Glasgow local elections; my preferences based on secularism issues

Written for Glasgow, but relevant throughout Scotland. Life goes on at local level, and I urge you to cast your local vote on local issues. Here, for me,* the order of preference is clear, based on my educational and secularist concerns:

Greens > SNP ~ Labour > LibDem >> Conservative

Marble staircase, Glasgow City Chambers (click to enlarge)

My reasons are apparent below.

Under the system used, it is important to list all your preferences (or as pedants point out, all but the last of your preferences) in order

I asked all parties a series of questions saying I would publicise their response or lack of it. SNP replied with specific answers. The Greens referred me to their manifesto. Other parties did not reply at all. I give below SNP replies, and such information regarding the other parties as I could gather from manifestoes and other sources (note that this introduces sampling errors); direct quotations from party sources in red:

Your attitude toward suggestions that Free Schools be set up in Scotland, as they have been in England

SNP response: No. Greens, Labour: No seems to me implicit in support for role of Local Authorities in education. LibDems manifesto: Decentralise more powers to schools, working with parents, to take decisions over the mix of staff, ethos and local priorities  … support the continued role of local authorities to set standards and strategy, and provide supporting services. The word “ethos”, in this context, concerns me.

Conservatives via manifesto: We recognise and celebrate the many achievements of Scotland’s schools, including the very dedicated commitment from teachers. However, reform is needed and we will continue to make the case for an educational system based on diversity in schools, autonomy for school leaders and a focus on basic literacy and numeracy. We remain supportive of introducing a range of schools run outside of council control, where there is demand, but also want to see powers devolved to school leaders in the existing model. If there are state schools which wish to be autonomous in controlling budgets, recruitment policies or school management, they should be permitted to do so. [Emphasis in original]

Socrates is still mortal, but fallacies aren’t fallacious

Updated repost of The Fallacy Fork and the Limits of Logic, at 3 Quarks Daily

No quiet moment; Theresa May calls snap UK election (BBC)

I had been waiting for a quiet moment to write about this, but there isn’t going to be a quiet moment, so now will have to do. [Update: these words went up on 3 Quarks Daily last Monday. On the Tuesday, Theresa May called a snap UK General election]

Debaters regularly accuse their opponents of using fallacies. These can be formal fallacies, such as simple errors of logic, or informal fallacies, such as appeal to authority, ad hominem and strawman arguments, among others. If a piece of reasoning depends on any of these fallacies, so it is claimed, the conclusion does not really follow from the premises, and while it might still be true we have not been given any good reason to believe it.¹ And so books that discuss logic, and science-promoting blogs (including one I follow), regularly include descriptions of informal fallacies, with stern instructions to avoid committing them.

Sagan warns us against fallacies. But is exposing fallacies enough to shield us from the demons?

In an article entitled The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life, Maarten Boudry, Fabio Paglieri and Massimo Pigliucci (henceforth BPP) challenge this view. BPP is written for the perusal of trained philosophers, which I am not, but I use it here as a jumping off point, while mixing in further content of my own. (For a discussion by one of the original authors, see here.)

BPP apply what they call the fallacy fork test to accusations of informal fallacy; either the reasoning is obviously erroneous, in which case no one would really use it, or else it is not obviously erroneous in context, and we still have all the work to do. In the first case, formal analysis is redundant; in the second, the facts of the matter need further consideration.

Science matters because it works (but it’s not quite that simple)

Reblogged from The Logic of Science, but with this comment: No one would disagree with these claims on behalf of science, and and that’s the problem.

The climate change denialists, like the smoking science denialists before them, pretend that the science is unsettled. The creationists prattle of “creation science” and “flood geology”. The extremely able and intelligent US Vice President, pandering to his creationist base, did not claim to be anti-science. On the contrary, he used the very fact of a major scientific discovery (Sahelanthropus, evolution, and the word “theory”; what Mike Pence really said) to blur the distinction between the established core and the fast-changing frontiers. And if we are to effectively defend science, we need to understand the emotional appeal of the ideology that leads to the rejection of vaccination, medicines, and GMOs, and to the prejudging of complex arguments in such cases as fracking and nuclear power.*

We need to think very carefully about tactics. If we seem to be saying anything like “Science is a good thing, therefore you should trust the scientists”, we are playing into the hands of our enemies. We are right to demonstrate and protest when science is denied, or ignored,  or muzzled.  And yet people (that’s all of us) believe what they want to believe.  The task  then is, how to persuade people to want to believe  in the evidence?

