Go away, libertarian/fascist/racist profiteer.

If we don’t get a “red wave,” will you move back to South Africa?


Oh, wait, is the “red wave” what Trump was referring to in his recent “blood bath” comments?

Spring break is over. I’m heading back to the classroom this morning.

What makes it all sting a little more than usual is that my restful week off was really just a brief interruption in the middle of the semester. I’m only half way through! I should be glad of the reprieve, but today I have to deal with the stress of resuming where I left off.

Oh well. I also spent the last couple of days setting up all of my classes. I’m all ready to go with a lecture on endocrine disruptors, specifically DES and BPA, which at least are interesting. I’ve got so much material here that I’m going to be talking about endocrine disruptors for the next two weeks.

Will Knowland was a teacher at Eton who was dismissed for making a video claiming that patriarchy was good after being told not to — I’m not keen on the idea of firing someone for expressing an opinion, but I do think it’s reasonable to fire teachers for ignorance and incompetence. Knowland has gone on to make more videos to demonstrate just how stupid he is. He has chosen to claim that evolution is false. Big mistake. Especially since his arguments are pathetic.

I have the transcript. Let’s see how big a dumbass Will Knowland is.

here are eight things about Evolution that I wasn’t taught in school

Correct. He wasn’t taught the following things in school because they are wrong.

0:05 number one because Free Will is real and humans are rational any materialistic account of our Origins is certainly false this means darwinian materialistic evolution is and that’s why people who hold that worldview end up denying human rationality and Free Will including their own the two stand or fall together

I think free will arguments are all bad, no matter what side you take, so I’m not going to touch that one. The argument about rationaility, though, I think, is already refuted, because his claims are all irrational. Humans aren’t particularly rational — we’re all creatures of emotion and bias, and I note that Knowland fails to provide any supporting evidence or arguments otherwise. It’s an assertion with no rational support.

It’s also false to claim that science and evolution, specifically, require the rejection of rationality.

0:32 number two the oldest rocks on Earth date from 3.8 to 3.98 billion years ago but life was present 3.81 billion years ago so life had only 100 to 170 million years to evolve that is an instant a blink of the eye in evolutionary time

Remember that: 100 to 170 million is a blink of the eye. I’m inclined to think that 100 million years is an incredibly long time — lots can happen in a million years or a thousand. The origin of life was a process of chemical evolution. How many chemical reactions can occur in that span of time?

0:58 number three there’s no evidence for concentrated organic pools on early Earth no empirical evidence whatsoever and without a blueprint to direct it and convert it raw energy isn’t usable anyway but since these are only produced by life this is the Catch-22 and don’t say life came from space that just pushes the problem one step back where did it begin if it came from space

How concentrated is concentrated? Is he claiming to be a quantitative organic chemist now?

The best models for the origin of life now suggest it arose in deep-sea volcanic vents, which are rich in the precursors for organic molecules, and also provide the energy necessary for the reactions to produce them. Right now, electrons are being shuffled across inorganic substrates, reducing compounds and creating the building blocks of life without “blueprints.” It’s all chemistry. All of life is chemistry.

OK, I won’t say life came from space. That’s just bullshit anyway. Why does Knowland feel the need to put bogus arguments into his critics’ mouths?

1:33 number four there are millions of transitional forms organisms observable across successive Generations appear fully formed they have no ancestors or Bridges and they don’t change and don’t say punctuated equilibrium that is empirically equivalent to creationism

At least he admits that there are many transitional forms, but it’s weird that he then claims they can have no ancestors. All organisms are functional, or they wouldn’t exist. Evolution is all about changes from one fully functional organism to a different fully functional organism by small successive variations. We’d be very surprised to discover a species that arose from a non-viable population of incomplete organisms.

Again, he puts a bogus argument in our mouths. Punctuated equilibrium is about rates of change in subsets of a population. It’s not a version of creationism. Eldredge and Gould would be very surprised to be told that they have invented a creationist theory.

1:57 number five some structures require the whole structure to be in place to be functional imagine having one tenth of an eye or one one hundredth of a heart or one one thousandth of a penis

Most birds, to name one counter-example. Most birds (excepting ducks, obviously) lack a penis and mate by cloacal kissing. Clearly you don’t need a whole massive 3mm long penis to successfully reproduce, as he should know since he has 7 children.

