Islamic tiles and modern mathematics

16:05:00 0 comments
Islamic art has always had a relation with complex mathematical patterns. Now two researchers have found that some of these patterns from medieval times reflect mathematical relations discovered by mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970's. One the interesting features of the pattern is that it appears regular, but never repeats itself.
Islamic tiling patterns were put together not with a compass and ruler, as previously assumed, but by tessellating a small number of different tiles with complex shapes, say Peter J. Lu of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University in New Jersey.

The researchers think that this technique was developed around the start of the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, it was sophisticated enough to make complex patterns now described as quasi-periodic.

These patterns were 'discovered' in 1973 by the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. In 1984, they were found in metal alloys called quasi-crystals that seemed to break the geometric rules of atomic packing
Read the full story here
And here is the abstract of the paper published in Science (Feb 23, 2007; vol 315, no. 5815, p 1106):

Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture
Peter J. Lu & Paul J. Steinhradt

The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons ("girih tiles") decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns,five centuries before their discovery in the West.

The tile work on Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, Iran (1453 C.E.) has patterns that reflect quasi-crystalline structure worked out by mathematician Roger Penrose in 1973

It appears that the artisans didn't know the mathematical theory behind their creation, but they indeed had an intuitive sense regarding the design. It reminds me of the mathematical analysis of Jackson Pollock's work, which shows that he was working with fractal patterns before the actual development of the fractal theory. Both the tile works and Pollack's paintings are amazing even without any mathematical theories...but this just adds some extra oomph!
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"Infidel Vaccine": Polio vaccination controversy in Pakistan

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Some clerics in conservative northern Pakistan have declared polio vaccine to be "infidel vaccine" aimed at sterilizing Muslims (see "Polio Cases Jump in Pakistan"):
The parents of 24,000 children in northern Pakistan refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations last month, mostly due to rumours that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilise innocent Muslim children.

The disinformation - spread by extremist clerics using mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations, and by word of mouth - has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan and hit global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. The disease is concentrated in North-West Frontier Province, where 60% of the refusals were attributed to "religious reasons".
This follows a similar controversy in Nigeria in 2004 and in India last year. Just this past January, a leading Muslim doctor was urging British Muslims not vaccinate their children as most vaccines contain some "haram" substances. The good thing is that these fanatics are still in very small numbers, and mainstream religious leaders have no problem with vaccinations. Indeed, some counter-fatwas by top clerics in Pakistan has improved the situation somewhat (lets hope there are no serious counter-counter-fatwas):
The North-West Frontier Province government made strenuous efforts to counter talk of an "infidel vaccine". Health workers fanning across the province last month were equipped with copies of a fatwa, or religious order, endorsing the vaccinations and signed by Maulana Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leaders of Pakistan's most powerful religious parties.

The move reassured many doubters. More than 5.7 million children were vaccinated in January, with another 3 million targeted in a second round due to start next Tuesday.

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Success of AskANinja.com

02:26:00 0 comments
This article talks about AskANinja.com:Ninja's game is elusionThe article says: "The simple videos last several minutes each and appear to cost almost nothing to make. The series, one of the most popular on the Web, launched in earnest at the beginning of 2006 and coincided with the rise of YouTube and video blogging. As the site's creators, Sarine and his buddy, Kent Nichols, recently signed a
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Carl Sagan - Still the most effective spokesperson regarding science & religion

15:43:00 0 comments

Science Times had a nice article (A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life) yesterday on Carl Sagan and his book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God.
Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication last month of “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.
While there have been many books on the topic of science & religion recently, the one thing that stands out about Sagan is his tone that nicely balances a respect for believers with his skeptical approach to religion.

Near the end of his book, Dr. Sagan parses the difference between belief and science this way: “I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”

The search for who we are does not lead to complacency or arrogance, he explains. “It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.”

Another review of his book was published in Washington Post a few books back. Here his views on God are addressed more directly:

Sagan does not deny the existence of God. Nor does he affirm it. As he quips in the lively Q&A section appended to the lectures, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." What Sagan does do is insist on the primacy of scientific method and scientific evidence, and he holds the many and various "proofs" of God's existence up to these scientific standards. Most are found wanting. But Sagan is not harsh in his critiques of religious thought; he is more perplexed by theology's narrow and unimaginative vision.

Why would an all-powerful God work only on a local (and recent) project like the Earth when there is a vast, 15-billion-year-old universe out there, with countless galaxies containing countless stars and the possibility of countless worlds? Why didn't God let us know about quantum mechanics and natural selection and cosmology from the get-go? And why would theologians insist on such a provincial version of the creation and God's imagination?

