The Science of Shortbread

1:

I took the batch of cultured butter I made yesterday and turned it into shortbread cookies. I wanted to make the ones that have two layers and a little dollop of jam in the middle, but a lack of ambition took me over so I made plain ones. Shortbread is easy, though: it's just 1 part butter to ½ part sugar, mixed and then you add 2 parts flour (in my case a 50/50 mix of white flour and oats). Mix it all up by hand, flatten it on a board with a pin, and then cut out shapes with your cookie cutters. bake the shapes on an ungreased pan at low heat (maybe 300 or 325) for about 20 minutes or until the cookies are just slightly brown.

The thing about shortbread is that it shouldn’t get too cooked. The cookies turned out really nicely. The oats (a traditional ingredient in these cookies) make them feel like they are going to crumble, but they don't because of all the butter.

Then, because I wanted a sandwich and I realised I didn't have any bread, I baked a loaf, and that took three hours. The bread: 2.5 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, two eggs (I wanted fluffy bread), some olive oil, a pinch or two of salt, the rest of the oats (the bag was almost empty), and all the buttermilk I made yesterday when I was making butter.

2:

I was talking to my friend Andrea about something called the Gaia theory, which is the theory that the entire earth and all the organisms and bodies of water and weather systems and everything all constitute a single organism which is (either consciously or unconsciously) colluding to regulate the general quality of living on the planet. I don't know anything else about the theory than this because she just told me about it today.

The one thing I noted, however, as I was reading about it was that one of the chief critics of the theory is the seemingly ubiquitous grand inquisitor of the atheist movement, Richard Dawkins. I have to say that I agree with Dawkins that taking the magical and historical claims of any religion seriously is tantamount to severe delusion and possibly madness, but at the same time I've noted a paradox in what he is saying that troubles me.

As a champion of evolutionary theory, I'm sure he would agree with me that one of the chief flaws in the Creationist platform is that, while there may be some questions still to be answered about how evolution works and there may be some particulars about it that force us to still refer to it as a theory as opposed to a fact, the doubts about evolution do not ever nor should they ever imply that by extension Creationism is correct. The two concepts are unrelated and, while the evidence for evolution does discredit Creationism by showing that the story in the Bible is impossible and untenable, it is not the case that the evidence against evolution proves by any standard that a ridiculous Semitic desert God created the world six thousand years ago. The biggest victory that the that the religious fanatics of the Christian world have scored of late is to establish in the public discourse the idea that there is a binary opposition between evolution and creationism. There is none.

However, when I see interviews with Dawkins (particularly in that show he did where he tried to make a whole lot of different religious and new age practitioners look bad), he had a disturbing tendency to sell science as a flawless and infallible alternative to religion. This is simply not the case. While one could argue that the scientific method is flawless and infallible, the way that the method has been used, and the conclusions that have been reached via the method, and a lot of the highly questionably motivated decisions made in the name of science and research are highly fallible and deeply flawed.

Science isn't always right, and science doesn't always do the right thing. A lot of scientists seem to be in denial about this (believe me, I meet people like this every day at the McGill squash courts). Another difficulty with scientific thinking is that it opens up the possibility of a means of thought that is without morality. It is action based on logic and (so called) reason, rather than on compassion.

For example, Dawkins champions Darwinism (and rightly so) but at the same time, one of the more unfortunate extensions of Darwinism was the Social-Darwinist idea that some races are better evolved than others and therefore superior. At the time, the science seemed sound and the scientists who defended the theory said quite pompously that there was no point in arguing things that had been proven by the scientific method. What these scientists failed to take into account, however, were the social and cultural climates and conditions that made one group different from another and made one group respond to its environment and situation differently from another.

Franz Fanon put it most artfully, when he explained that the French used their science to prove that the Algerians must be inferior to the French because they simply weren't able to do the things the French did nearly as well as the French did them. Dawkins defennce of his vision of the world as a scientific marvel from a position of insular privilege is what makes his vision of science as the only thing worth following so very unappealing to me.

The point here is that science, needs social science and science needs humanities and science (sorry to say) needs religion to help it act as a moral compass. At the same time, religion very badly needs science because the religious wingnuts are hurting the world immensely.