The original anti-vax poster

Why Evolution Is True

James Gillray (1756 or 1757-1815) was an English artist, caricaturist and satirist who has been called “the father of the political cartoon”. (Hogarth is another candidate.) Gillray also seemed to be anti-science, as judging from the cartoon below, which expressed the public fear of Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccination.

The proud owner of the original cartoon below is my old friend Andrew Berry, a lecturer and advisor at Harvard and spouse of Naomi Pierce, Harvard’s Curator of Lepidoptera. They are kindly putting me up in Cambridge for two days.

As I may have reported earlier, Jenner performed the first smallpox vaccination in the late 18th century, but the practice of inoculation, or variolation, in which matter from a smallpox pustule was injected into people, was practiced much earlier in India, China, and the Ottoman Empire.  (People observed that people who survived smallpox were henceforth immune to further bouts of the disease.)

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Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn @ the Serpentine Sackler Gallery

Books & Boots

This is a really wonderful exhibition. I thoroughly enjoyed it and had a struggle dragging myself away. And it’s FREE!

Luchita Hurtado has had the most extraordinary life and career. She was born in 1920, in Maiquetía, Venezuela, and is still working and painting, 98 years later! In fact the last section of the exhibition features a dozen or so works from just the past twelve months. But let’s start at the beginning…

The 1940s

Untitled (1949) by Luchita Hurtado © Luchita Hurtado, Private Collection. Photo by Genevieve Hanson

This is Hurtado’s first solo exhibition in a public institution, which seems amazing given the quality of everything on show.

The 95 or so works featured here are arranged in a straightforward chronological order to help the visitor make sense of the astonishing range and variety of styles and approaches to making art which have characterised her career.

Very broadly…

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Appeal to Ignorance

 

by Tim Harding

The scope of the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam in Latin) is more limited than its title would suggest. In the specific context of this fallacy, the word ignorance represents ‘a lack of contrary evidence’ rather than a lack of education or knowledge. The fallacy title was likely coined by the philosopher John Locke in the late 17th century.

In informal logic, this fallacy asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been shown to be false, or a proposition is false because it has not yet been shown to be true. This represents a type of false dichotomy, in that it excludes the possibility that there may have been an insufficient investigation to determine whether the proposition is either true or false. In other words, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’

In rhetorical debates, appeals to ignorance are sometimes used in an attempt to shift the burden of proof.  A typical example is as follows: ‘In spite of all the talk, not a single flying saucer report has been authenticated. We may assume, therefore, there are no such things as flying saucers.’ An absurd but logically equivalent example is: ‘Although NASA has shown that the surface of the moon is not made of green cheese, it has not conclusively demonstrated that the Moon’s core is not made of it; therefore, the moon’s core is made of green cheese.

This fallacy is a potential trap that empiricists need to be wary of falling into. We cannot prove the non-existence of anything, so the burden of proof lies with those who claim the existence of something, rather than those who doubt it. So, we should always remain open to the possibility of new evidence in support of a claim, even if no such evidence has ever been found.

Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain

Books & Boots

Before I went I’d read some disparaging reviews of this exhibition – but I found it really interesting, thought-provoking, full of wonderful paintings and prints and drawings, and making all kinds of unexpected connections. And big, much bigger than I expected.

The premise is simple: Vincent van Gogh came to live in England at the age of 20 in 1873, He lived in London for nearly three years, developing an intimate knowledge of the city and a great taste for English literature and painting. The exhibition:

1. explores all aspects of van Gogh’s stay in London, with ample quotes from his letters to brother Theo raving about numerous aspects of English life and London – and several rooms full of the paintings and prints of contemporary urban life which he adored
2. then it explores the development of van Gogh’s mature style and the many specific references he made back to themes and…

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Byzantine Emperors 324-802

Books & Boots

This blog post uses the timeline of Byzantine emperors from Wikipedia and then adds details and comments from John Julius Norwich’s book Byzantium: The Early Centuries.

Constantine I ‘the Great’ (324-337)

Son of the Augustus Constantius Chlorus and Helena. Proclaimed Augustus of the western empire upon the death of his father on 25 July 306, he became sole ruler of the western empire after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. In 324, he defeated the eastern Augustus Licinius and re-united the empire under his rule, reigning as sole emperor until his death. Constantine completed the administrative and military reforms begun under Diocletian, who had begun ushering in the Dominate period. Actively interested in Christianity, he played a crucial role in its development and the Christianization of the Roman world, through his convocation of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. He re-founded the city of Byzantium as ‘New…

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