You might imagine that the thoughts of an evangelic preacher like John Bunyan (1628-1688)[1] are as far as possible from a rationalist science based blog like this one. Yet the man and his works, including The Pilgrim’s Progress represent the psychological journey of anyone who has to confront the insufficiencies of this world, and knows that to remake it has become an urgent work of survival.

Born in Bedford to a family of tinkers and small traders, Bunyan’s life encompassed that most radical period of the English speaking world at a time when it was the epicentre of human progress and self discovery. The central challenge of Protestantism-the lone confrontation of the Soul with God-meant that anyone from any social class was thereby liberated to play a role in History, but thereby carried the almost insupportable burden to remake the world around them. Bunyan’s early life (Puritan preacher, service in the Parliamentary Army) was with the grain of his times. But the return of the King in the 1660s put radicalism out of fashion, and he spent 12 long years in jail for his beliefs- a sort of Alexy Navalny of his epoch.

Anyone of any faith, or none, who wants to reform the world will have experienced the slow journey from Angry Young Communist through Socialist, Social Democrat, Liberal and Whig, with each each progressive dilution of virtue seen as a Wordly Wise compromise with reality. The Pilgrims Progress is an analysis of the psychological challenges faced by those who refuse to compromise and stay out there, to confront the Devil and his works, in the name of us all.

For a long time, the journey to Moderation seemed the safer bet, for it has given us science, reason and the comfortable amenities, pleasures even, of modern life. Yet the Devil has not gone away. These days his identity is pretty clear, in the shape of the fossil fuel industry and its various outriders and lackeys in the media and politics. The danger they represent is now very real, and the challenge of how to respond is daunting.

There is no point in returning to Evangelical Christianity, most of whose acolytes now seem to lie on the the side of the very rich and white supremacy, at least in the United States. Yet the actions of protestors like Greenpeace who recently(and peacefully) daubed the house of the Prime Minister in oil coloured sheeting seem to have captured something of the spirit of Bunyan and his kind. If our side is to prevail(and our species thereby to survive) maybe we need just a little more of that angry spirit that knows evil when it sees it. And refuses to bend.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress

#christianity #global warming #john bunyan #radical #moderate

Climate Change is about Science, not Politics We start with a heartfelt plea to try to pull all of us-Conservatives, Centrists, Social Democrats, Leftists, Greens, Train Spotters, whatever-together in the face of what is fast becoming a real planetary emergency. Here’s Adam Ramsay, trying to be as emollient as he can for the Byline Times

‘The Climate Emergency is Too Important to be a Party-Political Battle’

Emotional Intelligence Ignaz Semmelweiss has always been one of he unsung heroes of public health. Yet he demonstrates the clear perils of being absolutely right, but not cutting through. Why? Because he seemed to specialise in rubbing people up the wrong way. Sometime emollience can be worth more than logic! Here’s Nature Briefings-why hand washing took a long time to catch on

Ignaz Semmelweis radically reduced rates of death in childbirth in the middle of the nineteenth century — by introducing hand washing. Yet, at the time, his ideas about infectious agents were rejected by the wider community. A play about Semmelweis now showing in London focuses on why his ideas failed to catch on. Although Dr Semmelweis acknowledges that the medical establishment was at fault for its resistance to change, it seems to place most of the blame on Semmelweis’s character, says reviewer and writer Georgina Ferry. Amid his struggle to save women’s lives, he offended his critics and fell out with even devoted supporters.Nature | 6 min read

Red Admirals Flutter by We’ve always had a soft spot for butterflies whose eye catching flights are synonymous with lazy summer days and things like Pimms, cricket and the smell of new mown hay. But their numbers are fluctuating wildly. The culprit? You guessedit- runaaway clime change. Not bad for the Mail!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12368879/The-Red-Admiral-soars-Migrant-butterfly-commonly-sighted-Britain-numbers-rocket-400-climate

Superconductivity-what is the current situation? There’s no doubt that achieving room temperature superconductivity would enormously cut our energy use. That’s why the whole field is so hotly contested, as this piece from the Conversation makes clear

https://theconversation.com/viral-room-temperature-superconductor-claims-spark-excitement-and-skepticism-210700?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign

well, there’s a raft of ideas for you. Before we go: Eurythmics were one those acts whose first two singles we loved, but never quite seemed to achieve the same special, almost neuralgic level again. Not for us anyway. Maybe you disagree. So to remind you of how good they were at the beginning, here’s Sweet Dreams.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=eurythmics%20sweet%20dreams%20videos&FORM=VIRE0&mid=2AE21FB0549442D293362AE21FB0549442D29336&vi

