This book is about the scientific basis of race. There isn’t one.
From a scientific, biological point of view, there is NO SUCH thing as race. You proThis book is about the scientific basis of race. There isn’t one.
From a scientific, biological point of view, there is NO SUCH thing as race. You probably heard this, but there are more DNA variations between black Africans than between black Africans and white Europeans. Since the Unesco statement in 1952 (“The Race Question in Modern Science”) this has been official scientific policy. In their words race was “a fundamentally anti-rational system of thought”.
You will have noted that, alas, this announcement did not stop the whole entirety of human society proceeding on the basis that of course race exists, and of course there are different races. Angela Saini puts it like this :
Racial categories were still alive in people’s minds. They were still active in everyday life, playing out in the politics and the racism of the real world. For scientists to suddenly stop thinking about humans in racial terms was impossible so long as everyone out there still thought about themselves and others that way.
Or in a nutshell, race is a “social reality” not a biological fact.
THE RISE AND FALL AND ATTEMPTED RISE AGAIN OF THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE CONCEPT OF RACE
Angela Saini tells the story of how science came to believe in the biological basis of separate races and how this “race science” rose to become orthodoxy, then fell dramatically and smashed to bits, and how now it tries to get back in through the back door, courtesy of some well-funded alt right whack jobs.
In the Victorian period there were a lot of bogus scientists running around spouting total nonsense, it took a long while to get them thrown out. You couldn’t tell the bogus ones from the sensible ones for the longest time. Race science began as part of the Victorian mania for classifying everything, butterflies, albatross eggs, fossils, types of wheat, and …. Humans.
EUGENICS (IT’S PRONOUNCED EWWWGENICS)
At the same time came the Darwinian evolution-revolution. When you put the two together, and considering Mendel’s rediscovered work on selective breeding, you got the idea of improving the human race… or a part of it…. (let’s say, oh, I don’t know, the white part)… by selective breeding of people. You know, just like farmers do with cows and those other things. That was called eugenics. Built into all this thinking was, of course, that some races are essentially superior than others, and therefore worth purifying.
DOWNFALL OF RACE SCIENCE
By the 1920s and 30s race science in the form of eugenics had been signed into law in over 30 states in the USA. Compulsory sterilisation of those deemed mentally or physically unfit was the first idea. Europeans were enthusiastic about this too. Germany under Hitler was the apotheosis of the racist state, and you know he kind of gave a bad name to that whole way of thinking, so this led to the abandonment of scientifically based race concepts after WW2 by all except the whack jobs.
DNA
However, says Angela Saini, there has been a partial return of race science in the form of genetics. Self-described antiracist scientists use the phrase “human biodiversity” and sometimes this whole DNA human genome thing sounds kind of not that dissimilar to something those old Victorian gentlemen scientists would have thought they were talking about.
THE BORING BIT
This book spends half its pages detailing the nefarious shady organisations and methods of right wing fruitcakes who still think there is a biological reality to race and who want to reintroduce their untruths into public discourse, to reclothe the Victorian racial hierarchy with sciency DNA chatter. Angela Saini really cares about that stuff, she wants those people recognised and booted out and crushed. I can see why but there was way too much detail for me. First half was very interesting though. I’m not sure if it’s useful to say I recommend the first half of a book!...more
In August 1969 Joni Mitchell couldn’t get to the Woodstock Festival so instead she watched it on tv and wrote a song about it, you may know it
We are sIn August 1969 Joni Mitchell couldn’t get to the Woodstock Festival so instead she watched it on tv and wrote a song about it, you may know it
We are stardust We are golden And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden
It turns out that she was scientifically accurate, as confirmed in the most beautiful passage from this book :
It is true that atoms can be split by collisions with other particles, but in general the atom is indestructible and it can exist forever. The human body is built up from complex organic molecules, but all those molecules are themselves composed of atoms. All the heavy atoms in our body have therefore been created inside a massive star or even in some cases a supernova. The atoms in our bodies are billions of years old. Through all this time the atoms remain “as good as new" . Nor have they aged since the time they left the distant and long-forgotten supernova from where they were originally created. We carry around in us remnants of supernovae explosions that took place aeons ago and millions of light years away.
Try bringing that up at your next family dinner.
“Granny, did you know that your body is composed of remnants of ancient stars which exploded millions of years ago?”
“Will you listen to the boy! You’ve been smoking those drugs again!”...more
What a headbanger, this is like one of those books that will make you smarter just if you have it in your house don’t even have to read it but if you What a headbanger, this is like one of those books that will make you smarter just if you have it in your house don’t even have to read it but if you do it’s a lot of very cool pix not too much writing from when the universe was just a little dot like a full stop like this full stop. until it’s the big thing that you see up in the sky so this book goes all the way from the big bong to the evolvement of the human beings from the dinosaurs and the microbes. The people that think that God did it will prolly not like this book but I bet they will secretly think its cool too. I see that if these pix are right from a long way off a microbe and a galaxy look quite the same, no coincidence, I think so, lol. I bet microbes are just little galaxies & if you can see inside there will be people in them too. Probaly people writing reviews on a microbe goodreads. I wished I had got this book last year, I would have past my exams better and not have to resit. It is so big you could pound someone unconscious easily. So you could use it on any home intruder. This artist has put in a lot of pix that are from movies I know, obvs J Park but also Ice Age and Creature from the Black lagoon and all those. This is when life has evolveled not with the microbes, there are no movies about fighting microbes that I have heard of although if there is I will not be surprised. When they make a movie like Bikini Bloodbath Carwash you know they will make anything....more
I was interested in the whole evolution/Christianity entanglement. It turns out it’s very entangled indeed.
First : some Christians say evolution is cI was interested in the whole evolution/Christianity entanglement. It turns out it’s very entangled indeed.
First : some Christians say evolution is completely incompatible with Christianity. But others say no, evolution, “like other scientific discoveries, only reveals in greater detail how God has chosen to order his creation”. So it’s no surprise to find some evolutionists are firm atheists and some are devout Christians.
However....!
