Not so Creative Design

I live in a country in which the government gathers the taxes for the church. I also live in a country in which at least two major parties (well, on the highest level they’re one party) keep the word “Christian” in their name. And yet, it is a country in which Creative Design is – rightfully – banned from school.

Now, to whoever is reading it: you might actually believe in Creative Design and thus say that Darwin got it all wrong.

The main problem with evolution – at least to some of the more fundamentalist Christian groups – is that it doesn’t require a deity of any kind to work. That’s right, Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest, and all that comes with it, works without any kind of god.

And Creative Design is such a good argument of ‘how God does His work’. Because everything in this world fits together so nicely, there must be some kind of intelligence involved in it. Someone (guess who) must have designed everything.

European Christians have found a way around the religious problem of evolution, by claiming that the ways in which evolution works, the natural laws, are God’s design. That would mean God is far more curious than we give Him credit for. He basically pushed the first domino and is now watching what has become of the chain reaction. I hope He enjoys it.

There is a wonder in evolution, too. The wonder is how life came to be. We know that no other planet in our solar system – no, not even Mars – is inhabited. As far as we can say, we are a statistical error in this universe. Life isn’t something a lot of planets have developed. Yet, somehow, here on Earth, while our atmosphere developed and the molten structures turned to stone, some random molecules came together and became the first living cell.

By all rights, this cell should have died. It was merely a little thing in a huge, dangerous and still poisonous world. But life proved strong and determined. The cell split, split again and started a process of change and development which – after a very long time – developed into me and you and every person you know and every other person on this planet and all the animals and all the plants and the bacteria and everything else that I might have forgotten to mention here.

Is this anything less of a wonder than a God creating every single species from scratch?

In Germany, Creative Design is not taught in school (unlike religion). You either get the religious part or the science part, but not both in one go. And as Creative Design is not plausible from a scientific angle, it is not considered science.

Science today knows how species evolved. Quite some ‘in-betweens’ have been found. And, as much as some people hate to hear it, humans are just a species of animals as well. We’re clever, yes, but our big brains and intelligence only serve to help us stay alive. We don’t have all that many natural weapons.

The idea ‘everything was put together by an intelligent force’ is nice, but where’s the prove? Don’t say Paley’s Watch, okay? If you find a watch while wandering around in the wildness, you know it has not grown there. You know it’s not a natural structure, but a construct. It is not alive. If you put two watches in a drawer, they will not produce any offspring. And watches don’t die, even though they may become dysfunctional. But you can repair a watch and, in theory, make it run forever. You can’t ‘repair’ a dead dog or a dead human and make them live forever.

Evolution is a difficult process which humans still not understand completely. But it is far from simple ‘accident’. Things develop into a new form over time, provided the first time this form appears, it proves useful. The necks of giraffes became longer over time, because it was an advantage. They could feed from places other animals could not reach. Flying developed various times throughout earth history, because it’s a great way to travel far over long distances, not matter whether you are an insect, a dinosaur, a bird or a bat. Whales and dolphins returned to the sea, because it proved useful for them. And they slowly ‘lost’ their legs, because they didn’t need them in the water. Fins were far more practical there. Yet the process of evolution is far too slow for humans to see. It takes generations upon generations to turn one animal into another. We can only see the developments that have taken part in the past. We can’t see those that are occurring at the moment.

Evolution is not destroying the wonder of life, it merely gives another explanation for the fact that we’re walking around on our hind legs and using our big brain to change the environment instead of changing with it. Creative Design is not the only solution to combine natural science with religion!

3D

3D in movies has become popular again (and this time it might be here to stay) and that leaves me with a problem. I wear glasses and it’s quite difficult and uncomfortable for someone wearing glasses to put on those cardboard glasses on top of their own glasses to watch a movie.

To be honest, I don’t need 3D to enjoy a movie. If it’s well made, I’ll be drawn in it, anyway. I’ve got a very fertile imagination and can completely enter a movie, even if it’s only in two dimensions on the big screen.

Yet I can understand why people like 3D movies. Especially with the movies produced in 3D these days (“Avatar”, “Alice in Wonderland”, the first part of “Harry Potter VII”), the additional dimension serves to flesh out a dream landscape. (That doesn’t necessarily make “Avatar” a good movie, though.)

