If You Shoot For The Queen, You Better Kill Her

You can’t quite say the Liberal and National Parties have declared war on the wind power industry. When opening the Macarthur Wind Farm Victorian premier Dennis Napthine said lots of nice things about wind turbines, and the party mostly denies that it wants to kill wind.

However, between allowing residents to block wind farms within two kilometres of them, banning developments in certain (quite windy) places even with 100% local support and trying to force windfarms to monitor noise caused by others it is pretty clear where the party stands. Moreover, many backbenchers are not even trying to hide their hatred of clean energy, propounding every discredited theory going.

However, this creates a problem for the Liberals. Wind energy is popular nationally. They’re used to taking on environmental issues where the majority of the population are against them. What they are not used to doing is taking on ones where there is also a substantial industry with serious money to invest to support that widespread popularity.

At the moment the wind industry in Australia is still fairly small, and quite a bit of it is in the hands of businesses with far larger investments in fossil fuels. The resources are there to really take the Lib Nats on, but only if the industry really wants to. On the other hand, if it keeps growing it will very soon reach the point where it can toss out sums of money that, in combination with wide popular support and passionate activists, can rattle a government to its foundations.

So it is very, very important to the coalition that the wind industry does not keep growing. However, the latest news from northern Victoria shows how hard this will be for them. Approval has been granted for a windfarm that will have everyone within a 3km radius as investors. It’s only small – a mere 5 turbines – but it shows just how hard it is going to be for the coalition to keep the industry down. With models like this they will either need to tighten the already ridiculously stringent rules governing planning permission, or accept that an industry they tried to throttle will get larger, wealthier and employ more people (many of them in areas where local employment is essential). As the song says, “You better run for cover when the pup grows up”.

Of course the alternative is for the conservative parties to ease off their attacks on wind and pretend they never happened. The leaders of the industry, most of whom have a background in business and probably a natural Liberal leaning, are certainly not looking for a fight. The problem is that, having already fanned the fury of their more extreme supporters, the coalition leadership has created a constituency within their ranks, including amongst their own backbenchers, that see wind power as the devil, and will not be inclined to kiss and make up.

Hug A Climate Scientist redux

It’s Hug a Climate Scientist day today. The idea came from a First Dog On The Moon cartoon noting that climate scientists have to face every day in their research the fact that the environment we depend on is under threat, and also get lots of hate mail and death threats for doing their job. Consequently, they need a hug.

Much as I love First Dog, and am grateful for his efforts to bring recognition to our under respected researchers, I do think he erred in selecting early winter for such an important day. If it was held on a day in summer where record breaking heat waves were likely it might get more support.

Nevertheless, I would like to repost my tribute to one particular climate scientist from two years ago.

This also might be a good time to refer to the study by John Cook showing that 97% of peer reviewed papers indicating a position on whether humans are warming the planet or not supported the case that it is. This didn’t get a lot of media attention at the time, but people have referred to it quite often since. Moreover, it got shared a lot on social media, including by Obama’s twitter account, who has over 31 million followers.

There are two aspects of the study that I think deserve wider attention than I have seen however. There first is that Cook went to some effort to demonstrate that his findings are solid. He effectively conducted two independent tests, one of which produced a 97% result, the other of which came back with two different figures – 97 and 98% depending on the measure you consider most significant. In other words the consistency if very strong. Moreover, if you don’t believe him you can do the study in microcosm yourself. Mosey over Cook’s site and you can assess ten random climate science papers and see whether you disagree with Cook’s team’s assessment of where the paper lines up.

Note the majority of papers that refer to “global warming” or “global climate change” don’t express a position on human involvement, but that is because they are looking at topics where it is not really relevant. If you are measuring what global warming is doing to a particular species or ecosystem you may not want to waste what Cook calls “valuable real estate”, particularly in the abstract, discussing why that warming is happening.

The other thing I think is worth pointing out is that the study was done over a twenty year period (1991 to 2011) and as time goes on it gets worse for the denialists. The rate of publication of papers disputing or doubting human contribution to climate change has been quite steady through that period (although slightly higher at the very start) while the number of publications in the field have soared, particularly since 2006. So if the assessment had been done over the last 7 years the anti-consensus “Sceptic” papers would have struggled to break 1%.

