Alphatuosity

Perspectives

2012-03-14T14:28:00.001-07:00

One of the benefits of having scientific, as opposed to religious heroes is that you are free to disagree, vehemently, with some or most of what your hero believes. Richard Feynman, for instance, was notoriously contemptuous of philosophy. 'Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.' Is one of the kinder ways he found to express this loathing. But I think he underestimated the need that ordinary scientists have to be told (by philosophers) what they meant when they said... If you think that believers have the same freedom with respect to their heroes, ask yourself when you last heard a priest say 'Yeah, I admire God but I think he's a bit unsound on buggery.' Religious critics of God's alleged views on buggery are reduced to arguing that God did not in fact claim that buggery's just reward is an appointment with the state executioner (Leviticus 20:13).

So the fact that David Deutsch doesn't just look like he ought to be a genius but is in fact a genius does not in the least deter me from thinking he's got a dodgy sense of perspective. Promoting his book The Beginning of Infinity, which I recommend, he performs an entertaining stunt in this lecture, illustrating what it is like to occupy a 'typical' place in the universe. It is of course dark there and cold. Apparently photons are so rarefied out there that a supernova in the nearest galaxy wouldn't register on your retina if you were staring right at it when the light reached you. He concludes that, therefore, living in a brightly lit, warm part of the universe is pretty special. In a couple of skips and a jump he's gone from there to the claim that there are no limits to (suitably augmented) human understanding and that we are at the very beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that will transform our descendants into gods. David Deutsch is, I think it fair to say, an optimist.

Deutsch's mistake is surely the same as that made by the lottery winner who thinks to himself, 'well fuck me, I'm a millionaire, when yesterday I was a simple toilet cleaner. Makes you think. There must be someone up there looking out for me.' Come off it, David. The odds imply that someone had to win the lottery. That doesn't mean there's anything special about the winner. The physical constants that pertain in our universe imply that most of it is devoid of photons and heat but also that a few bright spots must exist, for a while. Of course David Deutsch exists in one of those bright spots. To be fair, Deutsch is not helping himself to the claim that he was put here, but he is certainly reading much more into the fact of his existence than that mundane event warrants. Douglas Adams' vainglorious puddle would find itself in an unusual alliance with Deutsch and the Pope.

I think that many of the mistakes that our species has made stem from failures of our sense of perspective. For various reasons, I have spent a lot of time recently driving up and down the M5 motorway, which runs roughly north-south through southern England. There are several sections of this road that are, so the signs say, being 'upgraded to managed motorways'. For present purposes it implies that the speed limit in these zones is 50mph and new average speed cameras enforce rigid compliance. As a result of this triumph of technology over liberty, I have noticed that the difference between 49mph and 51mph is really obvious. To the extent that I become impatient with the driver of a car ahead of me in the same lane traveling 1mph slower than the limit. I presume that the reason for this sensitivity is that, despite the fact that until a couple of hundred or so years ago, no human had traveled at these speeds, the mechanisms that enable us to gauge our velocity when walking or running still function at the velocities prevailing on a typical British motorway. Step into an aeroplane, however, and once you are at cruising altitude all sense of speed is lost. Of course you know that you are moving at 500mph but, gazing down at the land below, it just doesn't feel that way.

Or what about the alleged wisdom of 'ancient' civilisations? Whenever some cretin tells me that a certain 'ancient' remedy is a sovereign cure for the common cold I want to tie the fucker down and saw his leg off using ancient surgical techniques. Recorded history extends, at the very most, three millennia into our past. Homo sapiens is about 200, 000 years old (that is, the lineage that led to all extant human beings diverged from other hominids about that long ago). In other words, the most ancient 'wisdom' to which we have access is about 1.5% as old as our species, which is in turn a neophyte on the global biodiversity stage. In comparison with the span if the history of life on earth, our most ancient texts are insignificantly earlier than contemporary texts.

Well, OK, but we are still at the summit of the immense mountain that evolution has scaled to produce us, aren't we? This is the most pernicious of all human conceits. Evolution didn't have us 'in mind' on its long, blind journey from our ancestors. We are precisely - no more and no less - as 'evolved' as every other extant organism on earth. We occupy a position at the terminus of one of millions of spokes on the wheel of life. The bacteria in her small intestine can trace their ancestry exactly as far back as the Queen of England, to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA).

'You are here' at about 10.30

One of the things I'm trying to learn about at the moment is how my conspecifics have thought about ethics during our very recent (say 3,000 year) history. When you approach the literature on this subject from a more-or-less random direction, as I have done, you quickly realise that there are two camps. According to one camp, humans of all societies are all the same, ethically speaking. Just as you can take a day-old baby from anywhere on earth, place it in a family anywhere else on earth and watch it acquire effortlessly the language of its adoptive parents, this camp says, the same baby will effortlessly acquire the moral mores of the culture in which it is raised. This is because humans posess a 'moral grammar' analogous with the universal grammar that all humans share (see here). What matters, therefore, is how we use the knowledge that our values are as much the product of natural selection as the shape of our noses. The other camp says no, no, no, morality is a cultural construct. Biology has nothing to do with it. Criticism of cannibalism or Nazism is therefore just another form of imperialism and should not be taken seriously.

This second claim makes me so cross that I want to stamp my feet, preferably repeatedly on the heads of the morons who adhere to this view. I defy you to look at the picture above and understand it and remain proud of your status as a human being. We humans are, to all intents and purposes, identical with respect to our values. The difference between Camus and a cannibal is trivial in comparison with the difference between both of them and a chimpanzee. Perspective. It's all about perspective.

Perspective

2012-03-12T18:04:00.001-07:00

The spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in the early 1970s and are drifting silently away from earth to this day. On the side of each probe is a small gold-anodised, aluminium plaque, six inches by nine depicting representations of the species - Homo sapiens - that built and launched them. The wonderful, whimsical idea, conceived by Carl Sagan, was that an alien intelligence discovering the probe in the far future could decipher the inscriptions and learn something of what we had been and hoped to become. What do you say to a hypothetical alien species using no more than 52 square inches of aluminium plate and how do you express yourself? A great question surely for A-level students of critical thinking. NASA's answer was to use the language of mathematics, which seems to be universal, and to provide a sort of Rosetta Stone in the form of depictions of the hydrogen atom (hydrogen is the commonest element in the universe) and a pulsar map. It also included drawings of a man and a woman, naked, provoking the utterly delicious criticism that NASA was using taxpayers' dollars to 'send smut to the stars' (note the censorship of the woman's genitalia).

Voyager I, launched in 1977 - later than the Pioneer craft - is further from earth than any other human artefact. It is currently approaching interstellar space, 120 times further from earth than earth is from the sun (that's 180, 000, 000, 000 kilometers or 4.28 kilometers for every dollar of net worth of Carlos Slim Helu, the richest man in the Solar System), and in 2014 will cross the heliopause, the theoretical boundary where the solar wind is balanced by whispers from elsewhere in the galaxy. Building on the Pioneer plaque, NASA included in each Voyager spaceship a disc encoding a few images of typical earth scenes (e.g. multicultural groups of well-fed children playing happily together) and a diverse selection of music from recent earth history. There's a lovely story (also attributed to Sagan) told about the late Douglas Adams. When he heard that a snatch of Bach's music had been considered for inclusion (and rejected) he said something like: 'don't you think that would have been showing off?'

The story may be apocryphal. It doesn't matter. It's trademark Douglas Adams in that it puts an explosive bullet through the center of parochialism's underdeveloped frontal lobes. The very finest Adams riff was a spontaneously delivered demolition of the hard anthropic principle, the vainest and most absurd of all our species's many parochial fantasies.

'... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'

Douglas Adams is a hero of mine because he made me simultaneously acutely aware of my own insignificance and glad to be a relatively well-educated human being. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I think it is fair to say, provides a sounder assessment of our species' importance ('mostly harmless') than all the creation stories of all our holy books combined. There's no point in rehearsing here the statistics that demonstrate our ephemerality (Sagan's 'Cosmos' does an unimpeachable job on this score but Monty Python makes the same point just as well, with added humour here).

Imagine you're a passenger on Voyager I, gazing back at Earth which is long-since irresolvable by your human eyes. Even the Sun is just a bright speck against the glorious galactic skyscape, like Venus viewed at dawn from the Atacama Desert back home. You've subscribed to a news digest service from Earth, just to keep in touch, and today's edition (a few hours out of date, for reasons that Einstein could probably have explained) contains an op-ed piece about this guy Rorty, who says that science and technology are just 'narratives', indistinguishable from other narratives about gods that make the sun rise each morning or devils who whisk away the souls of unbaptised children to an eternity of suffering in a hell beyond human imagining. Your eyebrows, frostbitten in the chill of interstellar space, rise a fraction of an inch (or should that be millimeter? it doesn't seem to matter out here) and you think 'but here I am, a few billion miles from home, thanks to the narrative that put me on top of a ten minute controlled explosion and launched me into space on a trajectory that took me via four gas giants and a few big rocks to this slightly lonely and very dark place. Could Huitzilopochtli really have brought me all this way? Or Jesus? He had some serious powers. Surely the Faculty of Social Studies at the Sorbonne could have designed a semiotic hermeneutics engine that could have propelled me at least this far on the crest of an immense wave of fart gas?

Sagan understood perfectly that the chances of an alien intelligence - if such exist - intercepting one of the Pioneer or Voyager probes is vanishingly small and that the messages were intended for human not alien audiences. Even if near-Earth interstellar space were littered with curious aliens, which it ain't, the chances of one of them noticing our toy rockets are miniscule. But let's just say that, in this, or a virtually identical parallel universe the unthinkable happened and the little green men happened upon Voyager I and decided to haul it into the cargo bay. What are the chances they'd be able to decipher and 'listen' to the recordings? What are the chances they'd appreciate Beethoven and Chuck Berry, both of whom made it onto the recordings, unlike Bach?

In the forgettable Monty Python movie 'Erik the Viking', Erik and his crew arrive at Hy-Brasil and are astonished to find it occupied by welcoming but musically incompetent people. This is funny because such a place could never exist, at least not on Earth. Why not? Because musicality is universally present in normal humans and hospitality to strangers is, if not universally absent, certainly not conspicuous by its presence in the tales and legends that have filtered down to us from prehistory.

Human musicality is a genuine puzzle for evolutionary biologists. New born human babies have it; almost all adults (even those, like me, with a tin ear) have it; other primates appear not to; some birds might. Steven Pinker described music as 'auditory cheesecake', a super-stimulus that tickles pleasure centers that evolved for other reasons. He came in for a lot of criticism from people with a fine grasp of music but limited appreciation of the gaping holes in their own education (see here)1. The Dutch psychologist Henkjan Honing is also sceptical of Pinker's theory and has done some brilliant and fascinating research, which he summarises here, 16 minutes of unadulterated pleasure.

Music of course has an underlying mathematical structure. Sounds lacking rhythm are noise. An octave is the interval between two musical pitches that harmonise and it so happens that the ratio between the frequencies of corresponding pitches in successive octaves is 2:1. This pattern was discovered independently by many musical traditions long before the mathematical relationships were quantified. But the mathematics of music runs much deeper than this. In this article for example, Dmitri Tymoczko is quoted as claiming that 'When you are sitting at a piano, you are interacting with a very complicated geometry...In fact, composers in the early nineteenth century were already implicitly exploring such geometries through music that could not have been understood using the mathematics of the time...Just as a mountaineer will find that only a small number of all the possible routes between two points are actually negotiable, so musicians will have discovered empirically that their options are limited by the underlying shapes and structures of musical possibilities.'