Similarly, we evolved from organisms that have little more than a muscular tube for a heart and an open circulatory system, or that have only an eyespot that can only sense light and dark. We have a plethora of examples of simpler hearts, eyes, and reproductive organs that are entirely functional.

2:19 number six there are built-in limits to genetic material Darwin thought natural selection worked a bit like dog breeding but humans can’t make a dog the size of an ant or a whale and we definitely can’t create a new species out of dogs and that’s despite centuries of intelligent intervention speciation has never been observed

What are the mechanisms that impose these limits? He doesn’t say. Creationists never do. Besides, speciation has been observed.

Refer back to his objection number two, where he says 100 to 170 million is an eyeblink, yet now he argues that the limitations of a few centuries refutes evolution.

2:49 number seven DNA is literally not figuratively a code it embodies meaningful information it’s like the typewriter not the message there’s currently a 10 million dollar prize for anyone who can demonstrate a naturally encoding and decoding system nobody can

Man, that metaphor went kablooieeee. So DNA is literally a code, like a typewriter? What? None of that makes sense.

The existence of loons who want to offer a prize for demonstrating something that silly is not a point in its favor, especially since they’re going to automatically reject the existence of the “encoding and decoding system” embodied in cells. This $10 million prize does sort of exist, at least as a PR stunt and hype engine for Perry Marshall, a guy with a degree in electrical engineering and no understanding of biology at all. He doesn’t have $10 million to give away, so the entire “prize” is contrived to make sure no one can possibly win. That is not a point in its favor.

3:12 number eight cells edit their own DNA in real time in response to threats this isn’t random and there is variation and adaptation before natural selection can occur talking about selfish genes also assumes the very teleology and purpose that Darwin explicitly denied

I don’t think he’s talking about gene editing here — that’s a completely different phenomenon. Since it’s “in response to threats” I suspect he’s mangling the idea of modifying gene expression in response to the environment. There’s nothing in that counter to the idea of evolution whatsoever. It’s a natural and well-understood biochemical and physiological process.

The selfish gene concept does not assume teleology. Some gene sequences can use cellular machinery to amplify their representation in the genome. That’s all.

3:37 and then we’ve got metaphysical problems life didn’t come from non-life animal life didn’t come from plant life man the rational animal didn’t come from non-rational animals these are all differences in kind not degree go into your garden pick up a stone and look at it and think of it one day evolving into being able to compose a symphony solve a theorem write a novel you can’t evolve a thin line into a thick one by simply extending it that’s what it’s like trying to get life from non-life animal life from plant life rational life man from non-rational Life The Brute animals

Those look like metaphysical assumptions, not problems. Animals evolved independently from the lineage that gave rise to plants, for one thing. Life had to have come from non-life, unless you think life has existed eternally. Stones don’t evolve, since they don’t reproduce. This all sounds like incoherent word vomit from a guy who doesn’t understand anything he’s babbling about.

Now for his grand conclusion…

4:24 so what do I think about Evolution now the church fathers are clear that God could have worked through evolutionary processes in creating man’s body but certainly not in creating his intellect and at least some creatures were created fully formed and many stemmed evolution of the others was involved

I don’t give a flying fuck what the “church fathers” said. They aren’t authorities on evolution by any stretch of the imagination.

Well, that’s all he’s got. Once again, a creationist demonstrates the paucity of intellect behind their reasoning, and their whole position goes down in flames. Maybe he needs to stop assuming that he is a rational being and try to earn that adjective.

Here we go again. Another paper, this time in Radiology Case Reports, got published while including obvious AI-generated text. I haven’t read the paper, since it’s been pulled, but it’s easy to see where it went wrong.

It begins:

In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.

That is enraging. The author of this paper is churning them out so heedlessly that they provide no time or care to the point they’ve given up writing and now have given up reading their own work. Back in the day when I was publishing with coauthors, we were meticulous to the point of tedium in proofreading — we’d have long sessions where we’d read alternate sentences of the paper to each other to catch any typos and review the content. Ever since I’ve assumed that most authors follow some variation of that procedure. I was wrong.