*This last comment cuts both ways, of course

The Logic of Science

Why should you support science? Because it works! It’s crazy to me that I even have to say that, but this is where we are as a society. Various forms and degrees of science denial are running rampant throughout our culture, and attacks on science are being disseminated from the highest levels. Indeed, it has gotten to the point that hundreds of thousands of scientists and science enthusiasts like myself feel compelled to take to the streets to march for science and remind everyone of the fundamental fact that science works and is unparalleled in its ability to inform us about reality and improve our world.

Image via the CDC

Just look around you. Everything that you see was brought to you by science. The batteries that power your electronic devices are a result of scientific advances in chemistry, as are the plastics that make up seemingly everything in our…

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The Woman Who Studied the Sun

Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin at work; Smithsonian Institute Archives via Wikipedia

I just came across this piece by John Gribbin, interesting for many reasons.
Glasgow University started awarding degrees to women in 1892; contrast Cambridge University’s 1948.
Auguste Comte, 1835: “We will never be able to determine the chemical composition of the stars”.
1802, Wollaston observes Fraunhofer lines
1814, Fraunhofer independently observes Fraunhofer lines. Perhaps a reader can tell me why they are named after Fraunhofer, not Wollaston
1859, Kirchhoff (of circuit laws fame) and, independently, Bunsen (of Bunsen burner fame) match Fraunhofer lines to atomic spectra, infer chemical composition of stars
1868, Lockyer correctly identifies third solar Fraunhofer line in “sodium yellow” region as due to a new element, names it “helium”
1892, Glasgow University starts awarding degrees to women
~1923 (see below), Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposhkin) completes studies at Cambridge, but cannot formally graduate because she is a woman
1925, Cecilia Payne gains Ph.D. from Radcliffe; unravels highly complex (see below) Fraunhofer lines of stars; shows that, contrary to all then current expectation, stellar composition is dominated by hydrogen and helium
1948, Cambridge University starts awarding degrees to women

johngribbinscience

Posting this in response to a question I was asked.  It is essentially an extract from my book 13.8

Cecilia Payne won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge (the only way she could have afforded a university education) in 1919. She studied botany, physics and chemistry, but also attended a talk by Arthur Eddington about the eclipse expedition on which he had famously “proved Einstein right” by measuring the way light from distant stars was bent by the Sun. This fired her interest in astronomy, and she visited the university’s observatory on an open night, plying the staff with so many questions that Eddington took an interest, and offered her the run of the observatory library, where she read about the latest developments in the astronomical journals.

After completing her studies (as a woman, she was allowed to complete a degree course, but could not be awarded a degree; Cambridge…

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Express science reporter: “proof dinosaurs lived with HUMANS?”

“Is this proof dinosaurs lived with HUMANS? Creationist claims REAL truth COVERED UP”

The Express, an ostensibly serious right wing UK newspaper, reports under “SCIENCE”.

Express caption” “Did dinosaurs co-exist with humans?”

The evidence? A display at Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. Ham is quoted as saying that the standard scientific evidence is a coverup, as his own dinosaur fossils show, for some unstated but presumably non-standard reason:

“Ken Ham, founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, United States, has put the supposed evidence on display at his centre. Standard scientific evidence shows dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago … and the anatomically modern man did not emerge until around 200,000 years ago. But Mr Ham believes this is a cover-up … the dinosaur fossils were found in Colorado about a decade ago and seem to represent a tyrannosaurus rex [sic].”

Express caption: Scenes might have been similar to Jurassic Park

(Fuller quotations supplied by the Sensuous Curmudgeon, here)

Ham complains that evolutionists “use dinosaurs … to promote their worldview”. How dare they! But do not accuse the Express of bias. It does refer to what it calls “the  standard scientific evidence”, and they do quote two sentences from Bill Nye, before showing the image on the right:

And compared with the image below, the paper’s front page in the runup to the Brexit referendum, the dinosaur story is factually balanced reporting reporting; fake news is not the invention of the Trump campaign.

The Express group is wholly-owned by Richard Desmond, a UK billionaire and former publisher of such informative periodicals as Penthouse and Asian Babes. circulation is close to 400,000, in addition to online readership. In 2002, Desmond made a £100,000 donation to Blair’s Labour Party, but in 2004 switched allegiance to the Conservatives.

