In fact its so counter-intuitive that I find it hard to believe. The bloke in charge of the study says:

The widespread assumption that human evolution has slowed down because it’s easier to live and we’ve conquered nature is absolutely not true. We didn’t conquer nature, we changed it in ways that created new selection pressures on us

Something about that doesn’t sound right. I understood the assumption that human evolution had slowed down to be based on the idea that possessing genetic disadvantages no longer made it less likely to pass those traits on. Maybe that’s what he means but he decided that “it’s easier to live” summed it up in a dumbed-down way.

Of course I am basing everything on a Euro-centric perspective, where most people have children and pass their genes on but those with all the genetic advantages – or at least who are most successful – seem to have fewer children.

But that’s just my first impression, and only part of the story. Perhaps the bit about more mutations is what makes a difference. And that sounds feasible. Actually it sounds a bit like ‘Heroes’… (I’ll have Peter Petrelli’s powers please, with flying as a second choice)

Anyway, I do wonder how the creationists will take it all.

A new series of Planet Earth started this week and as you would expect it is compelling viewing and a remarkable acheivement: a nearly perfect collision of the wonder and majesty of nature and the technology and perseverance of the programme makers.

But there was one tiny thing which irked me.

In a segment about penguins Attenborough was talking about how the male penguins incubate the eggs and said how the male carefully positions himself over the egg and hides it in a special pouch to protect it from the elements.  That wording ('special pouch') just grated as it seemed to imply some sort of direction or purpose to evolution. In a word (or two) it seemed to imply some sort of intelligent design.

Now as we all know, or should do, evolution is a random, hit-and-miss process with far more misses than hits and the use of such phrases is like the thin end of the wedge of creationism.  I am totally sure that Attenborough does not agree with creationism in any form, but such forms of words creep into the subconscious and inadvertantly give some credibility to the creationist theories.  Sometimes you will hear a presenter or scientist talking about some amazing creature or plant and say that such-and-such a feature evolved 'in order to' perform some function and that is the same sort of slip.

OK, it is easier and quicker to say than "a random mutation turned out to give some small survival advantage and got passed on to future generations and eventually it evolved into this feature which turned out to be ideal for this purpose" and its a habit a lot of people have slipped into. I think it is similar to the anthropomorphism which often creeps into nature programmes.

Maybe I am a bit sensitive on the topic but I think the pouch should have been called 'convenient' or 'fortuitous' instead of 'special'.  However its a small criticism – the other 99.9% of the programme was brilliant.

When we got up properly it was still more than a little damp and after breakfast we headed off to Kimmeridge Bay, only about 6 miles away.

Being more optimistic than us the kids put their swimmers in the car just in case, but when we reached Kimmeridge it was still overcast.

Kimmeridge Bay is an amazing place, which I still remember vividly from a school geography field trip. The cliffs are made of shale in fine layers which crumble at the touch. Fingers of rock extend into the bay which enabled Charlie and Chrystal to walk out about 100 metres into the sea.

While they were doing that I wandered along the bottom of the cliffs, keeping an eye out for fossils which are supposed to be plentiful there. As I walked it started to drizzle and I was able to get some shelter from the cliffs. Then the rain started coming from seawards and there was no shelter at all. I then noticed that tiny pieces of shale were tumbling from the cliffs and thought that maybe loitering near the overhang was not such a good idea.

As the rain persisted, all the more sensible people headed for their cars, leaving me totally alone in the bay, battered by the wind and rain, watching erosion taking place before my very eyes.

It was remarkable to see that. Erosion is always explained as such a long, slow process, with the seas taking hundreds of years to wear down that its a surprise to see it in real time. With such erosion being caused by a light drizzle and medium wind I do wonder how many centimetres of cliff are lost in a year.

Access to Kimmeridge Bay is via a private road with a toll – £3 for a car. On the back of the ticket are some warnings/instructions. One of them is that it is OK to remove large fossils from the beach, but hammers are not to be used. Seeing the cliffs literally crumbling on their own I could see why such a rule makes sense.

I did not find any large fossils to take away, but I did find a few small ones – actually fragments of fossil but still recognisable as fossil ammonites (I think). The Natural History Museum is not going to be asking for my little bits of rock any time soon, but I am still awestruck by them. Just the thought that this animal was swimming around anywhere up to 200 million years ago and then lay in the rocks all that time until I found it.

According to Stephen Jay Gould the area around Kimmeridge is one of the best places in the world to see evidence to support the theory of punctuated evolution, if I remember rightly. I can’t say that my brief amateur attempt at fossil hunting did anything of the sort, but I am still ridiculously pleased with my meagre little fragments.

I had only been watching for a few minutes when Richard Dawkins popped up doing his irate atheist bit, and it occurred to me that he could be doing his cause more harm than good now as a result of his ubiquity.

Its the Shami Chakrabarti effect.

If whenever a particular topic is featured on TV it is alway the same person appearing to support (or more often refute) it, isn’t there a danger that the more casual viewer will assume they are the only person with that opinion? This ends with the response not being the desired “Wow. What a good point. I’m persuaded.” but “Oh its just them. They would say that wouldn’t they? They always do.”

Horizon redeemed itself by featuring David Attenborough as well towards the end.

Not that I’m knocking Dawkins’ position on the ID debate: just the way he presents it.