If I knew an author was this sloppy and lazy in their work, I wouldn’t trust anything they ever wrote. How can you make all the thought and effort you put into the science, and then just hand off the communication of that science to an unthinking machine? It suggests to me that as little thought was put into the research as in the writing.

No wonder there is such a glut of scientific literature.

In progress right now: a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland, consuming the town of Grindavik. The volcano blew earlier, but this is a fresh eruption.

Live view:

I would leap at an opportunity to visit Iceland again, any time.

Still from '3 Body Problem'

Rarely has there been a television project that looked so good on paper. 3 Body Problem, which will be released on Netflix on 21 March, is an adaptation of a critically acclaimed Chinese science fiction trilogy by Liu Cixin. Since its first appearance in English translation in 2014, the trilogy has sold over nine million copies around the world. Among its fans are Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and George R. R. Martin, who recommended the first of the books on his influential blog back in 2015, describing it as “very unusual” and praising the work of translator Ken Liu.

Perhaps it was thanks to Martin that the showrunners of the Netflix series first came across the book. At the time of his recommendation, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were several seasons deep into their work on Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on Martin’s own A Song of Ice and Fire books that dominated the prestige television landscape of the 2010s. Add to that the fact that this show boasts executive producers like Brad Pitt, Rosamund Pike and Knives Out creator Rian Johnson, and it’s easy to see why 3 Body Problem was topping lots of “most anticipated TV of 2024” lists at the start of the year.

Look a little closer, though, and the cracks begin to show. Benioff and Weiss did helm one of the big TV hits of the last decade, but they also steered Game of Thrones from being appointment viewing in 2011 to a frustrating, lacklustre 2019 finale that resulted in 1.8 million people signing an online petition to remake the show’s last series “with competent writers”. One critic, including it on a list of worst TV endings of all time, wrote that the duo had “turned a series once considered the greatest of all time into a hollow mess”. The follow-up project to a such a hit-turned-flop needed to be first-rate, but when Benioff and Weiss announced in 2017 that they were working on an “alternate history” series for HBO called Confederate, in which the American Civil War ended in stalemate and slavery continued, it prompted widespread fury and condemnation that such “slavery fan fiction” should get screen time. In 2019, the pair left HBO for Netflix, with Confederate humiliatingly cancelled before it was even filmed. The pressure is on, then, for 3 Body Problem, reportedly worth $250 million.

The source material is rich, complex and nuanced. A time-hopping trilogy that reaches back to China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and then forward many centuries into an imagined future, Liu Cixin’s novels are tightly plotted pieces that have deftly explained scientific concepts woven through them. Liu’s overarching subject is humanity’s possible contact with extraterrestrial life. The English version of the first book opens with a compelling sequence in which Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, witnesses her father being beaten to death by Mao’s Red Guards after he has been branded a traitor. She is sent to prison, and while there is forcibly recruited into a scientific taskforce that is trying to use radio waves to search for life elsewhere in the universe. Certain there can be no positive future for a human society that would kill her family and destroy her hoped-for life of science, Ye responds to contact from an alien civilisation and so causes an invasion force to be dispatched for Earth. We then travel to the present day, where scientists are racing to discover the meaning of a mysterious virtual-reality-style game that may or may not be part of the alien invasion. The rest of the series deals with the fallout from Ye’s decision, skipping forward in time to show different stages in humanity’s preparations for the coming alien colonisers.

Ye’s story is partially based on events from the author’s own life, which perhaps explains why some of the scenes pack such an emotional punch. When Liu was a small child his parents, who worked in a coal mine, split up their family and sent him to live with relatives hundreds of miles away to keep him safe from the armed patrols enforcing the Cultural Revolution in their home city.

When the trilogy was first serialised in the influential Chinese magazine Science Fiction World in 2006, the section set during this time was buried in the middle of the story as a flashback. His Chinese publisher feared attracting negative attention from government censors by putting such openly political material so prominently at the start of the book, and persuaded him to hide it deeper in the text. When the Chinese-American writer and translator Ken Liu proposed that the flashback be moved to the beginning for the English version, Liu Cixin was delighted. In a 2019 interview, he told the New York Times that he recommends Chinese readers who speak English to read the translation, rather than the original version. “The protagonist needs to have total despair in humanity,” he said, emphasising the centrality of the Cultural Revolution to his trilogy.

