Or how about “Sacculina”, the mind-control barnacle? [LINK]

“Upon finding a host crab, a female Sacculina will crawl over the crab’s surface until she finds a chink in the armor: a joint. She then ejects her protective shell, reducing herself to a gelatinous blob, and invades.

Inside the host, the parasite grows long, root-like tendrils throughout the crab’s body…… she renders the crab infertile, and creates a small opening in the crab’s back that will allow a male Sacculina to make residence there. Soon the crab is filled with millions of Sacculina eggs and larvae, and like a zombie, the crab cares for these eggs and larvae as though they were its own, losing all interest in mating. When a male crab is infected, the parasite alters its physiology and behavior to be female, to better care for the Sacculina’s young.”

Imagine such a thing happening to a human? You’d essentially be powerless within your own body!

And lastly, the parasitic worm “Leucochloridium paradoxum” which infects snails. The snails eat worm eggs, the eggs grow inside the snail and …

In the snail’s digestive gland the miracidia change into cercaries and produce sporocystes, long tubes that can contain several hundred cercaries.

One or several of these tubes stretch until into the snail’s tentacles and begin to pulsate in there. The obvious colour and the sporocystes’ movement attracts birds that hack for the snail’s tentacles. The bird rips off the snail’s tentacles which cannot be withdrawn because of the sporocystes tubes inside.

Inside the bird’s digestive tract the cercaries change into the parasite’s adult stage, which then reproduces sexually and lays eggs. Thos are distributed by the bird to infect further snails, which closes the generation cycle.

So what does this tell us? What nugget of wisdom can be extracted from these disgusting and unnerving examples of the natural world?

Nobody cares for the snail as its getting eaten alive.  No one sheds a tear when the crab is slowly infested and paralyzed by tentacles.  The karma of the universe does not go out of balance whilst the snappers’ tongue is being eaten out of its mouth.

Life is ruthless. Life does whatever works. Life does not care and it’s going to mow you down if you’re not careful.

The “Complimentary and Alternative Medicine” or CAM movement is big business. It seems the “in-thing” to shun western medicine as being primarily driven by “big pharma”. Big pharma is a conspiracy which holds that there are cures for things like Cancer or Neuro-degenerative diseases like Parkinsons which are being withheld by the evil pharmaceutical companies in order to turn a profit.

So what’s Alternative Medicine? Alternative Medicine is medicine which does not fall under the FDA regulations for drug testing. The legal definition of a drug is “articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease”.  The FDA mandates that anything claiming to be a drug pass rigourous double-blind clinical trials and be proven to be effective, better than placebo whilst also causing no harm. As you can imagine it takes a LONG time and costs a LOT of money to go through this testing.

Enter CAM. CAM side-steps this troublesome process by simply putting statements on the bottle that say things like “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease”. Genius.

Now you’ve got all the ingredients of a good bit of foolery:

• a) The demand: People are sick, desperate and they need cures. Health-care is expensive.
• b) The opportunity: Just put some fine-print on the bottle and you’re good to go.
• c) The conspiracy: Propagate a rumour about the Evil Big Pharma.

A+B+C = The True Believer.  No one ever stops to ask if the stuff actually works and clinical trials seem like a silly nuisance.

You might be surprised to learn what kinds of things fall into the bucket of CAM, here’s a short list: accupuncture, anything chinese, anything holistic, Naturopathy,  Urine therapy, Magnetotherapy, Faith Healing, Fasting, Quigong, Calorie Restriction and on and on…

(ok, ok, I wasn’t surprised by “Urine Therapy”)

The Wiki4CAM states it with incredible irony/ignorance “Wiki4CAM has been started to provide the Complementary and Alternative Medicine community its own space, where it can build its knowledge base without any undue skeptical diversions. ”

Of course, no one needs skeptical diversions? Why bother ourselves “unduly” with the burden of efficacy? Unfortunately this does have a serious side and has often proven deadly.

