In a recent column in New Scientist magazine, physicist Lawrence Krauss argues with those who claim that the scientific world view disenchants the universe.

Krauss is absolutely right to challenge this highly offensive critique of reason, and his appeal to the natural wondrousness of the cosmos shows how creative and imaginative the naturalistic mindset can be. The atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins has also commented in similar fashion, though it is easy to overlook the more poetic passages in his writings, lost as they are in the relentless and all-too-necessary attacks on organised religion and superstition in general.

But Krauss makes a serious mistake in generalising his critique of religious thinking to an attack on myth as a whole. If I’ve understood him correctly, Krauss has failed to understand the nature of the mythical imagination, and how this connects with the social, economic and class-based nature of religious ideology.

“If this poetry of nature does not change the way we view our place in the universe, providing not mere facts but new meaning, then we are truly spiritually bereft. Yet too many people feel that they must invent alternative realities to justify human existence.”

I cannot argue with Krauss’ first sentence above, but there is something seriously wrong with the second. People very often create alternative realities as informal, loose-fitting mental models to help them make sense of their existence and experience of the world around them. They are not necessarily about justifying existence.

Among educated and relatively free peoples, such “alternative realities” are more often than not fictional narratives that serve to unlock the poetic imagination. And in the modern age they are almost universally understood to contain metaphorical rather than literal truths. They need not, as Krauss claims, detract from the “real-world thinking” required to solve “real-world problems”.

I say that Krauss has failed to understand the dynamic that turns mythical imagination into religion, but he did in his essay make brief reference to Barack Obama’s statement that some people turn to religion for refuge from the inequalities that abound in modern America. Krauss would do well to explore this further, and contemplate the nature and persistence of religion as a means of social control. Religion – whether it be militant Islam or tea and biscuits Anglicanism – is intimately entwined with political ideology.

Karl Marx wrote that to call on people to give up their illusions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. It is not enough to argue against religion from an epistemological perspective, as Lawrence Krauss and other promoters of scientism appear to be doing.

I only have access to the abstract and a brief write-up in New Scientist, but this paper in the journal Animal Cognition has caught my attention:

“Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) can steer by the stars”

It has long been known that cetaceans and certain other sea mammals occasionally pop their heads out of the water to survey the surroundings. Does this mean that the animals can use a starry night sky to find their way around?

Apparently so, says a group of marine biologists led by Björn Mauck at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Mauck and his colleagues studied the behaviour of harbour seals (common seals) in a specially built pool covered with a dome onto which was projected a simulation of the northern sky. The researchers found that even when the artificial sky was rotated at random, the seals could home in with very high accuracy on a particular star defined with a laser pointer.

“Seals and many other animals are exposed to the starry sky every clear night, and thus certainly have sufficient opportunities to learn the patterns of stars,” says Mauck.

Actually, they have far more opportunities than most human beings, living as the latter do in urban areas with light pollution blocking out all but the brightest stars and planets.

To me the result of this study is not at all surprising, but still I feel a sense of wow! at having the stellar navigation hypothesis confirmed in this way. It would be interesting to see a larger scale study of other intelligent sea creatures such as migrating whales and their stellar navigation techniques. Just how this could be done I have absolutely no idea.

Sixty-six English pence would buy me a small loaf of bread, a couple of chocolate bars or just over half a litre of petrol for my car. It is also, as it happens, what Queen Brenda and her dysfunctional family cost me and every other UK taxpayer in the previous financial year.

It is 66 pence too much.

According to Republic – the campaign for an elected head of state in the UK – the £40m total figure for last year included an average cost of £46,000 per train journey, £138,000 for Pip the Greek’s visit to the US, and £18,900 for a night out by the so-called Prince of Wales as part of his ‘The Pub is the Hub’ campaign. Then there is the £415,000 bill for Brenda’s five-day visit to the US.

Yes, I know that one could trot out similar figures for government ministers and other politicians. And some of the expense may have been wasteful. The difference is that politicians serve an at least partly legitimate purpose.

The philosopher AC Grayling is up to his usual polemical tricks in a Comment is Free article published today. It must be months since I last cited that august forum, and today it’s only happening as Norman Geras has taken objection to Grayling’s mode of argument.

In his article, which is ostensibly about “faith schools”, Grayling has a go at religious believers in general. Nothing new there, you may be thinking. But what is original is the author’s use of the neologism “anousics” to denote individuals who believe in ghosts, alien visitations, the dead coming to life, magic, rituals, incantations, strange psychological observances and sexual perversions, weird ancient myths, personified forms of evil and malevolence, and more.

Norm is right to question Grayling’s style and syntax, and his demonisation of all religious believers through an implied association with the stuff and nonsense listed above.

So is this just knockabout stuff, as Norm asks? Actually, it’s Comment is Free, and Grayling is merely adhering to a set of unwritten editorial guidelines understood by all those who write for the Guardian website. Grayling now has this nailed, and I kind of admire him for it.

If he were able to program a computer, Grayling could I’m sure generate code that spews this stuff out to order. And it might then be worth the paltry £75 a pop the Guardian pays those it pays at all (contrary to its freelance agreement with the National Union of Journalists).

Norm refers to honour, truth and logic. But he knows full well that there is little or no honour in Comment is Free, let alone truth. As for its internal logic, this is, shall we say, very special.

