Bethany Brookshire is wondering about how to justify writing about weird little animals.

Sometimes, I write about weird animals, I post weird anatomy facts, because I need to feel a little bit of wonder. Curiosity. Joy. I want other people to feel that way too. I know how much we are witnessing. I know how much we need little things to remind us that yes, there’s pain, but there’s joy in this life too. Sometimes, it’s romance novels or bad TV or funny Tiktoks. Sometimes it’s sea squirts. The world is, indeed, awful. But it’s also wonderful, and bizarre, and fun. We need the wonder as much as we need to witness.

I want to reassure everyone that it’s OK to write about bizarre creatures. You know, like odd specialized species that are seeing all the related species in their clade failing so spectacularly that they’re going extinct. Or strangely specialized organisms that have expanded a single organ in their bodies to such a freakishly large size that everything else is diminished in comparison. Or animals with such inefficient and unusual means of locomotion that they persist in despite every predator they’ve got being capable of outrunning them.

So yeah, I guess it’s OK to write about people.

But what’s weird about all the other animals? I spent part of my morning tracing silk to find the teeny-tiny juveniles that are bouncing back from winter, and then I was in the lab hanging out with my girls in the spider colony, and all it takes is an hour of that and you begin wondering why you have so few limbs and such a paltry collection of eyes, and hey, wouldn’t some venom come in handy when you get drafted into a committee meeting? We’re the weird ones, not them.

I’m waiting until we crack the ice on Europa, then maybe we’ll find truly weird critters…or more likely, I’ll start to identify with them and humans will look even more creepy and strange.

I was walking into work this morning, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the wolf spiders were underfoot, and I saw all these delicate lines of silk draped over everything (once your eye is attuned to spotting silk lines, you discover that they are everywhere, on every fence post and bush.) I stopped by the lab and saw that the temperature in the spider incubators was a comfortable 27°C, and the humidity is rising at last to about 35%, so I checked the colony. Nobody is laying eggs yet, but they are looking plump and healthy and ready for a season of fecundity.

Once the semester is truly over, in about a week and a half, I’m going to be doing some matchmaking, and that lovely virgin is going to take a lover.

Caitlin Flanagan is one of those creepy conservatives who manages to get regularly published in so-called liberal magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and simultaneously is loved by right-wing free speech warriors. She gets away with saying things like this, somehow.

What, exactly, are these faculty members supposed to be arrested for? Is it for peacefully protecting the rights of minority students to express their political opinions? I thought that’s what we are supposed to do!

I mean, for decades now I’ve let creationists and far-right students state their beliefs in my classroom (of course, I would then tell them they were wrong, and why, but they could speak their minds). It would have been so much simpler if I could have just called campus security on dissenters from my holy opinions and had them hauled away. Do I get to do that now?

I get email from creationists all the time, and it is so discouraging: there are a few people who manage to pump out so much noise and garbage, and there are a few people willing to engage their nonsense, and I guess I’m one of them. But I can’t possibly keep up! For instance, one obnoxious creationist has sent me a couple of links to his horrible website, Darhiwum, which just goes on and on with bogus misinterpretations at endless length. This particular article first quotes Conservapædia, and then explores the author’s misbegotten thesis, which is…let’s see if you can figure it out.

The cause of evolution does not exist in evolution. Evolution as a cause does not contain a response to the cause that makes it consequent. It does not give an account of itself, why is evolution possible in the first place? It is merely a programmed biological process on an assembly line.

“Evolutionary units must know the “trick” of reproducing, they must have heredity, hereditary variation… The basic problem is that the first evolutionary units could not have evolved in an evolutionary way, because they did not have the necessary properties at that time.” /Evolutionary biologist Eőrs Szathmáry/.

Where did they get this “knack” – they have no idea!

A pre-existing ability cannot be developed afterwards, and if the ability to evolve /reproduction, mutation, variation, natural selection, heredity/ is not there in the first place, the evolutionary process cannot even start. Evolution can only work if all its components are present and working simultaneously. Where do we get these capabilities by which the alleged evolution takes place?

First, I have to get something out of the way, this contemptible habit creationists have of quote-mining scientists. Eőrs Szathmáry is a theoretical biologist who published with John Maynard Smith, wrote articles presenting the mechanisms for evolution, and was never arguing for creationism. This creationist, though, throws out a mishmash of Conservapædia and established scientists to somehow lard his ideas with some trace of authority.

Their article goes on for thousands of words, but their central stupid idea is that evolution needed to evolve a specific mechanism for mutation, but evolution cannot proceed without mutation. Error is apparently intentional and designed; error is the “capability” that needs to be put in place by design.

I tried to read this bozo’s work with an open mind, but as it sank in what he was trying to argue, I realized that he was just stupid and not worth the effort.