Political controversy continues to surround the book series, though, almost two decades after it was first published. In a move that seemed to many commentators to be blatantly political, in January 2023 a Chinese television adaptation was released – beating Benioff and Weiss’s big budget Netflix offering to the screen by over a year. The 30-episode series was titled Three-Body and is available to watch with English subtitles on Amazon Prime. It follows the book very faithfully, to the extent that some of the scientific material that characters describe is reproduced in the dialogue almost identically. The computer-generated sequences are not quite up to the standard that Hollywood has trained us to expect, but it is overall an able take on the source material that also makes some prudent changes (such as the weaving of the “present day” scenes into the preparations for the Beijing Olympics).

More concerningly than a bit of China–US one-upmanship, in 2020 a group of US senators wrote a letter to Netflix raising concerns about their involvement with Liu Cixin – who is also a consulting producer on 3 Body Problem – due to his apparent use of a Chinese government talking point when asked about the internment of Uighur people in Xinjiang province in a 2019 interview. “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” he told Jiayang Fan of the New Yorker, a statement that she noted closely followed the line promoted by government-controlled media in China. The senators’ letter criticised Netflix’s decision to work with Liu as a “normalisation” of these views.

The adaptation will be released into the febrile atmosphere of US–China relations, and no doubt greater political scrutiny will be given to this unusual pop cultural partnership. The fact that Benioff and Weiss’s take on Liu’s story seems to remove some of its Chinese context is also worthy of note. Whereas all the protagonists of the original trilogy are Chinese, and Chinese history is key to the plot, the Netflix version has British or American actors, many of them white, in major roles – continuing America’s long history of “remaking” stories from other countries in its own image.

Still, the platform and reach that Netflix gives this tale of scientific discovery and political division are unrivalled. The universe, in Liu’s telling, is a complex place full of both wonder and despair. Whether 3 Body Problem proves to be a TV hit for the ages or just another mediocre streaming series, it will have a cultural impact, and the ideas at the heart of the story are worth taking seriously.

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

Drawing of Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus, 1913. Image: Science History Institute

Many adults can still name a favourite dinosaur. From the bunting-like triangles along the back of a stegosaurus, to the mace-like balled tail of the ankylosaurus, to the armour-plated horns and collar of a triceratops, there is something impossibly thrilling about their wildly ranging scale and fantastical features. My favourite, as a child, was the archaeopteryx, a giant flying reptile. Even the name was complex and mysterious. More than the painting of what the living creature might have looked like, it was the photographs of fossilised remains that captivated me: the contorted, impossible wingspan, seemingly trapped in rocks, like an insect in amber.

Some of that early fascination has stayed with me. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, I recall how much comfort I found in the number of unearthed discoveries, made as scientists and amateurs alike spent more time walking in quiet isolation, stumbling across potentially new species of fossils.

But it was in December that one of the most thrilling prehistoric finds of them all made international headlines. An almost complete skull of a 12-metre long pliosaur: a giant marine predator that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. This ferocious creature, with 130 giant curved teeth, emerged from the crumbling limestone cliffs of England’s famous Jurassic coast in Dorset. The skull alone was two metres long, drawing Sir David Attenborough to make a special documentary about the find.

The skull looked much as it would have in life: the ebony-dark teeth, pitted with long grooves, revealing the refined biology of a powerful carnivore. Even BBC News couldn’t resist describing the pliosaur as the “ultimate killing machine”. Perhaps that’s the key to our enduring obsession: a human attempt to make sense of the pure efficiency of something that seems to have emerged from our most terrible nightmares.

Our fascination with dinosaurs has deep roots, going back to the 19th century, when European and North American science elites tried to absorb the shattering implications of the fossils’ existence. How did these demon-like beasts fit with the Christian belief in God’s benign creation and the story of a Planet Earth that was less than 7,000 years old?