Sagan is not being flip or heretical, though he is intellectually playful and obviously likes the fray. Sagan took his own spirituality seriously -- indeed, he defined science as "informed worship." The closest he comes to articulating his own view of God is to describe admiringly the philosophies of Spinoza and Einstein, who basically considered God the sum total of all the laws of physics. These laws, he emphasizes again and again, govern not just the Earth and humanity but every solar system and every star and every galaxy. They are not local ordinances.
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Turkana Boy vs Evangelicals (in Kenya)

17:22:00 0 comments

Despite dying 1.6 million years ago, a 12 year old ancestor of modern humans is causing problems for evangelicals in Kenya. Known as Turkana boy, this is the most complete skeleton of a prehuman ancestor ever found. And now Kenya's national museum is putting it on display along with 160,000 other fossils. But as CNN has reported, Kenya's evangelical movement is upset about it:
"I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it," says Bishop Boniface Adoyo, head of Kenya's 35 evangelical denominations, which he claims have 10 million followers. "These sorts of silly views are killing our faith."

He's calling on his flock to boycott the exhibition and has demanded the museum relegate the fossil collection to a back room -- along with some kind of notice saying evolution is not a fact but merely one of a number of theories.
And here is Richard Leakey's straight forward response to the Bishop:
"Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his," Leakey, who founded the museum's prehistory department, told The Associated Press. "The bishop is descended from the apes and these fossils tell how he evolved."
Its like a family feud. Well like it or not, you belong to this family - and you can't choose to opt out of it.

The positive thing here is that Bishop Adoyo's evangelical coalition, which also believes in a 12,000 year old Earth, is the only religious group concerned about the exhibit. Hope it stays that way.
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Learning about religion from chimpanzees and gorillas

02:40:00 0 comments
Several new books have come out on the topic of origin of religious beliefs in the past few months. The latest is by an anthropologist, Barbara King, and its called Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. Her theory is based on the studies of social behaviour of apes and monkeys.

Here is a long Salon.com interview with Barbara King.

The Salon article does a good job of summarizing some major ideas on origin of religious beliefs in one paragraph:
Take Daniel Dannett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme -- an idea that evolved like a virus -- that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs. In this view, the brain developed a hair-trigger detection system to believe the world is full of "agents" that affect our lives. And British biologist Lewis Wolpert, with yet another theory, posits that religion developed once hominids understood cause and effect, which allowed them to make complex tools. Once they started to make causal connections, they felt compelled to explain life's mysteries. Their brains, in essence, turned into "belief engines."
King's basic idea regarding religion is also summarized in the article (there is obviously more detail in the interview and in her book):
For the last two decades, King has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. In her new book, "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion," King argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What's more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier -- back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs.
But more relevant here is her response regarding science & religion compatibility:
I'm part of the camp of people who thinks it's perfectly possible to see religion and science as compatible areas of thought and inquiry. In my book, I lay out three choices. You can say you've got to choose one. You can believe in science or you can have faith in God -- the Richard Dawkins school of thought. Or you can say there are "non-overlapping magisteria" -- the famous Stephen Jay Gould answer that religion will help us with meaning, and science will tell us about other things. I'm actually in a third place. If you can avoid being a biblical literalist, and if you can avoid being an arrogant scientist who tells everyone else what to think, you can think on multiple levels at once. There's a lot of beauty in seeing that religion and science are really about the same things. They can be perfectly compatible.
She describes herself as spiritual - which is quite a vague category. Her view on the compatibility of science & religion is equally vague. Of course, they can be compatible if you consider the feeling of awe provided by science as a religious experience - and that is indeed a good way of thinking about religion and science. But I'm not sure if this is what she is saying. Otherwise, its quite hard to make science & religion compatible/tolerable without resorting to Gould's non-overlapping magestaria (which has its own problems).
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Islamic Creationism book swamps French schools & universities

16:11:00 0 comments

Just to add variety to evolution/creationism debates, we have Turkish author Harun Yahya (this is his pen-name) who has made Islamic Creationism quite popular in the Islamic world. He has a very slick website, documentaries, and a collection of over 100 books attributed to him (yes, and most of these were written in the last 2-3 years). Now his latest book, Atlas of Creation (770 pages), has been sent to tens of thousands of French schools and universities. Its not clear who is funding this campaign, but Harun Yahya's group appears to be doing quite well. Apart from the usual creationist diatribe against evolution, it describes Darwin's theory of evolution as the "true source of terrorism".
The book features a photograph of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center with the caption: "Those who perpetuate terror in the world are in fact Darwinists. Darwinism is the only philosophy that values and incites conflict."
Here is the news article regarding this.