• In 2007 a PA boy dies from Chelation Therapy whilst being treated for Autism LINK]
• 40 year old Jacqueline Henson and mother of 5 died after consuming too much water [LINK]
• Just 9 days ago 11 year old Madeline Neumann died from diabetes. Her parents refused to get her medical attention and instead tried to “pray” her diabetes away [LINK]. Disgusting.

As one doctor said, “do you know what they call Alternatative Medicine that works? …”Medicine!”

I suppose the lure of these treatments is that they are “Natural” and how could anything natural be bad for you? Well quite easily for example Deadly Nightshade is natural or Arsenic is naturally occuring, both will kill you quite naturally.

This is all part and parcel of the move towards Organic food because non-organic food has chemicals and chemicals are bad. This is pure nonsense but let’s dig in. The basic premise in this case is flawed: Chemicals are not bad. Might I remind you that you’re breathing chemicals right now! Yes, Oxygen is a chemical, Nitrogen is a chemical, both essential to life which is based in our case on…Carbon! Oh no, another chemical!

Somehow there’s a feeling that food grown without chemicals (pesticide or fertiliser) is better than food grown with chemicals. Not true. In fact a study was just published which states

“Organically grown food is no more nutritious than conventionally grown food when it comes to the amount of certain important nutrients”. [LINK]

Organic food is smaller due to less fertiliser being used, there are more losses from pests, takes more land to cultivate (the yield per square foot is less), tastes the same and costs MORE.  Penn and Teller claimed recently that if all the world grew organic food, there’d only be enough to feed 4 billion people. 3 billion would have to go hungry. Nice.

Finally there’s Genetic Modification. Folks don’t like genetic modification because it sounds creepy. Genetic Modification is a process whereby the genetic material of foods is modified to enhance it in specific ways. Examples are strawberries that can survive frost, potatoes that absorb less fat when fried or apples that can fight blight.

The jury’s still out on this one but if you think about it humans have been genetically modifying food through selective breeding and agriculture for thousands of years.  For example, some evidence suggests the modern day “domesticated” carrot started out life a thousand years ago in Afghanistan as a small purple-yellow root.  Most flowers are products of genetic modification, same thing with domestic cats and dogs.

Is GM food safe? I don’t know but let’s base decisions off the evidence.

P.S. The image this time is of Donald Duck, a long time proponent of Quackery.

I’m no expert but it makes sense that we’d be best at recognizing faces better than say less frequently viewed patterns since there’s an obvious evolutionary advantage to that. So the next time you think you see a ghost in a smudged photo or the Jesus in the bark of a tree [LINK] realize that it’s just your visual cortex trying to help you out.

Same thing with that EVP nonsense “Electronic Voice Phenomenon”. Ghost hunters claim the white noise on a low quality recording is actually the voice of dead people “crossing over”. Sorry, just audio pareidolia .

Most people think they have a good memory but actually have a terrible memory. Our memory is NOT good at remembering, especially specifics. We remember generalist type things and our brain fills in the gaps. Often times our brain will make stuff up. Don’t believe me? Let’s check it.

First grab a pen and paper. You’re going to memorise a list of words then write down as many as you can in 60 seconds. Don’t cheat, here’s the list, time starts when you read the last word. Read each word once and out loud then minimize the browser window.

“sour, nice, candy, honey, sugar, soda, bitter, chocolate, good, heart, taste, cake, tooth, tart, pie”

STOP!!! look away and go write down as many words as you remember.

Ok, here’s a 2nd list, do the same thing:

“mad, wrath, fear, happy, hate, fight, rage, hatred, temper, mean, fury, calm, ire, emotion, enrage” *

If you’re done you can relax. We’ll get to the answers in a minute.

Memory is very malleable. Memories are stored in neural pathways within our brain, unless those pathways are revisited and re-activated they grow weak and the recollection grows fuzzy. The memory might even merge with another and make us think we remember something that never happened.