I myself do not see how Darwinists CAN be Christians, because then they will have to say that God was pleased (allowed, guided, made possible) that evolution pursued its vastly complicated path and ended up evolving all the NASTY DISEASES caused by such parasites as mosquitos, roundworms, pubic lice, the bugs that cause river blindness and scabies, and not to mention the thing that was in the fleas that were on the rats that were on the ship that brought the Black Death to Europe and killed one THIRD of its human beings over a period of three years in the 14th century. How can any Christian be cool with all of that nasty horror? Darwinians be cool with it because these species evolved and that's the way it was because that's the way it was, it's only from our human perspective that it all looks cruel. But Darwinism moves out from the human perspective. But when you bring the idea of a Loving God back in, then I think you may have a problem.
Second : What did Darwin think? He started in life planning to become a clergyman, but was distracted by barnacles and nematode worms or whatever those things were. At 67 he wrote
Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow I felt no distress, and have never doubted for a single second that my conclusion was correct.
However, wild horses couldn’t get him to speak against Christian beliefs in public, as his dear wife was horrified by his views. And also because he knew he’d be sticking his woolly head into a snake pit and what rational person does that?
Third : in his private writing about Christianity he discussed the problem of evil at some length – I have debated this one repeatedly in other reviews. What is worth mentioning here is Darwin’s own spin on the argument.
Evil’s existence is justified by Christians with reference to Man’s free will, which is essential to the whole project of the Creation. Evil tests or tempts human beings and their response gets them a ticket to ride on the up escalator or the down escalator. But Darwin opens out a whole new perspective which you don't get in the Bible.
The first thing that occurs to Darwin is that human life and history are only a small part of nature and its history.
In Darwin’s words :
what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?
Fourth : James Rachels says firmly that there is nothing in Darwinism that proves Christianity to be false, but it does provide “powerful reasons for doubting its truth”. After Darwin, “we are deprived of the idea that man has a special place in the divine order”. After Darwin, he says, “God looks more and more like an unnecessary hypothesis”.
Well, that’s his conclusion, but I still don’t see why Christian Darwinists can’t claim the glorious complexity of evolution as God’s brilliant idea all along. I do agree, though, that they might have a problem explaining all the non-human suffering which goes to make up the whole story. Why, just to take one example, would God bother to include the evolution and subsequent destruction of all the species of the Jurassic period? It beats me. And one thing they can’t say any more is that the Bible is literally true.
And that’s about all I can conclude here. The more I investigate, the murkier it gets....more
According to Johan Norberg those people who were wearing shades because the future was so bright were right. His introduction is called “The Go[image]
According to Johan Norberg those people who were wearing shades because the future was so bright were right. His introduction is called “The Good Old Days Are Now” and his book is an antidote to the daily news because the news is one of the very few things Johan thinks isn’t getting better. That’s because they only report the bad news because the bad news is rare and dramatic, which of course gives us all the idea that terrible things are happening all the time, which of course, they are somewhere on the planet, there’s a lot of people here and a lot of stuff is happening.
PEASE PUDDING AND SAVELOY- WHAT NEXT? IS THE QUESTION
Johan lists nine ways the lot of the human race has vastly improved over the centuries. Let’s take the first one : food.
What was the most important invention of the 20th century? Computers, planes, radio, television maybe? No – nitrogen-based artificial fertilizer, invented by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. “Without the Haber-Bosch Process about two-fifths of the world population would not exist at all”. Now, back in the 1960s ecologists were predicting massive famines in books like The Population Bomb (1968) by Paul Ehrlich (“in the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death”) and Famine 1975! by William and Paul Paddock (“in fifteen years the famines will be catastrophic”).
Johan says “yet the exact opposite happened”.
This was because the Green Revolution happened, pioneered by Dr Norman Borlaug, about whom it has been said
He is the first person to save a billion human lives.
Johan’s book is cramful of statistics and I will just quote a few about food –
In 1961 people in 51 countries, including Iran, Pakistan, China and Indonesia, consumed less than 2000 calories per person per day. By 2013 that number had fallen to just one : Zambia…
and
world agricultural prices are now half of what they were in the early 20th century.
And
The UN reported in 1947 that around 50% of the world’s population was chronically malnourished… Today this has declined to around 13%
TIME FOR A EUPHEMISM OR TWO
Okay, let’s talk about poo. Sanitation. Countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Vietnam have reduced “open defecation” by around one third since 1990. As a result of these efforts, global deaths from diarrhea have been reduced from 1.5 million in 1990 to 662,000 in 2012. Between 1990 and 2015 427 million more Africans gained access to clean water. What’s “open defecation”? Hey, I will leave that to your imagination, along with “flying toilets”.
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MORE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL
Let’s talk about life expectancy. “Before 1800 not a single country in the world had a life expectancy higher than 40 years”. Then came the largely successful war against infectious disease – TB, diphtheria, polio, measles and smallpox. And as we recently saw, there was no ebola pandemic. Even death from malaria has halved between 2000 and 2015.
You see where this all is going. Poverty and violence are declining, literacy and “freedom” (meaning liberal democracy) and equality are all going up up up. I was with him all the way in these chapters. Now we finally made it to the 21st century (which when you think is a lot of centuries) it seems that the appropriate response is to grab your coat and get your hat, and leave your worry at the doorstep, and just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.
The hard sell was the chapter on the environment. Only the day before yesterday the British news reported this:
Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, a report says. The Living Planet assessment, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF, suggests that if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020. The figures suggest that animals living in lakes, rivers and wetlands are suffering the biggest losses.
Human activity, including habitat loss, wildlife trade, pollution and climate change contributed to the declines.
And similar jeremiads are issued with conscience-deadening regularity.
But Johan tells us the excellent news of cleaned up air in European cities, unpolluted rivers like the Thames, no more acid rain, and deforestation stopped in the rich countries. Yes, caring for the environment is a luxury rich countries can now afford, while some poor people shoot elephants to gouge out their tusks to sell to other not especially rich people in other countries who believe ivory has magic powers, and rich people in rich countries disapprove of them terribly.
Going back to air pollution, this is one thing which he admits has got much worse –
The number of people breathing unsafe air has risen by more than 600 million since 2000 to a total of almost 1.8 billion.
But even here we can find a silver lining. This industrial pollution is being created because poor countries are getting richer via industrialization and “wealth creation”.
This process in poor countries is a way of dealing with even more acute and dangerous problems, just like the Industrial Revolution in the West increased pollution but solved the urgent problems of early death and poverty.
