen gets ahead of the blue dot it is as if I am five years old again and my mother says "I'll time you", amazingly motivating. I almost ran myself to death the other day because I did not want to lose to my past (I did eventually lose, but I will correct that soon). It the dots are too close to distinguish, don't worry, the program continuously tells you how far behind or ahead you are in meters and in seconds (or minutes).

To sum up. Good work Nokia! Via this piece of software you have increased my predicted life span by a couple of years.

Ps: I will soon start writing about more pressing matters such as religion, brains and free will vs determinism again, so no worries there…

Is the theory of evolution normative?

2008-01-17T13:52:00.001+01:00

A lot of people object to the theory of evolution on normative grounds, that is, because evolution says that people should behave in certain ways. To take a radical example, according to the theory of evolution men who rape has gained some sort of evolutionary advantage, and that is why the behavior still exists in many different species today. Speaking in evolutionary terms an individual can gain fitness through rape. Confused people (Russ Tanner in this video is confused on other issues besides this) who mistakenly thinks that the theory of evolution is normative goes on to argue that according to the theory of evolution, rape is good.

This is of course wrong. The theory of evolution says absolutely nothing about how we should behave. The theory of evolution, in other words is descriptive. It describes what the world is like and the mechanisms that are at work, it doesn't say what the world should be like or whether status quo is good or bad.

So independent of whether you want a communist or a liberal society, whether you want like or dislike a certain behavior that the theory of evolution predicts. Independent of what your opinion is, the theory of evolution can help you get you where you want to go because you can learn important lessons about human nature. Ignoring or trying to deny our natural instincts will just make things harder for you…

Go save the world, but do it using what you know about human nature

Ps: Also see my post "Ethics of an atheist"

Superstition in Hollywood

2007-12-31T11:00:00.001+01:00

Last night I went to see the new animated "Bee movie". It was a cute entertaining movie and I would recommend it to anyone, however, one thing in the movie bugged me =). In the very beginning of the movie there was a black screen and on it they wrote the infamous myth that "According to all known laws of aviation the bee should not be able to fly, but unaware of this fact, the bee continues to fly anyway.

This is of course nonsense, and it annoys me a little bit that they could not do a Google search to find out whether their claim is true or false… So Seinfeld, if you read this, Bees have been studied intensively, and according to the laws of aerodynamics they can fly. The citation above is based on the assumption that insects fly like airplanes and thus need same wing-area, an assumption which is simply not true. Bees and insects in general are small compared to airplanes and they accomplish their lifting force in qualitatively different ways. We do not know the details of how all insects fly, however, bees have in fact been studied rather intensively, and they can fly. If you are still in doubt take a look at any one of these links:

Caltech – Transcript of the original research

Wikipedia – Go to "bee flight"

Live Science

Ask Dr. Galapagos – Detailed analysis of this question

Skepticality discussion board – Discussion on all explicit and implicit claims in Bee Movie

Seinfeld and his friends are hardly the sole perpetrators when it comes to spreading superstitions. I have always been a fan of the series X-files. In the X-files (which I have heard is based on real cases) you have two FBI agents, Mulder and Scully. In a typical episode Mulder and Scully gets a case with weird circumstances and they go to investigate. Mulder always come up with a supernatural explanation, often involving grey aliens with pear-shaped heads, whereas Scully always comes up with a scientific explanation involving hallucinations and rare scientific phenomenon. Sounds like a perfect setting right?

The only problem is that in every episode Scully's scientific explanation is always ridiculed. In the series you often see the supernatural events actually occurring, sometimes they happen right in front of Scully, and yet she sticks with her scientific dogmatism – looking really dumb in the process.

My worry here is simply that a lot of people will walk away from their screens believing that scientists are extremely narrow minded people, even though they are not. I would bet that no scientist would ever claim that bees cannot fly – we see that they do. Just because there currently is no satisfactory theoretical explanation for a certain phenomenon does not mean that one has to deny its existence, and I don't know any scientist who would think like that. As a student of the brain I constantly come across examples where a phenomenon has been detected "e.g. consciousness", and yet there is no good theoretical account of how that phenomenon is caused. Much of science is devoted to finding such explanations – how are bees able to fly even though they have so small wings?, how does this thing that we call consciousness come about in the brain? Scientists do not deny inexplicable phenomenon, they study them and try to come up with an answer, a noble endeavor indeed.

Ps: My productivity has been a little poor lately. The reason is simply that I have been extremely busy. My blog is not about to die…

Do we have a soul?

2007-12-13T16:28:00.001+01:00

It is easy to get lost in a discussion about the existence or nonexistence of the soul. However, quite frequently conflicts do not arise because people disagree, but rather because they are using different definitions of the soul. Depending on the definition used I either believe or do not believe in the existence of a soul. A common though not very useful definition of "the soul" is what we really are, the core of our selves, or something like that. I would perhaps be inclined to call this "personality" rather than soul, but if that is what is meant by soul then yes, I think I do have one.

If on the other hand the soul is seen as something which is necessarily immaterial, then I do not believe in it. Hypothetically, should someone make an exact replica of me, with the exact same atoms in the exact same places, nothing more would be required. The replica and I would be impossible to distinguish from each other. The replica would react to any stimuli like me, would have the same childhood memories, be attracted to the same things, and just like me the replica would be disgusted by the smell of an orange.

This would not last long though. If me and my replica would continue our lives, then gradually subtle environmental differences would form us in non-identical ways, resulting in some small differences. These differences would ultimately affect the choices of me and my replica and consequently our preference would diverge. This, in turn, would lead to escalating environmental differences and increasingly different personalities or, if you prefer, souls. The resulting differences between me and my replica would be reflected in the way our atoms are put together, so we would no longer contain the exact same atoms. Nevertheless, there would probably be many striking similarities as well. There are examples of genetically identical twins that have grown up in very different environment, and still similarities have been extremely apparent.

What do I base this belief on? My main piece of evidence is that there does not seem to be any part of the personality that cannot be affected by brain injury. In my neuropsychology course I read about many patients with exotic brain injuries. A famous patient called HM, who is still alive, is unable to form any new memories. As a result he still thinks that he is 25 years old and he does not recognize the researchers who have visited him every day for several decades. Another older case is that of Phineas Gage who got a metal stick shot up through the frontal part of the brain. To everyone's amazement Gage did not die from the injury, however, according to his colleagues he was not the same after the injury. Following the injury he started swearing and behaved inappropriately to the extent that he lost his job. However, the most striking case that I can remember only vaguely is that of a responsible normal woman with three kids. Due to a tumor in her brain she suddenly underwent a radical personality change. Her behavior went from normative to completely reckless, and from being a good and faithful wife, she became extremely uninhibited and promiscuous…

One needs merely to take a look at a severe case of Alzheimer disease to see that material changes in the brain can change a person beyond recognition. Some would say that there is always something left, that even though Anna is now eating her own feces and hitting her children when they come to visit, she is still Anna, somewhere inside. I don't think so. Sure, she is still called Anna, and one can still recognize her appearance, but other than that Anna is not Anna anymore. The soul of Anna is very different from the soul Anna used to have before she got Alzheimer.