Tom Cotton has a plan to deal with those rioting students at Columbia.

The “mob” of “Jewish brethren” holding Seder.

Has anyone else noticed what a colossal ass Tom Cotton is?

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale Elevate) by Justin Brierley

Justin Brierley’s new book is a strange thing indeed. The ex-host of the hugely popular Christian radio show Unbelievable? is on a mission to convince us that belief in God (within any religion, though he admits his interest is Christianity) is on the rise. The problem is, he doesn’t offer any evidence that this is true. Why? Because the very opposite is happening.

In every meaningful sense, the data tells us that the world is becoming less and less religious. Even as some countries become more faithful, they are outnumbered by those that are losing their religion. Just before Christmas 2022, the Pew Research Center reported that in Europe and the US, people are becoming far less religious, especially if they are young. But Brierley doesn’t want to look the numbers in the eye. He doesn’t even think that a fall in church attendance and a rise in the number of people describing their religion as “none” are enough to contradict the title of his book.

In some ways, this isn’t surprising: the book is published by an imprint of Tyndale House, which specialises in helping readers “discover the life-giving truths of God’s Word”. So we might expect some level of wishful thinking. But the book might also tell us something about the state of the discourse within the Christian community. The reaction seems to have been extremely positive so far.

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God begins by pronouncing the death of New Atheism, with various parochial disputes listed as the causes. These pale in comparison with schisms within Christianity, of course – gay marriage; female priests; rampant sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet apparently Brierley doesn’t see the irony in a sentence like: “The question of which particular values we should celebrate and support was the issue that came to tear apart the New Atheist world, as proved by the rancorous infighting of its factions over feminism, race, gender, and LGBT issues.”

Indeed, an alarming lack of self-awareness pervades the book. To bolster his thesis that “attitudes towards Christianity among serious thinkers in many fields seem to be changing”, Brierley – a Christian himself – relies on a strange cast of characters. The psychologist Jordan Peterson is repeatedly cited as the main driver of this change. He also notes the influence of Douglas Murray, a divisive polemicist, and Russell Brand, who is currently facing sexual assault allegations (which Brand denies). None of these men actually believe in the Christian God – a fact that Brierley repeatedly acknowledges in the book. All three have had nice things to say about Christianity, but this hardly makes them ideal models of inspiration.

Peterson has made himself popular, especially among disaffected young men, by espousing an old-fashioned, disciplined philosophy that borrows from Christianity but is largely characterised by its opposition to “woke” politics. His popularity with the average 20-year-old man surely relies in part on him not explicitly saying that religion is the solution. Brierley’s honesty should be commended but the only thing he proves is the very opposite of his thesis. When he proudly quotes Russell Brand lamenting the worship of the self, it is almost beyond parody.

Admitting that it is best to start by wanting Christianity to be true, Brierley embarks on a quest to prove that the world is best explained through deism and the Bible. In doing so he makes various errors familiar to anyone acquainted with Christian apologism: citing Christian anti-slavery efforts as though they trumped the biblical licences for slavery, for example. Every objection an atheist might have is breezily solved by an assurance that proves nothing at all. God could have ended slavery earlier, for example, but he didn’t want to rush it.

In truth, the book reads as though it were written exclusively for people already convinced of the Christian story. Despite the ongoing, life-ruining abuses by Christian and other religious institutions, Brierley only fleetingly alludes to the failings of the Church – and argues that we can only say they’re failings “on the basis of Christian values and virtue”. His time might have been better spent reflecting on how significant these abuses were in precipitating the unmistakeable fall in faith in recent years. On the divisive subject of equal marriage, he has nothing to say at all.

In his work so far, this book included, Brierley has been animated by a desire for people to become not just religious but Christian. Here he is desperate to piggy-back on the success of the Petersons and the Brands of this world in order to make Christianity appear exciting and new, perhaps mainly to a younger generation. But The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God is unlikely to persuade anyone who isn’t already on the brink of a conversion, and is likely to irritate non-believers who happen to pick up a copy.

Brierley is clearly one of Christianity’s most appealing apologists. Though the world is certainly not becoming more faithful, this won’t slow the progress of his tireless campaign.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! Confronting the kinds of problems that the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science was created to address—such as the spread of anti-science attitudes and the intrusion of religious beliefs on the rights and freedoms of nonbelievers—requires us to utilize many different tools. Language may be foremost …

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Why metaphor? Because that is how we think, how learn, how we parse the world. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphora, a “transfer”; literally a “carrying over”. The very act of understanding (from the Old English: to stand in the midst of) implies the existence of a “between”, a bridge between new and known. In effect, a metaphor. How could it be otherwise? How else can we assimilate a new piece of knowledge, other than by linking it to something we already know? In doing so, we weave a web. When we wonder what something means, what we’re really asking is: what will it impact? If I pull on this thread here, where will my web tighten, where might it unravel?