Of course that still leaves the possibility that denialists are writing papers but being cruelly suppressed by the scientific community, but we can be clear that if you choose to hug a climate scientist today you can be pretty sure they need it.

Demographic Scare Campaigns

While watching the football this weekend I saw an add for Today Tonight. They’re going to be interviewing the supposed inspiration behind the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in the UK, and included a clip of him saying that Australia would eventually come under Sharia law.

This stuff really shouldn’t need to be refuted, but it does, so let’s go. It’s unclear whether this fanatic, whose name I cannot bother to dig up, is banking on a combination of high immigration of Muslims to Australia and rapid birthrates to create a situation where Muslims are a majority and will change the laws or if he just thinks “God wills it, so it will come true”. However, I think we can safely say that Today Tonight is relying for ratings on fears amongst non-Muslim Australians of the first scenario. We know from Dana Vale’s comments a few years back that even some members of parliament think this could happen if action is not taken.

Now one reason why this will not occur is because plenty of Muslims don’t want it to. Many of the people fleeing to Australia are trying to get away from forms of Sharia Law, and it is unlikely their children and grandchildren will want to rush back.

But there is another reason: Demographics will not allow it. Most of the immigrants to Australia come from New Zealand, the UK, India and China*. These four are far ahead of any other country. I haven’t been able to find an estimate of how many of the new arrivals consider themselves Muslims, but note that none of these have Muslim majorities. Perhaps the proportion of the immigrants who subscribe to Islam is higher than the population average, but I’ll bet anything it is still a small minority. The next two countries, btw, are the Phillipines and South Africa.

When these facts are pointed out the scaremongering turns to the notion that the immigrant population will have vastly higher birthrates than Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and non-religious residents thus allowing an eventual take over. This stuff used to be the stock in trade of Mark Steyn. It probably still is, but we hear less of it now that the New York Times took his microphone away.

Again, as far as I know it is hard to get stats on how many children people who adhere to particular religions are having. But we can look to predominantly Muslim countries to see what is likely to occur. Steyn and his ilk love to point to high population growth rates in certain countries as a sign of supposedly endlessly high Muslim fecundity. I pointed out in Crikey (can’t find in archives) at the time of Vale’s idiocy that they were being highly selective. Many Muslim-majority nations had low fertility. This included not only relatively westernised nations such as Albania, Turkey and Tunisia but even Iran. Saudi Arabia and some very small states aside, fertility depended much more on wealth, education and factors such as urbanisation than it did on religion.

I checked the figures again today and found that in the meantime something has changed, but not in a way that supports Steyn, Vale and Today Tonight. Even Saudi Arabia has seen a dramatic crash in the birth rate. The latest estimated average number of births the  lifetime of each woman in the kingdom is 2.21. This is barely above replacement level, or for that matter the level in the USA, which is 2.06. Admittedly the source for this is the CIA, so you have to allow for lefty bias. Note that the rate for Indonesia is 2.20 and the United Arab Emirates is 2.37.

Roughly 90% of the world lives in countries with fertility rates below 3, and there is a very strong inverse relationship between fertility and wealth. Most of the places with unsustainably high birthrates are in sub-Saharan Africa, and it doesn’t matter much what God the population prays to. Outside Africa the only Muslim majority places with fertility rates above 3 are Afghanistan, Iraz, Gaza and Yemen. Can’t think what the first three have in common.

The nameless nutter Today Tonight interviewed, Steyn and Vale are all dreaming the same dream – that religious fanatics will be able to convince Muslim women in the west to breed at a rate that all the resources of the Wahhabi-controlled oil state could not maintain.

Additional note: Steyn has always liked using France as his whipping boy, an exemplar of all that is wrong as Europe surrenders to “Eurabia”. In a talk he gave here a few years ago, which I heard when the ABC broadcast it in their quest for balance between truth and lies, he strongly implied that French fertility rates were close to 1, leading to the population halving every generation. They were never remotely that low, but I notice that on the latest figures they are at 2.08, just slightly above his beloved US.