In sum, due to the fact that there seems to be no sacred part of the personality, nothing which cannot be affected by changes of a material nature. Due to this I do not believe that we have an immaterial soul. Normally I try to avoid the word altogether because of the confusion that arises, but this is my current thoughts on this issue. The discussion here has many important implications, for instance it should affect how to think about free will vs. determinism. I have written about that here.

My review of Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion"

2007-12-01T12:35:00.000+01:00

I have now completed my extensive review of Richard Dawkins latest book, The God Delusion. My word counter tells me that the entire review is about 10,000 words long. The book has received massive attention, and Dawkins has visited many Universities as well as talkshows to speak about his book. You can take part of some of it by going here.

Here follows links to my reviews on all the different chapters...

Chapter 1 - A deeply religious non-believer
Chapter 2 - The God hypothesis
Chapter 3 - Arguments for God's existence
Chapter 4 - Why there is almost certainly no God
Chapter 5 - The roots of religion
Chapter 6 - The roots of morality
Chapter 7 - The good book and the changing moral zeitgeist
Chapter 8 - What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile
Chapter 9 - Childhood, abuse, and escape from religion
Chapter 10 - A much needed gap?

Happy reading!

The God Delusion, Chapter 10 – A much needed gap?

2007-11-26T21:17:00.001+01:00

Is a belief in God beneficial? Do we need God in our lives? Richard Dawkins discusses this issue in chapter 10 of the God Delusion. The first point he makes is that, whether or not a belief in God is beneficial in terms of psychological health or whatever, says nothing about the existence of God. There are studies indicating that religious people, on average are happier and healthier than atheists. The difference was not big but it was significant. However, it would be very erroneous to conclude that just because religion is correlated with happiness, God must exist… Dawkins writes:

"Religion's power to console doesn't make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God's existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst - none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It might be evidence in favour of the desirability of convincing yourself that God exists, even if he doesn't."

Personally I do think that the world would be a better place if people would have an evidence based world view. Politicians today often get stuck when religious arguments are brought to the table. Should Jerusalem be in the possession of the Israeli, or the Palestinian's? How do you argue with Bush when he claims that the Iraq invasion was a mission given to him by God? There is just not so much you can say in response to such an argument. To be fair, this was not his primary argument for going to war, but my point stands nevertheless.

I do not believe in God, yet I consider myself happy and I enjoy my life. When I face misfortunes I do not pray to God to help me, rather I try to come up with a concrete and effective solution to whatever it is I am facing. I realize of course that I have been born in a wealthy part of the world and that my miseries are nothing compared to the miseries that the average human being must face, yet even for them I think that it would be better not to rely on God to console and fix things. An additional bonus that you get as an atheist, at least to the extent that atheists do not believe in reincarnation, is that you value your time here on earth more. I do not believe that I will be reborn when I die, therefore I want to make the best of the time that I have here on this planet. For this reason I am also unlikely to end up as a suicide bomber. Only a very religious person would sacrifice something as valuable as his or her own life in order to kill other innocent people.

In short, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful for our time here on earth. One does not need God to have some substance in life. My life is filled with substance, and I think that for most people, even for religious people, the principal sources of happiness lie outside of the realm of religion. I end with these words from the God Delusion which illustrates my point well.

"But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E. O. Wilson has called Biophilia"

The God Delusion, Part 9 – Childhood, abuse, and escape from religion

2007-10-22T21:36:00.001+01:00

Chapter nine in The God Delusion, as the name suggests, deals with the way in which children are indoctrinated into faiths. In my opinion chapter nine is the most controversial one in the entire book. Personally I agree with most of what Dawkins writes, though occasionally I can have some understanding for a certain degree of child indoctrination. It is after all difficult to act in a completely neutral way towards children without letting your ideology shine through at all. I expect that it is even more difficult if you believe passionately in something as many religious people do. Personally when a child asks me about my beliefs I always say that I do not believe in any God, but I am also quick to point out that there are people who thinks otherwise. I will gladly explain why I do not believe in a God, but I try to not force the child into adapting my views. I also try to ask children what they think, thus encouraging them to think for themselves. These are my ideals, but I admit that sometimes I don't live up to them entirely, and I cannot expect religious people to do so if I do not… Dawkins writes (and I think he may be going a bit too far here).

"In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon."

Nevertheless, the damage that results form child labeling and child indoctrination is undeniable. Suicide bombers often commit their deeds because it will bring financial support to their family, however, I do not think they would have done what they do was it not for their strong religious faith. As Dawkins often points out, it is also very weird that we label children as Muslim or Christian considering how complicated belief systems really are. Have they read the bible and reflected on its validity? I seriously doubt it… It is entirely equivalent to labeling children according to some political affiliation, e.g. "a communist child", or a "social democrat child". Children should be taught how to think, not what to think. Dawkins writes:

"I thank my own parents for taking the view that children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is literally true or that the movements of the planets rule their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure."

In Sweden there is an ongoing debate (S) about whether confessional private schools should be allowed or not. Today we have a compromise in which religious movements are allowed to run schools as long as they do not have any religious perspectives in the normal subjects. They are however allowed to have some isolated religious events such as morning-prayer. As a liberal I find it hard to have a strong opinion in this debate. The essential question for me is how much the religious events in these schools contribute to indoctrination of children as well as whether going to such a school will prevent the children from meeting people with different ideologies. For instance, the Plymouth Brothers (S), a sect that has been allowed to start a private school in Sweden, have an ideology that explicitly says that it is not allowed to eat in the company of a "devil worshipper" like myself. Dawkins writes (and this I agree with completely):

"Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are 'valid', let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so."

Another theme in chapter nine is the obsession that some people have with preservation of religious diversity which they see as positive seemingly independent of the consequences. The argument goes something like this. Who are we to judge that say female circumcision is wrong - that is their culture and we should respect that. In one American TV-program the ritual sacrifice of a young Inca girl was hailed as being exotic and a wonderful example of cultural diversity (the event took place about 500 years ago). Dawkins writes:

"Humphrey's point - and mine - is that, regardless of whether she was a willing victim or not, there is strong reason to suppose that she would not have been willing if she had been in full possession of the facts. For example, suppose she had known that the sun is really a ball of hydrogen, hotter than a million degrees Kelvin, converting itself into helium by nuclear fusion, and that it originally formed from a disc of gas out of which the rest of the solar system, including Earth, also condensed . . . Presumably, then, she would not have worshipped it as a god, and this would have altered her perspective on being sacrificed to propitiate it."…

"Humphrey makes the point that no adult woman who has somehow missed out on circumcision as a child volunteers for the operation later in life."