So Johan says chill, give these countries a few decades and they too will be able to deal with the environment like rich countries can now, because the poor countries in the past 50 years have been able to catch up extremely quickly. Look at China.
I must say that on occasion Johan appears to have been eating some of those funny mushrooms, he becomes so excitable :
In laboratories around the world, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers are trying to revolutionise energy… If just one of them is successful, it will blow our minds and change the world.
I’M ONLY HAPPY WHEN I’M MISERABLE
British people were surveyed in January 2015 – the question was : is the world getting better or worse? 71% said worse. Johan Norberg demonstrates over and over that they’re wrong on every possible level but he knows they won’t change their minds. Things will keep improving and we’ll all still think we’re going down the drain.
Because won’t it be terrible when we don’t have anything left to moan about? No more greenhouse gases, no more climate change, every car electric, free childcare for all, giant pandas roaming the streets, hundreds of them. We’ll be reduced to moaning about not having anything to moan about. According to Johan this will happen around 34 years from now.
It’s hard to find a modern book on race which will tell you what is the current scientific thinking, given the remarkable progress of genetics and theIt’s hard to find a modern book on race which will tell you what is the current scientific thinking, given the remarkable progress of genetics and the unravelling of the human genome and all that. There are a thousand books on racism, but hardly any on race. Isn’t that curious? I believe that may be because scientists realise it’s a hornet’s nest and they prefer not to stick their heads in.
I recently heard of Nicholas Wade’s A Troubling Inheritance (2014) but before I got to that one I found this one, which turns out to be pretty much what I was looking for – a third of it anyway, the other two thirds is above my head.
But first, what can genetics do for you?
SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED THE GENE FOR RIDICULOUS SCIENTIFIC CLAIMS
Adam Rutherford does a search on Google : “Scientists discover the gene for”. It gets him thousands of headlines from every type of publication “from the trashy to the august”.
Scientists discover the gene for cocaine addiction (Guardian 11 November 2008)
Scientists discover height gene (BBC Outline, 3 September 2007)
Scientists have discovered an “anxiety gene” (Daily Mail, 19 July 2002)
Scientists find “gay gene” that can help predict your sexuality (Daily Mirror, 9 October 2015)
Scientists find gene for compulsive reviewing of books on Goodreads (Okay, I made that one up)
Adam Rutherford holds his head in his hands and moans slightly. Then he writes this book, the message of which is
It’s much more complicated than that.
Mainly this book is a deflating mythbusting exercise – you can’t check anyone’s DNA and find out what percentage of her is from the Sudan and what percentage is Viking. It’s a bit disappointing really – I wanted to ask Dr Rutherford, well, what can you tell me? Never mind about what you can’t. He likes to say what you can’t do.
RACE
One of the things he thinks genetics can do and has done is show that scientifically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. This was the best part of the book. I like it when people draw a line in the sand. Actually, in this case, he’s obliterating the many previous lines which have been drawn in the sand.
there are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a “race”. As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist…. This does not align with the popular concept of race.
He hastily adds
That, of course, does not mean that racism doesn’t exist.
Okay, he’s willing to say that there may be other interpretations:
The question of what race means from a scientific point of view is complex, controversial and still a source of great ire and debate.
But that doesn’t last long :
Biology fundamentally deceives our eyes. Genetically, two black people are more likely to be more different to each other than a black person and a white person…. The genes that confer skin pigmentation are few, but mask a level of deeper genetic variation within Africa than without.
JEWISH SONGWRITERS, BLACK ATHLETES
So then we get to the ticklish question – what about when it appears to be clear that a particular “race” appears to be BETTER at some activity than other “races”? Is it racist to say that, for instance, Jewish Americans have been consistently brilliant at writing popular music for about a hundred years? (This is something which particularly fascinates me.) All the way from Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart to Goffin and King and Greenwich and Barry and on to Randy Newman, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen – the list is endless. Is it in their genes? Dr Rutherford picks another obvious example, black athletes.
It turns out : there is no genetic component. He says robustly:
The idea that black people are better at sport because of genetics, and possibly because of breeding during the wicked centuries of slavery, is built upon tissue foundations, and its cultural ubiquity yet another example of the chasm between what we think and what science says is true.
Well, it’s a curious thing. Adam Rutherford along with other geneticists say very clearly that race does not exist, but of course as we know every day the world ignores this and proceeds on the assumption that everyone is a member of a discrete race, or is to be classified as mixed race. So it all becomes rather like atheists arguing that there’s no God when almost everyone in the world operates on the assumption that there is.
I think we must conclude that the human race, speaking generally, does not much care what scientists say is real or not real. There’s just no telling them. They just stick their fingers in their ears and say to people like Adam Rutherford “la la la la, we’re not listening”. ...more
I have been waiting for this book for years : an honest account of the history of psychiatry, and for this subject, when you say warts and all, you haI have been waiting for this book for years : an honest account of the history of psychiatry, and for this subject, when you say warts and all, you have to be prepared for warts to be pretty much all there are until the 1970s. What a horror story! Here is Dr Lieberman’s mission statement:
There’s a good reason that so many people will do everything they can to avoid seeing a psychiatrist. I believe that the only way psychiatrists can demonstrate how far we have hoisted ourselves from the murk is first to own up to our long history of missteps and share the uncensored story of how we overcame our dubious past.
Why do psychiatrists get hated on by so many of us? - They overmedicate - they pathologise ordinary human behavior - They forever spout psychobabble (That’s according to Jeffrey.) But that ain’t nothing compared to what they used to do. )
In Shrinks we are on a giant slalom from Franz Mesmer (he was mesmerizing in the 1770s) all the way up to Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Dr L does finally leave us on a highly optimistic note – more of a full chord – explaining how practitioners have ditched the loony stuff, thrown Freud under the bus, and armed with the new hot psycho drugs will confidently and successfully manage all but the most profoundly ill schizophrenic and depressive. Say 98% of everyone. So put a smile on your face for the whole human race. It’s almost like being in love. But only almost – he still can say
Even now, charlatans drawn from the ranks of professional psychiatry continue to dupe desperate and unsuspecting patients as the institutions of psychiatry stand passively by.