While there is no danger of French schools and universities suddenly adopting Atlas of Creation, this type of campaign can certainly have an impact in Muslim countries. I have had a chance to read through some of his books, and they are a hodge-podge of 'spontaneous creation" and some Intelligent design. And of course, the usual proclamation that theory of evolution is a hoax:
This book will provide you with not only such information as what fossils are and where and how they are found, but also a closer examination of a variety of fossil specimens, millions of years old, that are still able to declare, "We never underwent evolution; we were created." The fossils discussed and illustrated in this book are just a few examples of the hundreds of millions of specimens that prove the fact of creation. And even these few are enough to prove that the theory of evolution is a major hoax and deception in the history of science.
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Origins talk on the Daily Show: Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:37:00 0 comments

A walk through the history of the universe with the director of the Hayden planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson - any excuse to put a clip from the Daily Show on the blog. Actually Neil does a great job of conveying the excitement and enthusiasm of discovering the workings of our universe. For a contrast, see the Creationist video posted here couple of weeks back.
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Magical thinking and religion

20:04:00 0 comments
Science Times from last week (1/23/07) had an interesting article on why all of us are susceptible to superstitious thinking ("Magical Thinking: Why do people cling to odd rituals" by Benedict Carey"). There are two comments in the article that are somewhat related to science & religion:
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.

These habits have little to do with religious faith, which is much more complex because it involves large questions of morality, community and history. But magical thinking underlies a vast, often unseen universe of small rituals that accompany people through every waking hour of a day.
But religions certainly exploit many of these tendencies and mix them up with larger moral questions. One example is "Insha-Allah" (by the will of God). Growing up in Pakistan, we were told that we always have to say Insha-Allah for a future event. For example, I will be going to a conference next month - Insha-Allah. The point here is that everything is run by God and so by stating your own plans and not acknowledging God can be perceived as a challenge to God's omnipotence. In some odd ways Insha-Allah can be thought of as an equivalent to "knock on wood" - you have your plans but you want to add this extra bit without much cost. So when superstition is tied-in to larger issues then the line between religion and superstition gets quite blurry.

The article also talked about the development of religious beliefs amongst children:
Children exhibit a form of magical thinking by about 18 months, when they begin to create imaginary worlds while playing. By age 3, most know the difference between fantasy and reality, though they usually still believe (with adult encouragement) in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. By age 8, and sometimes earlier, they have mostly pruned away these beliefs, and the line between magic and reality is about as clear to them as it is for adults.

It is no coincidence, some social scientists believe, that youngsters begin learning about faith around the time they begin to give up on wishing. "The point at which the culture withdraws support for belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy is about the same time it introduces children to prayer," said Jacqueline Woolley, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. "The mechanism is already there, kids have already spent time believing that wishing can make things come true, and they're just losing faith in the efficacy of that."
From this it appears that we impede the development of rational thinking in kids by replacing one set of magical thinking with another. On a related note, Paul Bloom gave a lecture at Hampshire College last October as part of our Science & Religion lecture series, and he talked about how young kids have a dualist view of the world that later then transforms into religion. Check out his excellent article Is God an Accident? from the Atlantic Monthly (Dec 2005).
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Intelligent Design and Dawkins in UK schools

14:23:00 0 comments
The Guardian has reported that Intelligent Design (ID) will be taught in UK schools in religious education classes, but students will also get a chance to read excerpts from Richard Dawkins. Read the full story here.

On the one hand this is good thing as it clearly marks ID as a religious idea (or at least not as science), on the other hand it does give ID a foothold in schools. The focus will not be Intelligent Design, but rather on the relationship between science & religion:
The teaching of ID and creationism should prove less contentious in this part of the curriculum (although the scientists who argue that ID is a science may be disconcerted), as pupils will investigate and role-play disputes between religion and science, such as Galileo, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins.