When we can’t find a suitable metaphor to describe our scientific reality, we run into problems. Take, for instance, quantum mechanics. Most of the devices we use every day are built upon eerily accurate calculations made using quantum theory. Operationally, the theory is wildly successful, yet no one can make complete sense of it. Even scientists who wield the equations with ease don’t claim to truly understand quantum theory; we still don’t have a metaphor that works.

Metaphors aren’t only a means of description, they can also lead to revelations. Centuries ago, Newton was able to calculate the gravitational attraction between two objects given their masses and the distance between them. But, while he could describe this interdependence precisely, Newton would “feign no hypothesis” as to why it was so. He had the equation, but he did not understand gravitation. It took Einstein to do that. In most situations, the answers that arise from Einstein’s and Newton’s equations are so close, the numerical discrepancy is practically negligible. The real difference is that, with Einstein, we finally have a metaphor. When we picture space-time as a dynamic “fabric” that responds to the mass with dips and ripples, we begin to understand what gravity means.

Not only are metaphors connective, they are also generative. The mere comparison of space-time to a fabric suggests questions that were previously inconceivable: Can space-time be torn? Can it be punctured? Can it gather in folds? While gravity remained Newtonian – a force acting instantaneously across an inert space – such lines of thought were not possible. They arise only in this new liminality. They live because of a metaphor.

New directions

So why do we still not appreciate the crucial role of metaphor? Metaphors in science may seem like a subjective, even literary insertion into what is meant to be an objective and rigorous discipline. Scientists themselves often play into this misconception by keeping metaphors out of academic discourse, reserving them for watered-down conversations with the general public. But in trading their personal metaphors, scientists can nudge each other’s thoughts in new directions, and push the boundaries of science forward.

There is more to consider. If metaphors create possibilities and encode meaning, it should come as no surprise that they also impact our perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. As is the case with any tool, we shape our metaphors – and then our metaphors turn around and shape us.

Even the limits of metaphor can take us forward. It can actually be quite instructive to push a metaphor to where it breaks, and mark the boundary. Take the now-standard comparison of a brain to a computer. Do you know that it started the other way around? The computational power of early computers made such an impression that people started likening them to human brains. The comparison was a compliment, an expression of awe for these magic machines that seemed to mimic human thought. As computers advanced, their calculational abilities surpassing ours, traffic along the bridge of metaphor changed direction. We came to think of the brain as a computer, reducing this complex organic marvel to a mere machine.

Now that we’ve hit a wall trying to understand how the mechanical brain makes a conscious mind, perhaps it’s time to consider that we have exhausted this particular metaphor. But that in itself is very useful information. One of the most important things to know about a metaphor is where it breaks down and why: if you use a spring, you should know its elastic limit.

When James Clerk Maxwell first turned his attention to electromagnetism, he visualised this unfamiliar entity as best he could, in terms of what he knew. In Maxwell’s early papers, Faraday’s magnetic lines of force are modelled by a large array of spinning gears, connected by strings of ball bearings. Given Victorian England’s fascination with machines, this vivid picture made the invisible electromagnetic field much less uncomfortable an idea. The image only goes so far (which is why we don’t think of electromagnetism in terms of gears and pulleys today) but by the time the limits of the metaphor were breached, enough scientific progress had been made that new models were suggested. The metaphor had just been a stepping stone, but it enabled us to move on.

To the philosopher Max Black, metaphor not only describes, but can in some instances create the similarity between two terms. Any idea you hold up is like a source of light shining from a particular angle – each illuminates or casts into shadow different parts of the object you are studying. Both light and shadow carry information.

Vacuum cleaners of the cosmos

Metaphors are perhaps most useful in situations when we understand the least. Over the past century we have employed many different metaphors for black holes – which science still does not completely understand. Looking back, these metaphors trace our changing attitudes to these perplexing astronomical objects.

Black holes announced themselves in the humblest way possible: as a tiny equation appended to a letter, encased in a wrinkled, dog-eared envelope. The letter, written in the trenches of the First World War by the physicist, astronomer and German lieutenant Karl Schwarzschild, was addressed to Albert Einstein. It contained the first ever solution of his new theory. General relativity was an absolute triumph, but its equations were so difficult to solve that Einstein had doubted the task would be accomplished in his lifetime. Yet barely a month after his theory was published, here came a perfect solution – a mathematical dream drifting out from the nightmare of war. You would think he would have been overjoyed. You would be wrong.

Schwarzchild’s equation was simple, concise and elegant, but the implications it carried were, at the time, unthinkable. According to the solution, a black hole contains at its centre what is now known as a singularity: a point where the smooth rubber sheet of Einstein’s space-time is punctured, and physics as we know it breaks down. In the words of the physicist John Wheeler, “The black hole teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but.”

