Rant No.1 (I don't need this pressure on)

I destroyed my PC keyboard this morning, in the sense that I put it out of its misery. I picked it up and smashed it on the top of the monitor - keys everywhere.
Emma got it for me last Christmas because she was sick of looking at the stained and discoloured grey one I'd been using for years. Remember when all PCs used to be a sort of landing-craft grey? That's how old it was. But it worked Goddammit it worked!
The new one had been bugging me for a while - well, ever since Emma got it for me really, but it was a slick brushed steel effect wireless job so I stuck with it. And besides - Emma got it for me. But the keys were too close together and I was forever hitting the wrong ones. In particular I'd inadvertently hit the caps lock when I went for the A and since I caN'T TOUCH TYPE i'D NOT NOTICE UNTIL SEVERAL SENTENCES LATER. Like that. There's an Ebay thing you can go on called Fat Fingers where you can bid for things that have not sold owing to their posting having been miss-spelled. For example - anyone looking for, say, an aquarium will miss the fact that someone is trying to sell an aquaroium. You can find some real bargains apparently. Anyhow I resent the fact that they call it Fat Fingers. It's blatant discrimination against blokes like me with normal working man's fingers, and a refusal to accept the reality that we don't all have tiny tiny little girlie pin digits.
But that wasn't why I smashed it. I yelled at it for that but I didn't get violent. It was the fact that I couldn't log in sometimes that really began to get to me. Clearly it wasn't registering all my key strokes, but even that wasn't really it. What really did it was the message that came up. 'Did you forget your password?' it said. 'No' I fumed. 'I didn't. It's this bloody keyboard.'
Try again.
'Did you forget your password?'
'No I bloody didn't. Can you morons not countenance the possibility that it might be the technology that's at fault?'
'Did you forget your password? You're a bit stupid aren't you.'
'No I'm bloody not...'
Smash.

The thing that really gets me about this is the fact that the Tekkies who design this stuff - who presumably wrote that little message to come up when the wrong password was entered, could not allow for the fact that the machine rather than the user might be at fault. I've come across engineers like this before. My father was one, which possibly explains the violent atavistic reaction. 'A bad workman always blames his tools' he'd intone, helpfully, whenever I failed to accomplish a simple practical task. OK sometimes it was me that was at fault, but not always. But what got to me was that he could not conceive of the possibility of Bad Tools. They are unthinkable to the Tekkie, and hence not an option.
And the old key board worked fine, for years. And we threw it away because it was a bit grubby (frankly it was unsanitary - it had food in it). Clearly it's not impossible to make a keyboard that works. Why can't they do it then, the Tekkies? It seems like lately I'm coming across a lot of things (kettles, car stereos, socks) that I know from personal experience it is quite possible to make so that they function perfectly for decades. It's not exactly cutting edge technology, and yet  for some reason they don't seem to be able to do it any more.
I used to drive an old Lada (it was given to me free). I used the radio and tape deck pretty much all the time because I drive better with a little gentle distraction on in the background. It stops The Deep Thoughts forming. It never let me down - the radio I mean, not the Lada (although that did remarkably well too considering its age.) It was simple and reliable. Likewise that of the old Ford Escort estate I had after that. A simple to use, reliable car stereo is something that's been well within our grasp for quite some time now.
More recently I've had an MG ZTT (I know, don't get me started) and now I have a SEAT. In the MG the radio constantly tried to re-tune itself whenever the signal went a little off. I was yelling at it 'Leave it alone! It's not going to get any better!' but no. Try try try again, every ten seconds. Even worse was the setting where, if the signal from the station I was listening was not quite perfect, it went and chose another, seemingly at random.
'Is the sound quality of In Our Time not totally pristine and perfect? Well here's a blast of ludicrous junk from one of the local commercial stations. We're sure you'll find that an adequate substitute.'
No I won't! Bloody leave it alone!
At least I found the setting for that 'feature' and managed to turn it off. If I recall you had to press TTP, bass and FM at the same time while whistling the Marseillaise.
And now the SEAT has some sort of setting where every time you start it up the volume goes down to almost nothing and the Air Con blasts you out, drowning out whatever tiny sound the radio might be emitting. I have to turn the one up and the other down every time I start the car. Maybe there's some sort of factory setting I can change to stop it doing all these things I don't want it to. Who knows? But why should I have to? It should be obvious. I shouldn't have to go and find the manual to stop it doing a lot of unnecessary crap! Simple and straightforward should be the default. Tekkies can't conceive apparently of not wanting to read the handbook from cover to cover, or memorise a whole lot of permutations of switches and knobs in order to get the thing just to do the basic thing it was designed to do.
Our stove is like this if you switch it off at the mains. When you switch it back on you have to reset the oven by pressing these two buttons simultaneously and then that other one, or it won't work. Why? Surely the default state for an oven, when you switch it on, is to be able to use it to cook things. You shouldn't have to remember the combination.
And then, to cap it off there's the volume control (we're back in the car now) which, if you're not ever so delicate adjusting it (whilst driving along mind) suddenly turns the volume down to, say, 5 instead of up to 20, and then back to 12. Why? I understand it's a certain sort of design of dial and I'm sure it must have seemed very clever at the time, but... why? What's the point? Did they even think about it? Who employs these people?
These things do not happen by accident, as unintended consequences of some other feature of the appliance. Someone somewhere in  the design department has looked at these idiotic proposals and gone 'An oven that won't come on until you press some random combination of buttons. That looks like a great idea!' or 'Of course, we know much better than the actual driver what settings the car stereo/ventilation system should be at!' They've made an executive decision to install these pointless settings. Why?