There are plenty of examples of studies of this phenomenon. Psychologist Ulric Neisser took this account from a student in 1986 right after the shuttle Challenger exploded:

January 1986: “I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about the [explosion]. I didn’t know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching, which I thought was so sad. Then after class I went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and I got all the details from that.”And this account 3 years later from the same student:

September 1988: “When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV. It came on a news flash and were we both totally shocked. I was really upset and went upstairs to talk to a friend of mind and then I called my parents.”

Memories can also be implanted falsely into our minds through suggestion and there are many documented examples of this: Whilst under hypnosis Nadean Cool was made to believe she had been a member of a satanic cult as a child. This turned out to be false and she was awarded a few million. Beth Rutherford was made to remember that her father had raped her repeatedly. The father was disgraced and Beth was later found under medical exam to be a virgin at age 22.

In their paper, Loftus and Pickrell showed [LINK] they were able to “implant” a false memory of being lost in a shopping mall or large department store at about the age of five.

“We prepared a booklet for each participant containing one-paragraph stories about three events that had actually happened to him or her and one that had not.”

“The lost-in-the-mall scenario included the following elements: lost for an extended period, crying, aid and comfort by an elderly woman and, finally, reunion with the family.”

“in the two follow-up interviews six participants (25 percent) continued to claim that they remembered the fictitious event.”

That’s a statistically significant result. The lesson there; don’t trust your memory and don’t trust psychiatrists. Ironically eye-witness testimony in a trial is often used to trump circumstantial evidence!

Let’s get back to your memory test; take a look at your memorized word list, if you wrote down “sweet” or “anger” you’ve fallen victim to a false memory. Neither of those words were in the original lists.

* This is taken from Brian Brushwood’s lecture on memory which you can find here:

The image on this post is a portion of Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper. The “fool” connection is a little obscure but one of my favourite songs is “Tales of Brave Ulysses” by Cream. Eric Clapton played a guitar known as “The Fool” on this track.

James Randi has long offered the princely sum of $1,000,000 to anyone who can submit to clinical testing in a controlled environment (of their choosing) and demonstrate supernatural powers [LINK]. This has been called the “Million Dollar Challenge”. It’d be easy money if you had supernatural powers as these psychics claim. Sylvia Brown agreed to take the test over 10 years ago on the Larry King show but never followed through.

The truth is these folks cannot talk to the dead and do not possess psychic powers. What they are doing is knowingly fooling the public using a technique called “Cold Reading”.

Cold Reading involves a person (the Reader) making suggestions or statements, which at face value sound specific, but in reality are general statements which apply to almost anyone. The person being interviewed then takes these statements and applies them to their own lives, often without even realizing and the result is an experience in which the interviewee feels as though the Reader has either spoken to a dead relative of theirs or completely read their mind.

It’s called “cold” reading since the reader needs no prior knowledge of the subject. If they had prior knowledge that’d be “hot” reading.

Here’s an example:

• Reader: I see a male figure (guaranteed hit)
• Client: Yes
• Reader: An older male, with a strong temperament but a gentle demeanor, could be a uncle, father or grandfather (we all have at least one make figure who’s dead). The demeanor part sounds specific but it’s actually not. )
• Client: Yes, my Uncle passed away. He was very soft spoken.
• Reader: Yes a gentle man. He kept his strong side hidden.
• Reader: He’s upset. Something about “too soon”. He didn’t get to finish. (again, sounds specific, but if it’s an uncle then depending on the Client’s age this would be a high-probability hit).
• Reader: Was he sick for a while? (leading question)
• Client: No (What? a miss? Our psychic’s stumbling…)
• Reader: No, that’s right, because he’s saying it was quite sudden. (See what he did there? Turned a miss into a hit).
• Client: That’s true, he was taken suddenly.
• Reader: I see a huge pressure in his chest area. (this is a really useful statement which can mean anything from massive heart attack to lung cancer to getting hit with a stick in the chest to breaking a rib etc.)
• Client: No I don’t understand
• Reader: He says there’s something in the chest area, you have to help me here, something about a burning or smoke maybe?
• Client: I don’t understand, my uncle drowned. (the reader’s completely missed)
• Reader: Yes, that’s right, he says he felt pressure in his lungs from the water. (he’s turned it around)
• Client: (client is now sobbing) Wow! That’s amazing
• Reader: He says he’s ok now, things were very sudden but he wants me to acknowledge that he’s fine now.
• Client: Oh thank goodness.