Fortunately this dreaded singularity, which tears space-time to shreds, is sheathed within an “event horizon”. Outside it, we are safe. One foot on the edge, and we are doomed. Encoded in Schwarzschild’s equation, there is a radius that marks this sphere of no return. Some called it “the barrier” (stay out!); others, the “sphere catastrophique”. Black holes show no mercy. In the words of the physicist Steven Gubser, they “hijack the future of every object that falls into them”. Nothing can escape, not even the most fleet-footed thing in the Universe – not even light. They were framed as demons, greedy gluttons that gobble up everything. The Bermuda triangles of space. The vacuum cleaners of the cosmos. But perhaps most sinister is the association carried by the name that eventually stuck. The “black hole of Calcutta” was a tiny, cramped cell in which over 60 prisoners of war were incarcerated in 1756, more than half of whom suffocated in the heat.

Over time, attitudes to black holes became less severe. Where once the emphasis was on their “grotesque deformities and grim instabilities”, writes physicist Janna Levin, we now think of them more often as anchors that provide “a centre for our own galactic pinwheel and possibly every other island of stars”. We tend, instead, to describe the “throat” of a black hole as the “lip of a waterfall, beyond which space-time cascades ineluctably downward”, or the neck of “a glass bottle in the hands of a skilful Murano glassblower”.

Wondering what occasioned the change in tone? The simplicity of the equations eventually won us over. It turns out that astrophysical objects are extremely difficult to model. Stars, with their nuclear reactions, internal pressure and fluid dynamics are a particular challenge. A black hole, by comparison, is wonderfully simple. In short, we discovered the mathematical uses of black holes, and our association with them changed. We “tamed” them, until they became objects of fascination, safe even for elementary school children to handle.

Mathematical metaphors

There is yet another way that metaphors can lead to scientific discovery, and that is within the field of mathematics itself. Mathematical equations are schematic representations of the relationships between various aspects of a system. Equations describe how these quantities are tied together, how they tug or push at each other, what sort of web they weave. Regardless of the circumstances that inspire them, once written down, symbols in equations are like words in a poem: multi-layered, saturated with meaning. Occasionally, when we are very lucky, we come across a pair of systems that bear no apparent physical similarity, but are described by the same equation. Insights gleaned in one system carry over into the other. Every symbol now has two meanings – one per system – giving us a map between two seemingly unrelated entities; we have, in short, a mathematical metaphor.

One of the most fundamental and perplexing discoveries about black holes came about in exactly this manner. It started with the simple observation that just as entropy (a measure of the disorder of a system) can never decrease in classical thermodynamics, neither can the area of a black hole. Moreover, the equations that describe how these quantities grow have exactly the same form. It’s almost as if the area of a black hole is a measure of its entropy.

This seemed preposterous. Because of their celebrated mathematical simplicity, black holes were assumed to have minimal, if not zero entropy. The resemblance was put down to mere coincidence until Jacob Bekenstein, one of John Wheeler’s students, decided to take the equation at its word. In order for the metaphor to hold, one of the symbols in the equation had to correspond to “temperature”. Some radiation (something we could register as heat) would need to be emitted from the black hole – the very same black hole that notoriously swallowed even light. It was an audacious suggestion, dismissed by many experts in the field including, at first, Stephen Hawking. But the theory of Bekenstein-Hawking radiation is now a standard topic in any conversation about black holes.

Metaphors can also be visual. An idea can be linked to a picture as easily as to a word, and it is quite instructive to explore which aspects of the idea are illustrated and which are left out. Images mine depths words cannot, so when a concept is new to us, images are some of our most effective tools.

Stephen Hawking’s deep discoveries about black hole mechanics came after he lost the use of his hands: he reached his famous conclusions through manipulating visual images in his head. “The happiest thought” of Einstein’s life – the insight that led to a complete reconceptualisation of space and time – was the result of comparison between a window washer suspended outside his building, and a man falling in a gravitational field. How do you link one to the other? By rethinking gravity.

Anchoring ideas

New concepts have a tendency to fly away. Unanchored, they billow out, expanding through space – expanding space – in mysterious, unnerving ways reminiscent of dark energy. We can lose sight entirely unless we reel them in, anchor them to other ideas, and hold them in place by the weight of their connections. Whether these metaphors are structural, mathematical, verbal or visual is immaterial. Each is a strand in the net with which we draw knowledge in.

Physicist-philosopher Carlo Rovelli says the success of science depends partly on “the creative liberty taken with conceptual structure, and this grows through analogy and recombination ... It is not easy to change the order of things, but this, at its very best, is what science does.”

In his recent book, The Warped Side of Our Universe – a collaboration with artist Lia Halloran – the physicist Kip Thorne used poetry to talk about black holes, gravitational waves and other topics he has previously addressed in prose. When asked about the experience, he said he found poetry harder to craft than prose, “but the surprise to me was that I could use it to get much more deep into the essence of the science.”