To sum everything up, though I think it is categorically wrong to impose your view on children I can understand that in practice this may be difficult to attain to a perfect degree. Beliefs will inevitably shine through. However, I cheer everyone who encourages autonomous thought in children. Ask them what do you think?, do you believe in God?, how do you think the world came to be?, and other questions like that? Let them have their say and let them know that they can believe what they want. At the very least, don't be like pastor Roberts who is running a Hell House in which children are taught what will happen to them if they would be so evil as to have an abortion (they have very generous age limits compared to for instance Hollywood, see picture). Pastor Roberts says:

"I would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they absolutely do not want to go. I would rather reach them with that message at twelve than to not reach them with that message and have them live a life of sin and to never find the Lord Jesus Christ. And if they end up having nightmares, as a result of experiencing this, I think there's a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares."

What would be your choice of death?

2007-10-12T09:50:00.001+01:00

When I was little I often contemplated and discussed with my friends what would be the best way to end your days? I actually still think about this sometimes. I have often thought to myself that a high fall would be pretty neat, but then again, maybe you don't enjoy that kind of fall the same way you enjoy a rollercoaster… Floating into space is another alternative which have seemed like an attractive one to me. Until today all my reflections had been built on nothing, however, now that I have discovered this article from New Scientist, I am able to make a more informed choice about my preferred death scenario.

According to the article written by Anna Gosline, death is almost invariable caused by a lack of oxygen in the brain. How this oxygen deprivation arises is different from case to case. In the article ten different means of dying are discussed: drowning, heart attack, bleeding to death, fire, decapitation, electrocution, fall from a height, hanging, lethal injection, and explosive decompression. If your main priority is to not experience pain then your choice should be decapitation (a good decapitator is a requirement though), or fall from height. If conducted properly, these two methods will result in a rapid death and hence a minimum amount of suffering. Things can go wrong though. When Mary Queen of Scots was decapitated (see picture), the axeman failed to completely separate the head from the rest of the body in his first three attempts. He eventually finished the job with a dagger… Decapitation is probably the fastest way of dying, however, even an isolated head contains enough oxygen to function for about ten seconds. Hence, just like chickens can run around headless following decapitation, humans can operate their facial muscles. I don't know whether they can also experience consciousness, but I cannot see any reason why not (I wonder what it would feel like to just be a head)…

The "float into space scenario" has become a lot less attractive after reading the article. It seems to be a lot like drowning where you panic because you cannot get any oxygen. Additionally, your body will swell up like in the movie Total Recall (though they probably exaggerated a bit), not very pleasant in other words. Likewise, electrocution and lethal injection, seems to be rather unattractive choices. Electrocution is supposed to knock out the brain swiftly, however, whether this really happens is a matter of debate (the cranium is a good insulator and may thus prevent the bulk of electricity from entering the brain). An active brain will experience horrible pains as a result of the burns and the high current flowing through the body.

In the light of this, lethal injection seem like a much better alternative, at least if the dosing is right. Before getting the actual killer substance convicts are given a large dose of anesthesia and after that they won't feel a thing. The problem is just that occasionally the given dose is too small and then this alternative is no longer very attractive. Finally, falling from height does seem to be a fairly good alternative. At terminal velocity (the velocity you reach before the wind resistance balances the gravitational force), which is about 200km/h, the blow that you experience upon landing is so great that you can be fairly certain of a swift fatal dysfunction in your body, either the heart or the lungs explode or you crack your spine. If you try landing on your head results will be even "better"…

What would you choose?

Ps: I am not suicidal, I find life too facinating to want to kill myself, so you don't need to call any agencies...

Complementary and alternative medicine - Spontaneous recovery from disease

2007-10-05T19:42:00.001+01:00

Alternative and complementary medicine refers to products and practices which are not part of the standard medical procedure that you get when you go to a hospital. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, alternative refers to when a practice aspires to replace standard medical care whereas complementary practices only aspire to complement standard medical procedure. For sure, for sure, medical research is far from a complete understanding of the physiology and anatomy of humans, and there are almost certainly many effective remedies which are not a part of the standard repertoire today. In the future we will no doubt see many advances in science and in consequence, new therapies to treat disease.

Having said this, complementary and alternative medicine suffers from what I consider to be a much more serious problem. First of, many of the techniques and practices used in alternative and complementary medicine have never been tested, or have not gained any support, in controlled studies and hence they have never proved to have any "real effect" (as opposed to placebo effect which they probably do have). Even more serious, because alternative therapies have often not been tested properly, it is hard to tell whether they have any serious side effects. What is almost certain is that if a particular substance has any effect at all, then it is more than likely to have side effects as well (see table at bottom of this article).

Sometimes alternative practices turn out to be effective and when they do they are eventually assimilated into standard medical practices. To be fair, this assimilation process can sometimes be agonizingly slow and some doctors are probably too conservative, however, the essence of the matter is that when an alternative treatment or therapy has gained enough support in studies it will cease to be "alternative" and become "standard". This is to some extent true for acupuncture, which is now used occasionally as a treatment for various conditions even though it has long been controversial. However, importantly, the mechanism that makes acupuncture work seems to be different from what has been claimed by those who have used this procedure in the past. No meridians have ever been demonstrated. Instead it seems that acupuncture stimulate pain sensing nerve endings. These nerve endings in turn exercise a form of lateral inhibition meaning that they block other pain sensing nerve endings around them, thus preventing the patient from experiencing pain in that area.

Complementary and alternative practices can often give the illusion of being effective because we recover spontaneously from diseases. We have an impressive immune system, which deals with seemingly limitless pathogens in an extremely efficient and competent manner. I am making up the numbers here, but say that after taking a certain herb 90% of all people recover from the flue within a week. Wow, surely there must be something to it then? But wait a minute. Almost everyone (say 90%) recovers from the flue within a week if they just stay home in bed. Suddenly these herbs do not seem that fantastic, and they seem even less attractive if you take into account the often excessive price tags.

Back pain is another example that deserves mention, and these figures I am not making up (they come from a lecture I attended recently). Nine out of ten (90% that is) cases of acute back pain will go away after one week. Combine this with the fact that 60-80% of all individuals will experience back pain sometime in their lifetime and what you get is an awful lot of cases of back pain that goes away in one week. Not surprisingly, at least not to a cynic like me, there are a huge number of alternative or complementary therapies for back pain, and they all seem really successful as long as you do not compare them to no treatment at all…

Here is my advice, my alternative therapy if you like. If you experience back pain, and don't have any other serious symptoms such as your vertebrae penetrating your back muscles (in which case I would advice going to a doctor), don't spend your money on all sorts of alternative/complementary therapies, rather relax for one week and see if the pain simple goes away (in most cases it will). Once you have recovered, use the money you would have spent on a therapy on something nice, such taking your girlfriend to a cozy restaurant. If the pain does not go away after one week, go see a doctor and have your back checked up…

Writing about alternative medicines is something that really warms my heart. I have written about homeopathy here, here and here, and here I have written about the role of the placebo effect.