That’s just a sample made up out of whole cloth but you can see how the Reader just made artful guesses whilst the Client did the work. The Reader made numerous guesses, all high probability hits and when things went well he built upon them.

The mind plays a role here. Most folks who’d seek a psychic’s help are already true believers. They WANT the thing to work. In fact this desire is so strong that a client will subconsciously fail to remember all the incorrect guesses that a cold reader makes and only recall the hits that actually were close. Our friend, Confirmation Bias again.

Anyone can be a psychic if you know the types of things to say: Lots of folks use “Barnum Statements” – Named after P.T. Barnum, they sound specific but apply to everyone:

• “I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don’t know very well.”
• “You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house.”
• “You had an accident when you were a child involving water.”
• “You’re having problems with a friend or relative.”
• “Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen.”

Horoscopes work the same way. In “Cosmos” Carl Sagan famously read the horoscopes from different newspapers for the same sign for the same time period, all with different answers. When shown any horoscope, even ones which are not intended for that individual, the individual will find some nugget in there that makes sense.

As an aside: Astrology isn’t doesn’t seem to follow any rhyme nor reason anyway; Years ago the astrological signs were determined by the rotation of the heavens over the earth. At the time there were 12 astrological signs. Due to incremental changes in the earth’s rotation the number of constellations now is actually 13 but no one recognizes the 13th sign, Ophiuchus.

By now you get the idea. Psychics and Astrologists are all con artists. Over time a number of techniques have developed, here are a few more types : “The Jacques Statement”, “The Fuzzy Fact”, “The Greener Grass technique”, “The Diverted Question”, “Sugar Lumps”, “the Russian Doll”, “Forking”, “The Jargon Blast” and the “Good Chance Guess”. John Edwards seems particularly fond of using “Push Statements” – stories that are made up out of whole cloth and usually don’t make sense to the client. The client goes away and ultimately tweaks the story until it fits something in their lives. The point being that he is such a good psychic that he even knows stuff that at first doesn’t make sense.

Unfortunately the Media plays a big roll in perpetuating this nonsense. It doesn’t always go the Reader’s way though. Here are a few videos of Sylvia and John making completely wrong guesses and here’s what gets me; these folks are flat-out lying to people in extremely unfortunate situations. There could be nothing worse than giving false hope where there is none or telling someone their loved one is dead when in fact they are alive and well. Only the lowest scum of the earth would do such a thing.

Watch as Sylvia tells Shawn Hornbeck’s parents that he is dead. She provides incorrect information which diverted the police search. She gave false information on the description of his abductor. Despicable. Shawn thankfully showed up 4 years later alive.

Don’t be fooled; look for plausibility supported by evidence. http://www.stopsylvia.com

I’ve been pondering the universe these past two+ years and trying to research various different aspects of humanity (from my armchair). In this series of blogs I’ll try to share or regurgitate what I’ve learned.

Let’s start by discussing Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias is the process by which you take a look at something that has already happened and then infer a meaning or a reason for that having happened. Typically comes in the form of “well that was bound to happen because…xyz”. The distinguishing feature of Confirmation Bias is that folks don’t try to test their hypothesis properly and the reasoning is often in support of a position we already held, thus confirming pre-existing biases.

Flim-flam artists take advantage of this to trick us.

In the following video from Derren Browne, a wallet loaded with cash is placed on a busy city street – a bright yellow circle is drawn around the wallet. A hidden camera records the action. No one touches the wallet. Embedding has been disabled but here’s the link [LINK].