The narrator of Jorge Luis Borges' novel The Library of Babel is a librarian in a vast hive of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each lined with bookshelves packed with books, each 410 pages long. The books appear to be randomly arranged on the shelves but the librarians have inferred that the library contains every permutation of a limited set of symbols, spaces and punctuation marks. Of course, almost all the books are gibberish or religious tracts but somewhere in the library there must exist improved versions of Shakespeare's plays, perfect predictions of the future and succinct, lucid explanations of true scientific theories not yet discovered. There are vastly many of these literary gems randomly scattered through the library but, because they represent a vanishingly small proportion of all the books, they cannot in practice be located. The librarians, unsurprisingly, go nuts.

There is a musical equivalent of the Library of Babel, a library containing all possible musical scores, of a certain length written with a small, finite number of symbols representing a restricted number of octaves, each divided into an arbitrary number of pitches, say twelve. Most of these scores, when played would be noise. A handful, however, would render Bach's sonatas banal by comparison. Unlike Borges' library, the 'musical' as opposed to noisy scores would run together like veins of ore in a lump of conglomerate. This is not just to say that these rivulets of music are the only scores in the library that could in principle be appreciated but that everything else isn't music, it's noise.

I do not begin to understand either the music or the mathematics underlying Tymoczko's analysis - so feel free to shoot me down - but it suggests the fascinating possibility that music might be a property of nature that humans in the course of our evolutionary history have not so much invented as discovered. Just as flying machines built by other civilisations on planets with gaseous atmospheres will operate using the same laws of aerodynamics that permit heavier-than-air flight on Earth, it is conceivable that intelligent denizens of another reasonably similar world (who will certainly have sense organs capable of interpreting sound waves) might have discovered some of the same pathways through the 'complicated geometry' of musical space. In other words, it is vanishingly improbable but just conceivable, that Chuck Berry could have another hit with 'Johnny B. Goode' on a different planet in another solar system in the far, far future. How cool is that?

1. As an aside, the following sentences from a review of The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, are as fine an example as you could wish for of complete gibberish I've read outside a holy book: 'We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.' This half-wit wants so badly that music be mysterious, he is prepared to bury all evidence to the contrary, while his audience watches him dig his own intellectual grave.

Re-Kant-ation

2012-03-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I described 'An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics' by Scott James as 'dismal'. This assessment was unfair and I take it back. In fact, on a second reading, I view the book as a concise, impartial exposition of the state of the art in ethics thinking. I wish I were capable of expressing myself with James's clarity. I ought to have directed my ire not at the book's author but at his intended audience - students of philosophy. To the extent that philosophy is an enterprise concerned with clarifying the ideas being generated on the disputed frontiers of human understanding - perhaps the kindest definition one can offer - it is incumbent upon practitioners to familiarize themselves with the most recent maps. Reading James's book, one receives the impression that most students of ethics are working from charts marked 'here be dragons' at the edge of the known world.

Contrary to my earlier rash assertion that two thirds of the book is devoted to convincing readers that evolution happened, only the first two chapters - 47 pages - address this subject directly. Come on guys! Even Darwin's contemporaries accepted the fact of evolution; all that he did was to supply the mechanism, natural selection. Biologists have been exploring the implications of his astonishing insight for more than 150 years and have made quite a lot of progress. For example, the evolution of altruism has been studied intensively since Darwin's time and, in the last few decades, the problem that he feared represented a 'fatal flaw' in his theory has been largely resolved. Whenever Richard Dawkins or another prominent atheist writes a newspaper article, you can guarantee that some pathetic parish priest will write a letter to the editor asserting that evolution can't explain charity, self-sacrifice or love. This claim isn't just fatuous, it's pig-ignorant. I cannot comprehend how any literate human being can have avoided noticing that, not only can natural selection explain such phenomena, it is the only theory that explains all of them without resort to special pleading.

The problem that caused Darwin the most angst was existence of eusocial insects, for example honeybees or ants, in which worker castes are sterile and work for the benefit of the queen and her offspring, their sisters and brothers. How, he wondered, could a behaviour that required some individuals to eschew the ability to reproduce ever evolve? The manner in which this problem has been studied and resolved is an object lesson in how to approach an intellectual puzzle, one that all theologians and many philosophers would do well to heed. As an undergraduate, I was taught that the problem had been solved by William Hamilton, who argued that a quirk of hymenopteran genetics (female honeybees arise from fertilised eggs and therefore have two sets of chromosomes, whereas male bees derive from unfertilised eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes) implies that female bees are more closely related on average to their sisters (by 3/4) than they would be to their children (by 1/2), implying that their genes would be better served (i.e. copied more often) if sisters worked for the benefit of their female siblings than if they worked for their children. This insight (the 'haplodiploid hypothesis') was regarded as one of the finest intellectual achievements of Darwinian thinking. Amusingly enough, it turns out that Hamilton was wrong. For one thing, he neglected to take account of the fact that female workers work not just for sisters but for brothers (to whom they are related by 1/4) too, and for another he was not aware of the many social animals with conventional genetics that have subsequently been discovered. Here is E.O. Wilson, the founding figure of sociobiology, writing recently on the demise of the haplodiploid hypothesis.

'Hamilton's perception, later called the haplodiploidhypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, whilesynthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea instudies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made threemistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerningaltruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, andsurprises no doubt lie ahead. The interpretation I have presented here[that a type of group selection led to the evolution of eusocial insects] may itself in time be swept aside.'

The main point that I wish to make is that explaining altruism depends upon an extremely subtle understanding of the consequences of natural selection, operating within the rules imposed by genetics. A subsidiary point is that, faced with compelling evidence that a brilliant, beautiful theory is unfortunately false, Wilson does what any good scientist would do and ditches the theory. When was the last time you witnessed such humility in the teeth of evidence in a churchman?

But back to 'evolutionary ethics'. Hamilton's concept of 'inclusive fitness' (roughly the idea that genes that favour their own replication, whether the copies exist in their own host or others, will spread) does explain altruism towards kin. Trivers's theory of reciprocal altruism does explain atruism towards non-kin. The old philosophical chestnut 'is an act altruistic if ultimately it is motivated by selfish ends?' is shown by these theories to be not just the wrong question but a meaningless question. Genes that confer on their bearers the propensity to behave in a way that increases the gene's fitness will prosper and vice versa. All acts are ultimately 'motivated' by selfish ends, in the sense that selfless actors (i.e. genes) die out. There are numerous subtle consequences of this simple fact: for example, sibling rivalry; infanticide and conflict between paternally and maternally inherited genes, the last of which may explain certain psychological diseases in the human animal. But the main point, once again, is that there is simply no useful way in which to approach the study of altruism or its reflection, ethics, except in the light of evolution.

We know that we share a common ancestor with all extant life on earth. We know that we share with our closest extant relatives a moral mind. We know that more distant relatives behave in ways that indicate they possess a moral sense, albeit one we don't recognise as a close cousin (female mice, for instance, will be perfect parents to their offspring when times are good but will kill and eat them without a second thought when their own survival is called into question). We know, therefore, that our moral sense evolved. We have known all this for an awfully long time but the news doesn't seem to have reached the people who's mission is to clarify the way we interpret these findings.

Nothing in the preceding several paragraphs is controversial. Everyone familiar with the evidence and not ideologically committed to some theory-from-revelation agrees that this is the way the world works. I'm not trying to bully you into accepting as true something you don't understand. I'm simply pointing out that, if you decline to acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence from natural history, your ethical opinions are precisely worthless. Immanuel Kant may very well, for example, have possessed the most fabulous mind ever to have enquired into the origins of virtue but the Categorical Imperative is nevertheless more interesting to historians than ethicists. Kant didn't know where our ethical sense comes from (he assumed, incorrectly, that it comes from God), so his fabulous mind could never achieve traction on the problem of what one ought to do. It is, in my view, a delightful comment on the enlightening power of science that the comedian Tim Minchin (see here) comes closer to the truth than Kant when he sings 'if you cover for another mother fucker who's a kiddy-fucker, fuck you, you're no better than the mother-fucking rapist...if you look into your mother-fucking heart and tell me true if this mother-fucking stupid song offended you...are just as morally misguided as that mother-fucking, power hungry, self-aggrandizing bigot in a stupid fucking hat'.

Altruism, deceit and ethics

2012-02-22T15:33:00.000-08:00

Something nice happened to me at the weekend. No, honestly, it's true!

I lost my wallet and, at the very instant that I slipped a hand into my pocket and discovered the loss, my mobile phone rang. It was a policeman calling to say that some lost property belonging to me had been handed in at Bath police station and would I like to come and collect it? So before my shit-happens-primed brain could scream the words 'identity theft' into the uncaring void, the ball of stress coalescing in my sternum dissipated.

The woman who'd handed in my wallet had left her name and address. I went immediately to a florists' and ordered an extravagant bunch of flowers to be delivered to her on Monday with a message that ended 'give yourself a big hug'. I meant it too. Rarely have I felt so well disposed towards a total stranger and never pre-coitus. I was back in the same florists' today, buying a bunch of flowers to go on the kitchen table and, while she was tying an elaborate bow around the bouquet, the woman behind the counter asked 'You're the guy with the wallet, aren't you?' 'You've obviously been talking to my builder.' Is what I should have said but instead admitted I was the same guy. 'So, did she call?' She asked.

Now I hadn't spent more than five minutes considering whether I should append my phone number to the note with the flowers and I had been in no way influenced in my decision not to do so by the fact that my benefactor had given her name as 'Mrs...' but it amused me to discover that florists must get a little kick from the thought that many a relationship has been launched on the rocky road to ruin and recriminations by an extravagant hand-tied bunch of flowers prepared by their own fair hands.

In truth, all that I really know about Mrs... is that she isn't a thief and that she approximates sufficiently closely to a typical Homo sapiens that the following equation is satisfied in respect of our relationship.

If you are unfamiliar with the equation and the meanings of the terms I refer you to the marvelous paper by Robert Trivers in which it was first published, available here, for free - and that's a bargain).

Understand this equation, which is so simple that even my mathematically challenged brain can grasp its meaning intuitively, and you will have seen something lovelier than the combined magnificence of all the illuminated manuscripts in all the libraries of theology in the world.

In a sense, this is the equation that states the conditions under which it is possible for something like a human being to evolve. What it says, to paraphrase, is that, in a highly social, intelligent animal species, where members of the species possess memory of social interactions and meet one another frequently, natural selection can favour the evolution of reciprocal altruism. In other words, it can produce human beings. Or Vampire Bats. Vampire Bats are very much like human beings when it comes to reciprocal altruism in that they possess the same salient traits - sociality, intelligence, memory - that we do. A Vampire Bat that returns from a night's unsuccessful foraging will soon die but is often saved by an unrelated bat - a good sanguinarian? - regurgitating some blood into its friend's mouth. The system evolved because Vampire Bats remember who has saved them from certain death in the past and apportion their altruism accordingly.

It is an interesting feature of reciprocal altruism in humans that we seem prepared to act altruistically towards strangers that we have never met and likely never will (as in me and Mrs...). It's an open question, I think, whether this feature of our behaviour is an adaptation or an example of cultural evolution temporarily (I am thinking millennia, not decades, here) out-manoeuvreing natural selection.