 

*BTW: Why oh why is it so hard to find where the information you need, on almost anything, is stored on the Bureau of Statistics website. Their search engine has to be one of the most useless I have encountered.

Sectarianism’s Many Faces

A Society of Creative Anachronism Chivalry Tournament

On Tuesday and Friday nights one of my possible routes home takes me past a sports field where people dressed in medieval armour belt each other with swords. It’s not something that has ever really appealed to me, and I’ve never bothered to go and watch, but it always makes me smile to see so many people (because the numbers are often rather large) being out and active and doing something that gives them pleasure and harms neither other people nor the planet.

I have friends who are very much into similar activities, and I gather from them that the Melbourne medieval scene contains a number of such groups. By far the largest is the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) who fight with wooden weapons. However, there are a number of smaller organisations that prefer more authentic weapons such that they are collectively referred to as the “metal groups”, of which the only one whose name I can remember is the New Varangian Guard.

In hearing about the politics of the medievalist scene it has always struck me that there is a replication of a pattern one can see in many other places. The most obvious of these is amongst Christian churches (at least if one removes the complicating factor of the Eastern Orthodox Churches). Here the Catholic Church is the equivalent of the SCA, while Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists, Presbyterian and at least arguably Anglicans are like the metal groups – they all agree they have far more in common with each other than with the largest grouping, and sometimes discuss the merits of reunification, but generally maintain their own identities.

A similar pattern could be seen amongst Marxist organisations in Australia, at least until the Communist Party – who played the SCA/Catholic role compared to the numerous Trotskyite partylets – dissolved themselves. We saw replicas at the 1998 Constitutional Convention amongst those supporting both the Monarch and the Republic.

Of course most Christians don’t really make a choice as to whether they believe in transubstantiation and apostolic succession, they inherit their side without much questioning from their parents. Nevertheless, the common format is probably not all that surprising. When one group has a dominant position it is to be expected that those who prize free thought over orthodoxy to the extent that they break away will contain the sort of people who will be inclined to break from the new orthodoxy and establish multiple smaller groups. Meanwhile there will usually be enough people who prefer the enveloping warmth and tradition of the largest group to keep it as large, if not larger than all the break aways combined.

I intend no value judgements in saying this as to the merits of the different groups in the above paragraph.

The reason this interests me is that I suspect we are increasingly seeing something similar on the right of Australian politics. Here the Liberal Party (along with the Nationals) are analogous to the Catholic Church, the SCA and the Communist Party. And yes I did enjoy writing that sentence for the horror it must have caused the ghost of Robert Menzies, amongst others.

Standing in for the metal groups, protestants and Trotskyites we have the Christian Democrats, Family First, One Nation, Katter’s Australia Party, Clive Palmer, the Shooters, The Shooters and Fishers etc etc. (I’d exempt the DLP from this, as their origins are so different, but pretty much every other party of the right belongs in the mix).

No doubt some of the activists in these parties see a valuable role for a small ginger group and have no ambitions beyond a couple of spots in the Senate. However, I think most have larger goals, and anticipate that they will one day sweep both the voters and members of most of these other parties to create something that can rival, if not replace, the Coalition. Certainly Clive Palmer believes this, with his ambition to be Prime Minister, and one imagines John Bjelkepeterson’s decision to join him reflects a hope that something along these lines may happen.

I think that hope is forlorn. I would hardly be Robinson Crusoe in that, but most people reaching that conclusion would probably think it because they see the Liberal/Nationals as far too strong to be brought down by these puny forces. As I have argued before (and intend to defend in more depth soon), I think the Coalition are much weaker and more vulnerable in the medium term than most people do. I think what will prevent any of these parties becoming a substantial and long-lasting force is the centrifugal nature of their membership. If you draw your members from people who have changed party allegiance once there is a pretty high chance many of them will change again. Given how many of the people in these groups were at one time aligned with One Nation, after having had some loyalty to the coalition and possibly before shifting again that chance is further increased.