***
The problem for the would be doctors of mental ailments is simply put – they could not agree for the first 200 years what mental illness was nor how to treat it. Was there a biological origin? Or did it originate in that ghost we call mind? Because of that
Unable to find a biological basis for the illnesses within its province, psychiatry became ever more scientifically estranged.
and
Psychiatry has trumpeted more illegitimate treatments than any other field of medicine
As for instance
The Rotational Chair : a psychotic patient would be strapped snugly into the chair and then spun around and around like an amusement park Tilt-a-Whirl until his psychotic symptoms were blotted out by dizziness, disorientation and vomiting.
(There’s worse, much worse to come.)
ENTER THE VIENNESE DOCTOR
Freud stands in a class of his own, simultaneously psychiatry’s greatest hero and its most calamitous rogue
At first a minority European sect, the Freudians relocated en masse to America in the early 1940s, fleeing from Hitler, most of them being Jewish. They set up shop in the New World and found rich pickings.
The worried well became the primary market for psychoanalysis… instead of wearing white coats and shouldering through a daily grind of raving and catatonic inmates, psychiatrists could chat with well-heeled businessmen about their childhood memories and gently guide well-coiffed matrons through their free association.
What the Freudians did was locate the origin of the mental illness in an unconscious conflict between the patient and in 99% of cases the parents. (I’m generalizing here.) Autism? Caused by the “refrigerator mother”. Homosexuality? (But yes, this was considered to be a mental illness until the 15th of December 1973. Before that, it was diagnosis 302.0. Hey, the World Health Organisation retained their classification “Homosexuality Disorder” until 1990.) Anyway, homosexuality was “induced by domineering mothers who instilled a fear of castration in their sons along with a deep seated rejection of women”.
(The mothers got put through the Freudian wringer.)
But the Freudians also tried to give the talking cure to the severely ill, so you got “a psychiatrist urging a psychotic person to talk about his sexual fantasies” or “a psychiatrist encouraging a suicidal person to accept that her parents never loved her”. Dr J’s head is in his hands here. By the 60s “the psychoanalytic movement had assumed the trappings of a religion”. The Freudians believed everyone was slightly mentally ill.
Being “shrunk” had become the ne plus ultra of upper-middle-class American life.
***
Meanwhile, outside the bubble, other medical disciplines considered psychiatry as a racket populated by hucksters selling invisible snake oil.
Vladimir Nabokov :
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
ASYLUMS
The fate of the seriously ill was gruesome. A quote from 1917 :
We can rarely alter the course of mental illness. We must openly admit that the vast majority of the patients placed in our institutions are forever lost.
In 1904 there were 150,000 Americans in asylums, and by 1955 that had increased to 550,000. And there they stayed. Now comes the horrendous part.
Driven by compassion and desperation, asylum-era physicians devised a succession of audacious treatments that today elicit feelings of revulsion or even outrage at their apparent barbarism. Unfortunately, many of these early treatments have become forever linked with the public’s dismal image of psychiatry. [But] the simple fact is that the alternative to these crude methods was interminable misery, as there was nothing that worked.
What were these audacious treatments?
- Giving patients malaria to cure or abate their psychosis caused by advanced syphilis - Overdosing schizophrenics with insulin to put them in a coma for maybe six days in a row (one side effect was that patients invariably became grossly obese, another side effect for some patients was death). Coma therapy “was used at almost every major mental hospital in the US and Europe in the 1940s and 50s”. - And the big one, the leucotomy aka lobotomy, which is where you either drill in to the patient’s skull above each eye, or if you don’t fancy that, there is an alternative method :
First the patient’s eyelid was lifted up. Next a surgical instrument that closely resembled an ice pick was slid under the eyelid until it came into contact with the thin bone at the back of the eye socket. Next, a small mallet was used to hammer….
Anyway, Dr J describes the process as similar to coring an apple. The effect on the patient was (maybe not surprisingly) dramatic.
Patients who had previously hurled food, smacked the walls and shouted at invisible specters now sat placidly, disturbing no one. Among the more notable people subjected to this dreadful treatment were Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose and Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President Kennedy.
Finally – the other famous shocking treatment given to patients was shock treatment, also known as electro-convulsive therapy or ECT. This one is different from the comas and the lobotomies, because, everyone is agreed, it works. That is, it works in the case of severely depressed people. A blast of volts through the brain will get them back to a functioning state where they can once again converse and smile and live their life. And they still don’t really understand why. So ECT is still routinely practiced.
Please note : the guy who invented the lobotomy was given a Nobel prize in 1949 "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses."
So you got these barbarities dished out to the severely ill, and the quack talking cures of the Freudians dished out to the well-heeled worried well, and no wonder that in the late 60s/early 70s you got an Anti-Psychiatry movement. Which I do not have space to go into, but that’s fascinating too.
***
As you can see this is a hell of a story, which has affected most of us in one way or another, and this book is a practically perfect account of it all, written with heart and soul and with all the technicalities explained for us general dogsbodies. Totally recommended.
SONG LIST
Cracking : Suzanne Vega Like The Weather : 10,000 Maniacs Boys Of Bedlam : Steeleye Span Twisted : Joni Mitchell Sleepy Man Blues : Bukka White 19th Nervous Breakdown : Rolling Stones Love In A Faithless Country : Richard Thompson Like A Monkey In A Zoo : Daniel Johnson Feel : Syd Barrett Black Eyed Dog : Nick Drake
Mr Munroe includes some “weird and worrying” questions from his website’s inbox which he presents without attempting to answer – one favourite was:
If Mr Munroe includes some “weird and worrying” questions from his website’s inbox which he presents without attempting to answer – one favourite was:
If you saved a whole life’s worth of kissing and used all that suction power on one single kiss, how much suction force would that single kiss have?
I guess the answer might be “what pharmaceutical products have you ingested during the last four hours?” or “May I speak to your parents?”
Another person named Jon Merrill asked
How fast would a human have to run in order to be cut in half at the bellybutton by a cheese-cutting wire?
Answer has to be “as fast as I will be running if I ever meet you Jon”.
And a person called Kenneth asked
What if every day, every human had a 1 per cent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a one percent chance of being turned into a human?
Randall does not provide a response to that one but I would have said Kenneth, if only life were like that. Wouldn’t it be fabulous?
Everybody likes this book and I liked half of it, the other half was so far over my head it might have been a distant Andean condor croaking Sanskrit into a Bluetooth headset. Some of the stuff Randall devotes pages of detailed analysis to did not tickle my ivories, like
What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power were turned on and put into an airtight 1 x 1 x 1-meter box?
I mean, get a life. Who the flook cares about a hair dryer in a box? But many are very interesting. He tackles the old chestnut
What would happen of everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same time?
He picks Rhode Island (it’s just big enough for everyone on Earth, surprisingly) as a designated place where this event might be staged, and imagines the result. In regard to the jump and the landing itself, not so much would result. But then he imagines the implications of all those people trying to get back home from Rhode Island. It’s terrible – it’s an apocalypse. If this mass jumping event was actually staged it would cause the immediate termination of civilisation and the death of billions.
The edge of the crowd spreads outward into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Any two people who meet are unlikely to have a language in common, and almost nobody knows the area. The state becomes a chaotic patchwork of coalescing and collapsing social hierarchies. Violence is common.
Yes it is a nice book but I do not recommend that you wolf down this book as I did in 2 days, because it’s like TOO MUCH and it can get annoying. You keep thinking of your own absurd questions –
How many soldier ants would it take to chew through my leg in one hour? And would I survive?
And really, there is one question which I really want to ask Randall, it’s actually been something I have been wondering about for a long time – you know those vending machines stuffed full of really unhealthy chocs and crisps and cokes? Well, imagine a person was chained to one of those and had an infinite amount of small change within arms reach. Then imagine the vending machine gets refilled by the usual contractor in the usual way (who never notices the chained person). So : how long would it take the captive to die from a constant diet of crap? If they were only eating chocs and crisps and drinking cokes? A month? Six months? A YEAR?? It’s really bugging me. I may have to launch a practical experiment.
This book should be available in an edition for Christians. It would then be called WTF,God?! (yeah, rather disrespectful I agree). But all you do is This book should be available in an edition for Christians. It would then be called WTF,God?! (yeah, rather disrespectful I agree). But all you do is replace the word Evolution with the word God.
So, this book would be full of funny stuff like
These are supposed to be dolphins? God, have you ever actually seen a dolphin?
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Look, God, everyone has trouble staying motivated sometimes. Take a walk or have a snack when that happens…Don’t force yourself to make turtles when your heart obviously isn’t in it.
[image]
God had not had enough coffee when He made the Surinam horned frog.
[image]
Why so gloomy, babirusa? Is it because God gave you some weird extra tusks that are ugly, useless, too brittle to fight with, and may eventually grow so long that they curve around and fatally puncture your skull? Could that be it?
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Because the anti-evolutionists believe that every species was created by God individually, and did not evolve from any other species. You know, Genesis and all that :
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
The implications of this have been rarely teased out. The Bible literalists like to say that God created the
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and the
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But they shuffle their feet and look down at their hands when you mention the tapeworm. But it goes further. God also created the rats which spread the bubonic plague and killed around 45% of the population of Europe in the years 1346–53. But also He spent some time creating Xenopsylla cheopis - the flea which infected the rats. And before all that, He also mulled things over and created the Yersinia pestis bacterium which is the actual disease itself. I mean, without Yersinia pestis the fleas were just hitch-hikers and the rats were just stowaways.
And He created all the other diseases too, which I shan’t list – I’m sure you have your favourites. River blindness, syphilis, malaria, whatever.
So this thing cuts both ways. Yeah, evolution does look pretty silly when you think about that saiga antelope
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huh?
or the star nosed mole
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wha the??
– but if this indicates that Darwin was barking up the wrong sea cucumber and Genesis is right after all, then I do find it kind of worrying that we’re all in the hands of Someone who thought the Goliath spider was a good idea
Hubble : The universe is bigger than everybody thinks.
A humbler astronomer invented for the purpose of this review : Yeah? How big arOne day in 1925 :
Hubble : The universe is bigger than everybody thinks.
A humbler astronomer invented for the purpose of this review : Yeah? How big are we talking?
Hubble : Well, you know the Milky Way? Okay, now see through this telescope, see those little wispy things there?
Astronomling: You mean those spiral nebulae?
Hubble : Well what if I told you they weren’t spiral nebulae?
Little astronomer: Aww, you mean they’re just smudges on the lens? Damn. We wasted a lot of time on those things.
Hubble : No. I mean that those wispy little doodads which no one has been able to figure what in tarnation they are up to now are actually nothing more than other Milky Ways, vast conglomerates of billions upon billions of other stars separated by incalculable distances of deep space.
Lesser astronomer : Hmm. You don’t say so.
Hubble : But I do say so.
Unimportant astronomer : Oh I know you do. It’s just an expression.
***
Gotta tell you that for a non-scientist like myself, the 30 page introduction to this pretty much told me everything I needed to know and the rest was a bunch of unattractive men arguing politely about difficult sums. Not much sense of wonder there.
My GR friend Jason writes sturdy and trustworthy reviews, but I must take exception with him here :
The Disappearing Spoon is quick, light reading out My GR friend Jason writes sturdy and trustworthy reviews, but I must take exception with him here :
The Disappearing Spoon is quick, light reading out in the sun. It handles complex theory in a comfortable, approachable way.
Yes, it is all that, IF such stuff as this makes sense to you :
The strongest solo acid is still the boron-based carborane (HCB11C111) And this boron acid has the best punchline so far : it's simultaneously the world's strongest and gentlest acid. To wrap your head around that, remember that acids split into positive and negative parts. In carborane's case you get H+ and an elaborate cagelike structure formed by everything else (CB11C111-) With most acids it's the negative portion that's corrosive and caustic and eats through the skin. But the boron cage forms one of the most stable molecules ever invented. Its boron atoms share electrons so generously that it practically becomes helium, and it won't go around ripping electrons from other atoms, the usual cause of acidic carnage.
Well, this could be part of the rules of Quidditch for all the sense it makes to poor general reader me, so I think The Disappearing Spoon is really for science geeks who think stuff about German chemists being hornswoggled out of a Nobel Prize for Alchemy by some Californian sharpies in 1951 or a neat account of the crucial properties of the biomolecule which are called handedness is the very thing for those moments on the beach when there isn't any eye candy around....more
I am the LARGE HADRON COLLIDER. Thou shalt have none other COLLIDER before me. Hear ye, O children : the twin assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy I am the LARGE HADRON COLLIDER. Thou shalt have none other COLLIDER before me. Hear ye, O children : the twin assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy are related but not equivalent, and those that say they are equivalent, even suckling babes, shalt be cast in the fiery pit. For I sayeth unto you that isotropy does not necessarily imply homogeneity without the additional assumption that the observer is in a special place.
Hear ye, take special heed, that there are but four forces in the universe, not three, or five, or 47, and woe betide thou shouldst thou number the forces not four, either below, or above, for I the LARGE HADRON COLLIDER am a jealous COLLIDER, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that number the forces greater than the next number after the number three or less than the number of four. Yet I will show mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.
The names of the particles are fermions, and bosoms, and of fermions are there leptons and quarks, and of quarks there are three generations, and of the lepton each shall be in a pair and one lepton that is no charge shall be a neutrino.
But the quarks always are to be charged and those that do not charge the quark shall be cast into the fiery pit and shall wail and gnash their teeth, for I am a nasty COLLIDER and have no time for you.
There are 567 more COMMANDMENTS. These will be issued in batches of 17, the final batch being a short batch, every alternate Wednesday, unless the COLLIDER is resting, when it will be on the Thursday of the week following the said Wednesday.
Blessed is he that seeth not, yet understands, and that understandeth not, yet believeth....more
I’ve read a few of these fifty essential ideas now and even with the nice big print and quotations in boxes and timelines and all these great ideas biI’ve read a few of these fifty essential ideas now and even with the nice big print and quotations in boxes and timelines and all these great ideas bite-sized and right-sized and fun-sized and slipping down my throat like lozenges made of mentholated wisdom, I’m beginning to think that philosophy is bollocks. I already know theology is bollocks. History is bollocks too. Economics is bollocks. Opera is astonishingly expansively expensively convincingly bollocks. Space opera is bollocks everywhere except the fifth dimension. Ballet is so bollocks it makes bollocks ashamed to be bollocks. Jazz is face-grindingly bollocks (except for the stuff that people who like jazz don’t regard as jazz). Politics is bollocks. Television is the uttermost of bollocks and can't even be rescued by white kryptonite, which can rescue everything. Okay, that might be a bit harsh, there’s The Wire.
So given all of that I thought philosophy should have been the antidote. But it wasn’t. So you can’t tell if you’re A BRAIN IN A VAT? Who gives a shit. Okay, I'm a brain in a vat. I can't see the damned vat, and the bills still need paying. Do I know if I’m in a metaphorical cave and my reality is just the dancing shadows cast by the metaphorical fire? Nope. Do I care? Nope. Horse is the horseness of all horse? Okay, I can get behind that. Drunk is the drunkenness of all drunks. It could catch on. Thanks, Plato or whatever your name is. That one I like.
Here’s Bertrand Russell (we should imagine a short, attenuated man with a face like a crow who is in the process of trying to smarm his way into the good graces of the daughter of the society heiress who he hopes will pay for his incomprehensible book on mathematics and by good graces I mean shagging):
If we enumerated the things that are bald, and then the things that are not bald, we should not find the king of France in either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude he wears a wig.
This gets them rolling around at the Philosophers’ Lap Dancing Club. He goes on
There is an entity such that it alone is now the king of France.
Philosophers come out with this stuff all the time – at bus stops, in bed, in the checkout queue -
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it : we will call it The Box. Suppose further that no one can look into anyone else’s box.
I can do this too :
Suppose you erected a bus stop outside your house and stood every day at 9.30 at your bus stop as if waiting for a bus. Suppose other people began to join you.
Suppose philosophers all ate each other.
Suppose suppose is the suppository of all suppose.
Step with me into the maelstrom that was Dover High School and we shall see.
COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE PANDA
What hCAN IT EVER BE RIGHT TO BAN A BOOK?
Step with me into the maelstrom that was Dover High School and we shall see.
COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE PANDA
What happened in Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005 was a big fight between people who liked this book
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and people who liked this book
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The fight was all about whether the school board was allowed to present an alternative to Darwinian evolution in Dover High school biology lessons.
So the first book is a standard textbook and the second is all about Intelligent Design. The Christian creationists who were the majority on the school governing board in 2004 decided they should order 60 copies and give a copy to each student of biology. The science teachers would not be required to teach from this book, they would continue to follow the evolutionist curriculum. But before the school year a “statement” would be read out to these students saying that Pandas was available to them as an alternative explanation of life on Earth. The statement included :
Because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for all students who may be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves.
It was basically saying “they make us teach Darwin but it’s filthy atheism, so just learn it for the exam”.
THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION, FIRST AMENDMENT (1791)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech
Some anti-creationist parents, most of whom were Christians, sued the school board. Get those pandas off of our lawn! The argument was clear : the Panda was a Trojan horse. ID was a cloak for creationism, which was religion, and was therefore illegal to teach. You can’t teach a particular religion in American state schools because of the First Amendment. In 2003 a federal court told the Alabama Supreme Court to get rid of a monument showing the Ten Commandments!! from the court building. If the Ten Commandments are displayed in a government building it’s illegal! And if creationism is taught in a government school it’s illegal. And if Intelligent Design is creationism in disguise it’s religion and therefore illegal.
MANY AMERICANS DO NOT LIKE THIS PART OF THE CONSTITUTION
Local reactions to the law suit included :
Science has evidence about where we come from, as do the Christians – why shouldn’t students be able to talk about both?
Another parent said she “would like to see the Bible used as a reference book in the classroom”
One student was quoted as follows:
Whatever.
THE FOUR POSITIONS
The big punch-up about evolution shakes down into four types of contenders.
Darwinists of the materialist-atheist tendency (established 1859)
Christians who see no problem in accepting Darwinist evolution
The “intelligent design” guys (the new kids on the block)
The creationists (been here since 4004 BC).
Point of information : In 2014 Gallup found that 42% of Americans were creationists, almost the same number as in 1982. The number of evolutionists has increased from 9% to 19% in that time. (Compare that with a British survey in 2009 which showed 50% of British people said that evolution was either true or probably true. )
YERSINA PESTIS, WHY DO YOU DO LIKE YOU DO?
I don’t understand the creationist position at all. It puts God in a difficult position. If you say he designed all the species, and there was no evolution at all, then you must imagine that as well as designing the hummingbirds, the golden tamarind, the tiger, the giant echidna, the pigmy shrew and the koala bear, he designed the pinworm which causes elephantiasis, and the nematode Onchocerca volvulus which causes river blindness – but why stop with visible creatures? He also designed the rod-shaped coccobacillus Yersinia pestis which infected certain fleas which lived on certain rats and caused the Black Death, and more recently, he designed the HIV and ebola viruses.
But if you believe that all these creatures evolved, then God is off the hook. Except insofar as he allowed evolution to pursue its complex course without intervention, which, being God, was his choice. The problem of evil is often countered by Christians by the existence of human free will – if God intervened to prevent, say, Auschwitz, there would be no free will, and all our spiritual endeavors would be the worthless responses of automata. So, why do Christians not say that evolution is nature’s free will. You got your human free will, and your nature free will.
In the row between the Creationists and the Darwinists we have contradiction, rather than argument or debate. No one on either side is receptive to alternative points of view or well presented evidence. The idea that a creationist or a Darwinist would come away from such an exchange of ideas and have a change of heart, and renounce their errors, and embrace the opposition, is absolutely unthinkable.
DOESN’T WALK LIKE A DUCK, ONLY QUACKS SOMETIMES LIKE A DUCK
The ID guys try to say that ID does NOT propose that God designed all the species, it just says that evolution is wrong because the species were designed and they “suddenly appeared”. Statements about the identity or motives of the Intelligent Designer are avoided. Therefore the creationists promote ID as an “alternative” to Darwinism, claiming that it’s another scientific theory. You got your Darwin theory, now you got your other theory. However Michael Behe is the big ID theorist at the time of this trial (Darwin’s Black Box). He wrote : “It is not plausible that the original intelligent agent is a natural entity.”
One Darwinist Christian said that intelligent design had “as much to do with science as reality tv has to do with reality”.
BREATHTAKINGLY RUDE BRITISH JOURNALIST
Matthew Chapman’s account of this whole palaver is pugnacious, partisan, inquisitive, cringe-making, tiresome, confusing, clear-sighted, light-hearted and horribly mean. This book dishes out so many gross insults I’m surprised he hasn’t been sued too. On p 25 “they both had the reputation of being bullies, perhaps Donald, the father, who at one time was the town supervisor, more so than Alan”. On p30 : “although he was fascinating to listen to, he was not altogether capable of what customarily passes for conversation”. On p89 : “I began to feel comfortable with my contempt for the Buckinghams and Bonsells of the world”.
Angie had a mass of bleached blonde hair [and] a figure that stretched the definition of voluptuous… she looked the way Marilyn Monroe would have if she had survived until around 1975.
Nilsen [the school supervisor] was a manikin assembled in homage to bureaucracy
… a woman whose fangs had manifestly dodged the modern science of dentistry stood up to yell out the battle cry of the fundamentalist : “You’ve been brainwashed in college!”
Reverend Jim Groves, a wiry little homo-hater
Thompson, Gillen and Muise had, between then, produced twenty offspring… this is pretty scary. Fundamentalists are outbreeding other groups… we’re soon going to be overrun by them.
A USEFUL TEAPOT
How can Christians accept Darwin? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. John Haught, Catholic theologian, witness for the plaintiffs, explained thus:
Suppose a teapot is boiling on your stove and someone comes into the room and says “Explain to me why that teapot is boiling.” Well, one explanation would be it’s boiling because the water molecules are moving around excitedly and the liquid state is being transformed into gas. But at the same time you could just as easily have answered “It’s boiling because my wife turned the gas on.” Or you could also answer that question by saying, “It’s boiling because I want tea.” All three answers are right, but they don’t conflict with each other because they’re working at different levels. Science works at one level of investigation, religion at another. … The problems occur when one assumes that there’s only one level.
He didn’t say which level his wife was working on.
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"It is my intention to evolve into a panda. I have already started with my right eye."...more
As regards this book, since I sold my copy via Amazon to some geezer in Salt Lake City years ago, I can't remember much about it, so I'm just kind of As regards this book, since I sold my copy via Amazon to some geezer in Salt Lake City years ago, I can't remember much about it, so I'm just kind of busking here. This is a bad review. Talking just to be talking, you know. Because I'm reading some long books right now & it'll be ages before I can say anything about those.
But that makes me wonder.
Because, how we die on Goodreads is .... we suddenly stop responding to messages... stop adding books ... never finish another "currently reading".... no, it's too awful to contemplate. Our partners (if book geeks actually have partners) would never bother logging into our GR account and posting "It is with deep regret that we announce the passing of Barkywoofwoof79 from cirrhosis of the liver with complications, no flowers please".
Man visits his doctor. Doctor says "I've got some bad news, and I'm afraid I've got some even worse news." Guys says "Okay, I'll have the even worse news first." Doctor says "Okay, you have terminal cancer. The other news is that you also have Alzheimer's." Guy takes a deep breath and says "Okay - well, at least I haven't got terminal cancer."...more
Scientists at the Cern headquarters in Geneva made a shock announcement today which is sure to have profound imUNIVERSE IS MOSTLY FAKE, SAY SCIENTISTS
Scientists at the Cern headquarters in Geneva made a shock announcement today which is sure to have profound implications for all human life. They have discovered that most of the known universe is fake. Using their uniquely powerful large Hadron collider they have found that most of the sub-atomic particles which make up the fabric of existence were made in China. In a co-ordinated development, the authorities in three Chinese cities , Chongqing, Guangzhou and Shanghai, made an extensive series of arrests. Approximately 120 persons are now under interrogation.
“What we are saying is that three types of quarks, most leptons and a couple of types of gauge bosons are either all or mostly copies. I should say that they are really good knock-offs, impossible to spot with a normal electron microscope,” said Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuler “but we have in Cern a very powerful device which the counterfeiters can’t fool. At first we couldn’t believe it ourselves, but the evidence is clear. Our initial estimate is that around 55 to 60 % of all subatomic particles in existence are Chinese-made copies.”
Journalists bombarded the Cern team with questions. Perhaps the issue which has most relevance for the non-scientific community was summed up by the BBC correspondent who asked
“Prof Heuler, does that mean that precious substances like gold or diamond are now worth a lot less?”
Prof Heuler accepted this was certainly an implication of their findings. “The copies are so good that all the physical and chemical properties are not compromised at all, like if you buy a Gucci knock-off handbag and you put stuff in it, your stuff won’t fall out and the snap on the handbag will still work. So these fake quarks are like that. It really shouldn’t bother anyone too much, but we can’t speak on behalf of manufacturers or consumers.”
He added: “And we can’t have a queue of people outside Cern asking for their wedding rings to be valued either.” (General laughter.)
Okay, so here's my Bill Bryson story. I was in The Gladstone, a public house not too far from this very keyboard, with my friend Yvonne, who will remaOkay, so here's my Bill Bryson story. I was in The Gladstone, a public house not too far from this very keyboard, with my friend Yvonne, who will remain nameless. We had been imbibing more than freely. A guy approached our table and asked me in a sly surreptitious manner if I was him. Him who? Was I Bill Bryson? Now it is true that I bear a very slight resemblance
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but you could also say that about Bjorn from Abba
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and a zillion other white guys with beards and gently rounded fizzogs. Anyway, without missing a beat I said yes, I was him. So the guy immediately asked me if I'd sign two of his books, and before I could say "Come on mate, I'm not actually American, can't you bleedin well tell?" he had zapped out of the pub. Only to zap straight back with two hardbacks of Bill's deathless works. What could I do? He opened them up reverentially and told me one would be for him and one for his mother. Friends, I signed them - "Best wishes, your friend Bill Bryson". He was so grateful, so very very pleased. We drank up and got the hell out of there. I look back on this disgraceful incident and shudder. That's the last time I'm impersonating a famous author.
Short note on the book in question:
There was no way our Bill could write a gently humorous book about the history of all of science without sounding like a fairly smirky know-it-all, so that's what he does sound like, which can be just a trifle wearing. LOTS of good info in here, but it's like being forced to live on Indian takeaways and nothing else, great for a while and then GET ME A SANDWICH! Or like being stuck on a long airplane ride with a very garrolous and opinionated fellow who thinks he is the very model of the modern travelling companion, regaling you with insightful and humourous anecdotes by the bucketful while you're wondering if it would be so bad if you faked a heart attack and you could whisper to the flight attendant "I'm okay really but GET ME AWAY FROM THIS GUY!"...more
The subject of this book is the fast approaching Global Fry-Up. Oh, I hear you cry, spare me another jeremiad about this boring topic! Yes – I’m with The subject of this book is the fast approaching Global Fry-Up. Oh, I hear you cry, spare me another jeremiad about this boring topic! Yes – I’m with you. It is horribly tiresome. Okay, every time you turn on the news you get death, financial crisis, war, ghastliness, climate change. The news is always bad except for the last little bit of amusing oddness they throw in to stop you hanging yourself from your wardrobe door.
Hmm, climate change... sounds so innocuous. I guess you could also call it Looming Horror. But that might depress everyone a little too much. In the introduction to this book this guy Mark Lynas tells the story of how he was in the toilet at one of his early presentations of this Six degrees material.
I overheard a conversation in which an audience member apologised to another for dragging them out to something so depressing. I was truly shocked. Depressing? It had honestly never occurred to me that "Six Degrees" might be depressing.
I don't know what planet he's on. In this book Mr Lymas presents us with a series of terrifying cataclysmic visions of what life on earth will become after the earth heats up degree by degree. It’s ghastly all right. Because what is the ordinary punter’s reaction going to be, assuming she isn’t an influential scientist or on a government advisory committee? What can we do? Run out and quickly not go on that foreign holiday which we haven't been able to for the last 18 months anyway? Dash out and decline to renew your car? Swiftly consume less every day for the rest of your life? The climate change crowd are the all time downers. Mr Lynas thinks his book is a call to arms. But I think it's a call to phone in sick and watch Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes all day long.
There’s a lot I don’t get in these debates. For a start, I don’t even get why there’s even an argument between the Global Warming-is Caused-by People crowd and the No-it-isn’t, it’s-a Natural-Phenomenon sceptics. Because these two groups seem to agree that whoever’s causing it, it’s happening. So both sides should stop arguing and try to figure out a better solar panel. The pathologist is contacted after the patient has been pronounced dead. Or are the warming deniers simply saying that we should carry on partying like it’s 1999? Are they that genuinely idiotic?
Anyhow, the whole thing also seems to assume that everyone is in favour of the human race and that we should all be earnestly striving for the continuation of the species. I go back and forth on the question of whether humans should be preserved. Right now, the population of the planet is 7.8 billion. It’s too many, especially if 6 of the 7 billion start to acquire stuff the other billion takes for granted, like golf and patios and cars. Do you think they all bicycle to work because they’re fitness enthusiasts?
I remember a quote from a farmer in Yemen back in the 1980s. A left wing journalist asked him about his political affiliations. Well, he says, I’m a communist now. Then his face lit up. But one day I hope to be a capitalist!
So, it’s a great shame, and all, but in the future there will have to be a decision made about how many people we can allow on the planet. And there will have to be a cull. I’m sorry but this is probably a seats-3 billion planet. So we’ll have to agree on who we should get rid of. Yes, it will probably be an upsetting time. But I think everyone will be able to agree that the people who should be got rid of are the nasty people. Imagine if everyone left alive on the planet after the cull was nice – how lovely that would be. No more war, no more tax avoidance and no more public littering. And very few politicians. So, they’ll invent a nice-ometer. This will measure a person’s niceness. If you drop below 50% niceness you’ll have to go. Now this system would have amazing benefits even before any serious culling started. Just announcing it will make everyone start anxiously being nice to each other, having Golden Rule parties, doing their utmost to tolerate people they know in their heart are worthless trash. People will be donating their entire salaries to worthy causes, every blind person will have four or five seeing eye dogs, it will be remarkable.
I haven’t thought the whole thing through but I can only see benefits. I hope I live to see it. Although the chances of any device measuring me to be more than 50% nice is, if I’m honest, remote....more
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