Blog marketing tips – Building traffic and getting stats

2007-09-27T11:35:00.001+01:00

I am now 62 posts into my life as a blogger. Some weeks have been more productive than others but overall I am happy with my publishing frequency. If you have a blog which you want people to read then it is not always enough to write superb posts. In order to get people to view your blog you need to market yourself, otherwise people will not find your blog. So far I have not found any method that gives me loads of visitors without me having to do anything, however, some ways work better than others. Here are my tips.

The most basic tip of all is to keep writing. If you do not update your blog frequently, people will not visit your blog frequently. It is also very important to establish some contacts. Go to other blogs and comment on their posts. If you appreciate a particular blog you can add a link to it on your blog and then ask them if they want to do the same. Commenting a lot on other blogs also spreads your name and in consequence makes people interested in what you have to say.

The next step is to get your blog indexed by search engines and blog catalogues. The easiest way to do this is to use a pinging service. Personally I use Pingoat and Ping-o-matic. Both of these pinging services announce your new posts to a few dozen search engines and blog catalogues.

If you have accomplished the basics above (not a trivial feat), then you can start to look at different web-applications that will help you build traffic. If you have a blog in English, some time to spend, and want to build traffic, then my best tip is to sign up for Blogexplosion. The concept is simple, if you read other peoples' blogs then they will read your blog. At blogexplosion you get 0.5 visitors for every 30s visit you make on a blog. Every now and then you also get so called "mystery credits", which is just a kind of bonus. So you really get a little bit more than 0.5 visitors on your blog for every 30s visit to another blog. There are various similar services, including Blogmad and Blogadvance, but Blogexplosion has worked best for me so far.

It is nice to be able to see how traffic builds on your new blog, and there are some neat ways of visualizing the trends. For basic stats and trends (see picture above) I use Blogflux topsites, which generates charts showing how many visitors I have had for the last month. Blogflux mapstats (see picture below) is another excellent service which allows you to see the location of the people who have visited your blog as well as the site from which they came, or alternatively, what they put into their search engine to find you. ClustrMaps (see picture far above) is a similar service which has the extra positive aspect of accumulating statistics – it does not throw away all the stats every day. However, ClustrMaps does not give you as much details as Blogflux mapstats, so it is up to you to decide.

There are of course countless additional tips, however, so far these have served me the best.

The God Delusion, part 8 – What’s wrong with religion? Why be so hostile

2007-09-22T09:52:00.001+01:00

I do not think that religion is the only source of evil in this world. Humans have an instinct to form groups, and to amplify the differences between the in-group and the out-group. I am myself a fan of Manchester United, and for some weird reason I can get a little bit upset when someone criticize a player in the team or something similarly harmless. Now, I would never act on such feeling, however, there are fans or hooligans who in fact get into fights for such reasons, unbelievable as that may sound… I think that mankind will probably always find something to fight about, however, I also think that religion is the worst culprit of all when it comes to creating conflicts between groups. In chapter eight of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins addresses the very frequent question "what is wrong with religion"?

The danger of Islamic fundamentalism is obvious to most people. Last weekend I watched the movie United 93. Even though I have seen those planes fly into the world trade center thousands of times I still just cannot understand or accept that any human being can plan and execute such a deed which intentionally strikes against civilians, many of whom have had absolutely nothing to do with the miseries that the Muslim world has experienced. To take a plane full of civilians in great despair and then fly that plane right into a building with more such civilians is an act that must require a lot of faith. 9/11 was no zenith of terrorism. According to “The Religion of Peace.com” Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 9500 deadly terror attacks since 9/11.

Islam is not the only religion with blood on its hands though. In Africa, countless massacres has been carried out in the name of Christianity. See for example Joseph Kony (see picture), proclaimed spirit medium and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

So where does religious extremism stem from, what causes it? I have not read any studies on this, and if someone could enlighten me then I would be grateful. However, I think it is beyond reasonable doubt that religion has to take part of the blame. In particular, the problem with almost all religions is that they teach the young that blind faith is a virtue. To doubt in God when there is no evidence is for some reason a horrible crime. As a consequence, religious people often cannot tell you what it would take for them to stop believing. This is one of the things that separates science and religion. Dawkins writes:

But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.

There are well documented differences in peoples' tendency to be open minded. Some individuals are born with a taste for absolute rules and principles and a great dislike for grey-scale ethics and knowledge. One could add to the speculation above that if individuals of this kind, who score low on openness, is brought up in say a Christian family, then it is probable that this individual will become more extreme in his/her faith than the parents. Maybe, unlike the parents, the youngster decides that the bible must be read literally and then he read from the bible that “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed” (Exodus 22.20), right there you have the birth of an extremist. Dawkins explains it perhaps more elegantly than me when he writes:

The teachings of 'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves are an open invitation to extremism.

The religious movement in the United States seems to have abandoned the founding fathers' ideal of a true secular state. The intelligent design movement tries to bring religion into the classroom, a goal which may become a problem for them since the creator is not specified. Meanwhile there are the so called pro-life politicians (ironically, the same politicians tends to be strong proponents of the death penalty), who want a ban on abortion for faith based reasons. The religious movement in America has culminated (I hope) in a group referred to by outsiders as The American Taliban. I can find no difference between their rhetoric and that of Osama Bin Laden. According to Ann Coulter:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

Anyways, the main problem with faith and the answer to the question "what is wrong with religion" is that it idealizes faith without evidence. It is really hard to argue with someone who merely says "this is what I believe, and nothing can change that". Such an attitude makes it impossible to have discussion that is of any use. I will end with the following quote from Bertrand Russell (see picture) (which can also be found in The God Delusion):

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Relativism

2007-09-15T09:00:00.001+01:00

It is of course true that we cannot know anything for certain. For all we know, we may be living in "The Matrix", and everything we see is mere computer simulations. Likewise, we can never know for sure that a theory is true in an objective sense. I consider these two statements as uncontroversial, however, when relativists go one step further and argue that all theories are equivalent since no theory can be proven, that is when I must disagree…

People who use this reasoning have completely forgotten about the concept of evidence and prediction. Though a theory can never be proven in the absolute sense it can be better or worse at describing reality. Just as simple example there are people who claim that the world is spherical (or almost spherical), and there are those who claim that it is flat (based on religious reasoning I might add). What predictions does each of these two theories make? Well, one very simple prediction is that a round earth should cast "round" or banana shaped shadows on the moon when the earth is between the sun and the moon. If the earth was flat on the other hand, the shadow should be flat as well. Everyone who has ever gone out to watch the moon knows that the round earth theory gives the more accurate prediction. We cannot know for certain that the earth is round, but the predictions it makes agree with what we see. When a prediction is correct we can call that evidence. My point is simply that people do not walk around and think that the earth being flat and the earth being round are two equivalent theories just because neither can be proven. Almost everyone believes that the earth is round because there is so much evidence in favor of that theory.