Two theories come readily to mind - one is that the Tekkies are incompetent. They just haven't done enough research or thought about it enough, or tested it properly. I think this is quite possible. We're so obsessed with everything being new and exciting these days we don't seem to ask ourselves any more - But does it work? Is it reliable? Or failing that, is it easily fixed? We just go 'Ooh! Shiny new gadget. Ooh!' (stroke, caress)
'Does it work?'
'No idea. But isn't it shiny. And new.' (stroke, caress...)
This points to a second, more sinister explanation, which is that they're doing it on purpose, because after all, who wants computer hardware that lasts more than eight months? Haven't you upgraded yet?
Nobody's going to complain, or not enough of us anyway. We just chuck it out and get a new one. Which I suppose is what I've done (borrowed one actually, although I will have to get a replacement eventually.)
But at least I'm angry about it. All this stuff going into landfill. All this money I'm wasting buying new stuff (DVD players - that's another one - and you can't even nudge the arm to make it move on when it's stuck. You can't do anything except chuck it out and buy a new one. We've had five I think, in the last six years. One was a Wharfedale too so apparently that name counts for nowt these days) Am I alone in liking having stuff around that's been with me for donkey's years, grimy and clunky though it might be? Workmanlike is what I call it. It does the job. But can you get the parts?
I have a third explanation. Contrary to a lot of the whining going on at the moment about the price of things, most things (Electrical goods, clothes, you name it) are massively cheaper than they were a couple of decades ago. As I recall, the actual price ticket on, for example a half decent pair of jeans (£30) or a mid range stereo (£150 - £200?) hasn't changed but the figure on my pay cheque has increased by an order of magnitude (as a gardener £30 a week then vs £400 now) Maybe the new stuff is cheap because it's rubbish. Maybe the good stuff, which I'm sure you can still get if you know where to look, is also an order of magnitude dearer.
I doubt it actually. That may be part of the explanation but I think they're just happy to sell us flashy sub-standard junk and frankly they're really not that bothered what we think about them. Who could you complain to anyway, even if you could find the receipt? Customer Services? Don't make me laugh.
A lot of people born in the last couple of decades I suspect don't even know what it's like to own something reliable and well-made that's been around for years. (Wasn't that something they had to do in the post-war make-do-and-mend austerity times?)
Chuck it out then. Buy a new one. It's good for the economy after all, even if not for the environment or our moral well-being.

The End of Evolution

I lost a few friends one morning back in 1983. There was a debate about eugenics.

At the time I'd just broken up with my first proper girlfriend - a likeable enough girl, but who I didn't fancy and who I stayed with for two years because I was afraid no one else would have me. I was twenty-one.
Anyway - that's another story. Suffice it to say I was keen to make new friends and meet more women so when I met Chris Dance at work (with Brighton Parks and Gardens, picking the litter out of the municipal shrubs on the Whitehawk Estate) he seemed like exactly the type of guy to get me in there. He lived with a bunch of students in a shared house in Coleman Street, in the Hannover part of Brighton, north of Kemptown. He had travelled. He had a Swedish girlfriend. We went to see the Piranhas at what was then The Richmond (my first gig) and he introduced me to his house-mates and invited me along to one of their parties where we danced to the 12 inch versions of Dr Mabuse and Uncertain Smile. At the time it all seemed impossibly cool and trendy.

It was the following morning. We were all sitting around on the lounge floor in deep and meaningful conversation, and the subject of human evolution came up - about what we, the human race might look like in the future. As I recall the usual ideas came up - huge brains, puny little bodies, but then I piped up and said that wouldn't happen 'since everyone is allowed to breed these days'.
Things went very quiet after that. I was not invited back.