I presume that anyone reading this will be either familiar with Trivers' equation or too lazy (or tired, or fried, or whatever) to bother with reading a succinct explanation of the mystery that religion has been trying pointlessly to solve for ever: why are we so damned nice? If you set a million monkeys to masturbating in the corners of their lonely wire cages, the results could not be sadder nor less fruitful than the speculations of Aquinus or Augustine or Mohammed. Give a slightly crazy genius an insight into natural selection, a pad of paper and a pencil, on the other hand, and you get revelations.

Robert Trivers, according to Wikipedia, went bonkers trying to make sense of Wittgenstein, which is an excellent reason not to read Wittgenstein. Having revolutionised his adopted field of evolutionary biology in the 1970s, Trivers disappeared from view until very recently, when he published 'Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others' (buy it here).

What seems to have motivated Trivers to write this book is the desire to answer the question why that, whereas there are obvious benefits (to the deceiver) of deceiving others, the same does not apply to deceiving oneself. When I described this puzzle to a philosophically-minded friend, he denied the possibility of self-deception (how can one both affirm and deny a certain proposition simultaneously, he asked). So I'd better be clear what I (and I think Trivers) means by self-deception: interpreting sense data in a way that conforms with pre-conceived notions of truth, when an unbiased interpretation of the same data would result in a contradiction.

Trivers' claim which, so far as I know, is original is that natural selection can favour the spread of self-deception in species in which there exists an arms race between deceivers and deceiver-detectors. Imagine the following conversation between a husband and wife.

[Husband, staring into the middle distance.]

Wife: 'What are you thinking, darling?'

[Husband suspends contemplation of sex with the au pair; blushes slightly; suppresses blush.]

Husband: 'I was thinking about how much fun we had together before X and Y were born. Why don't we ask your parents to babysit and go on a cruise together?'

[Wife thinks: 'Yeah, I wasn't born yesterday, you wanker; who is she?']

Wife: 'Sometimes you still surprise me, darling. That's a lovely idea.'

[Husband resumes contemplation of whether doggy-style or reverse cowgirl would be more enjoyable, for him].

Wife: 'I'll call my parents tomorrow and ask when they can come over for a week.'

[Husband: Hmm, the au pair is half my age and a third my weight. Perhaps the cruise is a good idea.]

Husband: 'I love you, honey.'

Now I'm not suggesting, and I doubt Trivers would either, that this sort of dialogue is typical. However, I don't think it is particularly unusual either. There are two possibilities: my heterosexual male friends are a strange, sexually-fixated subset of the (otherwise balanced) population; or, all heterosexual men would really like to fuck the au pair, provided there were no consequences. What is more interesting, however, is to notice that, at the end of the hypothetical conversation, the hypothetical wife believes that the hypothetical husband loves her and, more pertinently, the hypothetical husband believes it too. If he didn't, the extraordinarily sensitive deception detector that is the human female brain would have seen the contents of his pitiful sex-crazed brain and left.

Why? I mean, why would any sensible British man (I am speaking from my own, limited, experience; I'm quite sure analogous arguments could be made for any gender, orientation or nationality) risk marriage, reputation, family and fiscal independence for a few brief thrusts into the vagina of an economic refugee from Poland? The answer, of course, is that ancestors in a lineage stretching four billion years into deep time have persisted by, so to speak, coercing Polish refugees into having sex.

Do you not find this fascinating? I mean, perhaps I am telling the story badly, but isn't it the most interesting story of all? What are we and why are we as we are? Come hither...

...to a book that I've recently finished: 'An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics' by Scott M. James. Philosophers write very carefully. That is what they do: they rephrase more carefully what the enthusiasts on the frontiers of discovery have reported. So I must state in words of as few and unambiguous syllables as possible my opinion of the book: dismal.

How is it possible that, in 2012, an influential moral philosopher can publish a book, three-quarters of which is wasted on convincing its audience that evolution actually happened? The temptation to mock the imbeciles who haven't yet clocked this fact is almost irresistible. I suppose that I should admire Scott M. James for his dogged determination to explain, in Bowdlerised form, the theory that has informed all reasoned discussion since 1853 to persons too stupid or willfully ignorant to have taken it on board yet. But I don't. Why? James, when he finally allows himself to come to the point, argues that the case for what he calls 'moral anti-realism' - aka the truth - is more-or-less accepted. Except for his own theory, on which he will no doubt build a pointlesss career.

Look. Our ancestors, before primates; before mammals if you want to go that far back, did not contemplate right and wrong. Jellyfish, the descendants of our (common) ancestors, do not worry whether they have offended their brother-in-law. But neither did they owe him a small fortune. We are descended from animals that had no moral sense. We have one. Ergo, it evolved. I don't expect to convert anyone with this argument but one can hope.

If we admit that our moral sense evolved, it is worth considering two subsidiary possibilities. Morality could be a property of the universe, like viscosity or gravity. If we ever drag our sorry asses off this planet and discover examples of life on other planets, we can be confident that 'birds' will fly, 'fish' will swim and 'bodies' will fall. Does anyone really think, however, that aliens will avow that sex before marriage is a sin? No, really - do you think this is likely? The other possibility is that morality is a word for the codes that enable society, given the genetic and cultural inheritance of a particular species. As Montesquieu said, triangles would worship a three-sided god and despise rectangles. If ants had a god, the caste system would be morally obligatory.

When you feel the tug of conscience, it isn't god whispering into your ear. It's billions of dead ancestors, all of them evolutionary successes telling you that if it works...

Windows onto the mind of God

2012-02-11T13:34:00.000-08:00

It is a source of immense frustration to biologists that the physics department's budget typically has several more zeroes on its end. What is more, biologists are scientifically-minded folk who weren't clever enough to study physics, which hurts. In the end though, the budget gap is due less to the relative profundity of the two disciplines than to a missed marketing opportunity on the part of biologists. Whereas physicists can speak without blushing of striving to understand the mind of god; of reaching for a 'theory of everything' or of 'unifying' the 'fundamental' forces, biologists' grant applications concern the mating system of the Dunnock or the function of the stripes on a zebra's arse (I am not kidding: see here). Ironically, it is biology that shines the brightest light into the mind of god - obviously one and the same thing as the mind of man - and while it might not have a theory of everything, at least has a deeply satisfying explanation for all of life, in its wondrous diversity, which is more than can be said for physicists and their zoo of possibly but probably not fundamental particles.

As my friends know very well, I am a living library of wasted opportunities. The first truly great opportunity that I squandered (ignoring the offer of a blow job to be administered by J, which I fluffed on account of nerves and alcohol) was the possibility of a lifetime spent as an academic biologist, studying tropical rain forests, Dunnock mating systems or pretty much anything I found interesting. My PhD was supervised by Nick Davies, who literally wrote the book on Dunnocks, and who is nevertheless one of the most original scientists alive. He practically invented the field of behavioural ecology, the study of the evolutionary basis of animal behaviour. With hindsight it is almost impossible to imagine asking questions about animal behaviour except in light of this approach. Nick was one of the first to apply it and is one of the keenest observers and among the most brilliant theorists.

In the preface to his book about Dunnocks, Nick quotes Reverend Frederick Morris, who admired this archetypal little brown bird for its apparently unimpeachable moral probity: 'Unobtrusive, quiet and retiring, without being shy, humble and homely in its deportment and habits, sober and unpretending in its dress, while neat and graceful, the dunnock exhibits a pattern which many of a higher grade might imitate, with advantage to themselves and benefit to others through an improved example.'

As it turns out, Dunnocks are among the most sexually wanton vertebrates ever studied in detail. The average human threesome is positively suburban in comparison with a polygynandrous dunnock family, in which both male and female surreptitiously cuckold the other. In a delightful inversion of orgasm, the female is often induced to eject the sperm of the male who previously inseminated her by her current paramour's 'cloacal pecking', a distressingly clinical term for oral sex, bird style. It's easy to mock Rev. Morris, which obviously isn't going to stop me doing just that. The problem for RM and all previous and subsequent admirers of god's handiwork is that The Maker appears to have been a bit of a sicko.

I have mentioned elsewhere my fascination with what Christians, Muslims or other creationists think the exploding penis of the honey bee reveals about the mind of god. I'm not sure why this particular example of nature's perversity captivates me except perhaps that I cannot help but wince at the thought of my bollocks exploding across the quivering buttocks of some drunken bird in a pub car park. It would certainly make you think twice about that second Bacardi and rum. It is frequently said that Charles Darwin finally abandoned his belief in god as a result of contemplating Ichneumon Wasps, which lay their eggs in the living bodies of other insects. The larvae consume their hosts from within. It's hard to reconcile the existence of such a 'creature' with a creator overflowing with kindness. Mice are occasionally infected by a parasite that causes the infected mouse to lose its fear of cats because the parasite requires a cat's intestine to complete its life cycle. Certain primates tend to leave more grandchildren if they trade their faculty of reason for membership of a cult. One could go on.

God is most certainly dead but the news hasn't reached everyone yet. My friend R has coined the perfect slogan to describe the struggle ahead: one believer, one bullet. I'll see you in hell.

The dangers of materialism.

2012-02-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

'Earth, man. What a shit hole!'

Johner, a character in Alien Resurrection.

'What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension howlike a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—andyet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to sayso.'

Shakespeare, Hamlet

'All sex is bestiality.'

CW, in an email

Despite having grown up on a diet of E.O. Wilson and Gerald Durrell, Johner's assessment of our beautiful pale blue dot succinctly expresses my feelings on the subject of the home planet. From the scum that floats in a greasy layer on our poisonous oceans to the scum who peddle porn, religion and other drugs to our not-yet depraved children, our world is surely a shit hole sans comparaison.

Saturday dawned bright, cold and crisp. I know this because, highly uncharacteristically, I was awake and alert at dawn, packing up my papers after a week spent trying to bash a round peg into a computationally square hole (more of which in another post). Saturday, I need hardly add, was the day of the first snowdrop sale of the season, at Myddleton House. What do you mean, you hadn't heard? Myddleton House is the former home of E.A. Bowles, one of those almost impossibly lucky healthy, wealthy and clever nineteenth century English gentlemen-of-leisure whose passion was plants. Myddleton House is now in Enfield (the house hasn't moved but Enfield has). Need I go on?

Snowdrop sales ought to be the subject of some social-wannabe-scientist's PhD thesis because they are little maelstroms of human vice, with greed, lust and envy to the fore. I was fourth in the queue when the gate was opened at 10.30am and by 10.33am I had bought about 30 new snowdrops, mostly from the incomparable Glen Chantry nursery. Even so, several that I'd wanted had sold out by the time I'd fought my way to the front of the line at stalls I visited after cleaning out Glen Chantry. Those of you who know me will not need to be told that this is my idea of fun. I can't remember the last time I experienced 15 minutes of such unalloyed pleasure. Two of my purchases, 'Big Boy' and 'Fanny', are illustrated below. So far as I know there isn't yet a snowdrop named 'Cunt' or 'Knob' but surely it's a matter of time before someone with a sufficiently developed sense of irony comes along.


Galanthus 'Fanny'


Galanthus 'Big Boy'

Coming 'home' is almost always guaranteed to extinguish any glow of warmth that has, against the odds, been kindled in my increasingly ample breast. On this occasion, my evanescent glimpse of happiness was snuffed out by a particularly surly greeting from my wife (who has been pushed beyond the brink of reason and reasonableness by me and whom I do not in the least blame) and an email from an old friend, announcing that his partner had died after four years with motor neuron disease. 'It is good news really although it does not feel like it yet', he said, and I wanted to cry.