Should that really be surprising? Within the lines of poetry, words are released from their literal, everyday associations; they exist as symbols, ripe for metaphor. Freed from the constraints of a linear narrative, words conjoin in wild, unexpected ways. They may defy the rules of grammar, they may not make prosaic sense, but these flagrant juxtapositions give rise to new images – impressionistic flashes from the lush world of the mind.

One argument against the use of metaphor is that a single metaphor can seldom encompass the whole truth of a physical theory. But that’s exactly why we need more of them. We’ve learned this lesson already, with coordinate systems in geometry. (Think of how shapes can be plotted out in three dimensions, on diagrams with x, y and z axes.) Only the simplest, flattest space can be covered by a single coordinate system. For more interesting, curved spaces – like the ones around black holes – we need to patch together many overlapping coordinate systems. Each expands into places the other can’t reach.

Taking a similar approach with metaphors would be infinitely rewarding. Through both comparison and contrast, each new metaphor adds a layer of richness to our understanding, each is a foil for argument, a source of insight and a path to generating new questions.

The frontiers of science – cosmic or subatomic – are far beyond the reach of direct experience. If we are to comprehend what we encounter there, we have to find a way to link it to that which we already know. Metaphors can make meaning from the new information we uncover. It’s time we acknowledge their crucial role, and give metaphors in science the attention they deserve.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely

As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with Azerbaijan dubbed “Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 2023” near its border with Armenia – a nation whose ethnic forebears were massacred inside Turkish territory in the prelude to the foundation of the Republic. More than a million died.

Erdoğan still refuses to acknowledge this internationally recognised genocide as such, outlawing any mention of the term “Armenian Genocide”. These developments underscore how readily national histories of bloodshed can be erased or recast to sustain any number of political and ideological narratives.

It is into this world of state violence, corruption and obfuscation that author and translator Maureen Freely draws her readers in her latest novel, My Blue Peninsula. The story unfolds from Istanbul, where Freely (who is American by birth and now lives in England) was raised.

Her protagonist Dora has a more complex identity, being part-Ottoman, part-Armenian and part-American. The novel centres around Dora’s attempts to untangle the fraught strands of her own family history and fortune, extending back over a century and including both perpetrators and victims of the genocide in 1915. It’s structured around a series of “notebooks”, authored by the late-middle-aged Dora and addressed to her two adult daughters, in an apparent attempt at explanation and restitution.

Having grown up in Turkey, Freely witnessed at close hand the repercussions of the Armenian genocide and its censorship. After her friend, the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, was assassinated by nationalists for his campaign for justice in 2007, Freely herself became involved in the translation of oral histories by Turks as they attempted to uncover the truth of their pasts. This work, Freely says, fuelled the writing of My Blue Peninsula.

Opening in present-day Istanbul amid the spectre of Islamist violence, the narrative promptly dives back into Dora’s own youth in the city as she begins to uncover the secrets of her parentage. The notebooks then veer off into the intersecting stories of family members – chiefly her elusive, charismatic mother and bohemian artist grandmother. Some 400 pages later, all (or most) of the dots are joined up and we arrive back in the Turkey of today under President Erdoğan, though he is never explicitly named.

Over the course of this epic family history, Dora documents multiple acts of betrayal, deception and violence – both between individual family members and at the hands of the state and other political actors.

These narratives are centred around her effort to discern the facts behind her own parentage and the veil of deception with which her various family members have shrouded their actions. Among these, we see the removal of children, collusion in murder and the theft of Armenian wealth, alongside the lengths to which people will go to obscure or expose the truth.

At times Freely captures this history with nuance and poignancy, while conveying some of the anger, grief and disorientation that many experienced with the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Yet the complexity of the family tree makes for a difficult read. The density of these details risks obscuring a deeper – and arguably more interesting – insight into the genocide and its aftermath. For example, significant attention is paid to the movement of the bourgeois family’s jewels, while the mass displacement and internment to which certain family members are subject receive little more than a sentence.

Similarly, Freely crafts a vivid picture of mid-20th-century Istanbul with its fading imperial grandeur, decadent and culturally diverse middle-class and vibrant street life. Yet these sometimes slightly hackneyed descriptions appear to come at the cost of a portrait that gives more solid insight into the historical and political developments of the period, with which readers may have limited familiarity.

So too do the rough notebook structure and miscellaneous narrative style – including Dora’s own voice, correspondences between family members and omniscient narrator, third-person style accounts – mean that the book seems to lack stylistic cohesion. The breadth of the cast of characters is impressive, but can sometimes come at the expense of their originality.