It both pleases and saddens me that the pliosaur was discovered in Dorset. Pleasing because it was here, in around 1811, that a young local girl – 12-year-old Mary Anning – together with her younger brother Joseph, discovered the first skull of another marine reptile, the ichthyosaurus. As one of the first such discoveries, it helped to transform our understanding of evolutionary theory. But Anning was mostly ignored and erased from accounts of early palaeontology. I was fortunate to be taught about her at school, more than 150 years later, when I was first falling in love with dinosaurs – yet even today she is hardly a household name.

It’s not surprising that Anning was written out of palaeontology by the men who went on to establish our national history museums. Victorian science, fascinated by dinosaurs, was also obsessed with pathologising the female condition. Women’s brains were smaller; their wombs might be damaged by too much intellectual stimulation. Even as discoveries enabled new understandings about the world, they were often used to reinforce old prejudices. Charles Darwin, while proposing his theory of evolution, was also among the respected thinkers of the time who promoted the idea of inferior races. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the word “dinosaur” has become a derogatory label for people (usually men) deemed to hold outdated views.

But there is another gripping element to the story of the Dorset Pliosaur. Part of the drama was the “race against time” to rescue the skeleton before the cliff crumbled. Climate-change-accelerated coastal erosion has brought more and more of these lost beasts to the surface. I think again of why dinosaurs enthrall us. Surely it is also because of the vastly contradictory timescale of how long they thrived (180 million years), only to be suddenly wiped out in the aftermath of an asteroid impact, according to the widely accepted Alvarez extinction theory.

Victorian writers Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle imagined the nightmare of bringing them back to life; a fear still evident today in the Jurassic Park film franchise. But the real nightmare lurking in dinosaur fossils is the brutal totality of their extinction. Not a symbol of a lost past, but of a possible human future.

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

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 …

The “茶, चाय, Tea” exhibition is at the Horniman museum, London, until 7 July

When at home in west London, there’s nothing better than sitting down with a mug of builder’s tea. That said, a bowl of spicy Indian masala chai with its feeling of embracing my Kenyan-British-Indian heritage is even more likely to hit the spot. I’m so in thrall to the beverage that I have an Instagram account full of images of cups imbibed whenever I travel. I associate the drink with soothing warmth in times of trouble, as well as with celebrating good news and catch-ups with friends and family.

Or at least I did until my visit to “茶, चाय, Tea” at the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, south-east London, which runs until July. And now, while I can’t really view tea as a source of pure unadulterated comfort anymore, I have a renewed appreciation of how it’s a potent symbol of multiculturalism and community-building. It doesn’t matter what your heritage is or where you are in the world, there will always be a place to bond over a brew.

Tea, it turns out, has a rather complex history. And in a climate where museums and galleries are treading carefully around the subject of how their items have been collected and curated over the years, it was refreshing to see the Horniman take a more direct approach. The exhibition centres colonialism and racism, especially Sinophobia, as issues blighting the history of Britain’s national drink.

The museum sits on the site of English tea trader and philanthropist Frederick Horniman’s original home. A campaigner for social reform and better living standards in the UK, his own wealth was built through the business of tea. As soon as you enter the museum, there’s a note about Horniman’s Tea Company, founded by Frederick’s father John in 1826. We learn that by 1891 it was “the largest tea trading business in the world” but also that “the production, trade and sale of tea in Britain was rooted in the exploitation of Asian and African peoples.”

Dotted throughout the exhibition are the personal stories of some of those involved in its curation. Coming from different cultures and heritages, each highlights their relationship with the drink and the role it plays in their identity. Two co-curators from Hackney Chinese Community Services give their thoughts. Theodora is pictured smiling and discussing the fact that tea “is not just a drink, it is a moment for reflection and meditation”, while Calvin, who grew up in Hong Kong and has mixed Eurasian, Tancareira and Manchu heritage, bluntly states: “I’m a by-product of colonialism.”

Throughout the exhibition we see how tea has built as well as disrupted communities around the world. These different threads are woven together in every carefully positioned item in the collection, from the booklet of global recipes – including Kashmiri Noon Tea and Russian Samovar – to the wooden tea crates discovered in the Horniman’s archives. These crates bearing their locations – Assam, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Kenya – were being used as storage boxes and appear as symbols of Horniman Tea’s own complicity in the indentured servitude of pickers on what became vast tea estates and the displacement of people forced to leave these lands. The crate stamped with Kericho, Kenya is accompanied by a note on the descendants of the Kipsigis and Talai people who were violently forced to move and work in “disease-prone reserves or detention camps”. They are still campaigning for justice today for what happened to their ancestors.