If you scan through the comments left by folks viewing the video you’ll see some very creative reasoning going on with all kinds of explanation as to why this works.

“Thats because people in public thinks differently than in private. They are just stuck on some kind of autopilot – (preprogrammed robots)- set of behaviours, what they think they should do in public. That set includes honesty and yellow chalk reminds them that they are observed by other people. It works in every civilized society.”

“I guess one chalk circle makes all the difference”

“why is noone picking it up… cause its ciculed in yellow they think its a trap????”

“There are a LOT of people walking through these streets, so if someone were to pick this wallet up, then a lot of people would notice. Not to mention that there’s a yellow circle surrounding it. It’s been drawn there and it looks intentional. So this would register to someone’s mind that, “Hey, if I pick this up and someone were to see me, they might think I wasn’t there before and am stealing it now.” There’s a lot that goes through someone’s mind.”

“The circle’s a bright color as well so it draws attention. The act of stealing something like a wallet full of money is a shameful and suspicious one. To bring that much attention with a bright color and an abnormal situation of a circle surrounding a dropped wallet would cause people to stop their impulse from stealing it. So they look, but they don’t steal because they would be afraid of being noticed. It’s quite a pity that we can’t have a circle drawn around our belongings when we lose them!”

“The yellow circle makes it so that on the offchance anyone notices the wallet, they’ll think someone will somehow know if they pick it up, which of course is true. It makes me think a lot about primal or instinctual ideas of territory and belonging.”

Admittedly my initial reaction was to jump immediately to the yellow circle, why was it there, how did it protect the wallet and all the while I assumed it was actually the key to the whole thing. I never questioned whether or not this was actually a genuine phenomenon at all!

After watching the video I held the bias that this Yellow Circle thing could protect a wallet and that it worked every time and that all I had to do was to figure out why.

I was operating under a false premise; that yellow circles protected wallets.

Truth is there’s nothing in this video to suggest that. All Derren’s done is play a trick on the viewer by leveraging confirmation bias. It’s highly likely that this experiment was tried repeatedly on numerous street corners until it worked. He might’ve lost numerous wallets before he got the clips of one continuous shot where the wallet wasn’t touched. He might’ve had a big sign held off-camera warning folks not to touch the wallet on the ground. Who knows?

By observing the result of something that’s already happened, and then trying to reverse engineer the reason behind it, we fall foul to Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias closes off other options and just leads us to re-enforce our personal biases on a given phenomenon.

Another way to look at it is that you’re Cherry Picking the evidence which supports your way of thinking whilst ignoring the evidence which does not support your bias.

So is confirmation bias bad? Not really, in fact it’s natural. The brain has evolved a great capacity to theorize, hypothesize and imagine. No matter what you do you are stuck with a mind that will try to infer meaning in the world around you. It’s unavoidable. As long as you apply the scientific method, look for evidence supporting your theory, then look for ways to falsify the theory and apply The Scientific Method you will not fall fowl to confirmation bias.

The article is filled with logical fallacies, the most basic being the redefinition of “God”. Most faiths define god as a sentient super being, who hears our every thought. Something who must constantly be glorified. Who, when we die will weigh up the good deeds vs the bad deeds and punish us or reward us accordingly, for all eternity. The article re-defines god as “that which is not limited by whatever limits the universe”.

Religion is a rigid set of traditions, beliefs and dogmata which have been informally handed down from generation to generation. Most religions have splinter groups which split off when the core group gets too large. There’s almost always a single authoritative leader in the group who lays things out for others to follow. Religion rejects new information and anything incompatible with the established practices is labeled “doubt” and ends up in the “sin” column.