There is plenty of rich material in this complicated novel. But unlike the ultimately enlightened Dora, the reader of My Blue Peninsula may be left with more questions on closing the book than they did on first opening it.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Gen Z are given a great deal of credit these days. Born between 1997 and 2012, they’re the generation with their heads screwed on, trusted to sort out the mess the rest of us have made of the world. This generation, now aged 12 to 27, were the first full “digital natives”, having never known life without the internet. If you have a Gen Z person in your life, you will know that each one is an IT Support Department for their entire family. I was able to keep the wolf from the door during lockdown because my children were on hand to get me onto Zoom calls and set me up for online gigs.

There are other, more subtle ways in which this generation are distinct. Gen Z schoolchildren do not seem to shun others for their appearance. Not even ginger kids. Not even ginger kids who wear glasses and not even if they are also fat. I told my 10-year-old daughter tales of kids shouting “Ginger nut!”, “Four-eyes!” and “Fatty fatty boom boom!” She was baffled. “That’s like laughing at someone for having feet.”

Messages of self-care are plastered all over their school walls. On my way to a parent-teacher meeting, I passed a notice on a door saying, “You Matter. You Are Enough.” Misty-eyed, I marched down the corridor, my head held high. “THANK YOU DOOR! I needed to hear that. I do matter. I am enough.” I burst into the meeting singing Shirley Bassey’s “I Am What I Am”.

They learn about the importance of equality, along with what “gaslighting” is, in PSHE (personal, social, health and economic education). When his friend came out as non-binary, my son reassured me, “It’s okay if you get their pronouns wrong, Mum, we know you’re old.”

I did have a problem with their pronouns, because I could not remember what a pronoun was. (Grammar and me have never been friends.) Once my daughter explained what one was, I was outraged. These pipsqueaks had no idea that the freedoms they have to be themselves are hugely down to the efforts of us “old” people. Changes in culture don’t happen by accident, they happen when people fight for them. So as we appreciate Greta Thunberg and all the bold and brilliant Gen Zs, may I remind you they were raised by my generation: the much-maligned Generation X.

We, the binge-drinking, pill-popping ravers of the 90s, have raised kids who have the self-esteem not to murder their brain cells. (And given the state of the economy, they also can’t actually afford to be the hedonists we were, poor things.) Social media is their language and they use it to promote self-acceptance and inclusivity, because they don’t internalise prejudice the way we did.

Generation X were the latchkey kids whose mothers were vilified for going to work. Our teachers were shackled by the brutality of Section 28. We had to look to Eastenders storylines to support our belief that being gay was not a perversion. It was ordinary for non-white kids like me to brace themselves for a racial slur called out to us from a window of a car. We did not have TikTok to turn to, in order to share our hurt. We thought we were alone.

For most of our childhoods, my generation had a prime minister who insisted poor people were deliberately poor, just to annoy everybody. Our newspapers heaped shame on those who struggled, so that kids at school wearing hand-me-downs were called “tramps”. We had to stand up for each other IRL (that’s In Real Life, grandad). We made placards and marched against racism at a time when the National Front had their meetings in the very same pubs where we enjoyed our first under-aged drinks. We marched for gay rights with hope in our hearts and Lambrusco in our rucksacks. Old indeed!

So when my son’s non-binary buddy came over, I thought, “I’ll show you who can’t get pronouns right!” But annoyingly, there’s no grammatical need to address people directly by their pronoun. Desperate to prove myself, I ended up asking, “Would thee like a drink?”

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

"I’ve done quite a lot of work in various media, from making videos, to writing live science shows, to writing books,” Alom Shaha tells me, over the phone from his home in Kent. “And I would put it all down to the fact that I kind of fucked up my physics degree.”

There are direct routes from studying physics to a career in teaching physics. Shaha took the long way around.

Born in Bangladesh in the early 1970s, Shaha moved to south London as a child. In The Young Atheist’s Handbook (Biteback, 2012), he describes a troubled home life: his father was cruel and violent; his mother suffered badly from mental illness and died, from complications arising from pregnancy, when Shaha was 13. School was an escape.

“My home wasn’t a happy place,” he tells me now. “Getting on the 176 bus every morning was like stepping through the wardrobe ... I grew up on a housing estate in Elephant and Castle, and then every day I would go to this private school full of kids from a different world, literally: much richer, almost entirely white. Nothing like the community I’d grown up in. It was very much like one of those classic children’s stories, you know, the kind of Harry Potter thing, escaping home to go into a different universe.”

Shaha – who had qualified for a free place at the school – excelled academically, particularly in English. But it was in science that he saw a glimpse of his future.

“From about 14, I had these amazing physics and chemistry teachers,” he says. “Part of what they were doing in their lessons was training people to become scientists. And that was a fundamental difference: the idea that science was something that any of us could go on to do, and therefore that that was just part and parcel of what was kind of ‘in the ether’ of the lessons. Whereas English literature was definitely this kind of holy thing, and all we could do was worship at its altar. At no point in my education was I ever given the impression by my teachers that writing was something someone like me could do for a living.”