I have previously argued that in fact it does not really matter whether a theory is true in the objective sense. As long as a particular theory is very good at predicting the world as we see it, it is a good theory and we should simply act as if it was true. It is this mentality together with the scientific method, which reduces the risk of seeing evidence where there is none that has brought us to where we are today. Here it is important to remember that if a theory is true in the objective sense, then all predictions derived from that theory would have to be true as well.

Relativists also like to point fingers at the scientific method. One frequent argument that you hear from relativists is that throughout history there has been paradigm shifts in almost all sciences. In astronomy for example we have gone from the Copernican system, to the Newtonian, to Einstein's relativity. Furthermore they claim that these paradigm shifts occur, not because latter theories are more accurate, but due to cultural factors. Relativists who use this argument, first of all, forget that history is also a science. They are using evidence which has been produced using the scientific method – the very same method which they are criticizing. Clearly hypocritical...

Besides, it is clear to me that all shifts in astronomy have been progressive. The details of the various paradigm shifts may have been influenced by sociological factors, however, the main reason for all the shifts have been that they make better predictions. Newton's theory of gravitation gives a better description than Copernicus theory, and Einstein's theory of relativity make better predictions than Newton's theory. Old theories are exchanged with new ones when the new ones are better at describing the world as we perceive it.

This will be all I write about relativism for now, but check back later if you want to read more. For some reason I end up in discussions about relativism very often, and therefore I also have many thoughts on the subject. Many of the arguments that I present here have been influenced by this book (see picture above), which I recommend to everyone.

Plagiarism

2007-09-05T08:44:00.001+01:00

A big step for me and a tiny step for humanity… I have recently come to realize that a significant event in my career has occurred. For the first time in my life I have been plagiarized! Even though I am supposed to be upset I actually feel a bit honored, I mean, someone actually thought my writing was so good that she pretended it was her own.

What is plagiarism? Plagiarism is one of the worst crimes you can do in academia. The term is taken from the Latin term Plagiare which means "to kidnap". Essentially you plagiarize someone when you take their idea, theory or text, and reproduce it as if it was your own idea, theory, or text. Someone who is caught expressing other peoples' view as their own without proper acknowledgement are usually punished with suspension or even termination of their job as well as a very bad reputation. Plagiarism indeed, is a big No No in academia.

It is of course not always that easy to tell whether you are plagiarizing something. Although I try to give acknowledgements to the people who inspire this blog, I am relatively sloppy when it comes to doing exhaustive explorations of the literature. Therefore it is possible that some of the ideas I express as my own have actually been thought up before by someone else. I do not do this on purpose however, and I see that as essential. I sometimes copy texts that Richard Dawkins have written, but when I do I write "Richard Dawkins says…". I try not to leave the reader with the impression that it is my thoughts.

When checking Technocrati last time was happy to see that my blog continues to generate reactions, that is after all one of my goals i.e. to get people to discuss things. However, on one blog written by a woman called Abida, my work was not cited, it was plagiarized, stolen without any reference, link, or acknowledgement whatsoever of my work. So what Abida did was not "accidental plagiarism". She wrote one paragraph about The God Delusion, and the she used ctrl+c and ctrl+v for the rest of the text. A rather embarrassing behavior I think, at least when it is discovered or written about on another blog…

Ps: If you happen to read this Abida, perhaps you can put in a tiny little reference in "your" review, and all will be forgotten, and not to forget, you can sleep well at night without fear of the eternal fire in that special place in hell designated to plagiarists J.

The God Delusion, Part 7 – The Good book and the changing moral zeitgeist

2007-09-01T07:26:00.001+01:00

In chapter seven of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins attacks the book from which some Christians claim to get their moral code from, I am speaking of course about the Old Testament. However, Dawkins makes it clear that he is not criticizing the moral or conduct of Christians per say, rather, he argues that Christians, like other mortals in fact do not derive their morals from the bible…

"We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist's decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation."

That people "pick and choose" among the moral guidelines in the bible becomes extremely obvious when you take into account what is actually advocated in the Old Testament. I believe that not even fundamentalist a Christians would send his or her daughter into the hands of rapists and murders (see Judges 19:23-4). I also wonder how many fundamentalist Christians actually think that God is doing the right thing when he commands the stoning of a poor man who worked on the Sabbath!? And then again there are people who believe strongly in their own interpretation of the bible, and based on that interpretation they commit horrible crimes… Richard Dawkins writes:

"As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' Blaise Pascal (he of the wager) said something similar: 'Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Criticizing the Old Testament is like shooting a dead elephant, not very difficult. To me it is quite incomprehensible how people today can believe literally everything that is written in the Old Testament. It is even more difficult for me to understand why someone would want to get their morals from this book. Luckily Yahweh's son(?) Jesus came along. I hope that those who believe that Richard Dawkins is a fundamentalist atheist who hits out at anything and everything associated with religion, will read the following quote carefully…

Well, there's no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn't) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His 'turn the other cheek' anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years. It was not for nothing that I wrote an article called 'Atheists for Jesus' (and was later delighted to be presented with a T-shirt bearing the legend).

I also see Jesus as a role model in more than one respect and I think his philosophy is good, albeit not perfect. I admire Jesus in the same way that I admire other philosophers such Bentham, Mill, Rawls and Kant. All these men have influenced the way I think about good and bad, but I don't think any of these men have THE ethical philosophy. Similarly, Jesus as he is described in the New Testament has many good ideas and thoughts, but he is not always an example to follow. Dawkins writes.

Jesus' family values, it has to be admitted, were not such as one might wish to focus on. He was short, to the point of brusqueness, with his own mother, and he encouraged his disciples to abandon their families to follow him. 'If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Speaking about Jesus, I have also always asked myself why? Why did God have to incarnate himself, ridicule his incarnation, and then finally have him crucified just in order to forgive us? Why couldn't God, who is after all omnipotent and omniscient, just forgive our sins without going through all the trouble? I don't think I have ever gotten a straight answer to that question…

A couple a weeks ago I was asked the question which always pops up in discussions such as this one: What about Stalin and Hitler, they were atheists and they were evil!? Doesn't that mean that atheism makes people evil? No it doesn't. In my mind it is not important what a particular person or dictator believes. What matters to me is the behavior and actions of the person in question. Quite often a person's beliefs influence the behavior of the believer and then the beliefs becomes relevant. Religion I believe, in general, has a bad influence on people's behavior, in particular when we are talking about world leaders since they become more rigid and difficult to negotiate with. Atheism, I would argue, has no such effect on behavior. Hitler probably was religious (read the book if you want further justification of this point), but Joseph Stalin was certainly an atheist. Did atheism make Stalin commit his crimes, I believe not. Did his Islamic conviction make Osama Bin Laden commit his crimes, yes they probably did…

What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does.

Married

2007-08-19T09:18:00.001+01:00

I have not updated my blog for a while now. This is not because I have been slagging, quite the contrary in fact. The 28^th of July I got married to Laila Hedlund (see our wedding picture above). We had a big wedding with I believe 158 guests attending. A little advice to anyone who is planning a big party and don't want to ruin their family in the process: hire catering! Even if it means you will be in dept for decades, use catering (and a wedding planner)!