Overall its an interesting move, but we'll have to see how things turn out. The UK guidelines are for their stage 3 that covers 11-14 year olds and it will depend a lot on how they design the curriculum around these issues.
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First Tech College for Women in Jeddah

17:53:00 0 comments
A positive step regarding women in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah is going to have a technical college for women with a capacity of 1000 students. Here is the full story from Arab News. The demand for technical colleges is a good sign and can open up opportunities for women in Saudi Arabia.
The overwhelming majority of the Kingdom’s female university graduates, who account for 55 percent of the total, remain at home as most Saudi families do not like to send their girls to work places. But the trend has changed in recent years. Many young women have of late taken up jobs as journalists, medical editors, executive secretaries and receptionists.
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$27 million creation museum near Cincinnati

08:32:00 0 comments

One would have guessed that at least Creation science, the literal six day creation of the world 6000 years ago, would be completely out of the picture by now. But apparently even that has some serious following. There are plans for a $27 million creation science museum in the greater Cincinnati area - and its stated to open on May 28th (wait a minute...shouldn't it be Oct 22nd - following Bishop Ussher's creation date of Oct 22, 4004BC? Shame on them for choosing a different date). To get a first hand flavor, here is a video of a seminar by Ken Ham, the person behind the museum. Here is the full story on the museum. Also check out the website for Creation Museum.

Towards the end of the Ken Ham video, note how he uses quotes by biologists to link evolution with anti-Christianity - and this is exactly the fear that is feeding this type of nonsense. Creation science, ironically, is equally critical of Intelligent Design, because ID shys away from saying that the Creator is a Christian God (even though it believes it is). Islamic creation movements, like that of Harun Yahya in Turkey, also have sentiments similar to Creation science - though they don't have a problem with an old Earth. Can't these groups fight amongst themselves and leave science and evolution alone?
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One strategy - copy a successful site

01:00:00 0 comments
Everyone knows about the success of YouTube.com. When I look at it today, it has an Alexa rank of 5. It was possible to detect YouTube's rate of ascent fairly early in its rise. So what should an aspiring entrepreneur try to do? Copy it.Thus we have LiveVideo.com, which has been making a very credible run in Alexa and is today ranked at 1,450. It will be interesting to see where LiveVideo is in 3
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Belief in evolution and political views

00:28:00 0 comments
This week's issue of Science (Jan 12) has published a letter by Allan Mazur of Syracuse University that shows that belief in evolution in US is higher amongst political liberals than political conservatives after controlling for education and religious denominations. This is based on a survey of 3673 American respondents, of which a majority (53%), in any case, considered this statement, "Human beings evolved from earlier species of animals" to be definitely or probably not true. Here is the figure showing survey results:

The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent’s religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.

At least education is still doing some good - belief in evolution is correlated positively with the level of education (with the exception of high school and college educated fundamentalists). I'm not sure what to make of the political result - perhaps a social scientists can shed more light on it and we defintely need more data. It will also be interesting to see if this political view correlation also exists in UK and other western European countries.
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'Faith and Reason' at Universities

21:03:00 0 comments
Lawrence Krauss on Pope Benedict's controversial speech and Harvard's (failed) attempt to make a course on 'faith and reason' a requirement for all students:
Reason, Unfettered by Faith (from the Chronicle - 1/12/07)
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Ancient toilet may hold clues about the Dead Sea Scrolls

22:30:00 0 comments
The mystery of who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls may get solved by the analysis of some 2000 year old poop (yes, this is official scientific lingo) in Qumran on the West Bank. Quite apporpriately, there is also a moral to the story: you die if you slack off regarding hygiene even while providing cool data to future archeologists. Here is the story from Science:
Evidence for an ancient latrine in Qumran, a settlement on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel, has bolstered the idea that Qumran was occupied by the Essenes, a strict, all-male Jewish sect linked to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Some years ago James Tabor, a scholar of early Christianity at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, spotted what appeared to be the remains of ancient toilet stalls behind a bluff about 1000 meters northwest of the Qumran camp. Recent soil samples turned up intestinal parasites specific to humans.

The find supports the notion that the Essenes did in fact inhabit Qumran from around 150 B.C.E. to 70 C.E., Tabor reports in the forthcoming issue of the journal Revue de Qumran. The men apparently followed toiletry practices prescribed in the scrolls, which included placement of latrines out of sight of camp and burial of feces.

The latrine may also help explain why more than 90% of the men interred in a Qumran graveyard died before age 40. Burial of feces meant that intestinal parasites survived rather than being dried up in the sun, says Tabor. The men evidently tracked the pathogens into a pool they were required to immerse themselves in on returning to camp. "In effect, the pool becomes a toxic waste pool," he says.

"There is a great deal of debate among scholars about how [Qumran] functioned and who lived there," says historian Joan Branham of Providence College in Rhode Island. "The discovery of a possible latrine could be an important piece of the overall puzzle."

Alleged laterine is behind rocks at upper left.

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