But after scraping through a disastrous first year at university – “I got 11 per cent in my astronomy exam” – and graduating from UCL with a 2:2 in physics, he felt lost. He waited tables, volunteered at homeless shelters and spent a stint as an unpaid intern for the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, before another turning point came along.

“After graduating, I’d gone off to work at a camp for homeless and disadvantaged kids in upstate New York. Really, I was just running away from home. I wanted to get as far away from everything as possible. And I had this wondrous three months in the American countryside where I was dealing with children who were far more disadvantaged than me – really, from some horrific backgrounds. When I got there, they said, ‘You, you’ve got a physics degree, right? You’ll be teaching science.’ I remember just standing in front of the kids and it felt kind of natural to me.”

It was an experience that came back to him when the idea of training as a teacher came up. “I don’t want to claim noble intentions,” he laughs, admitting that a guaranteed salary was the prime motivation. But he soon found that teaching offered him far more than a wage.

“What I found was that just being in the classroom kind of restored me psychically. It just made me remember the fact that I had loved school, that school was a place where I had flourished and I had always been happy.

“And I, you know, I think it helped me to climb out of a depression that I’d been in for a number of years – because I rediscovered how to be the person that I like to be.”

Jump-cut to the present and a recent book, Why Don’t Things Fall Up? (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023) which aims to fill in the gaps in the science we all learned – or were supposed to learn – at school. Why does ice-cream melt? What is the smallest thing? What are stars? What am I made of? It’s clearly a book written by someone who not only knows and understands science but also wants other people to – not just to love science, to marvel at it, but to understand it. In other words, it’s a book written by a born teacher.

“The book doesn’t really do anything that I don’t do in the classroom,” Shaha says. “That was one of the things that I really wanted to convey: everything in the book is what you and every other student should have got in class. Because otherwise you’ve not been taught science properly. You know, you have to start off with ‘what is science?’ And I think actually that’s missing from a lot of science education.

“One of the things that really helped me get my head around science was understanding at an early age, thanks to those teachers I had, that what we’re dealing with is scientific models, and that what science does is help us to understand the world in terms of things we’re already familiar with. The more you understand, the more you can understand.”

I mention theoretical physicist and teacher Richard Feynman, and his dictum that if he couldn’t teach it to freshman students, then he didn’t really understand it. Shaha seizes enthusiastically on the reference.

“Here’s why people should admire Feynman, not because he was a brilliant teacher, but because, like any good teacher, he wanted to know if his teaching was any good, actually any good – [to know] whether or not his students actually learned anything.

“That’s the thing with teaching, you see. Which makes it rather different to science communication. You know, I can give a talk to an audience of hundreds at the Cheltenham Science Festival and they can all clap and cheer and go away feeling good about themselves. But you know, nobody will ever check to see whether they’ve understood anything.

“I think part of the problem with science communication is that it flatters the audience. I think people want to read stuff or listen to stuff that makes them feel like they’ve understood something. That’s not what teachers have to do. We can’t just inspire the kids and make them go away with the feeling that they’ve learned something. They actually have to learn things.”

When The Young Atheist’s Handbook came out in 2012, “sci-com” was still riding a wave of popularity, fronted on television by the likes of Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain and represented in the bookshops by Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, Richard Dawkins and many others. Campaigners sought to have Mark Henderson’s The Geek Manifesto sent out to every MP in Parliament. There was a fleeting feeling that science literacy could save the world. I ask Shaha how he feels about that now.

“I think if everybody understood science or ‘got’ science or believed in science, to the same extent that I do, maybe we would have fewer vaccine conspiracists and perhaps we would have everybody caring about trying to sort out climate change,” he says. “But it’s not as simple as that. The people in power, the people running big corporations, people running governments, I think they’re perfectly capable of grasping the science of climate change. And they’re still not doing anything about it.”

Shaha is a dad to two young daughters. I ask him how he would characterise their relationship with science. “For me, for my kids, science isn’t going to be this other weird thing that only geeks do or whatever. It’s just part of their everyday experience of cultural activity. It’s something people do, it’s something humans do. After we’ve finished eating and pooing and all that, you know, humans do things like reading and writing and listening to music – and science.”

A few years ago, Shaha took on the Wonka-like persona of “Mr Shaha” in two vibrant and hugely original children’s books on science and engineering, Mr Shaha’s Recipes for Wonder and Mr Shaha’s Marvellous Machines (published by Scribble, in 2021 and 2023 respectively).

“That came out of my parenting and teaching,” he says. “The Mr Shaha books are my particular take on the classic science children’s book. But one of the things I felt was missing from a lot of children’s science activity books was what science was actually about.