Science on the other hand presents a means by which we can examine the world around us. It claims no final answers and there are no single authoritative leaders. There are no hard and fast facts, only theories which vary by the degree to which there is evidence supporting them. In some cases the evidence is overwhelming yet it’s still a theory (e.g. The Theory of Evolution). As new information is uncovered it’s evaluated, tested, documented and peer-reviewed. In fact science itself is already a meta-system! Unfortunately most people are not clear on what science actually is or how the community operates.

If evidence supports the re-writing of a theory then that theory is re-examined, re-tested and in some cases thrown out and replaced with a better, more encompassing theory. In this way science evolves and moves forward. Religion can never move forward as it would require admitting that the definition of god or the belief system is inaccurate.

Taking a closer look at the neurology behind it you might ask well why do we even have religion if it makes such little sense? First you must realise you’re an animal and your actions are governed by your brain. Just as you can’t touch your elbow to your nose due to how you’ve evolved physically, in a neurological sense you cannot resist the urge to make sense of the information you’re presented with. It happens automatically.

The human brain has evolved to make sense of the world. It uses the constructs of beginning, middle and end as an aide. When the brain lacks information it readily makes it up, there’s plenty of examples of this in patients with partial memory loss or dementia. They fill in the gap. On a grander scale that’s one possible theory as to why we have religion, because man lacked a systematic means to make sense of the world. Too much information, too fast, so we created the various religions we have today as a basic means to explain it all. That’s essentially what the author is doing in this case.

Even if you buy into the statement that god is “that which is not limited by whatever limits the universe” it doesn’t help. It’s like saying “everything I don’t understand is god”. If I took that definition and applied it back in the 1800s you would’ve said the “power which causes birds to fly is god” or “that which causes lightning is god” etc. It’s a fruitless exercise and as time goes by, understanding increases, we’ll find less and less of a need for a bucket labeled “god”.

One final note which must always be called out in discussions such as this; the presence or lack thereof of a religious set of beliefs is in no way tied to the morality or ethical behaviour of the individual. Just because you require evidence and question the world around you doesn’t make you a bad person. I certainly don’t have all the answers but I’m willing to present my thoughts in an open manner in an effort to further the discussion.

Thank goodness we finally have someone with a brain who can discuss and understand the issues at a macro level.

Most conservative (christian pro-lifers) are shaking their heads at this news. Not me. Does that make me an evil liberal baby killer? Eh no. Let me tell you why this is a good thing and why you need to open your minds and understand the issues before blindly following the pro-life rhetoric.

Most pro-lifers favoured the Republican party the last 8 years and even in the recent election because Bush and McCain are both pro-life.

When Bush took over from the democratic Clinton, abortion rates were at a 24 year low and on the decline. With a pro-lifer in office you’d think this would continue. Sadly abortion rates rose an average of 14% over Bush’s first term. Why is that? Bush thought that to reduce abortion you just needed to close abortion clinics. Bush didn’t understand that to reduce abortions you need to fund sex education, provide adequate health care options to the poor and build a strong economy (most women cite the lack of a dependable spouse as the reason for their abortion and folks don’t get married in a weak economy).

In the end Bush’s stance of being pro-life anti-abortion earned him lots of conservative votes but meant nothing.

Back to the stem cell issue. Bush banned stem cell research because he thought it was wrong to experiment on viable embryos. A very noble sentiment, one which I happen to share. BUT did you ever stop to think where these embryos COME from?

Eh, no? Well, funny you should ask. They are a by-product of In Vitro Fertilization. Huh? Yeah. If a couple come in to make a “test tube” baby, the clinic typically makes MANY MANY embryos in a dish, then they pick the best one and implant it in the woman. What happens the rest? Oh oh, bad question!

They get frozen for a few months and then thrown out!!! You mean like an abortion? That’s for you to decide.

Stem cell researchers can take these otherwise discarded embryos and use them to cure cancer, blindness, heart failure, Parkinsons, diabetes and on and on. Bush’s ban removed that possibility.

The point I’m making is that stem cell research does nothing to increase or decrease the number of viable embryos that get discarded. If you want to tackle the problem you should ban in vitro fertilization. That’s the cause, not stem cell research.