In 'The World According to Garp', John Irving describes how his fictional mother's funeral is hijacked by her feminist friends and he ends up dressing in drag to gain admission. I have thought about whether it is fair to write about the private tragedies of friends in a public forum, however unlikely it is that anyone will ever read this. In the end I decided that John - 'no man is an island' - Donne had it right when he argued that we are all diminished by and perhaps complicit in every tragedy and that speaking out is the right thing - or at least an acceptable thing - to do.

As it happens, X's death (or rather her illness) is one of a trio of tragedies, soon to be joined by a fourth, that I have become aware of in the last couple of weeks. Motor neuron disease is a foul condition, reducing most sufferers to mentally alert prisoners in a physically inert shell. By the end of her life, X retained control over only a single muscle in her body - that in one eyelid. Before the onset of the disease, X was a brilliant and successful linguist. Her partner, my friend, nursed her in their home, at great personal cost, throughout her illness with a devotion that beggars belief.

The second death was reported to me by a mutual friend of mine and the man whose son, T, had died. The boy, who I suppose must have been five or six, had been diagnosed at birth with severe epilepsy and was given a prognosis measured in weeks or months. In the end, as the moving email circulated by his father described, he died quietly within a few yards of his oblivious parents who could not literally chain themselves to his bedside and so were not there when he had his final seizure.

A few days ago I had an email from another friend, reporting that a man I knew slightly had committed suicide. I had stayed with this man and his male partner in the USA a few years ago and had been shown immense hospitality, though I was practically a stranger at the time. Who knows what S was thinking when he shot himself dead but I am reasonably confident that his sexuality, or more precisely, the dissonance his sexuality caused in him and those he was close to, was to blame.

How on earth is one supposed to react to these three events? A brilliant academic, in the prime of her life, is struck down by motor neuron disease and gradually reduced to a brain-in-a-jar, so that her death, when it comes after years of suffering, is universally perceived as a 'blessing'. A boy dies, silently screaming for help, which his parents, only a few yards away, are too late to give. He never knew fully what it is to be human. A young man, tortured by who-knows-what demons, walks into the woods and blows his brains out, leaving a note for his bewildered and unsuspecting partner.

None of these events is surprising, if one is a materialist. In fact, one expects the temporary defiance of entropy that we are pleased to call 'life' to end miserably and without warning. The single most mystifying aspect, to me, of this sordid, everyday story of human affairs, is the final sentence of the email from T's father, a man who was once a good friend of mine: 'Blessed be the name of the Lord.'

There is really nothing funny about any of this, yet I am irresistibly drawn to the (true) story told by the philosopher Daniel Dennett about a recent brush with death. He had a major heart attack and survived only thanks to some cutting-edge and swift surgery. While he was recovering in hospital he wrote an article designed in part to disarm the inevitable suggestions that he had recanted his atheism while in extremis. Some of his friends, he wrote, had said they'd prayed for his recovery. 'Thank you.' He was too polite to reply. 'Did you sacrifice a goat too?'

Dennett is one of those supremely rare people - how I envy him - who really gets how the world works and yet seems to be having an enormous amount of fun. My old friend W, confronted with the unspeakable and ineluctable reality of human experience, has tied himself in knots to deny the truth that is staring back at him from his late son's blank eyes. We are animals. We are born without reason; we live without purpose and we die, alone. Materialism is austerely beautiful but it isn't comforting.

A Christian nation

2011-12-19T15:25:00.000-08:00

I suppose that if your infant son had been born disabled and died very young, in pain and incomprehension, without having experienced any of the few joys that human experience makes possible, you'd find it hard not to agree with the officially sanctioned priests that God moves in mysterious ways. Not having had this experience, I can only marvel at David Cameron's faith and his determination to impose it on those of us less blessed in the suffering department. To the extent that the BBC website's comments, as edited, are a barometer of British public opinion, I suppose that this, from a Muslim, is representative or at least reflective of what Muslims in Britain think.

“It’s very seldom I get excited by what our prime minister has to say and this is one of those times. As Muslims we also believe in the Bible. We believe in the teachings of Jesus. Not only that, but in the teachings of all the biblical prophets, including Moses in the Torah. So this is something that we feel is absolutely in tune with the Muslim thinking. We have to base our behaviour according to scripture, God’s revealed message.

Would that be the same Moses who insisted his troops return to the scene of their recent victory against the Midianites, kill the married women and enslave the girls in order to rape them? Or is that just an allegory? If so, what's the message, chaps? Assuming that there is only one Moses in the Bible and that the Bible is 'God's revealed message', the only appropriate question to pose the author of this unctuous comment is presumably: 'are you an insane pederast or are you just a Muslim?'

Some of my friends wonder whether I get too worked up about religion. My challenge to them is to defend the right of Sheik___ to express the opinions published on the BBC website and teach them to my kids. No doubt there is a legal defense, but do you really believe there is a moral one?

Extinguishing the darkness

2011-12-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

'But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?'

Kurt Vonnegut

The late, dead Steven Jay Gould, self-indulgent self-promoter, too clever by half, not clever enough to make the cut, is most famous in academic circles for being a co-author of one of the most highly cited papers in evolutionary biology. Described by one of his critics as 'a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but...one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists', Gould was a brilliant essayist but he allowed his science to be dictated or revealed by what he wished were true. Because he thought that natural selection is a sort of Thatcherite plot to subvert the true teachings of The Founder, he devoted most of his career to exaggerating the importance of other evolutionary mechanisms and modes, most notoriously 'punctuated equilibrium'. His paper, 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm' is therefore almost always cited in order to mock the straw man it attempts to set up. The paper's chief virtue is that it introduced to a wide audience an arcane but useful architectural term.

A spandrel is the space necessarily created when two or more arches meet as in, say, a church roof. In architecture the space often becomes a vehicle for ingenious triangular artworks and Gould used it as a metaphor for biological traits that have the appearance of design but are in fact unavoidable design consequences of other 'decisions' that natural selection has taken. Gould's critics pointed out (perhaps deliberately missing his point, but then it's hard not to kick a man when he's down) that biological spandrels are always eventually co-opted by natural selection making the adaptation/spandrel distinction distinctly fine. Having come of age, evolutionarily speaking, when this debate was still current (the Spandrels paper made its obligatory self-immolating appearance in my PhD thesis), I was excited recently when I observed what I'll wager is a never previously noticed spandrel being co-opted not once but twice in the service of furthering the aims of its successive hijackers: toads and me.

In my greenhouse there are rows and columns of pots sat upon the floor, packed together as tightly as possible. Viewed from above, the pots are square and there are no spaces between them but they taper slightly towards their bases so that they will stack easily. This structural quirk creates between each group of four adjacent pots an invisible (from above) and wasted (from the perspective of efficient floor-space use) square-based pyramidal void. A spandrel, literally and figuratively, in other words. Toads love these voids because they are moist, warm and replete with slugs. I love toads because they love to eat slugs. Now, it often happens that I am working my way through a group of pots, weeding them. Often I lift a pot and disturb a toad, which has been whiling away the daylight hours snoozing in its niche. I smile benignly at the toad; it frowns at me and shuffles into an adjacent crevice. Inevitably this process is repeated, sometimes dozens of times, until eventually there are no more niches. If toads did not eat slugs things would then get ugly for the amphibian but in point of fact I simply pick it up and move it back to the other end of the group of pots. We part, if not as friends, certainly on cordial terms.

So Christopher Hitchens is dead after a long, public illness, stoically borne, pathetically traduced (see here for a reason, should you need one, to immediately venture forth and start summarily executing Daily Mail readers), lovingly lamented (see here) and tragically ending in another victory for cancer. Hitchens numbered among his friends the very brightest and best of our times, all of whom will say something to us of what he meant to them. What then can a not-even-acolyte say in farewell and in gratitude to an intellectual hero of Hitchens' stature? I say this: thank you for shining a light into the dark spaces where superstition lingers on this, the eve of our species' emancipation from fear. Thank you for seeing that your adversaries, retreating bruised from their latest headlong encounter with 'the wall', will eventually run out of spandrels in which to cower. Thank you for articulating the outrage that so many of us feel at the liberties we permit prophets, priests and other perverts to take with our children. You who, of course, can no longer hear must have died knowing how much we will miss you.

Does Jesus keep you safe at night?

2011-12-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my two children occupy a tectonically stable summit in my geologically active mental landscape. There are few things I would not do for them and none that involve no less effort than having a chat with a man that probably has more incremental influence on how they turn out than I do (I've given them some genes and can't take them back). Mr Baker is the Head Teacher of Christchurch School, a Voluntary Controlled State School in Bradford-on-Avon, where we live. Within quite strict limits, he is free to decide what my kids are taught and how.

In the UK, education to the age of 18 is free, although there are fee-paying schools that provide a better education than the State can afford. When my wife and I chose the school that our kids attend, our choice was limited by our finances and the schools to which we were entitled to apply. In practice there was a single option, the alternatives being so ghastly that they literally made my skin crawl. For the record, both Corinne and I (though I speak only for myself) are happy with the education they are receiving and there are few other schools we (I'd) rather they attend, money notwithstanding.

The most and best we can do for them as parents is to put them in the way of opportunities to learn and hope that they grasp them. It's also my view that there they should be protected, for a while longer, from exposure to some unavoidable but deferrable truths about the world they were born into. I don't want them to watch hard core porn, for example, or to join the local chapter of the Hitler Youth. I expect most of the parents of my childrens' peers would agree. When I suggest, however, that I don't think it's appropriate to teach five year-olds that human sacrifice is an appropriate way to expiate sins (the disgusting fantasy at the heart of Christianity), I am regarded as a troublemaker. Hence my meeting with Mr Baker. I'd been relaxed, by my standards, about the nonsense that primary school teachers spoon into children until Pieter came home one day and vouchsafed the following information:

'Daddy, did you know that Jesus keeps us safe at night?'

'No.' I said, 'Who told you that?'

'Miss ___', he said. 'We were asked to say something about night and ___ said "Jesus keeps us safe at night" and Miss ___ said "Yes, that's right."'

'Pieter', I replied, 'lots of grown-ups don't believe there is any god.'

'Oh, yes there is, daddy', he said, very seriously.

Prompted by this conversation, and steered into a diplomatic approach by my wife, I'd requested a meeting with Mr Baker to discuss the way in which our kids are taught about religious belief. Arriving uncharacteristically on time I was about to ring the bell when Mr Baker hove into view through the glass door. I waved, assuming he'd recognised me; he opened the door for me, turned his back and asked the receptionist 'So who am I supposed to be seeing, then?' It was an easy gaffe to make but an avoidable one. Never mind; he shook my hand, showed me into his office and asked what he could do for me. 'Please don't poison my children.' Would have expressed succinctly what I wanted to say but I wanted to make him feel the impotent pain of a father watching his childrens' minds being stolen.

I began by explaining that I'm an atheist with kids, who happens to live in Bradford-on-Avon. We decided to send our kids to Christchurch because it is the best school available to us. None of the alternatives have a different policy to teaching religion; all have a 'Christian ethos'. What, I wondered aloud, could a parent in my position do (I had some ideas)?