The career of Aidan McLindon is perhaps the supreme illustration of this. Elected as an LNP state MP he resigned from the party to become and Independent before founding the Queensland Party. He then joined Katter’s mob, running for them as an incumbant and becoming the party’s national director. A month ago he resigned from KAP and a couple of days ago announced he would be organising the campaign of Family First in Victoria. The idea that any glue on Earth can be found to bind people like this together into a single political force borders on the absurd.

In a preferential system the existence of multiple small parties is not necessarily fatal. Indeed under some circumstances it can be a strength. However, while it may assist in electing a senator, it is hard to see how a coalition of numerous such micro parties could ever convince the Australian public to put it anywhere near government.

As long as the Liberals remain a largely united and cohesive force that doesn’t matter. But if their own problems end up seeing them more like the Communist Party of Australia than the Catholic Church or the SCA this will create some very interesting questions about what will fill the vacuum.

Can Evolutionary Psychology Actually Be Science?

Last night at Cherchez La Femme Karen Pickering made reference to the recent abomination where a UNM Professor Geoffrey Miller tweeted “Dear obese PhD applicants: If you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.”

Karen noted that Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, at which point I literally snorted with contempt. But then I thought about it at bit more. There is no doubt that evolutionary psychology, as it exists at the moment, is not a science. It’s doubtful whether it is even what Kuhn would call a pre-science. It’s basically just a propaganda arm for misogyny. If you don’t believe me, take a look at Psychology Today’s Satoshi Kanazawa, who may well be the most read evolutionary psychologist in the world today. I could link to pretty much any article Kanazawa writes, but I think this one really expresses the level of his stupidity in a have to see it to believe it way.

Kanazawa may be a particularly egregious example, but it certainly is the case that pretty much all we hear from evolutionary psychologists is pseudo-science. There may be good ones out there, but if so they’re keeping a much lower profile.

Besides the obvious problem with this, there is another problem, which is that in response many people have written off the whole idea of an evolutionary basis for our behaviour, particularly in relation to sex. Consider this documentary (some bits NSFW) by Norwegian comedian Harald Eia. He explores the question of whether differences in enthusiasm for sex between men and women are genetic or cultural. He interviews researchers from both side of the debate, but the problem is that those from the cultural side don’t come out of it looking too credible. It’s hard to know if Eia has cut too much out of their interviews, but they basically seem to be denying that millions of years of evolution could matter at all compared to a our relatively recent cultural traditions. Frankly that’s hard to believe, even as someone who really wants to be on their side.

Antechinuses are proof of how strange sex, even amongst mammals, can be.

My argument would be that evolution almost certainly has a huge role to play in determining our sexuality. What we don’t know is where it points us. Evolutionary psychologists love to paint a simple picture where it is in men’s evolutionary interests to have sex with as many women as possible in order to spread their genes around in the hope that more children will result. Women, who cannot have nearly as many children and need to invest more heavily in each one are better off only having sex with the most “high quality” men and should be far more choosy.

This line of thinking is exceptionally popular amongst those who want to shame women for any enthusiasm for sex. A promiscuous man is just following his natural instincts they argue. A promiscuous woman is either a freak of nature, or (from a different brand of slutshamers) a puppet of the patriarchy out of touch with her own intrinsic sexuality because she has been programmed to want what men want.

This line of argument tends to get supported by pointing to animals that really do behave like this. Ducks are a particularly popular example, but there are plenty of others. The problem is that according to this version of how sexual selection this should be the way all animals behave, or at least all animals in which the female cannot have a very large number of offspring with different males.

Trouble is, it’s not. The diversity of animal sexuality is astonishing. I’ll be giving a talk on some of the more remarkable forms of animal mating behaviour on Tuesday June 11 at Loop Bar, just off Bourke St from 7pm. I don’t want to use up all my best material here, but lets just say that if humans do it there is a pretty high chance there is an animal analogue. Just the existence of homosexual behaviour in hundreds of species should be a tip off that the simple vision propounded by evolutionary psychologists leaves a lot out.

