Wilf Wilson

I’ve been working on this Maths Challenge all day. It wasn’t actually very hard this year, however it took a long time to think how to explain everything, particularly question 4. I got it all sorted in the end, though.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Ray Comfort, as well all know, if a first class idiot. He updates his blog daily with some of the most assinine arguments for God and against evolution which I have ever come across. It’s what these apologists do – no matter how thoroughly discredited that an argument is, they will continue to use it. Even though each of Ray’s posts gets over a hundred comments, a significant portion of which gently explain to Ray the error of his ways and his ignorance, he never learns.

Today’s topic isn’t new, he’s tried to bring this up before. Evidently, Ray does not understand evolution. If that’s the case, it’s either through wilful ignorance, or through stupidity. You don’t have to believe in evolution to understand it, and as a televangelist, I don’t think that Ray has any excuse for his embarrassingly awful grasp of the subject. He embarrasses me as a human being. I feel dirty.

According to Ray: A dog would evolve from a wolf. However, this lineage would die out unless a female just happened to evolve at the same time, and the two mated.

But perhaps his misunderstanding goes further, sometimes I get the impression that he thinks that the male and female of the species evolve in totally different paths, that for each new species, the evolution of sex must occur, and that the female and the male of the species evolve separately (what from, I don’t know) until they just happen to be able to be able to reproduce.

I won’t even bother explaining this second one – evolution makes no argument of such a thing; it’s completely wrong.

The first of Ray’s ideas is just as wrong.

This is how evolution happened, and happens (I have a very basic understanding):

• Life began.
• Life became more complex, single cells evolved. At this point, life reproduced through straight copying.
• At some point, as life got more complex, organisms found a way of sharing genetic code – sexual reproduction. For actual information, go to Wikipedia.
• Skip forward to, say, the first mammal. It had the ability to reproduce. Let’s say it was like a rat.
• Every time a new ‘rat’ is born, it will have slightly different DNA from its parents, and from its siblings. However, it is similar enough to reproduce with these other mammals.
• Imagine that a male was born, which had a shorter tail. It could have sex with a female which still had a longer tail. If the long tail gene is dominant, the descendents of this pair might all have long tales.
• For some reason, all of the long tailed rats get separated from the rest of the rats. This means that these rats will only be able to reproduce with each other.
• More mutations will occur, and these will spread through this population through reproduction, as each mutated rat can still mate with the population if any change is small.
• Eventually these changes accumulate, and they spread through this population.
• Imagine if the mutated long-tailed rats find the original rats again. By this point these long-tailed rats have changed so much that they can’t reproduce with the original ones – they have become a new species. They might be called mice or something.

[This is one way that it can happen… I think]

As you can clearly see, there is absolutely no requirement for a female to evolve the same mutation at exactly the same time as the male. Only one needs to change, and then that one can reproduce with anyone else. The descendents of this pair – most likely male and female ones – could carry this new mutation.

Ray’s idea is just baffling, and completely wrong.

At this point in my blog post, I feel that there’s a open argument (like a HTML tag that I’ve not closed yet), but I can’t think of it, and I’m not going to bother reading this article through, so – if this doesn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion, go and read Ray’s blog.

Makes me think of Napoleon Dynamite every time I hear this song. One of the most 80s songs that there is.

Yesterday was my Advanced Higher Maths prelim, my first official prelim, and probably my favourite subject.

I like Maths exams. There are a lot of exams I don’t like – French, Geography, and English (especially English, I hated it so much) – but I think that Maths exams are great. Now, they’re only going to ask you about things which are based on the course, and thankfully there is a well defined course, but they can – and do – take things further than the basics.

All the questions are totally gettable, that is we have the knowledge of techniques/rules to find the answer, however they question may combine completely different elements of the course, or it could present information and ask questions in novel ways and situations. For me, that’s what maths is about. Firstly, you learn the basic rules, but then you see where that takes you, and what you can work out from what you already know.

A good one yesterday was something like:

Here, in class you learn how to do the first two questions, the rest follow on and you have to work it out. Sure, this is a simple example, but it does go a lot further.

This why I love things like the Scottish Maths Challenge and the UK Maths Challenge – they challenge you to think about things in different ways. They’re nothing like what you do in class at school. In fact, I’m working on one right now. And I did very well in this one back in 2007. See if you enjoy them.

He is my antihero. If you have ever come across him before, you will know that the last line of this blog post is perhaps one of the most hypocritical sentences of all time:

“So let’s be careful when we mock things of which we have no understanding.”

I read his blog so that you don’t have to; I’ll keep you updated when he manages to top this example of ridiculousness.