I'm not sure I realised what had happened at the time. I knew something had though. Somehow I'd blown it.
It was only much later I realised what it might have been.
At the time (and ever since) I was very interested in Evolution and Natural Selection. I tended toward the Stephen Jay-Gould end of the spectrum rather than the Richard Dawkins, but found the whole thing fascinating. I wasn't used to speaking up in public but on that occasion I felt qualified. Such nonsense people spout about evolution!
What I meant of course was that people were ‘allowed to breed’ in the same way as, for example, jet engines allow English people to spent the weekend in New York, or modern medicine allows people to live into their eighties. I didn't mean they were allowed legally or morally, and certainly not that I thought they shouldn't be allowed to breed, but that was how they took it, my new-found, right-on, politically correct, student teacher friends. If anything my view would have been (had they asked) that if we are no longer evolving, we should spend more on the NHS because of the increasingly unfit (in the Darwinian sense) population. I certainly wouldn't have been advocating eugenics. Quite the reverse.
If you're out there Chris, for the record, I wasn't a Neo-Nazi. Ok?

The idea that the human race is not evolving is hard to stomach for a lot of people though, but it's probably about right. For evolutionary changes to occur, genetically determined traits must affect the breeding success of their carriers. So for example, for the 'Big Head/Small Body' humans to evolve, people with big heads (and hence presumably big brains, hence greater intelligence) would have to leave more children than people with small brains. Likewise people with big strong bodies would have to leave fewer. As it stands, and without wanting be all elitist about it, the reverse seems to be the case. It's possible we're getting stupider rather than brighter.

I’ve given this some thought and it's hard in fact to think of any traits that have consistently lead to bigger families long enough to affect human evolution (except perhaps stupidity). I’d guess that those genes that tend to make us sick or disabled would tend to leave their carriers at a disadvantage but the more we are able to treat these inherited conditions, the more the carriers will be able to live ‘normal’ happy fulfilling lives and leave just as many descendants as everyone else, hence the increasing medical bill. Simple things like very premature babies and the kinds of complications that lead to caesarean section these days would have completely removed the genes that are associated with them from the gene-pool at birth. Now they don’t and to the extent that such complications are heritable, they are likely to increase. Does this mean that we should let these babies (and mothers) die in childbirth (as they would have until quite recently) for The Good of the Species? Obviously not, but we will probably have to provide more hospital beds and incubators as time goes on.
Disease resistance is another thing. Evolutionary biologists talk about the Red Queen hypothesis whereby “It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place”. The bulk of ordinary routine evolution does nothing but maintain the immune system - those without the requisite disease resistance being routinely eliminated leaving only those that do to pass on their genes. The immune system has to evolve to keep pace with the evolution of the pathogens, some of which, bacteria in particular, evolve very fast indeed. But to the extent that medical science can keep pace with the pathogens (with antibiotics etc) even this level of evolution is much less crucial than it would have been in earlier times and in other species. In any case it hardly changes our outward appearance (hence the ‘standing still’ part of the above quotation.)

Sexual selection is another possible source of rapid evolution – the classic example being the peacock’s tail – evolved in spite of being a liability in the hiding and running away department, it has reached its present proportions because the females liked it and selected the males with the biggest tails to have sex with. (It is probably an ‘honest signal’ of male fitness – only very fit males could get away with lugging that thing about in the jungle.)
Which human sexual characteristics have been consistently attractive over long enough periods of history to have affected our evolution? Men’s heights perhaps? Women’s breast size? Facial symmetry is often cited as particularly attractive to mates. Breast size is an interesting one because breasts don’t need to be anything like as big as they are, even in relatively modestly endowed women, merely to feed infants. Other mammals manage perfectly well with much smaller ones, so they’re probably as they are just to attract a mate. (This might cause offence to certain feminists but it is interesting that in most other showy species it’s the male that does all the showing off and looking amazing and the females stand about and choose. Humans are unusual in going for a much more even division of labour.) Penis size might be another one. Human penises (and presumably vaginas) are much bigger than other apes’ penises (and vaginas).
But generally it seems to me that what is considered attractive in men and women has varied so much through history and geography that it’s hard to come up with anything that has been so consistently and universally desirable that it might affect the look of the human race in anything but a very temporary and local way. Much of the increased overall average human size is probably mostly accounted for by improved diet, medicine and sanitation.
Psychological traits (to the extent that they are governed by genetics) are better candidates. Sociability, the ability to perform (in the sense of showing off – singing and dancing etc) or fight or be a good provider might be selected for but I see no particular improvement in any of this in the human race at large.