So my question is: Is it possible for us to have a useful science of evolutionary psychology? One that is not, as Naomi McCauliffe puts, it run by “Just So Story tellers“. I’d like to think so. The fact that other areas of science are digging up so much interesting information about sex amongst animals ought to help. There is some really interesting research on female rat sexual behaviour in this article as an intro do the discussion of modern mores.More complex modelling work would help. I can’t find it now, but I saw a reference a while back to modelling that showed that even if passing on genes was the only thing that mattered it makes sense for both females and males to adopt a diversity of strategies with some favouring monogamy and some favouring promiscuity.

However, to really get somewhere we are going to have to integrate across a lot of different disciplines. It will be necessary to acknowledge that sex isn’t just about passing on genes (once again, the homosexuality clue).

A fish getting cleaned – and massaged.

In interviewing the marvellous Lexa Grutter for a recent Cool Scientist column she mentioned that fish have been shown to benefit from “tactile touching” from cleaner fish. If the survival of fish is enhanced from getting massages from a different species I think it should be pretty clear that there may be more to sexual interaction than just producing maximum numbers/quality of offspring*.

I suspect that the name evolutionary psychology is now so tarnished that as genuinely thoughtful work in this area is done it will be stuck with almost any other label.

* In one of the beautiful ironies of science, Grutter’s PhD was crucial in refuting an earlier version of this idea, which then went out of favour for a couple of decades. One of Grutter’s own students then proceeded to find evidence for a more nuanced version of the same phenomenon.

Welcome The New (Old) Koala

Did you know that even though there is only one living species of koala, there are 18 extinct ones? Me neither. Actually pretty much no one did, because the 18th only just got announced in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.

One more koala species, known only from one specimen and extinct for maybe 15 million years is not that exciting, but there are three things that make this particular fossil special.

1) We have a much more intact fossil of its facial area, and so we know it looked a lot more like a modern koala than quite a few others.

2) It appears to have been a nocturnal species with large eyes suggesting a more active lifestyle (although it would be hard to be less active than modern koalas).

3) It has been named Litokoala dicksmithi after the businessman, aviator, environmentalist and philanthropist. Apparently the study of extraordinary fossils deposits at Ravensleigh have benefited greatly from Smith’s patronage. It struck me that this really ought to be a way of extracting money out of Australia’s appallingly uncharitable mega-rich. I can’t remember the stats, but it does seem Australia’s billionaires and close to billionaires are amongst the least charitable in the developed world at least. Perhaps that is a blessing, since many of them if they were going to give would be spending the money on driving people further into poverty. Still, it has to have some appeal to have a species named after you, particularly if you are Clive Palmer and obsessed with dinosaurs. While I don’t think many of these people deserve to be recorded for posterity (Smith being very much an exception) if this is the only way to get some decent funding for Australian taxonomy and palaeontology then maybe it’s the way to go.

Michelle Shocked and Eddie McGuire – That’s A Pairing You Didn’t Expect

A few months ago certain portions of the web was filled with headlines about singer Michelle Shocked going on a rant against same sex marriage including the chilling line “God hates fags”. While this would be pretty awful from anyone, it was big news for two reasons. Firstly Shocked is very much a lefty, veering between anarcho-socialist politics and being on the far left of the US Democrats at different points of her life. Secondly, a huge portion of her fan base are queer-identified. On top of those things, this occurred in San Francisco, which at least lets her off the accusation of playing to her audience. Not surprisingly half the crowd walked out, and various venues cancelled follow up gigs.

Now I need to state right here that I have been a HUGE Michelle Shocked fan. Arkansas Traveller is a strong contender for my favourite album of all time. One of the many thoughts that passed through my brain when I saw The Age cover the story was “Jeez, now you cover her, you wouldn’t bloody give her a run when it was just about the music.” Buried in my cupboard is a t-shirt too precious to throw out, even though it is too holey to wear. It has a picture of Michelle and speech bubble saying, “Music and politics are too important to be left to the professionals.” So yeah, I’m biased, I want to cut one of my heroes some slack.

But I have not played any of my Shocked CDs since.