In a letter to New Scientist magazine, Ken Lignar from Chester, Connecticut, offers teachers a suggested lesson plan that would satisfy the desire of the outgoing US president to have “intelligent design” taught in schools alongside evolution. Here it is in total:

“The theory of intelligent design states that an omnipotent being created the universe and everything in it for reasons we cannot, and are not meant to, comprehend. There is no quantifiable evidence to support this theory, there are no hypotheses than can be proven or disproven using this theory, and it offers no predictive ability for any past, present or future events. OK, now let’s move on to the theory of evolution.”

That sounds good to me, though I would change a few words in the above text. For example:

“The theory of intelligent design states that an omnipotent being created the universe and everything in it for reasons we cannot, or are not meant to, comprehend.” [my emphasis]

This would deal with objections from Christian and other theologians who state that we are meant to comprehend the universe, but rely on the ‘grace of God’ as well as rational inquiry. Also, I would not refer to intelligent design as a “theory”. It’s time that we reclaim this term and define it properly, which Lignar has implicitly done in his lesson plan. That is, a theory is a testable hypothesis with predictive power; intelligent design is a statement of belief.

It may be awkward for those with a philosophical prejudice against the ‘selfish gene’ school of thinking in evolutionary biology, but recent work by researchers in the UK and Australia has cast doubt on at least one aspect of the group national selection theory of Harvard biologist Edward O Wilson.

Kin selection is the theory that individuals pass on their genes by assisting close relatives to reproduce. To give an extreme example, eusocial insects such as bees, wasps and ants sacrifice their own reproduction to help raise the offspring of the hive queen. This is altruism at a biological level.

Wilson argued that altruism evolved because it benefits groups, not individual genes. For what Wilson termed ‘group natural selection’ to work, organisms need not be closely related. Close relatedness would follow from animals sticking together and cooperating.

In a recent paper in Science magazine, William Hughes at Leeds University, Ben Oldroyd and Madeleine Beekman in Sydney, and Francis Ratnieks in Brighton, show convincingly that genetic relatedness is ancestral, and does not evolve after eusociality, as Wilson claimed.

Using a statistical technique known as ancestral state reconstruction, Hughes and his colleagues reconstructed female mating behaviour in 267 species of eusocial bees, wasps and ants. The researchers found that mating with a single male – monandry – is ancestral for all the independent eusocial lineages studied. Polyandry, on the other hand, is always derived.

Hughes discusses the experiment in a fascinating and easily comprehensible podcast, which is available to non-subscribers on the Science website.

So far there is little in the way of online discussion of the work. Other researchers will no doubt be mulling over the results, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this, despite Hughes’ assertion that “It’s pretty cut and dry, really.”

Be warned that much of the public discussion on kin versus group selection is driven by philosophical and political prejudices. And few are immune to this. I incline toward group natural selection, if only out of reaction against the often naively social-reductionist interpretations heaped on the ‘selfish gene’ theory by non-scientists*. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

* I should qualify “non-scientists” in the light of an argument between friends over at Obscene Desserts. The problem is due mostly to non-scientists abusing science for ideological ends, but scientists themselves are not entirely blameless. Even senior players such as Steven Pinker (e.g., The Blank Slate) have contributed to the debasement of scientific debate with polemics that rely more on demonising rhetorical devices than honest argument and a willingness to listen and learn from others.

The short answer is that if you are a dapper media darling medical expert, then the chances are you’re safe.

Raj Persaud – writer, radio and television presenter, professor of psychiatry and occasional jobbing shrink with the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust – has been found guilty of plagiarism in his written work. Hauled before the General Medical Council, Persaud’s defence was based on something like (I paraphrase!):

“I’m so extremely busy and stressed out being the popular voice of psychiatry that I became a little confused, and overlooked the fact that I had not properly cited the work of others. And for that reason you should let me off.”

Going by the three month suspension handed down by the GMC, it could be argued that this is exactly what the UK medical profession’s regulator has done. Physicians have been struck off the medical register for less than what Persaud appears to have got away with.

How the BBC and Persaud’s publishers will react to the outcome of the GMC hearing is uncertain. But going by the number of disgraced politicians whose media careers have not been adversely affected by criminal convictions and prison sentences, I fear that Persaud will be allowed to carry on with his broadcasts and newspaper columns. Persaud is, after all, a highly talented populariser of psychiatry and psychological science.

George Carlin (1937–2008)

On the digital age:

“Deleting someone is an even more powerful feeling than scratching out a name.”

On spleneticism:

“Still, when pushed to explain the pessimism and overt spleen that had crept into his act, he quickly reaffirmed the zeal that inspired his lists of complaints and grievances. ‘I don’t have pet peeves,’ he said, correcting the interviewer. And with a mischievous glint in his eyes, he added, ‘I have major, psychotic hatreds.’”

So what is it, do you think, that distinguished Carlin from, say, the multitude of grumpy old men and bitter, twisted, misanthropic bloggers?

Hat tip: JCW

Today is the start of National Insect Week. In deference to our six-legged friends you are kindly requested not to swat flies or stamp on beetles. Contemplate instead a world without bees, and the role of insects as a whole in the natural order. They will likely be around long after homo sapiens has left the stage.

I’ve just received an email from an official of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) about a new project called Middle East Strategic Information. MESI is directed by Yehuda Avner, a former Israeli ambassador to the UK and Ireland. Its function is to provide information and analysis from an Israeli perspective on the Middle East as they relate to the UK and wider world.

It may on the surface seem to be a public relations exercise, but given that MESI is an initiative of the JCPA my impression is that it has some substance.