After getting married we have moved to our new home in Lund. Finally I will not have to sit on a train for four hours to see my girlfriend… I mean wife J. We are now living in a real mess with boxes everywhere, but we are happy and it is nice to know that we will be here henceforth. When we have settled down a little bit I promise to keep writing on all the issues that I find interesting and important… Check back soon!

The God Delusion, Part 6 – Roots of morality

2007-08-05T08:21:00.001+01:00

In chapter six of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins deals with the roots of morality. There seems to be a major concern amongst religious people that should people become atheists there would no longer be any reason to behave morally. After all, why would anyone behave in a good way if there was no after-life reward, and if there was no hell fire, what would stop people from murder and rape??? On the question, "If there is no God, why be good?" Dawkins writes:

Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: 'Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, applepolishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.' As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.'

So what is the danger associated with atheism and in particular, a belief in the Theory of Evolution? It seems to me that many people mistakenly believe that the theory of evolution teaches us how to maximize fitness and perhaps more dangerously that maximizing fitness is necessarily a good thing…. There is nothing in the theory of evolution which tells us how we should act, that is for us to decide. Dawkins writes:

A great deal of the opposition to the teaching of evolution has no connection with evolution itself, or with anything scientific, but is spurred on by moral outrage. This ranges from the naive 'If you teach children that they evolved from monkeys, then they will act like monkeys…

I have written about this before in my post "Ethics of an atheist", but it is important so I will say it again. I think that the role of the Theory of Evolution is not to tell us how to act i.e. we should not derive our morality from the theory of evolution. Rather, I think, the theory of evolution can be used to make informed guessed about how people are likely to act in various situations. On a larger scale, I think that Evolution can help us predict which policies are likely to succeed as well as which ones are likely to fail because they violate our instincts? I think that in many ways a communistic society, as it is described in theory, would be quite nice. Marx's (see picture) slogan "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs" may be sexist, but aside from that it sounds like a very sensible principle to my ears. Unfortunately I think that a society based on this principle would never work, simply because it is human nature to want more than one need (this is probably the reason it never has worked to)… Largely for this reason I favor a market-based society. For those who are interested in this line of thought I recommend Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue (the last chapter is about implications for society). Dawkins writes that:

A great majority of religious people, I am sure, are moral and responsible human beings. However, the following letter to Brian Flemming, as well as countless historical episodes (9/11, Crusades, Inquisition etc), shows that religious belief indeed does not make people immune from primitive "ape like" behavior…

You've definitely got some nerve. I'd love to take a knife, gut you fools, and scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are attempting to ignite a holy war in which some day I, and others like me, may have the pleasure of taking action like the above mentioned…

Dawkins then points out the absurdity in defending an omnipotent omniscient God. Isn't it enough that all atheists will burn in hell forever after we die? Can't your God just punish us if he wants to, or perhaps this is where your faith breaks down? My advice to those who feel the need to fight in the name of God is, why not let God take care of it, should he exist then it should be a piece of cake…

So where does morality come from? Without going into the details the Theory of Evolution provides a perfectly valid explanation of the phenomenon. In experiments where people are given ethical dilemmas, religious people and atheists give pretty much the same answers, again suggesting that religion doesn't make you more moral... How did morality evolve? Here, to confine the length of this post, I will simply refer to Matt Ridley's The Origin of Virtue, which deals exhaustively with the subject...

Irrational fear 2: Nuclear power

2007-07-31T17:44:00.001+01:00

Last time I wrote about pesticides and how we are worried to death about 0.01% of the pesticides that we ingest (the synthetic ones) instead of the 99% which seem to be as bad if not worse. Another area which I think is often associated with irrational fear is nuclear power. The word "nuclear" seems to elicit a knee-jerk kind of reaction in many people. Take for instance Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (NMR for short), a very powerful and quite safe diagnostic method. People were very reluctant to use this method, seemingly only because it had "Nuclear" in the name. In part because of this fear they have now changed the name to Magnetic Resonace Imaging (MRI for short), and the technology has been a major boost to diagnostics as well as to research.

The following arguments are to a large extent a reflection on Richard Muller's (see picture below) paper with the title "The witch of Yucca Mountain". I can warmly recommend the article but if you want the same information in video format you can go here and forward to 47min and listen to the rest of the lecture (it is very entertaining).

It is no secret that we are facing an energy crisis. I am personally not convinced that CO2 emissions is an important contributing factor when it comes to Global warming, however, the fact of the matter is that our fossil fuels will eventually be used up and when there is none left we will need a different source of energy. Fission of uranium and plutonium is not an endless source of energy, however, it would provide us with energy for quite a while. Yet many countries do not want to build these Nuclear power plants, largely because of what I think is irrational fear…

Before I encountered Muller I associated nuclear power plant accidents with Chernobyl (see picture). However, Chernobyl was not a typical nuclear power plant. Its design was the worst imaginable and as Muller explains in his lecture such a design is completely prohibited today. The worst case scenario for a modern nuclear power plant is the nuclear meltdown. For a meltdown to occur, it is required that 4 different independent security systems which are inspected regularly, break down simultaneously which is not at all likely. If however, the highly unlikely worst case scenario would occur, and the radioactive material would penetrate meters of steel and concrete and go into the ground and the gases escape we would still not have anywhere near the same levels of radioactivity that were present after Chernobyl because the radioactivity leaks out into the ground instead of being blown up into the sky. I can understand that people want Nuclear Powerplants to be safe, however, there seems to be some sort of obsession here. People seem not to worry about other types of dangers. What if a chemical plant blew up? What is the worst case scenario there? Or what about the laboratories where they deal with the Ebola virus, what would happen if all their security systems broke down?

There is also a major concern about nuclear waste. The plutonium waste coming from a nuclear power plant has a half life of about 24.000 years meaning that after 96.000 years 1/16 of the radioactive waste will still remain. The question which does not yet have an answer is, where are we going to store this waste? In United States, Yucca Mountain, a place with very few earthquakes, was chosen as an ideal storage site. If the unthinkable would happen at Yucca Mountain, and all the radioactive waste would leak out, it would still be in small non-water soluble glass-pellets, so it would not mix with the ground water. Furthermore, even if Yucca Mountain was filled to its capacity limit and all the radioactive waste leaked out into the ground water and then out of the pellets in which it is cotained (this scenario has already passed into science fiction), the water would still not reach even a fraction of the radioactivity levels present in the Los Angeles drinking water! The drinking water that the citizens of Los Angeles are drinking is from the Colorado river which flows through many valleys with Granite. Granite contains some fraction of percentage of uranium which is slowly dissolved in the drinking water, thus making it radioactive. Because there is no agreement on where to store the waste today, today the radioactive material is simply sitting in a building next to the nuclear plant, not an ideal storage site.