What I want, though, is a better 3D technology. I want one where I can go to the movies with my glasses and without the need to wear an additional pair. Holograms would probably be a good idea…

What goes on my nerves, though, is that I can’t watch some movies without the 3D effects. I plan on watching “Alice in Wonderland” soon. But both the German and the English version shown in my local movie theatre are in 3D. That means, no matter which version I chose, I will be forced to put on those stupid 3D glasses and endure wearing two (not well matching) pairs of glasses at once.

On the other hand, a German magazine moaned this week that quite a lot of movie theatres can’t show the 3D version of “Alice in Wonderland”, because their 3D theatre is still taken by “Avatar”. I wish this were the case in my small town movie theatre, but it isn’t. They, strangely enough, seem to be able to show a 3D movie in every theatre.

So, please, whoever is out there and developing 3D technologies: Invent one I can watch with only my average, normal, non-polarized pair of glasses!

Weekend Update

It’s a wonderful, sunny Saturday and thus it’s time for another of those weekend updates.

• DVD to watch: some documentations about dinosaurs
• Book to read: I’m rereading “Stupid White Men” by Michael Moore this weekend
• Game to play: “M.U.D. TV”

I’ll also be outside and enjoy the wonderful sun and rather nice temperature.

Just thinking

The Apple “iphone” reminds me of a novel I read years ago (while I was still at school): “Phule’s Company” by Robert Asprin (I’ve already written a post about his “MYTH” novels). The books of the “Phule’s”-series are his tribute to science fiction, one could say.

Now, I hardly will own an “iphone” in the near future (not before I make my first million or so with my novels, that is) - and, honestly, I don’t need one, I use my own cell sparsely, if ever. I’m no businesswoman, neither am I another person who needs to basically carry her whole office around. I’m just a simple office worker, nothing more.

But the “iphone” (or, rather, the advertising for it which I saw) reminded me of how much our technical possibilities have changed over the years. When Asprin wrote the “Phule’s” novels (at least two of the three I’ve read), the idea of a small device, not bigger than a paperback novel (Apple’s new phone is even smaller) that can hold your notes, get you online wherever you are (well, if it’s somewhere with a connection to the cell network, of course), serve as a phone, get your emails and so on, was real Science Fiction. Nobody would have expected such a device to be (almost) affordable for everyone (wait a few more years and you’ll have to walk past a mobile shop quickly to avoid “iphones” being thrown at you). The commander of a squadron of space legionaries (like French Foreign Legion, just with less sand and more space) owns such a thing - but then, he’s a millionaire.

But then, some years ago, nobody expected almost everyone to be able to afford a cell phone. And nobody would have thought the internet would become such a big thing, when it was invented as a means for scientists to work together. Computers you can buy in a shop today do things that were next to impossible for the huge main frame computers twenty or so years ago. It’s really amazing, when you think about it.

I can still remember my first computer, a simple one, starting up with a disc (though it was 3.5” already).

One of the first games I played on it, by the way, was “Pirates!” (and I never got anywhere, I just couldn’t navigate ... so Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Hector Barbossa are safe from me, I guess). By now I’d say the graphics were dreadful ... but then, for that time they were quite okay. I even managed the fencing part, but the navigation always got the better of me - which is quite bad, if you’re trying to actually board ships and later on sell the loot ... hard to sell anyone anything, if you can’t find a harbour. (Kate is so going to laugh about that...)

And I remember installing the first “Discworld” game (still one of the best for me, although I like “Discworld Noir” more) from 20(!) floppy disks (took ages).

The third computer I had was the first with a CD-drive. By then, games on CD were quite the rule. (But I’m not going to tell you how abysmal I was behind the controls of an X-wing.)

And now? I’ve got two DVD-drives (one for burning and reading, one for reading only), two hard disks (which are far bigger than the first one I had), a 3D-graphics card, a CPU that’s faster than everyone would have thought possible when I bought my first computer. I won’t even mention the masses of RAM... (Or “Windows”, but for other reasons entirely.)

Technical means have evolved a lot during the last twenty years or so, that much is for sure. And that was what I thought about after that “iphone” advertising.

Living Forever

A rather funny headline for an online article on one of my favourite magazine websites caught my eye today. Translated: Four things to do to live longer.

Now, I personally think, there's only one thing you need to do to live long: don't die. Everything else might or might not work.

