Re-Kant-ation

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 haplodiploid hypothesis, and intensively promoted (not least by myself, while synthesizing the new discipline of sociobiology in the 1970s...), became firmly entrenched as an explanatory idea in studies of the evolution of animal colonies...It turns out, however, that this is wrong. Hamilton made three mistakes, which have led to the vitiation of his main thesis concerning altruism and the origin of sociality...these developments in sociobiology are in full progress, and surprises 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

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

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.

'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 how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.'

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

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

'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?

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.