Mr Baker earned my respect by acknowledging my difficulty and stating his own, that he is answerable to a board of Governors, a third of whom are appointed by the Church-of-England church that owns the land and buildings. He said he'd been reprimanded for removing the teaching of 'spirituality' from the 'RE - religious education' syllabus; that one of the governors had suggested that all children attending the school should be prepared for 'confirmation' (into the Church of England); that there had been complaints following his decision to invite a local Muslim to lead a school assembly; that there had been opposition from some parents to the project, which the kids loved, of studying life in a Sri Lankan village, on the grounds that Buddhism is apparently rife in Sri Lanka. But when I pointed out that somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the world's population (the stats are very hard to come by and highly unreliable) is declared atheist and isn't it therefore a school's duty to bring this to the attention of children, he admitted that it hadn't occurred to anyone to set the study of religion in the context of a world in which billions have no god. RE, even in enlightened schools, consists in the study of faiths, not in the study of myths.

After I'd been in Mr Baker's office for about five minutes, there was a knock on the door. A little man in a tracksuit, whom I took to be a sports teacher, came in without waiting for an answer. Ignoring me, he said to Mr Baker 'there are four of us waiting for you'. I need 15 minutes said Mr Baker. The small man frowned and left. Mr Baker and I carried on talking and I gradually received the impression that I was being told that there is little he (Mr Baker) can do. I suggested giving a talk, with the permission of parents, to kids in their final year at primary school, about atheism. He told me that the deputy head is chairing a working group (including some parents) on the teaching of spirituality in the school. 'Can I be on it?' I asked. I'll need to check with Mark, he said. There was another knock on the door and the little man came back in, looking quite irate. 'There are five of us waiting for you now.' He said. 'Who was that?' I asked. 'Mark', said Mr Baker, 'the deputy head.'

I am going to become a thorn in the side of the forces of evil, who want to teach my children that Jesus died for them on the cross.

Cretin of the Week: John Gray

2011-09-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

It is ironic that the subjects I detested most at school –Latin, Mathematics and Modern Languages – are those I’d now find most usefulhad I mastered them. Of the three, it was for Latin that I reserved the mosthighly refined species of loathing, distilled drop-by-drop from the deep fractionatingcolumn of my hatred. I literally burned my books the day I was permitted, aged14, to drop it.

It’s all PO’s fault. PO was my first Latin teacher. Were hestill alive I should think he’d be about 130 but I suspect the worldcontains one fewer tyrants than it did in his too-long lifetime. PO was driveninto a puericidal rage by anyone incapable of declining Latin verbs to order.Since I tended to lose my way after amo, amas… I was on the receiving endof at least half of each lesson’s quota of sarcasm.

‘You little cretin!’ was PO’s favourite insult and heinvested the two syllables of the final word in that sentence with more venomthan a tobacco-chewing cobra could spit. Why a word that caused me so much childhood trauma has become my own insultof choice is mysterious but its deployment is up there with orgasmand the first glass of red wine of an evening in my personal hierarchy ofstress-busting devices. Since sex and booze are off the menu for now, I make noapology for abusing the C-word on Alphatuosity, a blog that owes its existenceto a superabundance of CRETINS and a dearth of cretin-hunters.

There, I feel better already.

John Gray: Cretin of the Week

Many religionists hold their beliefs sacred. That isto say, criticism of their religious beliefs is felt not intellectually but viscerally. What is more, a propensity to sacralize objects, totems and beliefs is a human universal and, probably an adaptation. This is why blasphemy, which ought to be a concept asantiquated as alchemy, was illegal in England and Wales until 2008 and remains a crime in Scotland. And also whyreferring to Muslims as goat-fuckers got Theo van Gogh murdered (by agoat-fucker).

John Gray doesn't understand this and so he thinks that beliefs don’t matter much to theistsand that, in attacking the foundations of those beliefs, atheists are not justfighting on the wrong front, they are fighting in the wrong war (see here). Hadhe said that the war cannot be won, I’d have reluctantlyagreed with him (because it is futile to try to reason someone out of a belief he was not reasoned into). But Gray's current preoccupation is with showing that atheism (which he seems to equate with humanism) is just another religion, science just another myth and myth just another prop, holding open the echoing spaces in our animal minds. His modus operandi involves stringing together a series of half-truths, apparently in the hope that enough of them will make a whole truth. But Gray's series departs further from sense with every term he adds.

'We tend to assume that religion is a question of what we believe or don't believe. It's an assumption with a long history in western philosophy...'

'When they attack religion [atheists] are assuming that religion is what this Western tradition says it is - a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.

'In most religions...belief has never been particularly important. Practice - ritual, meditation, a way of life - is what counts.'

'Myths [are] stories that tell us something about ourselves that can't be captured in scientific theories.'

'Myths can't be verified or falsified in the way theories can be.'

'I've no doubt that some of the ancient myths we inherit from religion are far more truthful than the stories the modern world tells about itself.'

'The idea that science can enable us to live without myths is one of these silly modern stories.'

'If Darwin's theory of evolution is even roughly right, humans aren't built to understand how the universe works.'

'Science has given us many vital benefits, so many that they would be hard to sum up. But it can't save the human species from itself.'

'Unbelievers in religion who think science can save the world are possessed by a fantasy that's far more childish than any myth.'

'[It's] only religious fundamentalists and ignorant rationalists who think the myths we live by are literal truths.'

'Evangelical atheists who want to convert the world to unbelief are copying religion at its dogmatic worst.'

'We'd all be better off if we stopped believing in belief.'

'What we believe doesn't in the end matter very much. What matters is how we live.'

Res ipsa loquitur, as PO might have said. I rest my case.

John Gray's ideas first came to my attention when I bought a copy of his book StrawDogs, an analysis of the human conditionthat makes Schopenhauer's seem all coyly optimistic. I bought the book becauseI’d read a review by Will Self, in which he described Gray as possibly the cleverestman in the world. Like many reviews, this one turned out to say more about itsauthor than its subject (see below). The article from which the statements above are taken is essentially a summary of Straw Dogs and to see why Gray deserves my inaugural Cretin of the Week award it is necessary to look more closely at the argument in that book.

The central claim of Straw Dogs is that humans are 'just' animals and that therefore belief in either progress or in our ability to manage our species' inevitable exit from life's stage represents not so much hubris as a hilarious category error. The book was widely reviewed and much praised. It was nominated as book of the year by J.G. Ballard, George Walden, Will Self, Joan Bakewell, Jason Cowley, David Marquand, Andrew Marr, Hugh Lawson Tancred, Richard Holloway and Sue Cook.

What fascinates me about this is that, by implication, it came as news to these critics that humans are 'just' animals. Why else would an insight that has been blindingly obvious for 150 years to anyone with a passing acquaintance with evolutionary biology be heralded as revolutionary? What really pissed me off about the book and its fawning fans, though, is that he gets Darwin almost completely wrong. A self-confessed bookish man, Gray has clearly read The Origin of Species but, like the Nietzche-reading imbecile played by Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, he hasn't understood it.

'Darwin teaches that species are only assemblies of genes, interacting at random with each other and their shifting environments.'

No he doesn't. Darwin had no knowledge of genes and famously made a dog's breakfast of attempting to rescue his theory of natural selection from the apparently fatal flaw of blending inheritance. Species are not 'assemblies of genes'. Species are notoriously difficult to define in a way that captures every example of the concept because 'species' is not a natural category. The units of which they are comprised, however, are organisms, not genes. Genes do not interact at random; in fact almost nothing (save creationism) could be further from the truth. Genes that get copied do so because they are exquisitely adapted to their environment, which consists mainly in other genes, with which they interact in a highly restricted fashion that has been shaped by eons of co-evolution. As an example of alphatuosity, this sentence is probably unbeatable. Except by the next three.

'Species cannot control their fates. Species do not exist. This applies equally to humans.'

Complete bollocks, to be blunt. Having (wrongly) informed us a few paragraphs earlier that species are assemblies of genes, Gray now says that they don't exist. This statement suits his argument but it is nonsense. The reason that 'species' is not a natural category is that lineages of organisms split, fragment and merge over time. A river delta is a more apt metaphor than a tree (which Darwin used) in picturing evolutionary history. The trouble is that where we draw the lines that demarcate a species is a matter of taste not biology. That is not at all to say, however, that species do not exist. It is a very unusual human being who is sexually attracted to chimpanzees and vice-versa. Some cichlid fish literally have eyes only for other members of the same species, which preserves distinct lineages ('species') until the lakes in which cichlids live become too murky for the fish to discriminate (here).

What Gray probably means is that natural selection does not act for the good of the species (naive group selection is still a common misunderstanding of Darwinism). The entity that is selected in natural selection is the gene. It is genes - not individuals, populations or species - that persist through generations and wax and wane in relative abundance. Because it is only in special circumstances, in highly social, intelligent animals that genes 'for' identifying with conspecifics can spread, Gray is right to argue that most species do not control their fates. Humans, of course, manifestly do influence the fate of the groups with which they identify, including all members of their own species.

Admittedly I have picked two particularly stupid excerpts from Straw Dogs to analyse but they illustrate that you'd be unwise to take seriously anything its author has to say on the consequences of Darwinism. In fact, as a result of his misreading of Darwinism, the whole of Gray's thesis is grounded in a non-sequitur. Not unlike the last Pope, Gray has woken up to the fact that humans are animals and he has broken this alarming news to the rest of the intelligentsia. In his excitement he has gone on to conclude, falsely, that fluctuating gene frequencies - aka evolution - somehow rule out the possibility of 'progress', a concept that itself is coherent only by reference to evolved human values. For good measure he declares culture incapable of altering the trajectory of its own evolution.

Bizarrely, having declared that the reification of species is a philosophical error, Gray has embraced the reification of a genuine myth: Gaia. I think it may be his enthusiasm for Gaia that has earned him the adoration of the chattering classes. Consider the following from Self's review of Straw Dogs.

'Gray doesn't provide a blow-by-blow account of how exactly Gaia will shrug our troublesome species off of her broad back, but shrug he certainly believes she will...'

Oh, well that's alright then. If the professor believes that Gaia will shrug us off, it must be true.

If all philosophical lives are a journey then Gray is aWandering Albatross, drifting the oceans of thought, alighting occasionally ona speck of idealogically solid ground but never for long. For this, at least, Iadmire him. The inability to change one’s mind in light of new evidence isperhaps the greatest obstacle – bar stupidity – to attaining wisdom with whichour evolved psychologies burden us. You’d have thought, however, that having moved from leftist to Thatcherite to Blairite to anti-capitalist to Gaian in about thirty years he’d have ahealthy disregard for the value of his own opinion by now.

Press '1' if you're suicidal. Press '2' if you're just thinking about it.

2011-09-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

The NHS (that's the National Health Service for non-natives - a medical care system that contrives to be simultaneously both free at the point of service and poor value for money). You couldn't make it up. Several weeks ago, in search of a free detox, I rang the number my GP had given me for our local NHS addiction treatment provider. There was nobody there. Now I'm neither paranoid nor delusional but, if I were, I suspect this would have been enough to push me over the edge. When I rang back later, a nice lady asked me some questions about my drinking, which I answered honestly.

'Right, then,' she said, 'we'll be in touch'.

'About what?' I asked.

'About making an appointment for you to come in for an assessment.' Shit-for-brains, she didn't add.

'But you've just assessed me.'

'No, that was the pre-assessment.'