But first we start with a gentle journey through the development of tea cultivation in China where we read about the Camellia sinensis plant. Its dried leaves are behind the various types of delicious tea we consume. The plant is indigenous to a stretch of land spanning parts of China, India and Myanmar, although plantations are now found all over (including one in Cornwall). We see leaves borrowed from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and learn the various words used for the beverage. It turns out the most fundamental split was between those travelling the Silk Road and Mongol trade routes, who used the northern word “Cha”, and the European maritime traders, who would say the southern “Te”.

There are many origin stories in this global exhibition. We find out mythical emperor and demi-god Shén Nóng, who features in a painting on a long scroll created by an 18th-century artist, was said to have discovered tea in 2737 BCE while travelling across China. The story goes that tea leaves fell into Shén Nóng’s boiling water and so the brew was born. A little booklet under the portrait offers the mythical origin stories of other types of tea, such as monkey tea from the Wuyi mountains in Fujian. Apparently, the mountains were so steep that monks trained the animals to pick the rare and fine tea leaves.

There is plenty of teaware and accessories on display, including numerous tea bowls and a wonderful hefty Chagama – a 19th-century tea kettle from Japan. Apparently, Chinese scholar Lù Yǔ recommended 28 utensils for brewing and drinking tea in his classic eighth-century tea guide. (The chipped mug in my kitchen cupboard was put to shame.) Families wandered around with children shouting out “teapot” in delighted recognition, passing by the less familiar “teabrick” – a lump of compact tea used for currency. But these aren’t the only entertainments. There is also bubble tea merchandise, tea-themed poetry, and even children’s books tucked away in a corner for the youngest visitors.

Adults might be more interested in the history. As well as the Horniman’s part in the tea supply chain, much is made of the role of the East India Company. It placed its first order of 100 lbs of Chinese tea in 1664, getting it from Java in Indonesia. By 1800 the company was importing 23m lbs of tea to Britain. By then, a nice cup of tea was a staple in British culture, with European makers creating their own cheaper versions of the intricate Asian tea devices. Tea was something to aspire to, a symbol of social mobility and marketed heavily to women in the home. But behind the pretty domestic tableau the business was caught up in illegality and conflict.

The exhibition curators warn that one particular section includes content referencing violence, assault, addiction and enslavement. Here we are confronted by the Opium Wars and the lead up to the conflict, which included the East India Company’s colonisation of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa (now Odisha). Britain sold Indian-grown opium in China to buy silver, which was then used to purchase the tea so desired by the British consumer. But opium had long been illegal and the harm these smuggled supplies was creating was damaging and widespread. When the Qing Empire demanded Britain stop selling opium, our curators tell us: “Faced with this dilemma and in the name of ‘free trade’ and tea, Britain chose to wage war.” Weaponry, opium pipes and photographs of the colonised tea estates bring the “tea wars” to life, as well as the subsequent trade deals and the way in which Hong Kong ended up under British rule.

Then we’re brought right up to the present day and reminded that tea still poses significant ethical questions. We see photographs of tea workers around the world protesting over their rights. A model is dressed in the uniform of a modern-day tea-worker, including rubber shoes and the plastic sheets needed to protect them from jagged branches and leeches. We learn that tea pickers today are mainly women in south Asia. They earn, on average, around £2-£3 a day for 20kg of leaves. That would produce only 3 to 4kg of processed tea.

Horniman’s Tea Company has changed hands and although it is still trading, its business is much reduced. The profit from its heyday was central to the founding of the museum and gardens. It’s perhaps even more important, then, that they are free to all visitors.

While I’m there, I’m lucky to catch two museum volunteers – Alan and Pete – setting up an interactive demonstration. I can feel a teabrick in my hand and am given an opportunity to smell the scent of various tea leaves. But we also talk about what it’s like to be a local and the importance of this free museum to the area. The exhibition has worked hard to build partnerships with charities and community organisations. It includes a short film featuring the young people of Bollo Brook Youth Centre in Ealing discussing their shared experiences over a cup of tea, and also spotlights data provided by THIRST (The International Roundtable for Sustainable Tea) to cover the practices of the industry and the ethical questions raised.