No, it’s not as good a title as Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.* But it does pull together two of a our favourite tropes on this little blogsite: human evolution and antibiotic resistance. We won’t spoil the piece from Nature Briefings which you are about to enjoy, gentle readers. But it’s a marvellous example of using AI to squeeze available resources to the limit, in this case the genomes of our close relatives. “Would you Adam and Eve it?” as they used to say in Old Cockney Rhyming slang.

AI Brings Back Neanderthal Protein Snippets

Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped scientists to resurrect Neanderthal peptides — protein subunits that could be an untapped resource of new antibiotics. An algorithm was trained to recognize sites on human proteins where they are cut into peptides. When the algorithm and other tools were applied to publicly available protein sequences of Neanderthals and Denisovans, it found several peptides that halted the growth of certain bacteria in mice.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Cell Host & Microbe paper

*someone really produced a film with this title

#antibiotics #superbugs #genetics #dna #paleontolgy #evolution

International Day of the Tiger The Zoological Society of London has joined many others in promoting the conservation of this iconic cat. Here’s their link to show it isn’t all doom and gloom Incidentally, overseas visitors to the UK might enjoy a tranquil afternoon in its shady walks and interesting collections; or more so at its larger country subsidiary at Whipsnade.

https://www.zsl.org/news-and-events/feature/tiger-conservation-success-2023?utm_source=zsl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=tiger-success&utm_campaig

Dolphin Tracking Talking of conservation, we’d like to bring in another of our LSS perennials- Artificial Intelligence. Here’s Nature Briefings on a successful new project with great potential for the future

Artificial intelligence (AI) is helping researchers to map the movements of endangered river dolphins. A neural network was trained to recognize the clicks and whistles of the boto (Inia geoffrensis), or pink river dolphin, and tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis) in the noisy soundscape of the Amazon River. The AI can distinguish between the two species and other common sounds such as those produced by rainfall and boat engines. Using sound is much less invasive than is tracking the animals with GPS tags, boats or aerial drones.Nature | 4 min read Reference: Scientific Reports paper

Dirty Politics As the current Conservative Party runs out of intellectual coherence, it has resorted to culture wars as an electoral weapon. Astute readers will recognise this as a variant on the ad hominem school of intellectual fallacy. The Conversation discusses

https://theconversation.com/britains-next-election-could-be-a-climate-change-culture-war-210351?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%

The tragedy of Israel Israel is still the only democracy in the Middle East, founded with the highest possible hopes. For these reasons, we have tended to support them on most occasions, being right there back in 1967 and 1973. But what happens when they fall prey to a brute like Netanyahu and his deranged followers? Jonathan Freedland is on top form for the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/28/israelis-benjamin-netanyahu-democracy-protests-donald-trump

Have a good weekend

#tigers #israel #netanyahu #AI #conservation

Yesterday’s little blog (LSS 28 7 23) has produced certain reactions: some in favour, one or two markedly against. To show the world that we are a true Whig website, faithful to the spirit of Bertrand Russell, we will shortly offer a right of reply to regular reader who comes from anmother part of the political spectrum.

For personal reasons, and because of where he/she works(we have to be that circumspect, readers) the writer has requested absolute anonymity. And also a little time to prepare the piece!

But prepare it they shall, and we hope to bring it to you soon. In the spirit of fair play, balance and all that.

#bertrand russell #whig #balance

Air pollution kills. Whether by poisons like nitrogen dioxide, tiny particles or maybe even the C0₂ itself(see LSS 20 11 20) it causes asthma, cancer, heart disease and possibly dementia. Its effects fall mainly on poorer people. You’d think they would want to get rid of it at all costs, as soon as possible. Yet recent attempts to extend the London ULEZ zone [2] had so enraged a significant section of voters that the Labour Party was denied by election win in a key outer London marginal. What is going on? Do people really vote against their own interests? Or is there a better explanation?