But such headlines can be found quite often: How to live longer. How to stay young longer. How to stay healthy. One thing is strange, though: To stay healthy, you have to do various different things depending on what article you read. Actually, I can remember a song by the band "Genesis", created more than 15 years ago, in which they also sung about how the ways to stay healthy and live forever were always changing. So which way is the right one? And can anyone who's been following the 'wrong' way for a long time actually sue someone else, because it turned out he wasn't doing everything right to live long?

But, even if you do everything to achieve a long life, there's never a guarantee. When it's not a disease, it can still be an accident or just bad luck. On the other hand, there people around who are never heeding to any advice and still live a very long life.

So I stay with my tip for a long life: avoid dying!

Technical development

After I read (and watched) Elisabeth's post about Jack Bauer in 1994, I realized that the whole thing works the other way around as well. "24" would not have worked out like that in 1994 and a lot of the stories I read and watched as a child would not work out the same way today.

Information is traded much more easily today; the internet with the many sites, with email and chat-rooms and forums has changed the way we treat and gather information a lot.

As I read a lot of books about junior detectives when I was a kid myself, there was a lot of information-gathering in them. But while they had to resort to local research in newspaper archives, libraries or by talking to people, they would have a whole new host of possibilities right now. (And I don't want to imagine what Sherlock Holmes would have been able to deduce with means like those at his disposal ... although it's an interesting idea - I should file it away for now.)

Most of the stories I read (save for "Sherlock Holmes", of course) were set in the times I was living in, so the kids featuring in them were more or less living like I did (apart from having adventures, of course).

This made me think about the technical development of the last twenty or so years. That covers the time it took for the internet to become a well-used and much-frequented medium (opposite to the scientists' network it was in the beginning). That covers the time it took for cell phones to become a normal means of communication. The computer became an everyday thing, too, during that time.

I guess you could spent millennia discussing whether we need all those technical means, but then, theoretically, we could still live in cages, wear animal skin and eat our meat raw - and who wants to, seriously? They are here and they are used. It's up to us to use them sensibly.

10 years ago I didn't have a cell phone (and currently I've only got my third model, but then, I'm using a prepaid phone). 10 years ago computer games didn't look realistic enough to scare anybody. 10 years ago DVD was a new medium and only very few people actually had a DVD-player.

20 years ago nobody had heard of cell phones (at least where I live). 20 years ago computers weren't really everywhere. 20 years ago even video recorders were expensive (they are again, today, because there's not many of them around any longer).

Technical development can't and shouldn't be avoided. It's what 'civilisation' is all about.

Does God exist?

That is one of the basic questions of mankind, I think. Religion is an important part of our culture, no matter which religion it is. But does the fact that we believe in a god really mean this god exists? (Warning: this could be quite a philosophical post!)

Richard Dawkins doesn't think it does. That much is obvious from the various interviews I've read. There is no scientific proof of God's existence. (Of course, the point in believing is not needing proof.)

What I sometimes wonder about, is the question whether that really matters.

First of all, I need to point out my own approach to religion. I'm not very religious. I think there might be some kind of divine being around, but I don't believe in the Christian god as a such (although technically I'm Roman-Catholic). I'm not a follower of any church you might find out there. In fact, I'm highly suspicious of people who tell others what to believe. To me, belief is something highly personal and nobody else can tell me what to believe in.

In Europe, that's not very important. Europeans are not judged by other Europeans based on their belief (well, some might do so secretly, but not openly). Fundamental Christians are almost non-existent over here - or at least such a minority that they can't do a thing. Most European countries might be based on Christianity (though various kinds of it), but that doesn't mean they're Christian in the way a Fundamental Christ in the United States might understand it.

But then, what is belief?

Most people believe in some kind of god (or in more than one, that's what's called polytheism). They believe this god (or these gods) has created the universe, has created mankind and - usually - some special plan for us humans. Some religions have the idea of people being reborn again and again to learn about life while others only give us one chance on this world, before we are judged. (Sometimes I wonder what's worse: coming back as a housefly after a very bad life or spending eternity in hell...)

Still, that doesn't answer the main question. What is belief? The question is not how it manifests itself.

Belief is, most of all, thinking something is true without having any proof - and that's why Dawkins will never really convince firm Christians with his book. A true believer doesn't need proof of the things he believes are true. Belief is self-sufficient.

That brings along the next question. What do we need belief for?

Believing in something seems to be a major human survival trait. By believing what the parents tell it, a child can survive. Animals don't need belief, though, because they have more instincts to help them along. But then, maybe believing what older people tell you, is an instinct. We still don't know.