To sum up, instead of storing the nuclear waste in the safest imaginable location where it has virtually no chance of leaking out, and even if it would leak out it would not be a major disaster, it is stored in buildings next to the power plants, which is a much less safe location, all because of the irrational fear among the public.

Irrational fear 1: Pesticides

2007-07-18T23:04:00.001+01:00

About three months ago I wrote a post on natural foods and the highly exaggerated danger associated with pesticides. I cited research done by Bruce Ames (see picture), Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. In this very interesting interview, Bruce Ames gives his view on organic foods. In the following excerpt from this interview Ames explains that the reason why he is against spending more resources on natural foods is not that it contains more carcinogens but rather that the production and in consequence also the products is more expensive. More expensive fruits and vegetables means less consumption which will result in more cancers:

Ames: Yes. I'm much more interested in preventing cancer. Then we have to get out to the public what's important. If you tell them about trivia all the time, they get completely confused, and it's counterproductive. I just think all this business of organic food is nonsense basically. We should be eating more fruits and vegetables, so the main way to do that is to make them cheaper. Anything that makes fruits and vegetables more expensive may increase cancer.

When I cite this information people often ask where Bruce Ames gets his money from. Is he really trustworthy? This is a fair question when you take into account the fact that the food industry is a big industry, and if organic foods would suddenly become the public choice it would certainly be rather detrimental to many companies. What many people seem to forget though is that producers of organic foods also have money waiting for them, should they manage to sway the public opinion. Unless it is suggested that organic food producers have a superior morality, immune to economic incentives, this is not a valid argument, after all the economic incentive is there for both sides. Maybe those the people who tell us that organic is the way to go do so because they would get rich if people followed their advice?

I feel quite confident that Bruce Ames is not bought by the food industry. Why? Partially, I believe Ames is a good guy because of what my intuition tells me. When I read the interview (referenced above) with this scientist he just doesn't strike me as a man who has sold his soul to the devil, quite the contrary in fact. However, the main reason why I don't think Ames is bought by the food industry is that he is also the man who first proved that many synthetic pesticides are carcinogenic. For quite a while he was a hero to all the natural food proponents.

Bruce Ames showed that indeed many man made chemicals are carcinogenic, but what reason do we have to assume that natural pesticides aren't also carcinogenic? Ames did not make this assumption and when he tested natural pesticides, which are created by the plants themselves as a protection, he found that pretty much the same proportion of natural pesticides was carcinogenic. Furthermore, Ames discovered that plants which are not treated with synthetic pesticides (i.e. natural foods) contain more potent carcinogens than plants which have been treated with pesticides. (Things can be more or less carcinogenic; for example, even though mushrooms contain 50% carcinogens they are very weak and therefore doesn't do a lot of damage whereas coffee contains much stronger carcinogens.) Read my previous post if you want to understand why. Add to this that 99.9% of the pesticides that we ingest are natural pesticides and you will understand why this post is about irrational fear.

Here we are worrying about 0.1% of the pesticides we ingest which according to the data are, if anything, less mutagenic than the other 99.9%. That is what I would call irrational fear…

The God Delusion, Part 5 – The roots of religion

2007-07-15T21:07:00.001+01:00

Ok Richard, now you have spent four chapters arguing that religious faith is irrational and based on invalid argumentation. Say that we believe this, what is the alternative? How can it be that something as irrational and destructive as religion has been apart of every culture since the birth of humankind? Doesn't that suggest that there is something to it? What is your alternative? Why do you think religion is so widespread? These are the questions that Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, take on in the fifth chapter. Dawkins writes:

The fact that religion is ubiquitous probably means that it has worked to the benefit of something, but it may not be us or our genes. It may be to the benefit of only the religious ideas themselves, to the extent that they behave in a somewhat gene-like way, as replicators.

Allotetraploid recently posted a video in which Daniel Dennett (see picture) dealt with this issue. He used the analogy of the common cold. It too has existed in all cultures at all times, since the birth of the human race (and even before that), but we do not say that, "the common cold must be good for something" just because it is so common. You might complain that the common cold is a disease whereas religion is more like a choice, and I would think that is a valid argument if the meme theory is wrong. However, if there is something to memes, then it is definitely a valid argument.

My point here is simply that because something has been shared in a lot of different cultures and for many millennia, it doesn't follow that it is necessarily a good thing. Some people seem to think that just because astrology has been around for so long there must be something to it, but if you look at the evidence this is not case. Religion may exist just because it is beneficial to itself, just like the common cold is good for the bacteria causing the common cold. Plausible as this may be, Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion advocates a different position, namely that religion is a by-product of another mechanism which is beneficial. Dawkins writes:

Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn't have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does. I find it helpful to introduce the by-product idea with an analogy from my own field of animal behaviour.

In the following paragraph Dawkins introduces the analogy of a moth which, as we all know, is extremely attracted to light. Either they fly into your light bulb a thousand times in a night, making is virtually impossible to sleep, or they come diving into your campfire like a genuine kamikaze pilot. What could possible be the point of this behavior (read here for an answer)? I was told another similar analogy by Mike Majerus in Cambridge. Apparently one of his Australian friends had a garden in which he had lit up a small path using lights imbedded in stones. At dusk, a bunch of clever frogs would appear on these paths standing next to the lights which lit up the path. Insects, because they are also (like Moths) attracted to light would fly towards light and there the waiting frogs would spurt out their tongue and capture a nice meal. Yet the frogs' intellectual capacity did have a limit. One day when the owner of this house accidentally dropped a ping pong ball on the path he saw to his surprise how one frog's tongue fired out, grabbed the ball, and swiftly drove it right down the stomach. The frog seemed happy enough and would gladly eat more ping pong balls, all of which would sooner or later come out the other end (somewhat messed up). These frogs could not distinguish between ping poll balls and insects. It is as if they have a mechanism in their head telling them "swallow anything mobile in proximity to the lights". Had it not been for us humans throwing ping pong balls around, this adaptation would have been highly successful (perhaps it is anyways)…

Is religion the equivalence of eating ping pong balls? Richard Dawkins seems to think so and I think it is also a plausible explanation. He writes:

My specific hypothesis is about children. More than any other species, we survive by the accumulated experience of previous generations, and that experience needs to be passed on to children for their protection and well-being. Theoretically, children might learn from personal experience not to go too near a cliff edge, not to eat untried red berries, not to swim in crocodile-infested waters. But, to say the least, there will be a selective advantage to child brains that possess the rule of thumb: believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you. Obey your parents; obey the tribal elders, especially when they adopt a solemn, minatory tone. Trust your elders without question. This is a generally valuable rule for a child. But, as with the moths, it can go wrong.

So perhaps children who are taught by elders that God exists, that you better pray to God, and that you better go to church if you don't want to fry in hell, will accept this simply because they are told so by people who are supposed to know a lot about the world. This would explain the extremely high correlation between the religion of parents and their children, as well as the fact that virtually all religious conversions are to religions which are present in the culture in which the converter lives (there are not many people who move from say Iran to Sweden and suddenly convert to Hindu).