'So, when will you contact me?'

'Oh, about two weeks, I should think. There's a bit of a waiting list.'

I hung up. So you have to get in a waiting list to receive a phone call to make an appointment to go to Trowbridge to get assessed to determine whether you need admission and this is after you've just told someone you drink two bottles of wine a night. After some reflection I realised that this is in fact a brilliant stratagem for meeting targets. Make your drug addicted patients wait long enough for help that they've requested shortly after hitting rock bottom and they mysteriously disappear from the waiting list. Often under the wheels of a train. Problem solved. Ingenious!

As some of you know, I've been through two pyschiatrists, hell, a clinical psychologist, a course of Chlordiazepoxide and several dozen Baclofen tablets since this farcical phone call. So when I received the follow up call yesterday (the one about making an appointment to get assessed) I had to exercise all my self-restraint not to unleash my formidable arsenal of the lowest form of wit.

'It's OK.' I said. 'I went private.'

'So we can close your file?'

'Yes.'

'Oh good. Well done.'

I'm not sure whether the nurse was addressing this closing remark to me or to herself. Either way, I'm in the statistics as another triumph for the NHS.

Some of my best friends are American: taking pride in prejudice

2011-09-08T03:47:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-Semitic/a racist/homophobic/a misogynist. Some of my best friends are Jewish/black/gay/women. Who are you kidding? The minute you utter the sentence 'some of my best friends are...[enter despised group of choice]', you are identifying your unfortunate friends as the exceptions that prove what you take to be a rule. Moreover you are identifying an individual with a group and applying all manner of conscious and unconscious labels that you associate with the group to the individual. You are saying, in effect, that you like your friend, in spite of his membership of the group.

There are two distinct errors here. The first is that the labels are likely to be prejudices - opinions formed on the basis of insufficient evidence or none at all. The second is that you are unconsciously assuming that all the labels apply to every individual in a group. I see that you are nodding sagely, agreeing that prejudice is a very bad thing and noting that you yourself have never uttered The Sentence. I'll bet you have, though, unless you belong to a particularly maligned minority: Americans.

'Fucking Americans!' Are you really telling me you've never uttered or muttered these words? Everyone I know has a story that illustrates the alleged stupidity, parochialism and inflated sense of worth that characterizes Americans. My own favourite was told to me by an Australian guy who'd chatted up a pretty student at a bus stop in Harvard. After a while, she said she didn't recognise his accent. 'Oh, I'm Australian' he said. Her brow furrowed. 'Australia? West or East Coast?'

The thing is, some of my best friends are American. What's more, most of them live in Dumbfuckistan (aka the Republican voting States, aka Jesusland), as distinct from the Democrat States (aka the United States of Canada). See here. In fact, I have a nasty feeling that not only did some of them vote for George Bush, they actually have no regrets about doing so.

What disturbs me about this is that I sometimes feel the urge to apologise for this lamentable lapse of taste (liking some Americans) and that this urge is often strongest when my interlocutor is highly educated. The thing is, it's fashionable to hate Americans and has been for as long as I can remember.

How 'we' (educated, Western Europeans) chortle over polls suggesting that one third of Americans believe that aliens have visited earth (here) or that 24% of Republicans think that Barack Obama might be the antichrist (here) or that 55% of them believe that creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught alongside evolution in public schools (here).

We tend to forget that a clear majority of the world's top scientists are based in the USA (63% of the top 1% most highly cited scientific publications are written by scientists in the USA), that it boasts 15 of the top 20 universities in the world (the previous two statistics here) and that philanthropy levels in the USA are more than double those in the UK, Germany or the Netherlands (here).

When we mutter 'fucking Americans', what we really mean is 'fucking ignorant Americans' and educated Americans could and do justly mutter the same thing about the ignorant elsewhere in the world. Especially in France (here). What is particularly characteristic of ignorance in America is that it goes hand-in-hand with being a Christian (see this delicious article, which describes the National Academy of Sciences - 93% of whose members are atheists - as 'one of the most poisonous organizations in America' and 'a nest of atheists', thus neatly refuting the point it sets out to make). I shall expand on this point in another post. A lot.

Of course it is not very nice to be dismissive of the opinions of the ignorant but it is not prejudiced. By definition, the opinions of ignoramuses are uninformed and therefore worthless, except as anthropological curiosities.

Prejudice ought to be a matter for shame not pride, exactly in proportion to how educated you believe yourself to be. It also behoves us to learn to recognise our own prejudices before they come back to bite us. One man's prejudice is another man's clear-thinking analysis of the facts. How you react, for example, to the research suggesting that Askenazi Jews are more intelligent than other races (here) or that Africans are less intelligent than Caucasians (here) says a great deal more about your prejudices than it does about your lack of them.

'Prejudiced' is the pejorative adjective of choice of the terminally prejudiced.

There's an old joke about a regimental sergeant major, tried beyond reason by a lippy cadet, shaking his swagger stick at the cadet and bellowing 'Smith, there's a SHIT at the end of this stick!' To which Smith replies 'Yes sir! Not this end sir!' Show me an accusation of prejudice and nine times out of ten I'll show you a stick with a shit on the end of it. Not the pointy end.

Uncommon sense

2011-09-02T14:48:00.000-07:00

The Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft (see his website here) writes about the existence of god and has a large following. Google returns about 470,000 results from a search on his name. His writings are a splendid example of alphatuosity and as good a place as anywhere to start my crusade.

Most arguments for the existence of God turn out to be variants of one of three ideas: the argument from first cause, the argument from design and the argument from natural law. In this post I am going to discuss only the first of these, which Aquinas was the first to articulate. The argument says that all effects have causes in a chain that extends back into history until we arrive at the First Cause. The first cause is declared to be itself uncaused. It is a brute fact, stated as a premise of the argument. That's all there is to it. Aquinas was simply saying that there must have been a first cause, which we call God.

Aquinas's reasons for thinking the premise reasonable are subtle and ingenious, especially when viewed in the context of what passed for an argument elsewhere in the 13th century. He didn't know about atoms and quarks and quantum mechanics and therefore couldn't have realised that it is very far from clear that all effects have antecedent causes or, at any rate, that these effects are independent of observation. The reason the argument fails, however, even if one allows Aquinas's unbroken chain of cause and effect, is that the premise - that there must be a first cause and we might as well call it god - is silly. For it begs the question that every thoughtful child eventually asks. Who made god? In Why I am not a Christian, Bertrand Russell disarms the idea with an analogy.

'It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindus view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, How about the tortoise? the Indian said, Suppose we change the subject.'

1. All effects have tomatoes.
2. The first tomato was a turnip.
3. Therefore turnips are ultimately responsible for all effects.

In this argument, 1 and 2 are premises. They are stated as facts, not to be disputed within the bounds of the argument. Point 3, the conclusion, is logically inescapable if the premises are accepted.

1. All effects have causes.
2. The first cause was God.
3. Therefore God is ultimately responsible for all effects.

Hopefully it is now clear that the difficulty with these arguments is not in the internal logic, which is inescapable, but with the soundness of the premises.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the fact that smart children spontaneously appreciate this flaw in Aquinas's great argument is sometimes taken as a reason to doubt that the flaw exists (what, that old argument?). This objection is truly feeble. If a fatal flaw in an argument is so obvious that untutored children appreciate it, surely that should be cause to doubt the argument, not the children?

I am not especially concerned here to establish the validity or falsity of the argument from first cause. So far as I am concerned, Russell's question about what the tortoise is standing on demolishes the argument. If you disagree with me and agree with Kreeft that it's tortoises all the way down, we are just going to have to park that disagreement for a time, while you go away and think about it.

What I am interested in is showing how alphatuists fool others, and perhaps themselves.

At the end of his essay, Kreeft approvingly quotes C.S. Lewis:

'I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself'.

There are two curious things about this quotation.

The first is that these words were written by G.K. Chesterton, not C.S. Lewis. Perhaps Kreeft felt in his bones that it was the sort of thing that CS Lewis might have written. Perhaps the error doesn't matter very much because C.S. Lewis certainly did have such intuitions about the universe. He wrote, for example, in Encounter With Light, the unanswerable and moronic question:

'If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?'

and, in Miracles,

'How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?'

A better question might have been 'How come natural selection didn't expel such idiotic alphatuists very early in its history?'

The second odd thing about Kreeft's use of the phrase is his evident approval of the notion that gut instincts are a good guide to the truth. He makes this point explicitly at the start of his essay when he says that the First Cause argument is 'basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical'.

Appeals to intuition and common sense are frequent in alphatuosity. Practitioners regularly encourage their disciples to trust their intuitions even, or especially, when they conflict with reason. You do not have to be an evolutionist to see why intuition is a terrible guide to the truth, though it helps to have a grasp of how natural selection works.

Consider for a moment the theory of relativity. According to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower time passes, relative to an observer at rest. So if you get into your starship and whizz off to Mars at light speed, you'll have aged a little bit less than your friends back home when you return. If you spend decades rushing very fast around the galaxy, like Lieutenant Ripley in the Alien movies, you will return to find that your children have grown old and died before you get home. Does this make sense? If it does then perhaps you are a genius on a par with Einstein, whose counter-intuitive insight makes him one of the most revered figures in the history of science. Or what about quantum mechanics? Is Schrodinger's cat alive, dead or undead? Or, bringing the debate back down to earth, can a gene for tasting great to predators spread? Yes it can.

Common sense is in ordinary language the name for the rules of thumb we use to evaluate minute-to-minute decisions in life. It works really well because ancestors whose rules of thumb encouraged them to discuss vegetarianism with the saber-toothed tiger did not leave descendants. Our ancestors never faced situations in which they were traveling at warp factor nine, nor did their survival depend upon an appreciation of the quantum mechanical events 'occurring' in the subatomic particles of which they were composed, Common sense is therefore silent on these issues and it requires a huge intellectual effort to grasp, let alone manipulate the equations that govern these counter-intuitive truths.

The argument from first cause is a historical curiosity that gives us a glimpse into the frightening minds of our not-very-distant ancestors. Aquinas, enlightened by the standards of his day, also wrote 'Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.' As Richard Dawkins put it succinctly in The God Delusion, 'nice man'.

Whereas Aquinas had an excuse for being a complete wanker, Peter Kreeft does not. Whereas G.K Chesterton (just about) had an excuse for thinking that feeling something in your bones is grounds for rejecting the entire post-enlightenment scientific enterprise, you have no such excuse. If you listen to the siren calls of alphatuists who command you to obey your intuitions, you are destined to founder on the unforgiving reefs of reason. The truth, as Fox Mulder so rightly said, is out there. Go find it. Or if you really still want to believe in God, here are 666 reasons to do so. Thanks again to R, the source of all interesting factoids and websites for directing me to the link.

High and dry

2011-09-02T01:42:00.000-07:00

Another week, another mind-altering substance. This one is called Baclofen, an anti-spasticity agent that has been around for years and has been used primarily to control the symptoms of MS and cerebral palsy. A cardiologist, Olivier Amiesen wrote Le Dernier Verre, published in English as The End Of My Addiction, about how Baclofen 'cured' his alcoholism.

Baclofen is a GABA (gamma aminobutyric acid) receptor agonist, that works by binding with GABA receptors in the cell membranes of neurons, opening potassium channels via a series of intermediate metabolic steps and thereby inhibiting the release of certain neurotransmitters. Why that in turn reduces alcohol cravings remains in the realms of speculation.