The reason for this ‘failure to evolve’ is in another characteristic of human society – the fact that sooner or later, almost all of us find someone to mate with, no matter how repulsive and socially inept (and under-endowed) we may be. By comparison, among gorillas and baboons for example, almost all the babies are the offspring of the one big dominant male. This is more or less true of all species that go in for large impressive males. In any species where you see vivid plumage and fins, big teeth and antlers, exotic singing and dancing and scrapping, observed from the sidelines by relatively quiet dowdy females, you can expect that the vast majority of males will never (and I do mean never) get the chance to mate (unless they're very sneaky) and all their genes will be completely lost to the gene pool. By contrast, almost all the females will get to mate.
Humans are different. For all our bragging and posturing and the very obvious sexual conquests of our alpha males, the fact is that the vast majority of us also find our beta, gamma and omega mates in due course and, on average, produce just as many sproggs in the long run, if not more.

At any rate, one thing is for certain - we can't rely on biology to make us better people. That we will have to do for ourselves.

Hate Crime

I've just been listening to a debate this evening on Hate Crime on Radio 4, the stimulus for which was the murder in 2007 of Sophie Lancaster and her boyfriend 'because they were Goths'.
The argument seemed to be about whether the definition of 'Hate Crime' should be widened to include a much larger variety of victimised groups than previously and the perpetrators treated differently as a result. The exchange quickly got bogged down in the validity of the categorisations of the various groups that victims might belong to, in particular, whether membership of the group could be seen as voluntary (which for example being a Goth arguably is, in a way that being a woman definitely isn't.)

I think this muddles up two separate things - on the one hand the status of the victims and on the other the motives of the perpetrators.
Taking the latter first, it seems to me that there are various motives for criminal acts - most obviously Material Gain, whether it be burglary, mugging or looting for example. A simple love of doing damage whether to people or things is another - from vandalism to picking a fight with a random by-stander.
Hate crime is different (although any crime can have a mixture of motives of course) because it rests on intolerance of people seen to be different and therefore a threat to the perpetrators' idea of what people or society should be like. It's about power, contempt and narrow mindedness, and quite rightly it especially bothers us because it is reminiscent of fascism and other sorts of extremism. The riots were not a 'hate crime against shop-keepers' as one panellist suggested. They were mostly, as far as I could tell, about stealing and destroying stuff for fun.

My point here would be that in many ways, classifying this or that crime as 'racist' or 'homophobic' for example is perhaps giving the crime an integrity and a status it doesn't warrant. Certainly some people are more drawn to attacking black people than, say, attacking women, but in many ways that is just a matter of personal bias. What lies underneath is the urge to attack what is different. I firmly believe that it is not the case that if there were no black people in the UK the racists would all be lovely peace loving people. No, they'd find someone else to attack. It's who they are. They define themselves by who they hate, and feel the need to demonstrate this at every opportunity for fear of losing their identity.

Categorising the victims should therefore be irrelevant to the criminal justice system. Hate crime can be completely defined by the motivation of the attacker - which is hatred. It shouldn't matter what group or groups the victims might see themselves as belonging to and surely the police and the courts shouldn't be wasting time debating it. If the perpetrator attacked a person simply because of who they perceived them to be (as opposed to because they wanted to rob them or because they wanted to hurt someone and it didn't much matter who it was) then it is a hate crime.

Categorising victims in this or that group only becomes useful if those groups feel they can protect their members better by banding together - sharing information, providing solidarity and counselling for example. This is why categorisation makes perfect sense to victims and potential victims, but is of no use to the criminal justice system. (The only problem seems to be for those awkward buggers who are so different they don't fit into any groups.)

Something the panel did seem to agree on was that it didn't really matter whether membership of a group was voluntary or not. Combating hate crime is all about protecting the right of people to be who they are. Being 'different' is something we should value.
Amen to that.

It's the end of the world as we know it... (and I'm feeling a bit tired, to be honest)

I feel the urge to comment on what's been going on in London (and last night in other British cities) of late.
I live in a leafy Sussex village so not exactly qualified, and yet...
Part of me, the deeper more natural response, feels a deep foreboding. No Silly Season this year. My mind seeks to make sense of it - to find a pattern. With the chaos in the global economy and the corruption in our media, everything seems to be falling apart. It can only be a matter of time.
The other, more rational part of me though, wants to know if this is really anything new. It's my attempt at an antidote to Daily Mail style knee-jerk outrage - to see the broader pattern, look for counter examples. For a start, it's irrational to expect that extreme news stories will be evenly spaced through time. Sometimes they come along several at once. And haven't we seen all this, and worse, before, at other times, in other places?

Let me, for a moment, indulge the first part. There could be something big and dramatic going on. The thing that immediately pops into my mind is that there has been over the last twenty to thirty years a loss of a sense of morality - the idea that there are things you simply do not do, no matter how much you may feel you can get away with them, and that conversely, some things are simply right and worth doing whether they make economic sense or not. So -
The markets are in turmoil because the only thing that mattered to the traders and investors was making as much money as possible as quickly as possible, irrespective of what was being bought and sold. The media is in trouble because the only thing that counted was selling papers, and it didn't matter how the 'stories' were obtained or whether they were worth telling. What's happening in English city centres right now is happening because people have realised that if enough of them turn up in one place at one time and are prepared to be violent, that they can get away with pretty much anything. Civilised society, for all its faults (see pretty much any of my other postings) works not because there's an armed policeman on every corner but because people generally agree to go along with it. Without that agreement nothing matters except what you can get away with. And if you get caught? Well - you wouldn't want to be seen as 'Risk-Averse' would you? It's no different to rock-climbing, or snow-boarding, or market trading.

But is this anything new? Haven't there been crises, scandals and riots before? Not on this scale perhaps? Maybe. The Radio 4 programme The Long View is an especially useful resource here. There is always an historical precedent it seems. Go back a bit and you can always find something uncannily similar going on somewhere. Plus ça change, plus la même bloody old chose as I always say.

Part of me wants this to be different though. I don't want the world to be going to Hell in a wheelie bin but there's something seductive about it - The End of Days, partly because, being nearly 50, I probably won't be around to witness the denouement. Actually I'm much more deeply distressed by what's happening to the environment - for example in Brazil and China in the name of economic growth. I watched Avatar again over the weekend and was in tears, not because of what was happening on screen so much but because I know that huge swathes of Amazon rainforest will soon be under water due to a new dam they're building and the fish will no longer be able to migrate and breed and the locals will no longer be able to sustain themselves as a result, the way they have for generations. And yet it does feel like part of the same thing. The Brazilian government has decided that making money is their priority and everything else - wilderness, biodiversity, indigenous cultures, are just not definable, not measurable, not valuable enough to count. 'But what of the favelas?' you might ask. 'What about the poverty, the lack of proper jobs, the lack of a decent place to live?' but we all know there's more than enough for everybody, still, in the world, as it is. It's just not shared out properly. The Brazilian government says it wants to deal with the poverty, but only if it means not disrupting the wealth. That's the bottom line.
There was some finance pundit on the radio yesterday (I didn't catch his name) commenting on the power, or lack of it, of governments to deal with the economic chaos. He seemed to see The Market as this wonderful perfect democracy - where ordinary people could spend or invest their money as they wished, on what they wanted, expressing in the purest form, how they wanted the world to be run. Government was therefore redundant. But in that case, what of those with no money, or very little? Not that long ago the only people allowed to vote in parliament were the wealthy landowners, and then they let the wealthier merchants join in.
I might be able to vote with my cash whether to buy Freedom Foods chicken breasts or the factory-farmed alternative, but this other guy can choose whether to buy BSkyB Ltd or not.
And what about things that don't have a monetary value, and yet which are intrinsically worth having anyway, whether you have the money to buy them or not? (I know - such things are anathema to The Market.)

I could blame the parents. For all the good it did, since the sixties, parents have not seen it as being their job to teach their children right and wrong. 'Who are we to tell them what to do?' they say. 'What right have we?' And they feel so guilty for not being at home as much as they'd like, and for getting a divorce, so they want to be 'nice' to their children no matter what they do, and don't feel they are really justified in being in any way 'nasty'. (I actually have a lot of time for Supernanny popularising the concepts of 'Firmness' and 'Boundaries' but that's for another topic.) The pre-sixties authoritarianism where the husband and the father (the priest, the teacher, the policeman) enjoyed his arbitrary power I suspect stands as the bogeyman alternative - one none of us, quiet rightly, want to go back to. So morality is seen as something relative - a matter of opinion. We're all entitled to our opinions and the childrens' (because they are natural and unspoiled, until we get our greasy mits on them) are more valid than most.
But children are not perfect beings. They have no in-built morality of their own. Children, like other animals, are naturally amoral, selfish, inconsiderate and interested in immediate gratification unless taught otherwise. They don't think 'What is the right thing to do?' They think 'What am I allowed to do?' They don't think 'Is this a good thing to do?' They think 'What will get me the most attention?' They don't think 'Is this wrong?' They think 'Can I get away with it?' Only later on, if at all, does a more detached sense of right and wrong develop, and it has to be taught, like any other skill. That is our job as parents. It is not 'nasty' or authoritarian. It is necessary.

So - you can see where I'm going with this. Is what is going on in Tottenham and Wapping and The City of London a simple result of modern parenting? Are they really just spoilt brats writ large?
Of course not. How much have any of us ever really done simply because it was the right thing to do? How good has parenting ever been, really?
Isn't the magnitude of the chaos just about the size of the organisations - their global reach, or, in the case of the rioters, their ability to communicate via their Blackberries? Isn't it just all about technology and globalisation?
I honestly don't know.

Life, the Universe etc, part 2

Judging by the response to the last posting I've clearly failed to make myself understood.
I really didn't want to get into the whole atheism vs religion debate. I know it's very popular but I think it's redundant. Frankly I'm sick of it. But I was trying to say something else...

What was I trying to say?
Actually I think I was trying to say why I think it's redundant.
In my experience these discussions seem to begin with someone claiming that such and such a thing cannot be explained by science, and it's not just the existence of God. People believe in ghosts and like to recount their bizarre experiences, and invariably (in the movies at any rate) the man says "There must be a rational explanation!" and the batty old woman gives him a look that says "There are more things in heaven and earth Sunshine..."
Many people believe that each of us is born with some sort of non-material soul or spirit that is our essence and gives us our basic personality, and possibly our conscience. Most people I would think, believe that there is some sort of existence after death, either in an afterlife or in another life. Some people believe that the good and bad things we do come back to reward or punish us according to some sort of cosmic reckoning, in this life or the next. A lot of people seem to think there's no such thing as coincidence. Everything happens for a reason.
Am I alone in finding all this a bit weird? Maybe I'm missing something.

My first thought is that when people explain these beliefs they put a lot of trust in their Intuitions or Instincts. Basically, if they Feel something very strongly to be true then they feel it must be true, unlike the rather abstruse arguments of science and reason which can be very hard to get a handle on. (I genuinely sympathise, having tried and failed to become a professional scientist.) By comparison, the immediate experience of just realising that something is simply True is incredibly powerful.
I'm not just saying this as an outsider. I was converted to Christianity when I was a teenager. I can't remember what he said - the chap who converted me (Hi Ralph) but I do remember that ecstatic feeling of 'Of course! It's so obvious...' that I had for a while there. (I also remember the deep distress I felt at the Hove Town Hall prayer meeting - everybody up and dancing and speaking in tongues, when it became obvious that God wasn't talking to me.)
I also took a keen interest in Astrology for a while there. My mum was doing a course and I thought it was interesting and it really didn't occur to me to wonder if it actually made any sense. I had my horoscope done and lo and behold, there seemed to be some truth in it! (Plus it was an excellent way of getting into conversations with girls.)
I used to go to a homoeopath too, for my allergies. I was aware at the time that my body's responses seemed rather unpredictable but it didn't occur to me at the time to wonder if it was any more or less predictable with the homoeopathy. Sometimes it seemed to be working, but it didn't occur to me that my symptoms flared up irregularly anyway. I just went along with it, because a lot of my friends swore by it. I didn't consciously form a belief in homoeopathy. I just didn't really question it.

So I'm no stranger to credulity. I know what it's like. I still touch wood whenever I tell someone things are going well, because, well, why not? (If the custom was to touch shit I might not be quite so superstitious.)
The trouble is, this trust in personal experience is a major problem. I understand that there are all sorts of problems with impersonal 'objective' experience (as in science), but we massively underestimate the fallibility of our own personal subjective experience. There are several levels to this.
Anyone who understands anything at all about neurology will know that it's extraordinary that we manage to maintain any sort of coherent view of the world at all, and I'm not talking about brain damage here - I'm talking about normal brain function. We make stuff up all the time to fit our preconceived notions. We ignore stuff all the time and think we remember things as having happened that didn't - things we were told happened, or things we dreamed. My mother insists I took her advice and hit a bully at school when I 'know' I never did. She's absolutely sure it happened, because she remembers it, whereas I'm only 70% sure it didn't, which puts me at a disadvantage, but what I do know is that she can't possibly be that sure.
On top of all this there's all sorts of psychology involved. My mum probably really wants to believe that I took her advice (Bullies are just cowards really. All you have to do is stand up to them) and proved that I wasn't a complete weed after all. It's a nice story, but I really don't think it ever happened.
Then there are simple failures to think clearly. Understanding probability is the obvious one.
An Australian woman I once knew told me how extraordinary it was that she had met some neighbours of hers at Anapurna Base Camp. 'What are the chances?' she said. Uncanny. Except she forgot to factor in all the other possibly millions of people she'd encountered on her travels (all through Thailand, India and Europe) who she didn't know, and all the other people travelling with her who didn't meet anyone they knew at all. Given the numbers, the chances that an Australian will meet someone they know somewhere on their travels are practically 100%. Coincidences can be inevitable and meaningless.*

So we're fallible. Most of us I guess sort of accept this, and yet some of us are prepared to stand up and say that God exists, or that we have souls, or that there's an afterlife, or that we'll all ultimately get what we deserve.They have these deep intuitions. The religious typically get it through reading scriptures and/or contemplation or prayer, but I've known enough people of a sort of indeterminate spirituality of no fixed religion who make similar claims, who just seem to think they can just know that sort of stuff, just by, you know, sitting down and thinking about it. Why on earth, they ask, would that not work? I think they don't perhaps appreciate the magnitude of the things they are claiming to know. The existence of God is about the force behind the entire universe. And they imagine they can have some meaningful comprehension of that simply by sitting on a mountain, or by repeating something over and over, or by smoking dope.
Is it just me or does that seem preposterous? I honestly don't get it.
Tell me, genuinely. I really want to know. What is going on?
I'm certainly not saying that science or reason can step in and do it better. Science is good at mundane practical stuff, and it can extrapolate, to some extent, to the cosmic and the subatomic, but putting that on one side, how can anyone even begin to imagine that our limited, biased, flawed minds can understand anything about the ultimate nature of life, the universe and all that, just by contemplation? Why on earth would so many of us assume that? I can't help feeling there's a kind of arrogance to it.

So (nearly there) this is my basic question. Why, when we come up against this argument about the existence of God do we sceptics enter into a complex defence of evolution or cosmology or whatever, when the alternative hypothesis is simply nowhere? There's nothing to argue about. People are welcome to believe in all that stuff about God and so forth but let's not pretend that it is in any way a well-founded belief. It just comes down to what we happen to feel like (in a very deep sort of way admittedly) but there's no justification for imagining that these beliefs have any greater significance than that.
Does that make my position any clearer?

* For anybody who's interested in pursuing the subject of all the myriad ways we can't know for sure all the things we'd like to think we know, I can recommend nothing better than Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz

Life, the Universe and that sort of stuff

I was listening in on a conversation between my wife and my brother-in-law about the existence of God the other day. I can't remember how the debate started but it finished with him professing open mindedness on the subject. There might be Something, he thought. Who was he to say?

He tends toward the atheist and the sceptic generally but he didn't want to be dogmatic about it, and neither do I. I feel no need to gratuitously trash other people's belief systems. Belief in some sort of Almighty has a venerable history and here in the UK at least it seems harmless enough and if it means that ordinary people are more likely to get organised and do Good than they might otherwise I'm all for it. And I love old churches, choral music and renaissance paintings.
There is something odd about the whole Existence of God debate though. It's strange to me that there even is a debate. My Bro-in-Law's point as I understand it was that there are so many holes in the science (origins of the universe, evolution, consciousness) - so much we don't know, that, well, why not? Maybe there is a God. Who knows?
It sounds generous and broad-minded. And he's right - Science doesn't know Everything - not by a long way, and probably never will. Anybody who keeps up with the Popular Science media will know that there's a big question about all the matter that is supposed to have formed in The Big Bang. The sums just don't add up, apparently. They call the missing stuff Dark Matter but they know that doesn't explain anything. And then there's all the Anti-Matter. Supposedly there should have been equal quantities of Matter and Anti-matter in The Beginning, but nobody knows where the Anti-Matter's gone.
And anyway, how did the universe big-bang itself out of nothingness to begin with?
Maybe there's a God.

I've been watching the Faithful and The Atheists butt heads on this since I was a teenager, and I've joined in as a sort of Agnostico-atheist. (ie. It's impossible to prove that God doesn't exist, but it seems unlikely and way too convenient.) I personally have a background in ecology so I tend to get embroiled in the Evolution debate rather than the Physics, and I've had some memorable arguments with Evolution Deniers, trying laboriously to explain to them how an eye could possibly happen without being Designed by some sort of Intelligence. I found myself having to go back and back, trying to explain about the function of the lense and then the chemistry of the retina and then nerve function half remembered from my first year Biology. I'd have had to go on to explain about Evo-Devo and Precambrian ecology, in none of which am I an expert. Half the problem was that they just didn't have enough Biology to be able to imagine how it might happen (and yet they expected their opinions to be taken seriously). I don't know the details but I can sort of imagine. The evolution of an eyeball is just not that outlandish to me.
But in any case there was a better argument that only occurred to me later. (Don't they always?)

What I should have said was 'Ok, so you can't imagine how an eyeball could possibly evolve by natural selection. What is your alternative hypothesis?'
They'd look at me like I was an idiot and go 'The Intelligent Designer/Creator is the alternative hypothesis. Have you not been listening?'
And I'd go 'But what do you know about this Intelligent Designer/Creator? Where is it? How does it work? What's it made of? What does it want? How big is it?' And I'd guess they'd say... Well I don't know what they'd say. If they were coming from a religious point of view I guess they might say something mystical about 'The Unknowable'. If they were trying to be more scientific about it they might reiterate the point about the gaps in our scientific knowledge of the universe, which I concede are huge, but that doesn't mean we know nothing.

Going back to the Big Bang conundrum, there are huge gaps in our knowledge but we do know things. We know a fair bit about energy and matter and gravity and how they work. We know a bit about stars and subatomic particles. We have the Hubble Space Telescope and the LHC. We can do the maths and we can form hypotheses and we can test them. To be sure, it's quite a leap to take the physics of objects here on earth and to apply it to objects that existed billions of years ago at the dawn of time. The point though is, even if we had almost no evidence and practically no theories to go on, our knowledge would still be infinitely greater than our knowledge of The Creator, because on that, we have absolutely nothing.
So this is my question. Why is it that Atheists even enter into a conversation with Theists as if there is something to be discussed, as if they are in some sort of equivalent position? The very attempt at an Atheist response gives Theism a status that it does not have.
In fact even if we knew absolutely nothing of the science of the Origins of the Universe that would still not justify the assumption that some Unknown Being was involved.
Our relative ignorance of the science is not comparable to our absolute ignorance of the Creator. They are not comparable hypotheses. There's simply nothing to discuss.

Most Theists of course are coming at the question from a position of Faith.
Simply believing in something even though you have absolutely nothing that could count as evidence in a rational scientific debate is a venerable position and I have nothing to say about that (or not here anyway).
Most people of faith however are not so rigorous. Most do, sooner or later want to claim that they also have some kind of material evidence of His existence. (They may also claim that the Scientists have their own faith - in reason, materialism or some such - something I could refute, but not right now. Another time perhaps.)
Usually though their argument boils down to something like 'Well how else do you explain it?'

This is the problem with My Bro-in-Law's Open-Mindedness, because you could explain it any way you like. You could advocate any of the myriad creation myths that exist and have existed around the world throughout history. You could claim that the stars were sprinkled from the Breasts of the Sky Goddess. You could claim that the universe hatched from an egg. You could say that the universe was sneezed from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseisure. They're all at least as plausible as the idea that there is some unknown being out there, that, for unknown reasons and by unknown means, brought the universe into being out of nothing. Calling It God or The Intelligent Designer simply gives our ignorance a name. It does not even begin to explain anything.

A Viable Alternative?

Just a quick note here about the whole AV (Alternative Vote) debate going on here in the UK. I'm voting 'Yes' btw.
My initial thinking was, being a bit of a Leftie and living down here in Southern England, voting has often seemed a bit futile (except when I lived in Brighton or Lewes, which are Green and Lib-Dem respectively). Look at the map - it's almost all Conservative down here and yet I know almost nobody who votes for them. I'm not crying electoral fraud, it's just how it is, at least under the first-past-the-post electoral system. We lefties simply have no voice in Parliament down here. So initially I just thought they needed a bit of a shake-up. What the heck, I thought. It's all anarchy.

One of the problems I suspect is that being left of centre is not a simple either/or situation. There are all sorts of shades of opinion and debates going on about public services, human rights and the environment. The debate is ethical and ideological as well as economic. On the other hand, I don't think I'm terribly wide of the mark if I say that being Conservative is relatively simple - It's the economy, stupid. Conservative voters basically just want to know how much tax they'll have to pay. As a result the left wing vote is always to some extent split between Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Greens, where the right-wing vote really isn't.

So my support for AV now is based on the idea that Labour voters are likely to put Lib-Dem or Green candidates second and third on their ballot slips, Lib-Dems are likely to put Labour or Green, Greens would likely put Labour or Lib-Dem. None of them is likely to put Conservative as a second or third choice.
I'd concede that the Conservative vote might to some extent be split by those who like to blame foreigners for everything (As if the British Government never passes stupid laws. As if British people would never work illegally or claim benefits they were not entitled to.) and who therefore vote for UKIP or the BNP but they're frankly a bit of a joke, at least down here. Most right-wing people here trust the Conservatives to bash the EU and the immigrants.

What this means, if I'm on the right track, is that under AV, left-wing voters might be more likely to get the representation at the polls that they actually warrant. I have no idea how many more non-Tory MPs this would give us in parliament, but it's got to help. It might at least mean that the Tory candidates can't ignore us if they want to stand a chance of getting that second or third place on the ballot slip.

Sure it would be nice if we Lefties could get organised, stop squabbling among ourselves and form a big single-minded party like the Conservatives, but the whole Conservative way of thinking is based on the simple-minded notion that politics is a simple us/them, red/blue, dumbed-down tabloid sound-bite, first-past-the-post competition.
It's not, or it shouldn't be.
That view of Politics gets them into power, but it doesn't make them right.