The lead story of this post would seem to be based on the February 4 2014 debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, which did so much to restore the former’s finances. Why it should have resurfaced now in the Express, I have no idea. But it does concern me. Desmond does not make a habit of backing longterm losers.

Glasgow Council elections; my questions to the parties, and addresses

City Chambers, from George Square, c. 1900

Here are my questions. I will post the answers in due course.

All parties: I would like Glasgow City ***’s views on the following questions:

The teaching of evolution and creationism in schools

The presence on education committees of Church nominees not answerable to the electorate

Inclusive sex education including realistic education regarding contraception

Your attitude toward suggestions that Free Schools be set up in Scotland, as they have been in England

All parties except Conservative:

Whether you would under any conditions go into coalition with the Tories

Labour only: Your leaflet in my ward refers to “SNP Bus Pass cuts”. What is your evidence that any such cuts are contemplated?

SNP only: My ward’s Labour leaflet refers to “SNP Bus Pass cuts”. Are any such cuts contemplated?

Comment (all parties): I will be sharing your answers  (or your failure to provide an answer) with my social network and blog readership.

Addresses, alphabetically by party: Conservative office@glasgowconservatives.com, [Scottish] Greens https://greens.scot/glasgow “Contact us”, [Scottish] Labour Scotland@labour.org.uk,   LibDem info@glasgowlibdems.org.uk, SNP https://snpforglasgow.scot/contact/

Notes on questions: My position on most of these questions is well-known. There is talk of setting up Free Schools on the English model. This in my opinion would be disastrous, since it would be used to promote denominational schools where demographics would not otherwise justify them, and, worse, to shield those schools from adequate Local Authority control. Given the importance of this issue, among others, I would regard the presence of Conservatives on a coalition as potentially a matter for grave concern. See here: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15224503.Tories_target_half_of_Glasgow_and_council_king_maker_role/?ref=ebmpn

 

Removing Church appointees from Education Committees; more good news

Things continue to go better than we could have hoped.

Image from Scottish Parliament website

The story so far: For historical reasons, dating back to 1872 and beyond, all Local Authority Education Committees in Scotland must by law include three full voting members nominated by the Churches. Our petition, PE01623, asks for their removal, on grounds of democracy and equality, especially in view of the fact that most parents now describe themselves as having no religion. Spencer Fildes and I gave evidence before the Public Petitions Committee last November, and the Committee, having sought additional written submissions, met again in February.  At that meeting, the Convener, the redoubtable Johann Lamont, laid considerable emphasis on the equalities issue, and quoted the comment from the Jewish community that “none of these issues have been addressed.” The Committee agreed to write again to the Scottish Government, asking about the timescale of the current review of educational governance, and its response to the matters raised.

Spencer Fildes and Paul Braterman give evidence to the Public Petitions Committee, November 2016

Now read on: Last month, the Scottish Government responded, and we in our turn have replied to that response. We see a steady softening in the Government’s position, from asserting in 2014, when faced with a similar petition, that the presence of the Church appointees “provides support to the authority in discharging its duties”, to a 2016 letter saying that it “was viewed” in the 1973 legislation as providing such assistance,  to its present position, which after a review of the legal background goes on to state:

Clay tablet casts new light on origins of Genesis

Archaeologists are puzzled by the significance of a cuneiform tablet dating to around 1400 BCE, recently discovered during excavations in Sumeria. A tentative translation, still controversial, is as follows:

“From Moses, General Secretary of the Brickmakers Union, Land of Goshen, greetings.

Moses, contemporary scupture, holding what is thought to be this tablet

From my measurements of the sedimentology of the Nile Delta, I estimate that the river has been depositing sediment there for many tens of thousands of years. Concerning the origin of mankind, I am now convinced that we, the jabbering creatures of West Africa, and the knuckle-walking giants who live beyond Numidia are different species of the same family.

However, You-Know-Who has told me to come up with a simplified version of the story, which my members will be more capable of understanding.

Nile Delta in ancient times (Wikipedia)

I wonder if there is anything suitable among your own traditional mythologies. In particular, since the Internet has not yet been invented, can you send me by camel post a preprint of Enuma Elish. And if possible, an advance copy of your pending publication, The Flood of Gilgamesh.