I've finished my course of Chlordiazepozide, so the number of psychotropic substances I ingest each day is stable at four. Since three of these have anxiolytic properties, a pot-toking jellyfish probably suffers more anxiety in the course of a bad day in the plankton than I do in an average week. My new psychiatrist cheerfully told me that he is using me as 'a sort of a guinea pig' because the Medical Research Council has recently declined to fund a full scale clinical trial into the efficacy of Baclofen in addiction treatment so, for the moment, he must rely on anecdotal evidence from his patients.

Clutching his prescription in my sweaty hand, I paid another visit to Bliss (the pharmacy, not the state of mind), handed over £12 and swallowed my first dose. At this rate of expenditure on pharmaceuticals it will take me 32 years to spend as much as the Priory would have charged me for a month's stay. I may not be a financial analyst of the first water but I know a bargain when I see one and Baclofen is definitely up there with Sainsbury's own-label Chianti and the flame-haired masseuse at the Hotel Lipka in Montenegro.

Speaking of the Priory, a friend(1) has alerted me to the entertaining factoid that 'the Priory chain was sold to a bunch of US private equity sharks, Advent International, which specialize in “mid-cap growth companies” (addiction is a fine growth business, of course)'. I worked for a few years in the leveraged buyout group at JP Morgan and became accustomed to going on site visits, during the course of which we observed soon-to-be-made-redundant wage slaves going about their futile working lives. This activity was referred to as 'kicking the tyres'. Presumably Advent's executives got to kick the retards before they handed over the wonga to the Priory's previous owners...wait for it...RBS.

Boarding the train back to Chippenham my new drug was immediately put to a stern test by the bloke who sat next to me, sipping beer from a can all the way. I was trying to read a book by the wonderfully euphonious philosophical quartet Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle, the first and third of whom argue that qualia (the 'what it is like' of sensations) do not exist. I can assure them that the beer quale not only exists, it has real effects in the brains of addicts like me.

But this blog is meant to be about alphatuosity, so let me present you with a fine example, taken from the Priory's leaflet on alcohol dependency, on display in the waiting room above the machine dispensing free coffee (an addictive substance on which, according to John Walsh of The Independent, the average Brit now spends more per annum than on utility bills - see here).

Is alcohol dependency a disease?

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease. People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink. The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely.

Alcohol dependency is described in medicine as a 'morbid process'. Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated.

Let's briefly but critically appraise this lovely example of complete horse shit.

It has a cause, a symptom and is treatable - so it has all the characteristics of a progressive disease.

Right. So love is a disease, is it? It has a cause (meeting someone with whom you experience mutual sexual attraction), a symptom (several actually, all mind-altering) and is treatable (by marriage). The non-sequitur (see this splendid cartoon series for daily illustrations of the concept) is an essential weapon in the armoury of alphatuists. The method involves making simple, inarguable claims, then drawing invalid but superficially plausible conclusions. I believe in God. I needed a parking space. I prayed that one would be available. There was a parking space just where I needed it. Therefore God exists.

People who are dependent on alcohol lose control of how much and how often they drink.

True but then people who are dependent on oxygen lose control of how much and how often they inhale. The true-by-definition statement is another hallmark of alphatuosity. The point of treatment for alcohol addiction ought to be to enable an addict to regain control. Telling an alcoholic that he cannot control his drinking is like telling an explorer he cannot head east from the North Pole. It is true but useless. The alcoholic, like the explorer, needs to know something that is true but not trivial.

The only effective remedy to is to stop drinking completely.

The argument from authority is very powerful. The above sentence is untrue. Many heavy drinkers and some (but very few - see here - alcoholics) learn to moderate their consumption without stopping completely. Presented to suggestible individuals, in a leaflet published by a respected psychiatric hospital, however, it is treated my most readers as being the gospel truth. Ordinary people will do truly appalling things if instructed to do them by an authority figure (see here for a description of a classic series of experiments by Stanley Milligram in which volunteers complied with instructions to administer fictitious electric shocks to a 'subject', who was in fact an associate of Milligram). Alphatuists know this and will often abuse positions of authority by asserting useful falsehoods as undeniable. The key to the gates of heaven are to be found beneath that bulge in my cassock, little boy.

Put simply, it may kill you if it is left untreated.

Life is a morbid process. Metabolism leads inexorably to death. The point is not that alcoholism 'may' kill you if it is not treated. The point is whether or not the small quota of life each of us experiences is enhanced or diminished by alcohol. It's a moot point and one on which the Priory's leaflet is silent.

Because the Evening Standard is now free I picked up a copy at Marble Arch tube station yesterday, which is why I know that 'shopping mall bosses are shocked at staff who cannot read or write' (see here, if you must - the article is journalism at its most tawdry). Why the bosses are shocked is not explained but one sometimes wonders whether the illiterate are not the lucky ones.

No doubt Advent International will meet its IRR target for the Priory acquisition. My friend is right. Addiction treatment is a growth industry, one driven more by credulity than greed.

(1) It's odd but true that 95% of the interesting factoids I know have been vouchsafed to me by, at most, 5% of my acquaintances. I am not blowing smoke up the arse of this guy (although I suspect he'd enjoy it if I did) when I say that he is responsible for a clear majority of the 95%.

Psychotropic drugs and the cult of AA

2011-08-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the only good thing about being a depressed alcoholic is that I get to take a lot of psychotropic drugs without fear of prosecution. My daily cocktail currently includes Venlafaxine (a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor that acts on two separate neurotransmitter groups), Mirtazipine (a noradrenergic and seratonergic antidepressant), Zopiclone (a non-benzodiazepine hypnotic agent), Chlordiazepoxide (an anxiolytic benzodiazepine derivative with anticonvulsant, sedative, and amnesic properties) and a line of coke with my cornflakes. I also take strong vitamin B complex tablets, pills to control my hayfever and Diclofenac for the gout that plagues me from time-to-time, but I don't think they count as psychotropic. Floating on the mild high induced by the soup of pharmaceuticals bathing my few remaining neruons, I could have strolled through the recent riots in Tottenham without a flutter of anxiety troubling my chemically lobotomised brain. Until very recently I was also drinking between two and three bottles of red wine a night (that's about 205 units a week, rather more than is generally recommended).

It's a minor fucking miracle that anything resembling Tom Mitchell materialises from the pharmaceutical fog when he wakes up each morning and stumbles downstairs to make a mug of tea. Ask any honest psychiatrist how and why each of the drugs listed above works and the answer will involve an expressive shrug and some stuff about molecules binding to receptors. In truth, contemporary psychiatrists work a bit like a monkey pressing buttons on a keyboard, a few sequences of which release treats if pressed in the correct order. They know that the sequences have certain effects; they understand that pressing the keys sends certain signals to the computer's processor but beyond that you may as well ask the monkey what's going on for all the coherence of the answer you'll get. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that mediaeval apothecaries operating using Paracelsus's doctrine of similars were as well informed.

It grieves me to report that I have drunk my last alcoholic drink. The final sip of the liquid that has been my lover, trusted friend, confidante and unfailing source of uncomplicated pleasure for 23 years passed my lips on Tuesday 23 August 2011, at about 11pm, when I was barely conscious and certainly unable to appreciate the poignancy of the moment. The following day I went to see a new psychiatrist (my psychiatrists have a half life of about 18 months) to discuss options for detox and rehab. For a variety of reasons this man's approach clicked with something in me and, when he asked when I'd like to start detox, I replied 'tonight'. The course of Chlordiazepoxide, which prevents seizures during withdrawal, that he prescribed expires tomorrow morning, after which I'm on my own, chemically speaking (except for the other psychotropic drugs, of course, but they have ceased to count, or work).

I have been dithering about this decision for a couple of months. My hesitation stemmed not just from the fact that I really, really didn't want to make it (true) but also because it is astonishingly difficult in the UK to get help quitting any addiction unless you are prepared to join a cult.

When I asked my psychiatrist (the one before the current one) for advice, she recommended admission to the Priory's 28 day 'Addiction Treatment Program' (ATP). For about £18,500 you get a supervised detox, a private room, three barely edible institutional meals a day and the opportunity to participate in an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) 'fellowship' group. AA's approach is based in the so-called 12 step method, which is a truly terrifying set of instructions for brainwashing highly vulnerable and often desperate addicts.

See for yourself:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Allow me to paraphrase.

1. Take a vulnerable subject and persuade him that he is worthless, dirty and spiritually dead.
2. Into the void you have created slip a convenient substitute - God (our God).
3. Hit the poor bastard with the sucker punch - he can never leave because, if he does, he will immediately go to hell (aka step 1).
4. Go forth and spread the word.

Now I knew some of this at the time my psychiatrist suggested the Priory and I said that I didn't really think that an approach that required me to relinquish control over my fate to a higher power was destined to work with me, a monist, a materialist and an atheist.

Did she immediately see that I was right and suggest other approaches? Did she hell. She asked me to keep an open mind (see my earlier post on the real meaning of such a request) and suggested I talk to one of the 'experts' on the ATP. This I agreed to do (psychiatrists wield tremendous authority). The lady I met was lovely. Inarticulate and severely screwed up but sincere and lovely. She told me that yes, there is a lot of talk about God and a lot of evangelising but 'many' participants think of the fellowship as their 'higher power' and wouldn't I consider just taking the bits of the program I wanted and ditching the rest? She even knew an atheist (only the one but who's counting?) who was still 'with the program' after a decade. How could I dismiss it without having so much as attended a meeting, she enquired? I swear, this woman could have taught the Reverend Moon a thing or two.

AA should be banned. Is most respects I am a believer in the motto caveat emptor. If I offer you a bottle of snake oil for £100 (or £18,500) and you are stupid enough to hand over the wedge, that is not a matter in which the government should intervene. In this case, however, the victims of the scam are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and their resistance to BS is likely to be at an all time low at precisely the moment they are targeted by the AA cult.

'Hang on', I hear you say, '"victims", "scam", "BS", "cult"? Surely AA helps people, doesn't it?'

No. It doesn't. About 70% of the individuals who embark on a 12 step based ATP relapse. According to the government's own mental health guidelines (see here) 12 step methods do not have significantly different outcomes than other approaches to addiction treatment. The other approaches were CBT, couples therapy, psychoeducational intervention (whatever that may be) and 'coping skills'. Let me ram the point home. Going on a 'coping skills' course is statistically neither more nor less likely to help you successfully give up alcohol than AA.

Lest you think that I am making this up I have quoted verbatim the wording in a footnote (1).

I wouldn't be so worked up about all this if AA were not so all-pervasive in the addiction treatment industry. Out of curiosity, I checked out every residential rehab unit within 50 miles of my postcode. Every single one of them either uses a 12 step approach or is run by the Salvation Army.

Faced with the option of checking into a rehab clinic that requires you to leave your brain at the door or going it alone, I decided to go it alone. My beloved, wise and inspired sister had tracked down a psychiatrist at a Private Hospital in London. He specialises in addiction and had successfully treated a friend of my brother-in-law. Dear friends, let me tell you how much it costs to detox safely and without added institutional meals and charlatanry. £9 (sic). That's what the oh-so-aptly named 'Bliss Pharmacy' at Marble Arch charged me for the 52 Chlordiazepoxide tablets that Dr S prescribed. I'll admit that the one and a half hours I spent with Dr S set me back £380 but boy was it worth it.