A couple of weeks later an email lobbed in my inbox (I’m on her mailing list). It was pretty rambling and confused, but most of it was made up of the text of an interview she did with Piers Morgan. This started off even more confused, sometimes seeming as if two people with contrasting views were fighting over control of Shocked’s larynx, with sentences that contradicted themselves or appeared to me to lead nowhere. I might despise Morgan, but he did a good job under the circumstances of leading her back to answering the questions and at the end he got this out of her:

MORGAN: And do you have any problem with gay marriage?
SHOCKED: No, I don’t.
MORGAN: Do you support it?
SHOCKED: I do.
MORGAN: So you support full gay rights?
SHOCKED: Absolutely.

Apparently some people in the audience that night thought Shocked was not expressing her own views, but trying to explain how opponents of same-sex marriage saw the issue (despite her leftist politics she attends an evangelical church where a lot of the people are very conservative so she knows these views). Reading the first part of the interview with Morgan one could well imagine how it would be very difficult to follow what she was trying to say.

Australian readers might now start to see the improbable link to Eddie McGuire. (For non-Australians, McGuire is the president of the most famous football club in Australia. He took over at a time where the club’s supporters had a reputation for racism, and took considerable strides to turn this around, while pissing a lot of people off for various other things. A couple of weeks ago a 13 year old supporter of his club racially abused one of the game’s greatest players, who is Aboriginal. McGuire was generally judged to have acted very responsibly in denouncing that behaviour, but then undid it all by making a racist joke about the incident on radio).

Now unlike a frightening number of talkback radio callers, most people who comment on articles or people who have absolutely no excuse at all I understand that being straight I don’t get to decide how offensive Shocked’s comments were. Just as, being white, I don’t make the call on the seriousness of the abuse Adam Goodes coped, or McGuire’s follow-up. The people affected weren’t in much doubt, and it is beholden on everyone of good faith to support them, rather than wonder around saying “I just don’t see why it’s an issue”.

But judging the statement is not the same as judging the person who made it.

When A Beautiful Mind came out some people denounced it for “whitewashing Nash’s anti-semitism”. It’s true that John Nash said some appalling things about Jews. At the time he also thought he was the emperor of Antarctica. He apologised profoundly once he found himself back in touch with reality. Do you judge a sane person by what they do when they are in the grip of psychosis? Surely not. I don’t think Nash deserves to be considered an anti-semite on the basis of his hallucinations. One can debate how problematic  A Beautiful Mind‘s departures from literal truth are, but the idea they were covering up for an appalling bigot by not alerting the public to what he said is pathetic.

Shocked is not schizophrenic, but if you look up the symptoms of bi-polar disorder you pretty much find a picture of her staring back at you. Psychosis is not a universal symptom of bi-polar disorder, but nor is it a rare one. I’m not qualified to diagnose, but reading that Morgan interview felt like watching someone dancing the border between sanity and madness. I’m inclined to blame what she said at the disastrous gig on the psychotic state.

What about Eddie Everywhere? He may have delusions of grandeur, but I’ve seen nothing to suggest he could be classified as mentally ill. Nevertheless, I’m not convinced a couple of sentences represent him. That’s not in anyway to minimise the seriousness of linking of Goodes to one of the world’s most famous symbols of sub-humanity. I think Harry O’Brien‘s statement was utterly true as well as very brave. But a couple of seconds, repented immediately, don’t define a person. There’s plenty of things to be critical of McGuire over, such as his complete lack of grasp of the concept of conflict of interest. But I’m not sure that someone who has spent almost two decades tackling racism deserves to be branded as one because somewhere in his brain some wires crossed.  It’s possible to say someone did a terrible thing, but is not a terrible person.

Over the weekend, I’ll be turning fruit from my tree into jam. It’s not strawberry, but it has been my tradition when producing preserves to play Michelle Shocked’s song encouraging people to “close down these corporate jam factories”. The speakers have died on my computer, and my earphones don’t stretch to the kitchen, but I might just be singing it under my breath.

Update: Martin Flanagan pretty much agrees with me (as well as having some other really important things to say), while Miranda Devine thinks Eddie McGuire is a racist. I think the case is not closed.