Belief makes it easier to control large quantities of humans. If you can use a group's belief, you can make them do whatever you want. That's what happens in some countries to this very day - and has happened in most others in the past. You just have to say "god wants you to kill those people" or "god wants you to give me all your money" and they will obey. Tyrants have to put in a lot more hard work for the same results...

On the other hand, for children, belief really is an important thing. If a child can't believe its parents when they tell it something, then who could teach it about what to do to survive? If a father tells his child "don't eat this" or "don't touch that", it's usually because those things are dangerous. And as the child believes all he tells it, it will be safe.

So belief is important, but it can be misused easily (and this has happened in the past).

Religion also brings us straight to "the meaning of life," this fundamental question embedded in the human nature. We like to think our life has some kind of meaning. We like to think we're on this globe for a purpose. And, of course, we like to think we're important.

"God has given this world to us" is a basic principle of the Christian belief. We are in charge and can use the world whatever way we like (and just look what we did with it). With this and the idea of Christianity being the "only true" belief, Christians conquered other people, enslaved the populace, took over their country and in addition thought those conquered and enslaved should be grateful for it (but, to be fair, so did the Moslems as well - and various other religious groups). Genghis Khan had a more difficult approach: he just took the country and said "believe what you want, but don't oppose me." Strangely enough, that worked well.

Biologically speaking, the only "meaning of life" for every living creature is to propagate. But that's not enough to keep the human mind entertained, so we need something else to do with our spare time. So we're making our own "meaning of life" and invent reasons why it's true. And belief is a practical way to make others share our idea of the "meaning of life" and help us to make it come true. That might create a paradise or a hell, based on the ideals of the one starting all of it.

And now back to God. Does God exist?

Scientifically: probably not. It has never been proven. Religiously: yes, without a doubt. What would a religion be without God?

And who is right? That's the question nobody can answer.

Gender stereotypes - and where to shove them

Looking back today, I have to admit I'm quite happy I grew up during the 70s and early 80s. During that time most young parents didn't want to raise their children on stereotypes and thus did everything possible to avoid it. This meant for me to be allowed to choose my toys and interests without always hearing "that's for boys, dear" or other stupid remarks (not that I would have minded...). Actually, even so, my aunts did say stuff like that sometimes...

I hate gender stereotypes. To be honest, I hate stereotypes as a rule, but gender stereotypes are even worse than other kinds. It doesn't matter whether it's stereotypes about men and boys or about women and girls. They're all restrictive and don't really fit. Humans come in all shapes, forms and sizes. There's no such thing as the woman or the man around. (Which is why I usually find statistics so hilarious...)

There's no such thing as the boy or the girl either, but nevertheless magazines, TV shows, books and other media try to make us all think there's just one way to happiness and that's to become a stereotypical member of our own gender. And unlike a grown woman or man who should (theoretically at least) be able to see through such manipulations and know everybody is an individual, the children and teenagers can't see through it. How should they, without the experience an adult has?

Yes, I read Enid-Blyton-books when I was young - I liked them, too. But unlike my friends I didn't see them as a reality for me. I wasn't one of those girls. I was different and - especially during my teens - I actually started to be proud of it.

I owned a large collection of Barbie dolls and I played with them (what else would I have owned them for, seriously). But my games weren't the kind about the super-model or the perfect wife in a perfect relationships (my Kens - 2 opposed to about 10 Barbies - would in real life probably either have become gay or died of loneliness). My Barbies went through adventures - but I've written about that before, twice at least.

And yes, I like horses. But I've only ridden a couple of times in my life and I never felt the need to work at a stable during my teens, just to be near them. I read a few books about horses (and the girls owning them), but I never became such a girl.

And I think I might have mentioned how much love stories and romances bore me before...

But what makes me even more averse to gender stereotypes than my own life (and there's always the odd one, naturally), is what it does to all women. Why? Because of one real strong stereotype: the 'woman can't understand anything technical'-myth.

That's a stereotype we all grow up with, isn't it? Whether it's in books, in movies, in TV series, even in school sometimes, it's always like that: technical things are done by boys. There might be some girls around who work with technical means or natural science, but they're 'not normal'. They are odd - they are geeks.

A 'normal' girl doesn't do such stuff and isn't interested in computers (except for the 'acceptable' parts as playing the new Barbie game or surfing the internet for tips about make-up or a new diet). In the minds of quite some people female technicians, female programmers, female web-masters (I still think the word 'web-mistress' sounds a bit dubious ... more like I'm wearing a whip and something tight-fitting in latex) simply don't exist. There are all those women, but they do not - or rarely - appear in the media. We had to wait for over 20 years until the first "Star Trek" spaceship had a female captain, for heaven's sake! (And quite some fans don't like her at all.)

But that stereotype is dangerous to us women. Fact is, a lot of the new, well-paid jobs are in the computer and internet business. To get them, you have to work with those new technical means. You have to understand and use those means. And unlike what some men think (and some men still think women can't drive a car correctly - while all real-life experiences about accidents say something completely different), it's not really difficult.

As a programmer you have to work carefully. You have to be prepared to do the same stuff over and over again until you've found the error and corrected it. That's tedious work, surely, but nothing a woman can't understand or do. And don't people always claim women are better with learning languages? Programming also is done with languages ... what a coincidence.

As a web-master you do some web-design yourself (depends mostly on the kind of job you get, some are more based on taking care of the network, others are more based on creating and maintaining a website or something similar). You have to know the technical basis for it, you have to know about servers, networks and other stuff. But you also have to have a good eye for proportions, for colours that fit well together and so on. Sure, taking care of a server isn't easy, but selling the new collection to a woman who doesn't look good in it, isn't easy either.

The only thing biologically separating men from women is one chromosome. Women have two X-chromosomes, men have only one - and a Y-chromosome. Genetically speaking everything with one Y-chromosome is male, although there's men with two or more X-chromosomes around... Apart from that our genes are completely identical. And I doubt all the stereotypes fit onto this one chromosomes (which men have as well, as you might have noticed from my explanation).

So why do we still spent so much time trying to figure out what's 'male' or 'female'? Is it female to be able to sew? Is it male to be able to hammer a nail into the wall? I can do both (and learned it both from my mother who wouldn't have let her daughter move out without knowing she was able to do normal repairs on her own). In modern times, it wouldn't hurt a boy to know how to sew on a button and it wouldn't hurt a girl to know how to use a hammer.

Gender stereotypes don't really fit into the modern world. We can't try to build the World of Tomorrow with the Views of Yesterday.

Sometimes it hurts

Yes, I do know not everybody is as fascinated by sharks as I am. That's only logical - after all, we're all interested in different things. But if I write an article about something, I ought gather information about it first. And I fear, some journalists don't.

I was reading more of the magazines after finishing my last post and stumbled upon an article about a primeval shark (with the picture shown at the left of this paragraph). The creature on this picture is a dunkleosteus (hope I wrote it right) and the topic of the article. That's a large and dangerous fish from the Devon (if I'm right), but it's not a shark. Sharks are among the oldest fish still alive today, but given the fact life on earth started in the oceans, that's not much of a surprise. It's had a head start, after all.

The dunkleosteus is a dangerous fish, as I already pointed out, with a lot of bone plates on the front half of its body. Actually, it doesn't have any teeth in the way we would understand it, but bites through its prey with sharp bone plates around its mouth. It's the largest and best known member of a whole group of fishes. Not something you'd like to keep in an aquarium ... unless, of course, you're a super-villain. (But in this case you're a couple of millennia late ... sorry to tell you.)

But, if that's possible without looking among the mammals in the ocean, it's the anti-thesis of a shark. A dunkleosteus is half-covered in bone plates while the only 'bones' a shark has are its teeth and jaws. Sharks and rays (is that the right word? my translator didn't accept "Rochen" and I know that "Teufelsrochen" translates into stingray) don't have bones by default, it's what sets them apart from all the other fishes on earth (octopuses don't count, they're no fishes). Sharks are fast and manoeuvrable, even the largest like the White Shark or the Whale Shark. The dunkleosteus wasn't. But as it was larger than most other fishes around, and well-armoured, too, it didn't have to be.

In fact, the whole article reminded me of a horror movie I saw some years ago. It was about a 'primeval shark', too (and the critter almost looked like the dunkleosteus). But that was just a horror movie - and I love horror movies about sharks, although most of the time they only make me laugh ("Shark Hunter" didn't though, that was one good movie - great meg). Now I wonder whether the journalist saw the same movie...

Anyway, I always thought a journalist should do a quick research before writing an article - and even the most basic information about sharks and other primeval fishes should make everybody see there's definitely a difference between them.

Obviously I was wrong.