Amy Winehouse recently became more famous than she could ever have dreamed of being in life by the simple if drastic expedient of dying. A friend sent me the link to her song 'Rehab', in which she explains her refusal to acquiesce to pleas that she should go there. If someone had had the wit and the wisdom to tell Amy that she didn't need to go to rehab, she might not have felt the need to rebel with such fierce and suicidal determination and she might still be alive today.

'Rehab' by Amy Winehouse

So what next? I'm detoxed. I've said 'no, no, no' to rehab. I'm not going to be in the 70%. I am semi-resigned to a life of sensory deprivation (the friend who advised me not to worry about this - 'masturbation is an art form' he said - is evidently better versed in this field than me). For the moment I'm working very, very hard and thinking as little as possible. One step at a time.

The explorer Benedict Allen became infamous for killing and eating his faithful pet dog Cashew, while lost in the Amazon rain forest. Cashew had become separated from Allen some days earlier when his canoe capsized but the dog had somehow tracked his master and was reunited with him. Several days later, delirious with malaria and hunger, Allen chopped the poor dog's head off and ate its flesh. I think I have an inkling how Allen must have felt, when he regained his sanity. He had killed his best and most faithful friend in the belief that it was absolutely necessary if he was to survive himself. Cashew's story has a sad denouement. A few minutes after eating him, Allen vomited up the dog's remains. Cashew died for nothing but Allen lived to tell the tale (in fact I heard the story from the man himself, when I was an undergraduate). Will the murder I have recently committed have a similarly pathetic ending?

By the way, I don't really do coke with my cornflakes. Just wanted to know who was paying attention.

(1) 'The clinical evidence revealed no significant difference between TSF [twelve step facilitation] and other active interventions in maintaining abstinence, reducing heavy drinking episodes when assessed post-treatment and at various follow-up points up to 12 months. TSF was significantly better than other active interventions in reducing the amount of alcohol consumed when assessed at 6-month follow-up. However, the effect size was small...and no significant difference between groups was observed for any other follow-up points.

No significant difference in attrition rates was observed between TSF and other active interventions in attrition post-treatment and up to 6-month follow-up. However, those receiving TSF were more likely to be retained at 9-month follow-up, although his difference was not observed at 12- and 15-month follow-up.

The quality of this evidence is high, therefore further research is unlikely to change confidence in the estimate of the effect.'

On balance

2011-08-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

Keep an open mind. The slogan of charlatans everywhere. What they mean, of course, is keep an empty mind and most of us are happy to oblige. Purveyors of homeopathy, crystal therapy and religion all understand that humans have a propensity to notice coincidences and imbue them with meaning but to fail to notice the absence of a coincidence. In other words, we are born superstitious.

My Dad was a practicing Christian in his youth but, like most thinking people, harboured his doubts. One day he prayed to God to give him a sign. Just at that moment a minor earthquake struck Pietermaritzburg in South Africa, where he was on his knees at the time. All doubts instantly expunged, Dad fervently implored God to desist. And, amazingly enough, God desisted.

I was close to my Dad and often, as a child, was plagued by nightmares that he had died (he was much older than most of my friends' fathers). The night before he actually died I dreamed of nothing at all. But suppose I had? It's not that unlikely. Let's suppose that I dreamed 100 times during my childhood that Dad had died, when in fact he had not. That's about 1% of the nights between my birth and my father's death. Assuming that the dreams were randomly distributed - not, of course, an accurate assumption but this is just an illustration - there's a 1% chance that I'd have dreamed he'd died the night before the actual event. And yet, if I'd actually had the dream on that night, I guarantee I'd be telling the story to this day. How remarkable, I'd be saying. It really makes you think, doesn't it? Well actually, no. It really makes you not think.

It is not a sign of intelligence or wisdom to insist on considering 'both' sides of every argument. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, we are technically obliged to be agnostic with respect to a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. No-one can prove its non-existence but that is not a reason to waste time worrying about its potential existence. There are sound independent reasons for doubting that such an orbiting teapot exists and the burden of proof lies with the teapottyists.

The dominant surviving religions are deeply embedded in the societies they have infected. We atheists are often chastised for demonstrating a lack of 'balance'. Surely all those people can't be wrong? Surely, I say, no-one is stupid enough to believe that all those people can't be wrong? Why must we treat with respect imbeciles who preach the existence of a loving creator-god who answers prayers? One wonders what the exploding penis of honey bees (see here) says about the mind of god. One wonders about the problem of evil (we have free will, which lets Big G off the hook). One wonders about the under-reported observation that prayers are not, in fact, answered. One wonders why anyone would treat the claims of advocates of the loving creator-god hypothesis with any less contempt than the claims of teapottyists. Respect, we are rightly taught, must be earned. So must contempt. Believers have earned it in spades.

A balanced view admits opinions that offer evidence for their veracity. It excludes opinions of the teapot-in-orbit-about-Mars variety, that depend for their acceptance solely on an appeal to the unproveability of the contrary viewpoint. I am all for balance. I am all for keeping an open mind. But let us take the advice attributed to many different wise men but perhaps most plausibly to Carl Sagan to keep an open mind but not so open that our brains fall out.

Why it matters

2011-07-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

When I was about ten years old the worst insults I knew were 'Jew' and 'homo'. I had no idea what either of these words meant but, if one of my peers was mean, I'd call him a Jew and if another was creepy I'd call him a homo. I remember vividly a game we played in our spare time, a variant of tag in which a tall, pretty boy chased the other kids around the playing fields while we shrieked 'homo! homo!' at him. If he succeeded in touching another boy, he was infected with homo-ness and became dirty. A few years later, when I'd understood that Jews have long been associated in Christian culture with miserliness and that 'homo' meant 'homosexual', I felt no shame at having misused these words. I felt smug about my new worldliness and my revulsion for Jews and homos deepened.

Those playground games were supervised by adults, men (mostly) and women whom our parents had charged with our education. So far as I recall, they never intervened. Never thought it appropriate to stop our game and rescue the unlucky child who had been labeled a homo. Never thought to ask us what we understood by this word. What were they thinking? What weren't they thinking? It wasn't until, as an undergraduate, I made a friendship with an openly gay man that I was forced to confront my prejudices. But for a chance encounter with a like-minded bloke in a bar in Cambridge, I might not yet have seen them for what they were. Anti-Semitism and homophobia remain ubiquitous and have resulted in contemporary times in atrocities ranging in scale from the Holocaust to the personal hell inflicted on gay men and women by intolerant societies.

Children learn with consummate ease but they forget only with extreme difficulty. Consider the simple case of handwriting. If well taught, kids pick up the basics in a matter of months and within a few years are able to record in arbitrary symbols, perhaps with a few spelling mistakes, any sentence uttered in their native language. Some children pick up bad habits, often from their parents, forming letters 'incorrectly'. If these habits are left uncorrected they can persist for life. This is hardly a big deal but nevertheless we practice correct letter formation with our kids in the knowledge that habits, good and bad, they learn now will stick. "Give me the boy until he is seven and I will give you the man."

Now I have two young children of my own. I would like to protect them from evil for as long as possible. This duty implies much more to me than keeping them away from paedophiles and other predators. Their mother and I are the guardians of the gateway to their developing minds. Childrens' minds are little engines for generating beliefs about the world. The raw materials for these beliefs are supplied by adults, specifically by the special class of adult known as teachers. Teachers therefore have a responsibility to avoid putting false beliefs into the minds of children. Parents must ensure that teachers discharge this responsibility and intervene if they do not.

Children in most schools in England no longer run around playgrounds screaming 'Jew!' and 'homo!' at one another, for which I am grateful. I am happy for my kids that they will never have to unlearn the false beliefs that Jews are miserly and homosexuals are creepy. I think this represents genuine moral progress (a large claim which I will try to justify in a future post) and is something our society should be proud of and should defend against the claims of moral relativists.

The deliberate reinforcement of some particularly vile false beliefs has been curtailed, then, but there are plenty of other false - and dangerous - ideas that we allow our children to be taught. Conspicuous among these are the tenets of the dominant religious ideology in the culture in which they are growing up. In the case of my children, this ideology is Christianity.

My five year old son came home from school the other day and declared that "God keeps us safe at night." How did he know this? I asked. "We had to say something about night and ____ said 'God keeps us safe at night' and Miss ____ said 'That's right.'" I told Pieter that some grownups disagree with Miss ____. For example, I said, "I think that there isn't any god." "Oh yes there is, Daddy." Shot back Pieter.

Whatever our respective views on Miss ____'s beliefs, we can surely all agree that god or God emphatically does not keep us safe at night and that it is downright dangerous to teach children that he does. We would be rightly angry if our children were taught that god keeps them safe when they are crossing the road or playing with a box of matches. Why then should we smile indulgently when they are taught something equally ludicrous but less obviously life-threatening? Why should we impose on our children the burden of having to unlearn later in life, when unlearning is so hard, the false beliefs that we are quite deliberately shoveling down their willing little throats now?

In England we still permit, even encourage priests to visit our schools and teach our kids false beliefs. I suppose that I should be grateful we don't live in Ireland or Italy, where the instilling of false beliefs is far from the only thing on a priest's agenda. If these beliefs were about the correct way to form the letter 'P' then I would do what my wife advises and relax. But they are not. They concern the existence of a particular God and claims that the foundations of human morality are to be found in the word of that God, as revealed by his prophets and recorded in the Bible.

What exactly are these claims? It's tough to pin down a Christian these days but it's hard even in the Church of England, to deny that at the core of Christianity is the belief that god sent his only son to earth and caused him, after a few years of ministry, to be tortured to death in order to redeem the sins of humans dead and yet unborn. Practicing Christians remember this god/man at least once a week, in a ritual that involves drinking his blood and eating bits of his flesh.

Let us be very clear about this. We are allowing our children to be taught that God's son had to die in mortal agony so that their sins could be forgiven by his father. And that Dad orchestrated the whole setup.

Of course, I think the evidence indicates quite clearly that god does not exist but, even if I did believe in god, why would I worship him if these are the sorts of ways he gets his kicks? More pertinently, why would I allow anyone to teach my children - too young still to argue back - to worship him?

The Bible is the core text of Christianity and is also, in part, held sacred by Jews and Muslims. To followers of all three religions it is a document to which we are meant to turn for moral guidance.

Moses' instructions to his army captains, who had been a bit sloppy in the matter of murdering the Midianites, is a celebrated example of Old Testament morality.

"Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Numbers, Chapter 31, Verse 13

Nor was Christ the loveable chap he is generally held to be. The New Testament is full of bad ideas too. Bertrand Russell pointed this out with mischievous wit in Why I am not a Christian.

"There is, of course the familiar text about the sin against the holy Ghost: Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come. That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

Whichever way you look at the truth of the claims made by Christians, it seems to me a grave moral error to allow these claims to be taught, as though they were beyond dispute, to young children. How can it be right that we care enough about correct letter formation to practice it endlessly with our children lest they develop bad letter-forming habits, yet are so indifferent to their moral well-being that we allow them to be taught that human sacrifice is an appropriate way to expiate sins?

This blog is my personal take on religion and its dangers. My starting point, as a human being and a father, is that religion does matter. We are allowing our kids to be taught Very Bad Ideas in ways that present them as being very good and I contend that, in allowing this, we are culpable of a crime against our children at least as great as that perpetrated by my parents and the teachers who allowed me to scream 'homo!' at a ten year old boy without confronting me with what I was saying.