Yes, a typical voter, particularly one hardscrabbling a living at the poorer edges of society will still know about air pollution and how it damages their children. But most have a closer, more pressing urgency; to see those children fed. And in an economy where margins have become so impossibly tight, the £12.50 charge to enter the ULEZ zone can make a real difference, especially to those like builders or van drivers who may have to cross it several times a day. Of course they voted against-wouldn’t you? And so, just when a really crucial, life enhancing reform needed all the support it could get, a vital set of potential supporters fell away.

“Cut wages the minimum-we’re paying ourselves to much!” was the key mantra of the Thatcher years from 1979 to 1990. Only a drastic fall in real wages would allow the economy to thrive, ran the old nostrum. In its name millions of secure, unionised and well paid jobs were abolished. To be replaced by precarious self-employment in jobs like delivery, building trades, taxi driving and the like. The effect was to drive a deep wedge between progressive opinion and large sections of the working class. The early signs were apparent at the Stanlake disruption of 2000, a geezers-in-vans uprising if ever there was one. It has grown and anastomosed ever since, aided and abetted by a well funded ecosystem of “news”outlets such as The Sun and GB News. Now, when it is even in the billionaires’ interests to achieve a cleaner planet, the critical social mass has gone missing.

We still have a little time to clean the noxious clouds of filth the shroud us. But progress is slow. And it was Margaret Thatcher who chained the fetters which slow us. That will one day be seen as her truly toxic legacy.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-matters-air-pollution/health-matters-air-pollution

[2]https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/pollution-and-air-quality/ultra-low-emission-zone-ulez-london

#margaret thatcher #pollution #particulates #ULEZ zone #london

Back in the long-ago days of Covid lockdown, we set you a puzzle: what to make of the enigmatic remains of Homo Naledi from the Rising Star Caves in South Africa. It was very much in the spirit of brain teasers like crosswords or computer chess, and there was no right answer. But the material found, with its curious mix of primitive and advanced features, is certainly intriguing. It’s as if Rolls Royce had tried to build a car using combining bits of a 1923 Silver Ghost with its 2023 descendent.

Which is why we are not surprised to find a bit of push back against some of the claims made for naledi. As Nature Briefings so presciently observes:

Archaeologists wowed viewers of a documentary — released last week — with stunning scenes of a cave crammed with bone fossils that, they argue, are the remains of the earliest-known burial by humans or their extinct relative Homo naledi. But days earlier, four scientists who peer-reviewed the paper making those claims called the supporting evidence “inadequate” in the open-access journal eLife. The study is a high-profile test of the journal’s innovative publishing model: it no longer formally accepts papers, but instead publishes them alongside peer reviewers’ reports.Nature | 6 min read

As so often happens in Paleontology, as in other sciences, as soon as someone makes a big claim, someone else comes along to assert the opposite. We won’t go into a pseudo-philosophical riff on Hegel and the dialectic here-we want people to enjoy this blog-but it does reflect a deeper truth which we’ve alluded to once or twice in these pages. Data is one thing and interpretation quite another. In this case, we don’t know which side is right, but in the last resort it’s only a few old fossils, and being scientists, they will all settle their differences without gunfire.

But it illustrates a deeper truth Because it’s not just about science but life in general, as the recent case of Andrew Malkinson [1] demonstrates. Where the consequences of confusing interpretation with facts can be very grave indeed. Perhaps there would be less miscarriages of justice, and fewer bad referendum results, if people thought more and believed less.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-66323436?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

#evolution #data ##andrew malkinson #miscarriage of justice

a look at back at stories that caught our eye this week

“God gave you two ears and one mouth” as the old Spanish proverb has it Listening is a much underrated skill; and some of the most able managers we have worked for have always been good listeners. Here’s a tip from regular correspondent Mr Peter Seymour on how you could accentuate this skill From The Stylist

https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/listening-styles-communication-connection-social-skills/805311

These genes are made for walking One of the mot exciting developments in science has been the way the genetic studies are slowly being aligned with fossil studies. It looks as if the chromosomal areas associated with walking upright are slowly being identified, with exciting possibilities for those of us who wish to know more about this fascinating phase in human evolution From Nature

A map of genomic regions that could explain the evolution of our unique skeletal architecture, which enables us to walk upright. Researchers used deep learning to analyse measurements from whole-body X-rays of more than 31,000 people, and combined them with their genetic data. One hallmark of walking upright is having longer legs relative to arms; another is narrower hips. Genomic regions linked to these features bore signs of evolutionary selection in humans. The work also points to regions of our DNA that place us at risk of the common skeletal disease osteoarthritis.Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Science paper