But wait! This only explains how religion can be passed on. How did it come about in the first place? Richard Dawkins, in order to explain this, suggests that it might have to do with our "Hyperactive agent detection device":

Justin Barrett coined the acronym HADD, for hyperactive agent detection device. We hyperactively detect agents where there are none, and this makes us suspect malice or benignity where, in fact, nature is only indifferent. I catch myself momentarily harbouring savage resentment against some blameless inanimate such as my bicycle chain.

I don't think I risk any overstatement when I say that people blame "things" for all kinds of stuff. My mother often calls me when she needs help with her computer and she is always certain that she did indeed not do anything to mess up the system, that option is unthinkable. No, the system messed it self up, intentionally… Well, maybe that is why we have religion. Who are we to blame when it rains on our wedding day?, who are we to blame when the alarm clock stops working the day when you were going to that really important meeting?, and who are we to blame when a tsunami has swept away your entire family? Surely there must be an agent who influences these events? I think that we probably have a mechanism in us which biases us towards such explanations. Hence religion.

Ps: For some "good news" see the Guardian article "Atheists top book charts by deconstructing God"

Equal opportunity design

2007-07-11T20:18:00.001+01:00

Intelligent design proponents tell us that evolution lacks evidence and that the alternative, a creator God who designed all creatures as we see them today, is equally likely. Their favorite analogy is the clockmaker analogy which basically says that our intuition tells us that everything complex have a designer, therefore humans must have a designer. A little sidetrack: even though our intuition often leads us in the right direction it can sometimes be quite wrong to. Read here.

I have already dealt with the essentials of Intelligent design, and why I think that it is wrong in a previous post. Here I want to focus on a consequence of the intelligent design argument that only became apparent to me after reading an article in the latest issue of my favorite magazine "Skeptic". The article is called "Who designed that?" and is written by Tom McIver. The problem that ID proponents face is the following.

In order to avoid being deemed a religion, intelligent design cannot say that any particular God is the designer, after all there is no rational argument why it should be Yahweh or Allah rather than any other God who designed us and our planet. Now, ID proponents are eager to take their theory into the classrooms to be taught in the biology lessons as an alternative theory to the theory of evolution. In practice, what they really want (in the US at least) is to read from the Bible during biology sessions, and that is where the problem is. Since any designer God is equally unlikely, any religion could claim their time in the classroom and their chance to convert today's students. In essence, Christianity would have to be taught side by side with Islam, Gnosticism, and even the silly religion of Scientology (man I lost my respect for Tom Cruise and John Travolta when I learned that they belonged to this church). In their morning biology session students would be taught about how God created plants and then came the light (have you noticed the severe conflict with science in this?), and then later on came Adam, and from his rib came Eve. In their afternoon biology session the same student would be taught the following.

"The Gnostics taught that God was a mad scientist named Yaldabaoth who had been created by accident and built the earth as a prison for pre-existent human souls. He cloned Adam, raped Eve and kicked them both out of paradise when Christ came in the form of a serpent to liberate them" (excerpt from "Skeptic magazine" number 2, 2007, p.60).

The next fifty biology sessions would be spent going through everyone of these, all equally plausible, alternatives to the theory of evolution. Needless to say, this would be a preposterous scenario. Evolution does have loads of supporting evidence. If you don't believe me, read about an experiment here or about AIDS here. Intelligent design, on the other hand, merely bring up another problem, namely who designed the designer?

The God Delusion, Part 4, Why there is almost certainly no God

2007-07-04T09:29:00.001+01:00

I am not the only blogger who is discussing The God Delusion. If you want a view that is really different from mine you can go to the Apologetics homepage where you will find comprehensive criticism of Richard Dawkins latest book. Deepak Chopra whom I recently criticized for his abuse of quantum physics also taken the challenge of trying to break the arguments put forth in The God Delusion. Needless to say I don't think that the Apologetics or Chopra are able to break the very strong message in the God delusion, but that should be up to you readers to decide.

After having met the many arguments or proofs for God, one by one, in chapter four Richard Dawkins goes on to describe not only why we do not need a God to describe our world but also why such a God in fact is quite implausible.

He starts out by explaining why the alternative to a creator God, Charles Darwin's (see picture) Theory of Evolution, is not, as many people tend to think, the same as blind chance. It is really quite wearisome to hear people say "so you think we just popped into existence" when you say you believe in evolution, but I have already written about this issue in my blog post Evolution is NOT blind chance. Dawkins also points out that to call upon a creator in order to explain complexities which we have not yet understood does not solve nothing, all it does is to invent another complexity that needs to be explained. I would like the ID proponents to suggest an empirical test, similar to the one below, which if it succeeded would support their "theory" and if it failed would falsify it. Dawkins writes:

"Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis"

Another common tactic used by religious people is "The worship of gaps". Whenever there is something science cannot explain such as for instance language, certain religious people take this as proof of God's existence. After all, if science doesn't have the explanation, then it has to God right, right?

"The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this: 'I [insert own name] am personally unable to think of any way in which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is designed."

But what about the Universe and what about us humans? Why should there be a Universe? Why should we exist? Surely someone must have wanted us to exist? No not of necessity. Though I am still merely an amateur astronomer (I am trying to help that by following a lecture series by Professor Alex Filippenko available at Berkeley's webcast), I know that there are theories out there which could potentially elucidate why our Universe looks the way it does. There are also good attempts to explain how the first cells arose. These theories I admit can sound a bit far fetched an even unlikely. However, it seems that we are also relatively lonely in our Universe and so the unlikely event of a cell (see below) forming spontaneously from various organic constituents only had to happen once for us to exist. If you throw a dice billions and billions of times you are likely to at least once get say 10 sixes in a row even though the probability of this series is as low as 0.00000002.

We humans are also ill equipped to accept hard nosed scientific theories instead of explanations that invoke an agent such as God. Humans have a natural tendency to see agents everywhere. Dawkins writes:

"Maybe the psychological reason for this amazing blindness has something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability. J. Anderson Thomson, from his perspective as an evolutionary psychiatrist, points me to an additional reason, the psychological bias that we all have towards personifying inanimate objects as agents. As Thomson says, we are more inclined to mistake a shadow for a burglar than a burglar for a shadow. A false positive might be a waste of time. A false negative could be fatal. In a letter to me, he suggested that, in our ancestral past, our greatest challenge in our environment came from each other. 'The legacy of that is the default assumption, often fear, of human intention. We have a great deal of difficulty seeing anything other than human causation.' We naturally generalized that to divine intention."

In summary, chapter four in The God Delusion, bring up a few quite important points. It is shown that a creator God is really an inadequate answer since it merely brings up another problem namely who created the creator, or who designed the designer? The best theory we have to explain our own existence without invoking an agent is the beautiful and simple Theory of Evolution.

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The God Delusion, Part 4, Why there is almost certainly no God