Instead old Dubbya attacked science, took the popular position and here we are 8 years later, with just as many embryos washed down the drain and nothing to show for it. Thank goodness we have someone who understands the issues.

A resistor limits current. In the water analogy, current is the speed of the flow of water. But I never knew what a pull up/pull down resistor was. Until a few weeks ago when I started building a set of buttons for a project I’m working on…

Essentially a button is a switch, when the switch is closed the current flows, when it’s open the current doesn’t flow. Now if your switch is open, without anything driving the circuit, the value on the line is going to float all over the place, sometimes high, sometimes low. Any electrical noise will cause a change in the circuit. This causes a problem as when reading a value off the circuit you might think the switch is closed when in fact it’s just floating high.

The circuit on the left uses a pull up resistor. If Vcc is +5Volts, that goes through the 10k resistor and has nowhere to go but to pin 1. So when the switch is open, pin 1 is showing +5Volts (but very low current due to the 10k). Pin 1 will be steady, it won’t float up or down since it’s got some power to it.

When you close the switch, the current flows to ground. It’s always going to go to ground if it can so Pin 1 will show 0Volts.

The pic on the right is the pull down resistor. Same thing but the 10k resistor is between the pin and ground, causing it to “pull down” whilst the switch is open. Once it’s closed the majority of the current flows through the pin vs going to ground hence the pin reads +5V.

It’s making sense to me and now that I’ve actually built some stuff from scratch, I’ve actually experienced this voltage float and fixed it with a pull down. This blog will help me remember it in a year.

P.S. The Image is from “Resistance 2″ on the PS3. Pardon the pun.

Both men had fairly interesting lives but I think the overall achievement award has to go to Darwin. Arguably the single most important scientific contribution in the history of the planet: “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.

To truly appreciate this man’s work you have to imagine what things were like back in 1859. Back then the Catholic and Protestant church had pretty much killed the idea of evolution. Folks believed in Genesis, that God was micro managing things and carefully designing each and every living thing. Darwin’s wife was very religious and out of concern for her he held off for about 20 years on publishing this work.

Note: Darwin was not the first to have the idea that species evolved over time, rather he was the first to publicize it and document it in a scientific manner.

Many of the ideas put forth in “Origin” came from Darwin’s observations whilst a passenger on the Beagle”. How cool is it that 200 years ago folks were sailing around to places like the Galapagos islands, discovering animals and plants that had evolved in complete isolation. Amazing stuff.

It’s incredible to me in the 21st century that we still have folks walking around who think Evolution is a Theory. Yes it’s a theory, but so is everything in science. That’s how science works. There are no absolutes, only theories and evidence. When new evidence is discovered or observed, the theory is either validated or invalidated. We have the theory of Gravity, the theory of thermodynamics, the theory of Relativity and the theory of Evolution and on and on.

A couple of common misconceptions:

- Evolution does not maintain that we are descended from apes. Rather that apes and humans share a common ancestor.

- Evolution is not random. There is a random element to it but the driving force is Natural Selection.

- Evolution is sometimes elegant and efficient (e.g. great white shark) and sometime not (moray eel evolved a 2nd set of jaws as the first didn’t give enough suction due to how the body type evolved).

In 150 years of scrutiny the “theory” of evolution has held up. In many cases evolution has predicted the existence of species EVEN BEFORE THEY WERE DISCOVERED! Scientists have dug up fossils and found that “yeah, this fits as a transitional species between X and Y”.

Funnily enough I often hear folks refer to it as “The Origin of The Species”. As if there were only one.

So spare a thought for a brave genius; Darwin.

They saw how things were linked together, how a click on the screen lit a dot on the matrix and it was simple enough but yet they could quickly make shapes and letters. They got a big kick out of it and I’m really glad to be able to expose them to science and learning at such an early age.

If you’re interested in a closer look at the matrix driver circuit, checkout the gallery here: