Sexuality & Evolutionary Non-Mysteries

The BBC has a lengthy magazine article entitled The Evolutionary Puzzle of Homosexuality. Of course, it is useful for science to investigate sexuality, genetics, conditioning and so forth in order to better understand ourselves and the way we all tick. But something is amiss:

"This is a paradox from an evolutionary perspective," says Paul Vasey from the University of Lethbridge in Canada. "How can a trait like male homosexuality, which has a genetic component, persist over evolutionary time if the individuals that carry the genes associated with that trait are not reproducing?"

In other words, there is an argument that goes:

• Men whose sexual behaviour is largely or exclusively homosexual are less likely to have children.
• If traits are genetic, they are passed down by people having children. 
• Therefore, homosexuality cannot have a genetic element.

And yet there is strong evidence that sexual orientation is largely innate, homosexuality is evident even in societies where there is deadly pressure to conform and homosexual behaviour is seen throughout nature. What can it all mean?!

It benefits scientists and universities, who really ought to know better, to keep talking about, giving interviews and publishing papers on this alleged paradox, because it is a controversial and salacious subject. Oooh, sex!  Oooh, controversy! Oooh, mystery!

And thus you get nonsense like the Gay Uncle Hypothesis - the idea that the presence of childless adult men* in the extended family was of evolutionary advantage to that family's genes. In other words, gay men exist to babysit and mentor the children of their straight brothers (though not their sisters, particularly). Some (usually straight) people like this theory, because it justifies the existence of gay folk and renders their difference a practical advantage to the normals. It's perhaps one step up from the argument gay men exist because musical theatre was crucial to keeping warm and cheerful throughout the the last Ice Age (some may scoff - my gut says it was).

But there is no paradox. Let's frame our syllogism with a slightly different example:

• People with Down Syndrome are less likely to have children. They are less likely to survive far into adulthood and, on average, they have some disadvantage when it comes to sexual selection and child-raising. 
• If traits are genetic, they are passed down by people having children.
• Therefore, Down Syndrome cannot have a genetic element.

Down Syndrome, as we know, is straightforwardly genetic, caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21. Yet it is rarely asked why people with Down Syndrome should still be being born after millions of years of human evolution. Why? The subject is not sexy and, although there's no shortage of discrimination against people with Down Syndrome, nobody suggests it involves choice on the part of the individual (their mother, maybe, but not them).

Of course, as with many genetic disorders and human traits that we don't happen to call "disorders", this mutation usually occurs spontaneously or else trickles down in families where the vast majority of people don't have this trait. It happens because it happens, because DNA must mutate in order for organisms to adapt and evolve.

Mutation is a good thing in terms of species survival, but it is entirely random. The fact that one mutation can create a dynastic dead-end for one individual in one set of circumstances doesn't stop this kind of mutation from occurring. Virus strains can - and often do - mutate to become less contagious.

People with Down Syndrome are much less vulnerable to some sorts of cancers. Maybe that means the condition plays or has played some sort of as yet unseen beneficial role within families?

Neither homosexuality or bisexuality appear to be entirely genetic; these traits are undoubtedly a special combination of genes (probably multiple genes), in utero hormonal events and other environmental influences. But maybe something about sexualities which make having children less likely (and in this we must include heterosexual trans people, asexual people, bisexuals in same gender partnerships and anyone disinclined towards PIV sex) has some overarching benefit on a family's chances of survival? Or maybe not.

And so what if it doesn't? Does this justify homophobia? Would or should it even matter if these were conscious choices that individuals made about the life they wanted to live?

There are far more questions than answers about evolution and the vast range of sexual behaviour in humans and other animals. The framing of one harmless, relatively common and naturally-occurring deviation as a mystery is unhelpful, both in terms of the public understanding of science and our ongoing struggle towards social justice.


* Lesbians and bisexual women are still largely side-lined in research into sexual orientation. We know all kinds of strange trivia about gay men's fingers and how their hair typically whorls clockwise (or is it anti-clockwise? I think it matters enough to forget). but nearly nothing about lesbian eyebrows, for example. I may apply for a grant. 

Why are women typically more religious than men?

There are some really dodgy theories about sex chromosomes and their influence on human behaviour, but this one shocked me on account of the source and context. I was listening to the Christmas Eve edition of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which was a really good episode and had three guests I'd turn on the radio for - Mark Gatiss, Richard Wiseman and Steve Jones (of the snail fame). Their other guest was Victor Stock, the former Dean of Guildford Cathedral, who was rather brilliant. 

But the great Steve Jones was talking about the evolutionary psychology of religion and came out with the following;

"Universally, worldwide, it's always been the case that those who are crippled and afflicted by having a Y chromosome - that's all of us on this platform - are less religious, and less willing to accept religion that women who don't have a Y chromosome. It's very hard not to argue that there's not some kind of biology there. We may not know exactly what it is, but biology is in there somewhere."

He then goes on to explain that people on the autistic spectrum are much less likely to be religious, which must, he feels, have a biological explanation.  I'm sure someone else can clear that one up.

Of course, the important phrase is "in there somewhere", but does it have to be?  It may be that biology does play some role in religiosity, but before the end of the programme, I had thought of a number of reasons why women may exhibit greater religiosity than men.  And I think only someone living in the West could possibly assert that biology must play a role. So...

The Possible Reasons Why Women Would Be Typically More Religious Than Men 

as came into my head in the space of five minutes - okay, it took longer to write down!

• Cis men typically possess an XY pair of sex chromosomes, cis women typically possess an XX. There may be something about the difference between these particular chromosomes which alters men and women's brains to make women more prone to religious feeling - however that may be defined - than men. 

• Globally and locally, women are more likely to live in poverty. Across the world, there is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and religiosity.  There are many exceptions and complexities, but these trends are pretty crystal; women are more likely to be poor, poor people are more likely to be religious. 

• Women are more likely to witness birth and death first-hand. Obviously, women are more likely to give birth but, although it's commonplace for fathers to be there in this country, across the world, women are more likely to attend births.  Women are more likely to care for the sick and dying, and to be with people in their last moments. Understanding, celebrating and coping with birth and death is one of the major themes of all religious and folk traditions. Religion often gives people the language to use and the stories to tell on such occasions. 

• Women are more likely to live with chronic illness. Faith can help people cope psychologically with loss, pain and other difficulties, but organised religion is also good at combating social isolation and in many cultures, providing nursing care and assistance where state help is absent.

• Women like dresses.  Although predominantly men, most religious leaders wear dresses, often with elaborate trims and accessories, depending on the occasion. Women may attend places of worship to see the dresses their leaders are wearing.

• Across the world, women are much less likely to get very much school education. Women are less likely to be literate. Women are less likely to learn about other belief systems or acquire the intellectual tools and information which allow some people to doubt the messages they've been taught all their lives.

• Women are more likely to be widowed and/ or to live alone for significant periods of their lives.  Organised religion is often excellent at combating social isolation. There ought to be, but there is no organised humanist system for holding communities together and looking out for people on their own.  

• Women are more likely to find themselves in situations of abject helplessness; rape, slavery and domestic abuse. Faith gives some folk something to hold onto when everything else is out of their control. This isn't necessary faith in God or gods, but it often is. 

• Kate Middleton got married in a really big church. All women are interested in the life of Kate Middleton and so are more likely to go to church in an attempt to emulate their idol. 

• Women are more likely to be responsible for the moral and intellectual education of their children. In many parts of the world, organised religion is at the centre of all available education - even in the UK, many better state schools are church schools.  One big reason some religious institutions spend so much energy trying to subjugate and control women is because mothers are seen as the key to their children's religiosity; control the women and you control the next generation.

• Because certain religious institutions do spend so much energy trying to control and subjugate women, that tends to keep women hooked.  You're nothing, you're a spare rib, you're weakness, you're a temptress and a slut who brings violence upon yourself, but come here every Sunday and you will be forgiven.  Men can feel tremendous religious guilt, of course, but often having less laid on their heads, it may be easier to walk away. If you have grown up believing that your very physical being is responsible for not only your sin but the sin of those around you, it's really difficult to finally stop apologising. 

• Women are less likely to have opportunities for fulfillment in paid work. Religious institutions are very good at organising and valuing unpaid volunteers who care for the sick, provide childcare and other social services, produce and distribute clothes and food for the poor, make crafts, raise-money and so forth.  

• The major religious festivals almost always involve a lot of baking (with and without yeast). Women are really good at baking. Women become involved in religion so that they can show off how good they are at baking.

I think there are probably other ways that religions allow women, who often live in circumstances of very little power, to have some power, even if they're very rarely the ones in charge.  Even in ancient Athens, which was an extraordinarily sexist place, the city cult was headed by a massively powerful priestess.

None of this means that biology has nothing to do with religiosity, but as is almost always the case with the claims of evolutionary biology around gender, there are other more obvious explanations that need exploring first.

Older Mothers: Sexism, Ageism & Disablism

Elizabeth Adeney is soon to become the oldest new mother in Britain at the age of 66. There has been lots of news and blog coverage, much of it condemning her actions as selfish and reckless. You can probably gauge the two ends of the spectrum of opinion by checking out the Mail article (in which the poor lady becomes a "desperate divorcee") and the post at Feministing.

Ms Adeney has done an extraordinary thing which I can't empathise with one bit, but almost every criticism I have heard against her invokes some time-honoured prejudices around gender, age and disability. These include:


Older women having children is against nature.

Nature is a git when it comes to reproduction, has nothing to do with morality and most of us defy it. Personally, I intend to enjoy a lifetime of acrobatic sex without ever getting pregnant. In a society where the vast majority of our children will reach adulthood, all but a tiny minority of men and women control their fertility artificially.

Most women (not all) can have children naturally up until their mid to late forties, but because they rarely choose to anymore, we have this idea that the natural cut-off might be much sooner. As women get older, their fertility does begin to decline. It's likely to take longer to get pregnant. Natural conception above the age of 50 is rare, but not impossible.

Men's fertility declines from an earlier point, but does so very slowly, such that it is possible for some men to have children in much later life. The fact that a woman requires technology in order to do the same thing doesn't, by itself, make that it wrong.

It could not be paid for with public money - I'm anxious that some American commentators think it was, and imagine this is the sort of thing that universal healthcare is expected to cover. No way! The NHS won't usually give IVF to anyone over 40, but again this is not about morality, but viability. Most IVF cycles fail anyway and it is an expensive and traumatic procedure. As a woman with fertility problems is even less likely to get pregnant over 40, it is felt that it isn't worth (a) the money or (b) the heartache for the prospective parents to go through this. But there's nothing wrong with an individual going abroad and paying for treatment they cannot get here.

Personally, I would encourage people who cannot have children naturally to foster or adopt. There are a great number of children in the UK whose need for a loving home is far greater than any adults' need to have a child they happen to have given birth to. Well I think so. But it's not my place to tell people what to do or object to people doing what they wish to.


Older women have disabled babies.

The older we are, the more likely it is that mutations will take place in the DNA of our gametes. This applies to both men and women. For women, this results in a cultural anxiety about older mothers who are more likely to have children with certain impairments, such as Down Syndrome. For men, this results in academic anxiety that too few older fathers might slow human evolution. Older fathers may be more likely to produce children with autism, schizophrenia and a range of physical impairments, but wink wink, nudge nudge, proves there's life in the old dog yet!

Of course out of all the families you or I know, there is unlikely to be an obvious connection between older parents of either sex and disabled offspring – not because the statistics lie, but because the statistics are about an increase in a fairly small risk. Most disabled people were not born disabled. And of course, most disabled babies are born to women under the age of thirty-five simple because most children are born to women under thirty-five. The only way you can effectively avoid having a disabled child is not to have a child at all.

At my school, where about a third of my classmates went to Oxford and Cambridge, I had one of the youngest mothers among my friends. Mum had me (second born) at 27, whereas most of these posh ladies with the gold-chain handbags had had children in their mid thirties or later. The more affluent and well educated a woman is, the older she is likely to be when she first has children, and we know what having educated and affluent parents does for one's life chances.

So I'd guess being born to an older mother both increases your chances of being born with some impairment and increases your chances of a high IQ and financial affluence. Statistically speaking.


Women who are likely to have disabled children shouldn't have children.

As described above, it's not a matter of likely, but what if it were? Trouble wrote a bit about this in response to the comment thread at Feministing.

Mutation is not a bad thing – it occurs in our cells all the time, whoever you are, and it is necessary for evolution. Most things we identify as mutations we perceive as negative, although every step we've made from the primordial gloop has involved mutation. So the point about human evolution and older parents (as the same principle applies to both sexes) is valid - though I have my doubts about what conclusion, if any, should be drawn from that.

Some mutations result in children with impairments, but the child and the mutation go hand in hand; there is no cruelty in having a disabled child unless you think that that person's existence would be worst than if he or she was not allowed to exist.

And most people don't actually believe that at all. What some people believe is that the rest of us would be better off if (some) disabled people didn't exist, such as individuals whose net financial contribution is destined to be smaller than the cost they incur to the state. Like me! Yet even I would argue that I have intrinsic worth.

Not everyone feels this way. AJ certainly contests this – he says I should be put out of his misery. But I was playing Tainted Love on the ukelele at the time.


A woman who is disabled or likely to become disabled shouldn't have children.

Mary covers this very nicely in her BADD post, Well Meaning Insults. Seahorse and Frida also write a lot about disabled parenting and the prejudices they encounter. Ms Adeney is in excellent health, but her chances of becoming disabled within the next twenty years are significant - far greater than for a woman twenty or thirty years her junior. Commenters are anxious that she won't be fit enough to cope with a small child and that the child should later become an enslaved young carer.

This is sexist as well as disablist - people do not express nearly so much concern about older or disabled fathers. It all hinges on the idea that a mother must fulfill every conceivable need of her child without outside assistance. She must lift, carry, bath, change and entertain the child twenty-four hours a day and nobody else is allowed to help. No other family members can help (unless Daddy is some kind of superhero who overcomes his every masculine instinct to change the occasional nappy*) and certainly no outside party should be employed to help.

Of course, nobody parents like this and it would be pretty unhealthy if they did. People have always outsourced some practical aspects of child-rearing, to other family or community members and paid employees - although this became disapproved of in modern times with the rise of the isolated nuclear family and the idea that the mother is the only adult with whom the child is safe. Yet we don't condemn those fathers (they still exist) who perform almost no hands-on role whatsoever.

Of all the ways in which a parent can fail their child, being disabled isn't one of them.


Older mothers confuse people and invite their children to be bullied

As one Daily Mail commenter summarised all possible objections to a woman having a child at 66;

"Think of the raise eyebrows at parents evening!"

This same argument is made against gay parenting, single parenting, disabled and mixed-race parenting. You can't make the most important decisions of your life on the grounds that you might confuse some ignorant people and invite their ignorant children to make fun of yours. Okay, so it is fairly safe to assume that your average 66 year old with a small child in tow is its grandmother or even great grandmother, but that's not going to be impossible to work around. AJ was once mistaken for my father by a doctor in A&E - I wasn't offended, rather I laughed. And laughed and laughed. And then laugh again every time I remind him about it.

As for the children, a schoolmate once mocked me for the size of my father's nose (not much, it was just one of those ridiculous taunts children come up with). Dad doesn't have an especially big nose (there he is, you decide), but even if his nose was enormous, should he have considered getting a nose-job before he had children? Should parents have to wear a uniform to stop children taking the mick out of other children's parents' dress-sense? Bullying can be a soul-destroying experience, but you don't prevent it - can't prevent it - by removing potential targets of mockery from a child's life.


People have also commented on the fact that Ms Adeney is single and have pulled out all those clichés about single parents. The only remaining issue is the fact that the lady will be approaching her life expectancy in the next eighteen years - I'm not sure she'd get a twenty year loan from the bank. This strikes me as by far the biggest potential issue, although it's none of my business. And it is probably safe to assume that this issue has been very carefully considered, and arrangements made accordingly. It is a very bad thing to lose a parent when you are still a child (it is a very bad thing at any time), but the possibility can be prepared for to a certain extent.

*Jeremy Hardy once recalled being on the bus with his eighteen month old, when an elderly woman, admiring the baby, asked if Daddy had changed a nappy yet. To which Hardy replied, "No. You're supposed to change it? I was wondering why she always smelt so badly."

Sex, Human Nature and Morality.

It's Valentine's Day and this week saw the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, so I thought I would write a post with some rude words in it (and way too many parentheses).

Unreasoning folk who don't have a religious text to refer to, often use nature as the measure of all things that are good and proper. All manner of human behaviours are condemned as being unnatural, but most especially sexual ones. For example, I was brought up with the idea that only sexual partnerships are between a man and a woman are okay because only this particular combination of naughty bits can possibly produce a baby and that's what sex and love are basically about. Men and women must play very particular roles because nature has endowed them with difference.

Nature has equipped us with many things but no code by which to live. It does not provide any purpose in life nor does it dictate our social priorities. Evolution doesn't mean we were put here to reproduce – there is no consciousness behind our being here at all. The instincts we have do not, in themselves, justify any behaviour. We are plenty smart enough to work out what is right and wrong without pretending it has anything to do with our genetic heritage.

People who get very upset about other people's sex lives are generally quite insecure with themselves, but you can see how our culture has lead them to this place. Generations were taught that sex was a sin, that even thinking about sex was worthy of the red-hot-poker treatment and yet most people must have done it or else none of us would be here. So in order to feel okay about our own desires and dirty doings, we imagine degrees of sinfulness.

Perhaps I'm okay because I only perform unspeakable acts within marriage – people who perform the same unspeakable acts without the certificate must burn for all eternity. If not that, then people who get hot and sticky with the wrong sort of people – or more than one person - in the wrong place or wearing inaccurate historical costume (a bona fide Highwayman wears a frock coat not a tailcoat). The Victorian moralists were particularly good at this, condemning everyone and everything but themselves and their own peccadillos (which is like an armadillo but kinkier).

And yeah, I know it is a bit daft to talk of nature and marriage, but people do. It is the only objection to same-sex marriage from the non-religious. People imagine that a life-long state-certified sexual union between a man and a woman who have children together is the most natural state of things and therefore superior to every other kind of relationship. Of course, what is considered natural has skidded all over the place throughout our history. So, a little about our prehistory...

Our closest living genetic relatives are the Common Chimpanzee and the Bonobo Chimpanzee. Both of these, but particularly the Bonobos, are promiscuous. Bonobos are sex-mad! Sex is recreation, bonding, celebration and conflict-resolution. The gentleman-chimps frot and they all do all manner of filthy things which have absolutely nothing to do with reproduction.

We are not Bonobos; sex tends to matter quite a bit more to us. We only want to have sex with people we're attracted to and most of us are picky. We do however share some of this heritage. We are physically equipped to enjoy sex immensely and our reproductive setup is such that most of the sex we have is not reproductive. A human female is vaguely fertile for less than two weeks out of a month, only very fertile for a few days in a month - and then only for about half her adult life - whereas her desire for sex, and others' desire to have sex with her is continuous (whether people are less attractive as they age is beside the point – older people do have sex, many creatures out of season get none at all).

So even the baby-making business cannot be said to be entirely about baby-making, let alone all the other revolting practices that come to mind when presented with all the bits and pieces we have available to us. Human beings do use sex for purposes other than pleasure and bonding – demonstrated most disturbingly in the sexual violence that occurs in power struggles both domestic and international. Power is often in the mix even without coercion. And whilst most humans are attracted to members of the opposite sex, in a same-sex environments (boarding school, prisons and the military) well, any two people have the capacity to assist one another and they frequently do. *

And we have promiscuous minds. I imagine if you were a swan or some animal that mated for life, there would be some sort of mental block when it came to eying up swans who were not your mate. Rather as most human beings have complete blocks when it comes to the family members we grew up with; we can't see any of them as sexual beings and find it rather gruesome to be reminded that they are. But otherwise, however attractive you may find one person, there are always other people who are also attractive.

Yet we have big brains and since ladies stood up (in our high-heeled shoes) we find ourselves with a relatively narrow pelvis through which to give birth. Babies are born very small and helpless and remain extremely vulnerable for a period of years. At this point in our evolutionary history, it became highly beneficial for sexual partners to bond with one another on a long-term basis so that there were two caregivers and the offspring might better survive its early years.

Meanwhile, good reproductive strategies – getting the best genes to combine with your own whilst still ensuring that offspring are brought up and cared for – began to involve deception. This occurs in many organisms, and it means we can be both very crafty and immensely jealous. It is in our gene's best interests for us to deceive but not be deceived (not that our genes have interests exactly, but you get my point).

So it is natural to want to have sex with different people, it is also natural to bond with one partner for a period of years. It is natural to deceive our partners, and to be jealous. We haven't lost any of this - if we had, then these behaviours would not have remained commonplace.

But then language and love came along of course, which complicates things further. It means that some people really can mate for life and be very happy together. And this is where homosexuality shows up. Like I say, we've all got plenty of bits and pieces to play with, so homosexuality doesn't matter a great deal until you start falling in love with people. I imagine that most exclusively gay people have had heterosexual sex at some point. But with love, we can't be so flexible. Nor should we be.

There are lots of theories about a biological cause for homosexuality, including genetics - it probably is a genetic mutation, whether entirely spontaneous or to do with the womb environment. Some people are really desperate for a reason, preferably an evolutionary reason, a purpose, a justification. But it really doesn't matter. Homosexuality involves a fairly subtle deviation in the midst of our complex make-up, a single crossed-wire and its effects are completely and utterly benign. And in terms of our ungrateful culture, it has been extremely useful; gay and bisexual people are over-represented among the great men and women of our history because it is always the oddballs, often those without family responsibilities, who do all the interesting stuff. I've said it before, but just as mutation is necessary for biological evolution, it is the mutants carry society forward. Whether or not they reproduce.

So anyway, this is how we are. Various and conflicted. And very much complicated by other people. Our variations seem significant only because we're not Bonobos and the prospect of sexual behaviour which don't happen to turn us on often seems disgusting. A lot of kinky stuff that people get up to would make my stomach turn, but the stomach isn't any kind of moral compass or else cake would be one of the seven cardinal virtues.

A lot of misery is caused by a failure to recognise this mix, by magic ideas around sex and love. If I believed that being in love would blind me to all others, then my first new crush would seem like falling out of love. If I believed that true love lasted forever by default, I might not be such a good lover (I mean good as in decent and faithful). And if I believed that one set of my entirely natural feelings were virtuous and another sinful, I would loath myself – which of course, I did.

What matters in life is what we do, not what we feel. None of us are compelled by our instincts, we must reason with ourselves. But I guess there are really only three things that matter in all sexual relationships:

1. That we don't harm others. This includes not taking advantage of people who are vulnerable or much less powerful than ourselves – obviously leaving children and disinterested parties alone, but also being wary of more subtle forms of exploitation.
2. That we are honest. Being honest with one another doesn't avoid hurting feelings but it helps a great deal. This includes making our promises very carefully and sticking to them.
3. That we take responsibility for our reproductive potential. We should avoid making babies which we don't want or can't provide for. When we do have babies, we must give them the best possible chances.

We make our own codes to fit our own choices, lovers write their own rules together. But little else is of universal importance.


* I made this point to my mother during a very round and about conversation in which I first told her explicitly that I was bisexual. Anyway, it had all started with Boudica (I don't think she was queer, the conversation took an unplanned route) and I made this point about pragmatic sexuality, that ultimately any two people could get one another off, which in itself was a shocking thing to have said in front of my mother and she was silent for a while.

Then she said "You mean, like Edwina Curry and John Major?"

I thought about this for a moment. "I suppose."

"Well," she said, "I think there ought to be a law against it!"

Intelligence, Genetics and Race

I know, do excuse me while I get this out of my system...

A few weeks ago, Dr James Watson, who with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins discovered the structure of DNA, made some comments which provoked lectures to be canceled and the loss of his research post. The Sunday Times article he was quoted in says

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

The thing that bothered me most about this scandal was that folks struggled to explain why he was wrong. The furore quickly became an issue of acceptable debate; was it okay for a scientist to say such things? Irrational Point eloquently explains the confusion between whether what was said was merely controversial or unscientific. However, many commentators seemed to say, This is wrong because you just don't say such things. I wanted to write a little bit about why Watson's assertions were plain wrong, regardless of how offensive they were.

So intelligence. You cannot stick a probe into someone's earhole and get a smartness reading of 7.3 goldfishes (a sensible unit of cleverness, I think you'll agree). Goodness knows we've tried; weighing brains, measuring skulls, dissecting and scanning and tickling a person to see if they have a knowing laugh (another of my failed experiments). There are no straightforward physical indicators of intelligence. This is partly because we don't know what the heck intelligence is.

What is intelligence? I dunno. How is it different from wisdom, knowledge or creativity? Dr Watson has himself demonstrated the possibility of extraordinary intelligence and foolishness coexisting in the same individual. There are lots of difference sorts of intelligence – and I don't mean if you include the entirely fluffy emotional intelligence* - but intelligence applied to processing numbers, processing images, problem-solving, data recall, comprehension, translation, wit and so on.

In any case, until we learn a lot more about the brain and perhaps not even then, the only question science can answer is What is there about this thing we call intelligence which might be measured?

And thus, they came up with IQ. IQ is a very useful idea – a fact I must concede before I knock it as I am about to. A person's IQ is represented by a number somewhere along a spectrum represented by a bell-curve, where the most common score will be 100 and the further you score away from one hundred, the fewer people share your intelligence quotient or lack thereof. Originally it was calculated using a comparison of "mental age" and actual age, but not only is mental age in itself a flawed concept, but you can only apply such measures to children. Anyway, it's now all relative, so for example, to get into Mensa, you must have a “genius” level IQ of over 150, which puts you in the most intelligent 2% of the population. So goes the theory.

But, the IQ test does not test intelligence. It provides a measure of your ability to perform certain cognitive tasks within a set time-frame – tested just the once, under one set of conditions. Because of the need for inflexible test conditions, great swathes of the population cannot be tested at all. In this regard it is rather like testing fitness through a running race, assuming the fastest people to run the distances are the fittest; there are lots of very fit people who cannot run at all, and even more fit people whose immense fitness doesn't happen to coincide with speed. However, in general, there would be some relationship between fitness and the ability to run fast, so it still has its uses.

Much more importantly, you can get good at the IQ test. Practice those sorts of puzzles and you can improve your score.

This fact is the clincher, as far as I am concerned; the only measurable manifestations of our intelligence are skills and as such can be learned. Of course there are people who have a natural advantage or disadvantage, just as we do when it comes to physical activity, but no individual is born with the ability to identify the missing number in the sequence 8, 13, 21, ..., 55, 89.

In order to know the answer, one must first learn to understand what numbers mean and how to do put them together, multiply, divide and take away. You have to learn to consider possible relationships between numbers. But if you had learnt about the Fibonacci Sequence in school, you would recognise it straight away and answer using recall as opposed to reason.

Although formal IQ tests attempt to avoid anything where a person may do better because of some knowledge they have, this is ultimately impossible. And for this reason it is extremely dangerous to make any connection between IQ scores in a population and genetics.

The physical development of the brain can be effected by all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle events from conception onwards. Oxygen levels, nutrition, disease and injury, as well as the levels and nature of stimuli a child receives before you get on to academic education.

And then there's culture. Different cultures consciously or unconsciously encourage different sorts of cognitive development. For example, a Chinese baby develops something akin to perfect pitch because the same word-sound can mean something different when articulated in a different tone within those languages. Some older generation Australian Aboriginis describe quantities as either one, two, some or many, creating a culture happily free of chartered accountants, but making them pretty rubbish at IQ tests, all of which require some basic mathematics. This, before you get onto differences in formal education levels, literacy, social inequalities and so on.

A further analogy: men have dramatically differing abilities to grow a beard according to their genes. This variation exists between individuals but also between ethnic groups. Using IQ tests to explore differences in intelligence as determined by our genes is rather like exploring one's beardy-genes by measuring the length of one's beards. From this one would conclude that the vast majority of white Western European men were unable to grow a beard, since most of them don't have beards. Beardiness is very much like intelligence; all a bit fuzzy.

So there's all of this, on top of the fact that race and ethnicity are largely cultural constructs. Of course, we have different genes which determine skin-colour and other things, but it's only by our external features that we use to determine our ethnicity; external features which only say one thing about our genetic heritage. Because of the way that race and particularly whiteness works, a person may have three white grandparents and one grandparent of colour and yet be identified in some non-white category. The whole thing is artificial, we're all a great mishmash and this is especially the case when talking about as diverse and large a group as Black US Americans.

Now, none of this means that there is absolutely no genetic difference influencing intelligence between people of different ethnicities. It is not beyond the realms of possibility, although it would have to be very slight because it seems so counter-intuitive. However, at this time in the history of science and in the history of humankind, there are other possibilities which might explain a difference in the typical IQ scores of different ethnic groups** which seem far more likely. Like the massive inequalities in education within our societies and throughout the world.

As far as Africa's problems are concerned, in the hundred years previous to 1945, Western Europe experienced bloody civil wars as well as international conflict, dictatorships and oligarchies, genocide on a massive scale, famine and pandemic disease. We have no reason to think those white Western Europeans were any less intelligent than the white Western Europeans of today. Africa's problems have nothing to do with the intelligence of its people, but the circumstances that face them, the lack of virtue in some of their leaders and the stupidity (as in lack of wisdom) of white Western Europeans who buggered things up there in the past.

And alas, Watson's comments about black employees read way too much like “You can't trust a [insert racist term].” In reality, a person having been employed on their merit is not going to reveal themselves to be of lower than anticipated intelligence at a later date. But there is the old racist stereotype that black employees will let you down one way or another, of which I hear an echo here.

Waston was wrong, but not because what he said was offensive. It happened to be both.

He has since apologised for what he said in such terms that it is difficult to work out how he managed to say such things in the first place.



If you got down this far, you deserve a joke, which as ancient as it is silly. But every time I read Dr Watson, I think of Holmes and Watson and this appalling joke.

Sherlock Holmes surveys the crime scene and asks his companion what he sees.

“Well,” says Watson, “I see a naked man lied on his front with what appears to be a yellow citrus fruit between his buttocks. So then, Holmes, what do you make of it?”

Holmes considers the scene and concludes, “A lemon entry, my dear Watson, a lemon entry.”

(Elementry, geddit? Nevermind.)



* I don't like the term emotional intelligence because it lumps a lot of things together which actually deserve to be recognised, explored and appreciated for their own worth, without needing to be compared with this very different thing we call intelligence. Empathy, tact, wisdom and compassion are highly valuable and in many circumstances, far more valuable than being able to find the root of seven hundred and twenty-nine. The concept of EI seems entirely superfluous.

** I haven't linked to this data as I cannot find a reliable on-line source. There is a much disputed Wikipedia page if anyone wants to get an idea of the kind of data we might possibly be talking about. However, as far as I'm concerned it is how we might understand that data rather than the data itself which is important.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Today is World Environment Day. Time to go shopping!

In fact, of course, reducing the amount of stuff we buy is probably the most important thing that a consumer can do to save the planet. Currently, we purchase unsustainable amounts of stuff; shopping is regarded as a leisure pursuit, even though every item we buy which we're not actually going to use (need, of course, is impossible to measure) has involved a manufacturing process, packaging and has been transported to us - sometimes from the other side of the world.

However, since life has to be worth living if it's going to be worth saving, a good place to start reducing one's impact on the environment is by looking at the really boring activities we can't avoid. Who takes pleasure in buying wash powder or stand around waiting for an inefficient kettle to boil? Exactly; no sacrifice involved. And in the long term, all of these things save money.

Most of these things I've mentioned before, but I thought I'd put them all in the same place.


1. Eco-Balls

You stick the Eco-Balls into the washing machine instead of using powder. The balls contain thingies which ionised the oxygen particles in the water and bash the clothes clean on a molecular level. It really works. It works as well as biological powder and these are supposed to last for 1000 washes - which would use a lot of washing powder.

This is also great from my point of view because there's no heavy box of powder to lift and nothing to spill. Also my gruesome skin itches a great deal less.

Downside: We have been programmed to associated a synthetic floral fragrance with cleanliness, whereas the Eco-Balls don't smell of anything. Despite being convinced of their effecacy, I couldn't persuade my Mum to buy some as she felt things didn't smell clean.

Price: Other than eBay, the cheapest price currently appears to be £27.50 at Cap Carbon where there is a money-back guarantee and you can get £10 is you also buy...


2. Dryer-Balls

When you can't dry things outside for whatever reason, the dryer-balls reduce the time things take to dry in the tumble dryer and soften your clothes while there at it. My experience suggests a drying time-reduction of about a third, although this must vary. So you save time and money on electricity.

Downside: They can be rather noisy.

Price: See above for the offer at Cap Carbon, otherwise £7.99 at ecoTime. I've seen them for three or four quids on eBay as well.


3. Bicarbonate of Soda / Sodium Bicarbonate / Baking Soda

Bicarbonate of Soda is a main ingredient in lots and lots of cleaning products but can be effective without the additional chemicals and packaging of shop-bought stuff It is really effective at shifting miscellaneous muck and quite fun to play Mad Scientists with, on account of the fizz it makes when coming into contact with anything acidic.

I use the stuff for everything from stopping strong foods smells contaminating the milk in the fridge through to washing my hair. However, a far more comprehensive list than I could ever manage can be found here: Sixty-One Uses for Baking Soda.

Downside: Bicarbonate of Soda can leave a powdery residue anywhere you failed to rinse properly.

Price: Because it's also a main ingredient in Bath Bombs, you can buy Bicarbonate of Soda in large quantities from shops that supplier folks who hand-make cosmetics. Just a Soap seems the cheapest for amounts you don't need an extra cupboard for storage (although note the prices exclude VAT).


4. The Eco-Kettle

The Eco-Kettle is so cool! It consisters of two cyclinders; you fill the inner one with water and the push the exact quantity of water you wish to boil into the outer cyclinder. It then boils extremely quickly. You don't have to worry about exposed elements or anything like that. It is great and is purported to save about 30% electricity - a significant saving for a tea junkie like myself.

Downside:
Measurement is in cups, as in tiny wee tea cups, so you have to work out how many cups of water fit into a grown-up mug. It is a bit heavier than an ordinary kettle. I also think it requires more strength in one's hands to work than your average kettle. Therefore, not one for people with signifcant weakness in their hands.

Price: These come up relatively cheap on eBay as unwanted presents, but the postage is usually steep. I got mine for £29.50 at the Ethical Superstore, where you get free teabags, you get a free gift anyway and you might find that you've accidentally bought a shedload of Fair Trade Chocolate at the same time (Actually, the Ethical Superstore is also great for your Teabags, which you can buy relatively cheaply in bulk.)

It is expensive for a kettle but you can go a lot dearer - here is a £60 kettle and it doesn't even look as cool. You can buy a kettle for a fiver, but those things only last about six months.


5. Vinegar

Vinegar is a super all-purpose cleaner. It cleans. Everything. It is antiseptic and antibacterial, it'll eat through grease, rust and all manner of crud. However, a far more comprehensive list than I could ever manage can be found here: Wise Bread's 242 uses for Vinegar. And Counting.

Downside: I don't like the smell of vinegar, even though it doesn't linger at all. Lemon juice is a good additive or even an alternative when this is important. Also, because of the acidity, you have to be careful about certain surfaces (I can't use it to clean the vast marble surfaces of our bungalow, for example).

Price: Uh, I don't know, we buy it with my groceries. We get the clear distilled stuff which probably tastes foul on your chips.


6. The Mooncup/ Keeper/ Menstrual Cup

I wrote an entire post about this last year, which covers the advantages and disadvantages of this method of sanitary protection.

Price: Just now, the cheapest would appear to be £17.99 at the Ethical Superstore, although I got mine cheaper than that. Look out for special offers. Also while we're on the distasteful subject of bodily functions...


7. Weenee Pouch Pants (sorry; that's what they're called)

This is my nephew Alexander's recommendation. It's a compromise between the convenience of disposable nappies and the ecological advantages of Terry Towels. What you have is a washable brief with a waterproof gusset, as it were. In this gusset fits a liner which is disposable and biodegradable. So Alexander's nappy doesn't need changing completely every time he goes to the toilet; the liner can just be thrown away. And when the nappy is changed, it can be washed and worn again.

Downside: Not as convenient as disposable nappies when on the move. When Alex stays away from home he prefers nappies you can just throw away. Or at least, his Mummy and Daddy do. Also, I imagine there is more of an issue with the growing size of a baby than with Terry Towels which you can adjust as you go along - I forgot to ask.

Price: These are bloody expensive; apparently at £11.99 a pair everywhere - although I can recommend Spirit of Nature having bought stuff from there myself. A good source for condoms which are suitable for vegans and biodegradeable.


You know, I'm sure there are other things, but that's all I can think of today.

Fitter, happier, more productive

I have a bad luck condition. Out of the blue bad luck. Sometimes it irks me when I see others abuse their precious health; in the same way that it irks me that I see folks fritter vast quantities of money away simply because they have something I don’t and I imagine, if I had it, I would use it more wisely.

However, there is something that irks me far far more than that. From BBC News, Blair calls for lifestyle change.

"Ten per cent of NHS resources today are used to treat diabetes," he said. "By 2010 the estimate is that this could double.

"That's 20 per cent of the entire resources of the NHS - and it's avoidable. Three quarters of diabetics are Type 2 diabetics, and two thirds of them have a disease which could be preventable with exercise, diet and more healthy choices."

This is irresponsible rhetoric for several reasons.

The first is that such statistics are non-existent. It is possible to speculate about proportions of cases of Type 2 which may have been preventable, but sorry, there is no way that we can apply real numbers to this. We don’t understand why some folks get diabetes and other don’t; this condition is of unknown aetiology. Aetiology, Mr Blair; look it up. All we know about are risk factors.

There is almost certainly a genetic predisposition going on with diabetes. In Type 2, age is a massive risk factor - all those irresponsible folks surviving past sixty-five. There are various illnesses, surgical procedures and medicinal regimes that increase your risk. And clearly, obesity is a major risk factor or more precisely, the amount of fatty tissue in the abdominal cavity is a major risk factor. And obesity is a complex disease in itself. My two friends who developed Type 2 diabetes in their thirties were already disabled, which undoubtedly influenced the millions of individual decisions they made which may or may not have contributed to getting sick - or took those decisions right out of their hands.

How exactly the proportionate cost of diabetes could double within three and a half years, I really don't know, but we'll pretend that makes perfect sense.

Obviously, the idea behind this rhetoric is either to scapegoat and stigmatise people with diabetes or it is to persuade currently healthy people to take steps to prevent themselves getting ill in the future. We'll give the guy the benefit of the doubt...

But which of these two messages is more likely to effect your own lifestyle choices?

A proportion of people with diabetes brought it on themselves because they eat too much and don’t get enough exercise.

or

You greatly heighten your risk of diabetes if you continue to eat as much as you're eating and don’t start getting more exercise.

The point about most of the risk-taking we do is that it is just that; risk-taking. Nobody knows for sure they are going to get ill if they take a particular course of action.

People calculate these risks using the information available to them as well as something called the optimistic bias; because actually, we’re not natural worriers and most people would rather think that they are not going to get sick. One of the ways that this operates is that we identify and emphasise the differences between ourselves and people who have acquired illness; those people got sick because they are more stupid, lazy, careless or selfish than I am; I will not get sick.

Talk about how other people have become ill, and even people in high-risk groups will disassociate themselves from those people; well, I am overweight, but those people who got sick must have been very overweight.

Of course, however much information we have about how to look after ourselves, the day we stop taking risks is the day we die. And I believe most of us do think about this and made our decisions accordingly. I know there are things I do to make myself feel better in the short term, but which cannot be doing me much good in the long term. Included in these are the five prescription items (none of this which is keeping me alive or benefitting my long term health) as well as various dietary stuff. Hopefully you will sympathise this because I am a tragic cripple, but I don't believe that I have more on my plate than other people; for me, it is pain and fatigue, for others it is stress, time constraints, poverty, etc., etc..

Of course some people make excuses for themselves (perhaps most of us), but since none of us can possibly determine this from the outside, we can’t make any judgement on individuals. And if we could, what could we do about it? We cannot physically prevent people from making bad choices. And we cannot punish people for their mistakes; chronic illness is disproportionate and entirely unjust as it is.

So to public health:

He argued that public health problems were "not, strictly speaking, public health problems at all".

"They are questions of individual lifestyle - obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, diabetes, sexually transmitted disease," said Mr Blair.

"These are not epidemics in the epidemiological sense - they are the result of millions of individual decisions, at millions of points in time."

Some more words to look up. Epidemiology is the study of incidence and distribution of disease. Obesity (ICD-10 E65-68), alcoholism (ICD-10 F10-19), diabetes (ICD-10 E10-14) and the different varieties of sexually transmitted infections are all diseases. Statisticians might legitimately describe these things as endemic - or epidemic if the incidence is increasing. These can also be described as public health problems.

Smoking and “alcohol abuse” (if this phrase is taken to mean binge-drinking, for example) are indeed matters of individual lifestyle. The prevalence of these behaviours within our culture have an effect on our health. These can also be described as public health problems.

Poverty is also a major risk factor for almost every life-threatening disease there is. That can also be described as a public health problem. Just thought I would throw that in.

I know, I know. What is a Prime Minister to do?

First off, you can't blame sick people for being sick. Nobody chooses to be ill, certainly nobody deserves to be ill and the most anyone can say about almost any condition is that a person took a gamble and lost. There may have been quite compelling, even logical reasons for taking that gamble, or it might have been a very stupid thing to do. Every case is individual but nobody who is losing their sight through diabetes or gradually running out of oxygen because of a lifetime of smoking deserves to be told or treated as if they brought it on themselves.

Secondly - and perhaps more to the point - you can't blame the short-comings of the NHS on people who live less than healthy lifestyles. Talk to doctors, nurses and health-service managers - of course there will be exasperated by certain patients who refuse to mend their self-destructive ways, but my experience suggests that this won't be the first thing that comes to mind.

Thirdly, to improve the health of the nation...

Personally, I am in favour information which explains the precise relationship between cause and effect. Ideally, we would all get excellent human biology in schools and then everything else would be easy after that. Public information has tended to be ineffective because it fails to explain stuff; when a child is doing something naughty, it is sensible to say "Stop that at once!" but if you want the child to refrain from doing it again, you must explain why it is a bad idea.

More is perhaps less with public health information. Too much information, especially information which has the potential to cause worry, tends to confuse people. What's more, the message must be got across that people can get sick regardless of lifestyle. This week there has been a study to show that people with dark skin are more likely to die of skin cancer. One of the reasons for this may be that all this emphasis on the tan-craving pale folks who are more likely to get skin cancer may have lead us to believe that darker skins are not at any risk at all.

The NHS needs... uh, don't ask me.

All sorts of social problems, which can be affected by legislation, lead to unhealthy lifestyles. Poverty and social inequality being a very big deal - okay, so it is relative; few people are starving in this country, but then by the same token, there's nothing wrong with our nations health compared to most other parts of the world.

Otherwise, I think we should try to appreciate what we have got, but also appreciate its fragility. Illness and death are inevitable parts of life - the latter, defines what life is. If people value their lives and value their health, then they will act accordingly - or not, but since there's nothing any of us can sensibly do to coerce one another, that's something we'll just have to accept.

The Fall of Civilisation

I intended to write a grand essay for Blogging Against Heteronormativity Day but as I have been rather poorly all week, you’ll have to make do with the little story of one of our heroes, Alan Turing.

The world might be a very different place if it wasn’t for Alan Turing. Most famously of course, the Allied Forces may not have proved victorious in the Second World War if it wasn’t for Turing’s contribution to the cracking of the Enigma Machine. What is certain is that very many more lives would have been lost on both sides and the whole thing may have lasted much longer.

You really ought to read the magnificant Simon Singh’s The Code Book if you are at all interested, as my capacity for maths may fall rather short of even explaining the gist of the problem. Basically you have a machine which creates and translates an alphabetic code. But in a very complicated way – check out the Wikipedia entry if you even begin to understand probability. This machine might be configured in so many different ways that even a modern computer would take literally years to work through all the possibilities. Add to this the fact that the configurations of this machine were changed on a daily basis

Nazi Germany were entirely confident that this was an uncrackable code and used it to communicate all sorts of strategic information – including, for example, the whereabouts of U-Boats in the Atlantic Ocean. With two grandfathers in the navy, the Goldfish’s unborn self was at stake. Maybe you too.

With the help of an older version of the Enigma machine given to us by the Polish (who had been working on this long before us) Turing and his team created a new machine called the Bombe, a computer which… well, look I really can’t do the maths so you’ll have to take my word for it that it was very clever and it did the job. And we won the War.

After the War, all this remained a total secret and Enigma machines were still used for military purposes elsewhere in the world, genuinely believed to be uncrackable. This is one of the reasons that Turing was not hailed as the national and international hero he really was, during his lifetime.

Another profound way in which Alan Turing has effected our lives is his contribution to computer science. Turing invented the Turing Machine, a mathematical thought experiment which could stimulate the logic of any computer which could possibly be constructed. Do you understand what this means? In 1936, this guy laid down the model for at least the next seventy years of computing theory. My computer works according to principles he said were inevitable. So does yours. He is therefore widely considered to be the father of modern computer science.

Turing also made a tremendous philosophical contribution to our age and this is the aspect of the man which has gained hero status in my own esteem. He was one of the first people to seriously discuss the implications of artificial intelligence and perhaps most notably, the questions about the nature of human existence and experience that arise when we are confronted with the idea of intelligent computers (still much more of a fantasy back then).

If I think therefore I am then what it is about the act of thinking which distinguish me from a computer’s computing? What am I, beyond a sophisticated organic computer? What are our thoughts and emotions beyond chemical and electrical events? Is there something more to life? Is there something which makes the thought processes of a human impossible to imitate and if so, what would that be? What are we? Who are you? What? Eh?

The answer to these questions and more will not be coming to a blog near you any time soon. Point is that Turing contributed at least as much to Philosophy of the Mind in the Twentieth Century as Freud. And these are just the highlights. The guy also did all sorts of things I don’t really understand because he was so very much more clever than I am.

So why am I telling you all this for Blogging Against Heteronormativity Day?

Am I telling you all this to demonstrate that gay people are capable of making a contribution too? Uh, no.

Am I telling you all this because of the tragic way our nation chose to treat my hero? Only a few years after he had saved the world, he was arrested and convicted for gross acts of indecency (committed in his own home, behind closed doors, with one other fully consenting adult). He escaped prison on condition he took hormonal therapy, which amounted to a sort of chemical castration. He became impotent, obese and developed breasts. His private life was exposed in the newspapers. Meanwhile, his security clearance was taken away – when our lives depended on it, we trusted this known homosexual with our most precious secrets, but in peacetime he was out on his ear.

Am I telling you all this because even now we are trying to write the guy out of history, with movies like The Enigma which has the problem solved by rosey-cheeked straight boys and girls with no mention of our beloved stuttering homosexual?

Nope. The reason I am telling you this is because Alan Turing was just forty-one when he (rather poetically) ate an apple laced with cyanide. Forty-one. I don’t think that it is fanciful to assume that he wasn’t quite finished at this point; that he perhaps had a great deal more to give. That we effectively killed one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century, of any century because of our preoccupation with sexual conformity, our obsession that other people’s most private and intimate activities should look and feel exactly the same as everyone else’s.

Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-four when he found himself in prison charged with Sodomy. Fortunately, his Papa got him off. Fortunately for him, fortunately for us, (fortunately for Dan Brown), fortunately for almost everyone who has lived in Europe since.

An important principle in both biological evolution and human history is that progress is only ever made by the mutants; those organisms or individuals who break the rules. Non-conformity is a necessary condition for greatness. It isn’t a sufficient condition; some mutations are harmful, most are neither here nor there. However, attempts to suppress such superficial differences are not only to the detriment of an individual who has a right to these freedoms, but to the detriment of every one of us alive and all those of us yet to come.

This was not at all articulate but given my current state it was either this or writing merely “Heteronormativity is a bad thing. Stop it!”

Don't people just make you sick?

Inspired by Charles Dawson and his allegedly Distasteful Subject.

Recent generations have had a kind of cultural mysophobia instilled in us from an early age. AIDS emerged within six months of my birth and was always in my consciousness; eight year old Sally and I decided not to make an oath of our friendship in blood in case one of us was infected. I do not know quite how many diseases I was vaccinated against and indeed, my health was excellent as a child.

On diagnosis of the condition I developed at fifteen, I was informed that I had simply not had enough bugs and diseases and my immune system had now collapsed, perhaps permanently, in the face of its first significant challenge.

Now personally, I would prefer that people like me became disabled than mothers and fathers had to face the deaths of their infant children to preventable diseases – if indeed there is a connection between my pathetic immune system (and the increasing rate of asthma and other allergies) and vaccination. My point is that I am not naïve about the potential effects of infection.

One of the chief candidates was Epstein-Barr which causes Glandular Fever or Mono.

Meet Epstein-Barr, also know as the kissing disease, because that’s one way of contracting it and most people who get Glandular Fever are adolescents who do a lot of that sort of thing. With tongues. Scary stuff, eh? You could be ill for months and if you are unlucky, you could end up like me. Don’t kiss any icky boys or slimy girls and you’ll be safe, right?

Well no. In the developing world, there is an almost 100% infection rate among babies and in the UK about eighty percent of us carry the antibodies; evidence that at some point we were infected and are now immune. Most of us didn’t get sick at all, however many tonsils we tickled.

Similarly; herpes. Eek! Herpes! Seventy percent of us have facial herpes that causes coldsores. About one in five of us have the genital version of the virus. That means that a state of herpes infection is actually normal; fortunately most of us are oblivious to the fact because our immune systems tuck these things out of sight and most of us don’t experience (or at least don’t notice) symptoms.

Just recently in the news there was the suggestion that students should be wary of the number of partners they kissed because of the heightened risk of Meningitis. Meningitis is serious, it can kill and otherwise cause severe lifelong impairment. Yet one in ten of us carry the bacteria involved. Without behaving abnormally, there is very little you can do to guarantee your health and therefore, your life.

People do make you sick. Human contact is a bloody dangerous business. And as I say, we are riddled with potentially problematic, even potentially deadly organisms who largely manage to coexist with us. Some of them even benefit us. It is just the way the world is.

So, The Goldfish Guide To Avoiding Sickness From Infectious Diseases

• Hand-washing and food hygiene is all essential. It is very easy to make oneself very ill with the toxins your body has already disposed off, so to speak, as well as bacteria in meat and eggs which is destroyed with cooking. That stuff has to be taken seriously.

• There is no excuse not to use a condom. They are an effective form of contraceptive and protection from at least the ew nasty diseases. When you don’t want to use a condom, and either party has slept with anyone else ever, get screened. If you are grown-up enough to have sex, you are grown-up enough to feel no shame in this. The vast majority of STIs cause very little harm unless they go untreated.

• If you have an infectious disease such as the flu or a sickness bug, stay away from other people until it has run its course. Remember that your sniffle could do a lot more harm to someone with a vulnerable immune system, who may be a colleague, or someone next to you on the bus – apart from the fact that making your colleagues sick will double your workload when they’re off work in a few days time.

• Have a good idea about the symptoms of serious infectious diseases like Meningitis so that on the rare occasions that it does crop up (and you don’t need a SU card to get sick), the damage can be kept to an absolute minimum.

• Look after your immune system by exercising, eating healthily, giving up smoking but most essentially, getting plenty of human contact. Then at least if you do catch the dreaded lurgy, your immune system will be boosted by all the love, laughter, support and stress-relief provided by whichever bastard infected you.
  

At this point I must remind you of the wonderful Giant Microbes website first pointed out by Gimpy Mumpy, where you can contract various diseases, including Syphilis (right), for a mere £6.25.

A competitive price around our way.

Love is real, real is love

Inexpert evolutionists believe that romantic love doesn’t exist, that it is just about sex and delusion. It is unselfish and we need to be selfish in order to survive, they claim. They are wrong.

The Anti-Science brigade (can’t say Creationists since evolution does not eliminate the possibility of a creator God) argue that if the evolutionary theory is correct, then love cannot exist. It is also an irrational state and therefore, one might think, the dominion of organised religion. They are wrong.

Love is real and belongs to us all. It happened something like this:

Once upon a time, when people paired off to make babies, all anybody could think about was physical indicators of fertility and the sort of genetic heritage that would allow potential offspring to physically survive and reproduce themselves. All we cared about were waist to hip proportions, distribution of bodily hair, indicators of youth and vitality. We were a very shallow bunch indeed and not getting very far at all. Even sex wasn’t all that good as we only had one position.

One day, an ape creature was sitting on a rock – we’ll call him Johnny. Johnny was a troubled young man who was full of ideas about the world around him but nobody to express them to. Alas, there was no language back then and all his peers were interested in was hunting wildebeest and getting laid. He was lonely even when surrounded by other ape creatures. So lonely in fact, that he sang a sad little song to himself. It went something like this;

“Ug, ug ug ug ug.
Ug, ug ug ug ug.
Ug! Ug ug, ug ug ug ug
Ug, ug ug ug ug.”

As he was singing this last melancholic line, a bright-eyed female approached his rock. We’ll call her Jane. Poor Johnny was fed up of women as back in those days, they were only ever after one thing.

“Ug ug,” Johnny said, in the nonchalant tone that he had adopted for members of his own species. But as he was about to turn away, he noticed a flicker of comprehension in her eyes.

“Ug?” Jane asked, scratching her head. For she too had had these feelings that perhaps there was more to life that sex and wildebeest – much as she enjoyed both.

“Ug ug,” he explained. “Ug ug ug ug.”

“Ug ug ug!” Jane exclaimed and the two of them fell about laughing at this joke, the hilarity of which has long since been lost amid the shifting sands of time. It was very funny. I guess you had to be there.

And so the two ape creatures sat there talking all day long. Of course they hadn’t got any sort of language, but being a tad brighter than your average bipeds, they were using tone of voice, facial expression and hand gestures to get their message across.

It was getting kind of late, so Johnny suggested that they head back to his cave for a coffee.

Jane pointed out that they were on the wrong part of the continent for coffee, even if they could work out, within the space of an evening, how to process the seeds of that plant into a stimulating hot beverage. As you can imagine, without language, this took the best part of an hour to get across.

Johnny averted his eyes and twiddled his thumbs as if to say, “I know, but I just invented the euphemism.”

...Years passed and Johnny and Jane never did run out of things to “talk” about. When their children were born, they inherited good communication skills both through the genetic legacy of brain architecture, but also through having parents who encouraged good communication. And when these children grew up, they were looking for partners who had something to say for themselves and in turn, produced good communicative children.

Language and love thus developed concurrently. Love is, in reductionist terms, sexual attraction based on a person’s ability to communicate. Call it personality or whatever else you like - that's really what it is.

In order for love to exist, we must have developed the ability to communicate well, but in order for language to exist, we must have nurtured these abilities over many generations, thus we must have been the products of predominantly loving relationships and this somehow gave us the edge over those not-so-communicative ape creatures who made sexual selection on purely physical attributes.

Why? Possibly we make better parents; standing upright gives us a relatively narrow pelvis, meaning our offspring must be born very small and vulnerable – it is literally years before they can be left alone, so at some point pair-bonding needed to become long-term. Love might have helped. Or it could have been that good communicators were better in crises which involved team-work or problem-solving. I don't know everything, I'm just making it up as I go along.

Of course, we must not over-romanticise our genetic heritage or our current nature. We didn’t abandon other types of sexual attraction – look at Keanu Reeves. Exactly. Plus our most romanticised version of love is not necessary the optimal reproductive strategy; in the most primitive of circumstances both parents need to invest in one offspring at any one time, but both men and women may optimise their chances of reproductive success through deception and betrayal.

Perhaps one of the big mistakes we make culturally is to assume that there are only two types of sexual relationship; casual, purely sexual relationships which are entirely shallow and thus illegitimate and permanent love relationships where some mystical rite or institution ensures that both parties remain happily in love for ever and ever and ever.

The whole business is far more complicated than that, but for today I just wanted to argue for love's existence.

Thought for The Day

Sometimes people may point to a flower and say, "How can you look at this thing, which is so perfect, so orderly and yet so beautiful and believe that it is the product of random events and not created by the mind of God?"

But because I understand the science of evolution and see evidence for this science all around and indeed, inside myself, I just cannot believe that an omniscient, ominipotent and benevolent creator God did any more than set the ball rolling - if that.

However, when in my fatigue, I forget to put in a Tesco order, run out of milk and am forced to use powdered milk in my Earl Grey tea for a twenty-four hour period, I am left without a doubt that there is a supernatural force of Evil at work in the world today.

I have just added two new links:

Rolls Eyes is Ouch regular Justin R's new blog.

Clausentum Photography is my sister's new platform for wedding photography in the New Forest area. She is very good. On the off chance that you or someone you know is planning to get married in the New Forest, do check her out. I know this is a rather silly place to advertise such a service but you never know who may be passing through. You can also buy a print of the flower at the top there.