Overall the “茶, चाय, Tea” exhibition strikes a fine balance, celebrating a globally popular beverage and all that it represents, while also raising awareness around how this everyday product is socially and politically charged. If you’re planning to visit, make time for the café afterwards – and bring a companion perhaps, to share a cuppa with and dissect everything you’ve just learned.

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

The New Zealand dotterel an endangered bird species

Humans have not been good for the bird population. We know that Homo sapiens has caused the extinction of hundreds of species, as indicated by fossils and written records. However, most of this data was recorded after the 1500s, so our ability to estimate accurately has been limited.

Now, a team of scientists from Sweden and the UK, led by Rob Cooke of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, has used statistical modelling to come up with a new estimate. By looking at historical figures and taking into account the likely number of undocumented extinctions, the team concluded that humans may have contributed to the extinction of around 1,400 bird species.

Because most known bird extinctions have occurred on islands, the researchers focused their estimates on these ecosystems, using New Zealand as a starting point. The country is the only place in the world where the pre-human bird fauna is thought to be completely known, with well-preserved remains of all bird species. So the team extrapolated from this data to obtain a global estimate.

If this is roughly accurate, humans have driven one in eight bird species to extinction. And with the disappearance of birds goes their ecological role. Birds can be prey for larger animals. They are also important pollinators and disperse seeds as they fly, helping plants to reproduce. Their extinction has a cascading effect of harm on ecosystems.

Today, many species of birds are still endangered around the world. According to the British Trust for Ornithology, the number of wild birds in Britain has fallen by 73 million since 1970. While there isn’t much that ordinary people can do, installing bird feeders in your garden is a good start, as is finding ways to deter cats from hunting your local feathered friends. To achieve more drastic change, policies that promote habitat restoration and sustainable agricultural practices could help reduce the risk of bird extinction. Moreover, as unpredictable weather patterns drastically affect wildlife, action to tackle climate change is urgently needed to protect and restore bird populations.

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

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 …

A spoon with active dry yeast.

Back in 2010, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego announced they had synthesised a new organism. They had created a complete genome of a bacteria and used it to “boot up” a cell whose native genome had been removed. The result was arguably the first truly synthetic organism.

This kind of synthetic biology research could eventually enable as yet unimagined bioengineering, leading to the creation of new synthetic fuels, foods and medicines, helping to tackle challenges such as carbon capture.

Bacteria are, however, relatively simple single-celled organisms. The next stage is to create a synthetic eukaryote. These are much more complex organisms, whose cells have a membrane-bound nucleus. All plants, fungi and animals, including humans, are eukaryotes. But in order to better understand and engineer eukaryotes, scientists have started with single-celled yeast.

Even this task is dauntingly complex. The yeast’s genome consists of some 6000 genes, spread over 16 chromosomes. At the end of last year an international consortium – the Synthetic Yeast Genome Project – published a series of papers describing a major step forward. They created a strain of yeast where some chromosomes were edited and synthesised in the lab, and an additional chromosome unlike anything seen in nature was added.

While the creation of the chromosomes proved to be a time-intensive process, the true bottleneck was the debugging phase. Researchers conducted tests to assess the viability of a yeast cell hosting a new synthetic chromosome. Any issues were addressed by fine-tuning the genetic code, but as more synthetic chromosomes were introduced, the task became increasingly intricate.

The focus now is to replace the remaining natural chromosomes with synthetic ones. This could create synthetic yeast that has improved characteristics, including a wide range of applications in medicine, bioenergy and biotechnology. More generally, creating the first synthetic eukaryote could help unravel the fundamental building blocks of life.

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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 …
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This is the 2024 follow-on from the 2023 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2024 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …

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.

CoverHigh

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.

Richard-Wisemans-On-Your-Mind-1080x1080

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.

everybodys-magic-1I 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. 

everybodys-magic-11This 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.

everybodys-magic-4All 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 […]
@davorg / Tuesday 19 March 2024 00:18 UTC