“I tried to write a book that would help parents to become their children’s first science teacher. It’s very clear to me that all parents are their kids’ first teachers: most parents will teach their kids to count, most parents will teach their kids their first letters, most parents will teach their kids to sing ... and yet when it comes to science, an awful lot of parents would lack the confidence to even broach the subject. That’s where the Mr Shaha books come from: the idea that parents can and should introduce their children to scientific thinking.”

Another children’s book – How to Find a Rainbow, with illustrations by Sarthak Sinha – was published in February by Scribble. The story, which covers how rainbows are formed, also includes a guide on how children can make one of their own, bringing the science in the story to life.

“It’s the book I’m most excited about ever, because I wrote it for my children,” Shaha says. “If you read a lot of picture books, you’ll know they often have some kind of message or moral at the end – you know, ‘be kind’ or whatever. And I wanted to write a book where there’s a bit of science at the end instead.”

Teaching, rather than preaching. For this atheist-humanist-writer-teacher-dad, it seems rather apt.

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From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science has always been two-fold. We work to promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview. The stories we’ll look at this month illustrate how and why those two goals are inextricable and why it’s important to employ …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! As any good skeptic or scientist will tell you, the details always matter. No matter how exciting or alarming or enticing the headline may be, it’s almost inevitably the fine-grain details that matter most. I was reminded of this by two recent stories that we’ll explore in …

Hi there,

I am delighted to say that I am back performing at the Edinburgh Magic Festival this year.

First, on the 28th December I will be exploring the strange world of illusion, mystery and magic in a show called MIND MAGIC. This will involve showing some of the best optical illusions in the world, revealing whether paranormal phenomena really exist, showing how we can all achieve the impossible, explaining how to transform a tea towel into a chicken, and much more. All the info is here.

Then, on the 28th and 29th December, I am presenting a new and experimental show about the invention of magic. This will be an intimate affair for a small number of people. It will examine how magicians create magic, and explore the mind and work of a magical genius who created the world’s greatest card trick. Info here.

So, if you are around, please come along, and fun will be had!

Some exciting news from me! I have just written my first book for children.

It uses magic to teach youngsters a range of essential life skills, including social skills, confidence, creativity, lateral thinking and much much more. Readers will learn how to perform lots of seemingly impossible feats, including how to defy gravity, read minds, pluck coins from thin air, and predict the future. Most important of all, these tricks have been carefully chosen to help boost mental wellbeing and resilience. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s magic!

I am delighted to say that Magic Your Mind Happy will be published by Wren and Rook in May 2024, and is available to preorder now here.

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Two quick bits of news.

First, The Royal Society have kindly given me the prestigious David Attenborough Award. This is a lifetime achievement award for my work promoting psychology and critical thinking, and focuses on my research combatting pseudo-science and examining the psychology of magic. Previous recipients include Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Professor Alice Roberts, and I will give an award lecture about my work in August 2024.

Second, I have a new academic magic book out! It is part of the well-known Arts For Health series and reviews work examining how watching and learning magic is good for your wellbeing, including how it boosts confidence, social skills, dexterity, curiosity and much more. It was lots of fun to write and also includes interviews key practitioners, including Richard McDougall (Breathe Magic), Julie Eng (Magicana), Mario the Maker Magician (USA), David Brookhouse (UK), David Gore and Marian Williamson (College of Magic), and Tom Verner (Magicians Without Borders).  More details here.

I am delighted to say that the second series of our On Your Mind podcast has launched today!!

Each week, science journalist Marnie Chesterton and I will explore aspects of the human psyche, including astrology, how the clothes we wear influence our thoughts, attraction, friendship, dreaming, mind control and much much more.  We will also be joined by some special guests as we attempt to answer all of your questions about psychology. The first series reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts, and so we hope that you can join us. 

Our first episode looks at creativity and explores how to have good ideas and whether children are more creative than adults. You can listen here.

I am excited to launch a new fund raising initiative for the amazing College of Magic in South Africa. The College is a non-profit community youth development organisation that uses magic to offer hope to young people in and around Cape Town.  They do incredible work and for the past two years I have been working with them and Vanishing Inc (the largest magic retailer in the world ) to produce a unique  magic booklet and custom deck of cards for budding magicians. 

This gorgeous full-colour booklet involves students from the College teaching magical illusions, and tells inspirational stories of diverse historical magicians. Both the booklet and cards showcase great artwork by South African illustrator, Ndumiso Nyoni, and readers have special access to videos of the students teaching the tricks and offering top tips.

All the profits raised from the sale of the booklet and deck of cards will go towards furthering the important and wonderful work of the College. It’s a lovely gift for friends and family and it would be great if you can support the project.

To find out more, please click here. 

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]