Still on the subject of Dawkins, I was in Crockatt & Powell yesterday, looking for a new non-fiction book to keep me going and I noticed that they had six Dawkins books but only three Stephen Jay Gould books. That was depressing, but what was surprising was that the six Dawkins books did not include The Blind Watchmaker – surely his best-known book.

Maybe someone had already bought it?

I have to say that I found some of the fundamentalists a bit scary. The American evangelist (Haggart?) seemed especially unnerving, the way he invaded Dawkins’ personal space, stared him in the eye without blinking and kept a rigid grin on his face all the time. Regardless of what he actually said, his whole behaviour was very threatening. I would be surprised if Dawkins did not feel very uneasy. The chap in Jerusalem was no better, possibly even worse as he was very matter-of-fact about the way he was saying that non-muslims should retreat to their own countries and wait to be conquered.

So far, so bad, but as others have pointed out, extremism in any dogma whether it is religious, political or anything else is, well, extreme. Dawkins tried to get to the fundamental problem in Jerusalem by asking about how to relate to other people who had equally strong and firmly held, but opposite, views but the question was not really answered.

I agree with Dawkins up to a point, but really his strident atheism is now getting to the point where he is as strident in his anti-religion as the zealots are in their faiths. Admittedly he does seem to be making an attempt to understand what the relious people are thinking, but a lot of that is for show. His attitude is every bit as confrontational as the fundamentalists he is talking about.

In the same way that the extreme muslim clerics cannot accept that non-muslims should exist, Dawkins does not accept that any religion should exist. He sees even the moderately faithful as only the thin end of the wedge.

Dawkins’ late competitor in the evolutionary biology field, Stephen Jay Gould, had different ideas. He had very different ideas about evolution which is what made him a sort of academic arch-enemy of Dawkins in the first place – and as a layman I still find Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium more persuasive than the alternative – but he also had different ideas about religion.

Unusually for a Darwinian biologist, and an atheist, Gould felt that religion and science could happily co-exist. He wrote about this in an essay which I would quote from but I can’t find it, and expanded on it in a later book called Rocks of Ages – which is one of his books I don’t actually have.

Anyway, Gould’s essay and book were based on the idea that religion and science are ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ or NOMA, with science responsible for how things work and religion responsible for moral considerations. Its an attractive proposal, if a bit idealistic.

The concept falls down when faced with fundamentalists of the type we saw on TV last night who are not prepared to concede any ground at all, but I kind of like the idea that an atheist like Gould is capable of trying to embrace the religious rather than tarring them all with the same brush, even if the whole thing is doomed to failure.

I was a little concerned that Dawkins concentrated on Christianity and Islam. I missed a bit of the programme, but I didn’t hear anything about Hinduism or Buddhism. Is that because those religions do not have such easy targets? What I have read of Hinduism makes it all look quite benign, but Dawkins was arguing that any faith at all is contrary to good reason and science.

Don’t get me wrong, I am an atheist myself and a fervent Darwinist, but I can’t see what benefit there is from trying to impose my opinions on others. Maybe this live-and-let-live attitude is not practical on more than a personal level, but it suits me to agree to disagree. I quite happily go to the various Interfaith events in Crawley without having any faith of my own, and rub along OK with the people there and I am happier with this approach than with Dawkins’ call to arms. Its just intolerance which I can’t tolerate.

Nice line about ‘all people of faith have rejected nearly every god that mankind has ever invented: some of us just go one god further’ though. I liked that.

It was obviously a heart-felt piece, but while I totally agree with the thrust of the argument I have to say that I found a follow-up article this week, by John Allen Paulos a lot more effective.

Maybe its because Paulos is not a biologist (he is a mathematician and author of some popular maths books like ‘Innumeracy’) that he can appear more detached from the subject, or maybe its because its a much shorter article and easier to grasp the whole thing in one go. Whatever the reason, the choice to draw an analogy between biological structures and processes, like the clotting of blood, and modern economic infrastructure is inspired, and well worth reading.

I know its a bit of a nerdish thing to admit, but I’ve been a fan of Gould’s for a long time, and half a dozen of his collections of essays have pride of place on my bookshelves. In later years he was probably more well-known for his ongoing spat with Richard Dawkins over punctuated equilibrium versus gradual evolution. (For what its worth I’m on the side of punctuated equilibrium but don’t shoot me down in flames for it – I know there are a lot of Dawkins fans in the left-wing blogging fraternity)

That particular essay had a big effect on me when I first read it in one of his books. Since then I have lent the book to friends who have been diagnosed with cancer and they found it very reassuring.

It is a brilliant demonstration of how our mathematical ignorance can lead us to assume that being diagnosed with a condition with a median mortality of 8 months after discovery means we will probably be dead in 8 months. Instead Gould interpreted that statistic as an indication that he had many years left in him and would probably die of something else before the mesothelioma with which he had been diagnosed.

And he was right. He died 20 years later of something different.

It is not impossible that the knowledge that he was probably not at risk, due to his informed interpretation of the statistics, increased his chances of survival – the relationship between mind and body is still a huge grey area.

So now, thanks to Tom, if I ever find myself pointing anyone else in the direction of this fascinating and touching essay (and I really hope I don’t have to) I can just give them the URL instead of spending half a night trying to remember which book it was in.