It’s too darn hot as Cole Porter used to have it. As we continue to smash through world record temperatures, it may not be the heat per se that gets you, but the humidity which goes with it According to The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/as-heat-records-fall-how-hot-is-too-hot-for-the-human-body-210088?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The

And so farewell Tony Bennett; Definitely one of the nice guys of history, as well as being a most talented singer. However, we own to a confession: we had perhaps overlooked Mr Bennett’s oeuvre until reminded forcefully by the opening sequence of Goodfellas, where the bold brassy score Rags to Riches sets the scenes for the lurid story to come

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Song+Rags+to+Riches+by+Tony+Bennett&&view=detail&mid=88C92BA5A5E6032BE65088C92BA5A5E6032BE650

#climate chane #global warming #listening skills #bipedalism #tony bennett

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Even on a proximal danger such as anthropogenic global warming. As it is our prime assumption at LSS that most people are not fools, we will assume that those who doubt the climate crisis have arrived at their opinions by careful reasoning and an exhaustive consideration of the evidence. In which case they will be happy to answer the following questions (we have put the answers below)

1 How do you explain the fall in the C¹³/C¹² ratio in atmospheric CO₂ since 1850?

2 Why has the ratio of C¹⁴ in the atmosphere also fallen since 1850?

3 In which case, where has all the extra C¹² come from?

4 Taking the figures from 1850 to 2023 as a baseline, does the increase in CO2 match the increase in observable global temperatures?

5 Why is Venus so hot?

6 If the data suggesting global warming is manufactured by scientific institutions as part of a conspiracy, are the same institutions conspiring in areas such as cancer research, astronomy and cardiac medicine?

7 If you believe in conspiracies, is it equally possible that other bodies, such as certain energy companies and media outlets may also be distorting facts and manufacturing opinions to suit their agendas?

8 If the sudden increases in warmth are due to natural cycles, how long are these cycles? Has the length of them changed. What is their amplitude? Do we see the same cycles across a range of natural phenomena, and how closely do your figures coincide for each?

9 Can you suggest any natural phenomenon which accounts for the rise in global temperatures since 1850?

10 Please explain your criteria for choosing between fact and opinion

Answers

1It has fallen as the amount of atmospheric CO₂ has risen

2 There is no measurable C¹⁴ in the carbon in ancient coal and oil, as its half life is only a few thousand years

3 fossil fuels

4 very closely

5 Very high levels of carbon dioxide in atmosphere

6 or do you just pick and choose which conspiracy is convenient to believe

7 yes- and the same thing happened with tobacco fifty years ago

8 E.g. are the cycles in sunspots, ocean temperature, fluctuations in earth orbit, atmospheric temperature, or what?

9 No

10 This one is up to them 

#climate change #global warming #carbon dioxide

It’s not a baby, there’s no Guinness in it, and it’s just a shot. So how on earth can the Baby Guinness possibly qualify for our cocktail this week? [1]

The answer lies with one of our researchers, who was having a drink with a couple of the patrons of The Dog and Bell, which seems to be a highly recommended tavern in the region of Deptford, London, SE8. [2] For the Baby Guinness is a technical ingenuity, one of those masterpieces of human thought that sets us apart from and above our nearest simian relatives, such as the pygmy chimpanzee (Pan paniscus). To quote Wikipedia

A portion of coffee liqueur (e.g. Kahlúa or Tia Maria) is topped by a layer of Irish cream (e.g., Baileys or Coole Swan) which is poured over the back of a spoon so that it sits on the coffee liqueur. The ratio of coffee liqueur to Irish cream varies but is generally around 3-to-1. The resulting drink looks like a miniature pint of Guinness stout, with the coffee liqueur as the beer and the Irish cream as the head. It is normally served in a shot glass.^[1]

And some people say there’s no such thing as Progress. So, next time you are in the Dog and Bell, no doubt debating the finer points of human evolution, and a Bonobo walks in, you can shout “Oi! Monkey Face! Bet you ain’t ever had one of these!”

And watch them crumple in shame.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Guinness

[2] https://www.facebook.com/TheDogandBell/about/

guinness #baby guinness #cocktails #deptford