Prosopamnesiac triumph

Posted on June 16, 2005 by acb

To Lambeth palace, for the Archbishop’s lecture on press ethics: mine being judged in need of improvement.1

This was followed by the sort of party when I find myself talking to someone who clearly knows who I am, and to whom I would clearly have a lot of old-friendly backchat to make, if only I could recognise their sodding face. This one was the first time that someone I don’t recognise has not just started talking on thebasis of familiarity, but grabbed me and said “Andrew! We haven’t kissed!”. Attractive woman talking to Jane Williams did exactly that. I cheerfully kissed her on both cheeks and was sucked into the conversation. Jane Williams made a joke about being completely unable to remember what we had said at the last bash, said that I had woken a few days later convinced that we’d been talking about worms. Oh well, she said, everyone was a little drunk at that party. Well, I wasn’t as drunk as Dr Vallely, I said. The pretty woman who had kissed me remonstrated, and at this point I recognised. She was Mrs Vallely, Christine Morgan, the woman who currently runs all the BBC’s religious broadcasting; and I had just made a joke about her husband’s being pissed to the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Anyway, about my career in print journalism …

1 along with those of Ruth Gledhill, Mary Ann Sieghart, Andreas Whittam Smith, Jonathan Petre, Steve Bates, Austen Ivereigh, Christine Morgan, and, oddest, Theresa May, MP. It was notable that no editors felt their ethics needed improvement, not even the editor Church Times.

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The female orgasm

Posted on June 13, 2005 by acb

Is it a happy accident, or an adaptation?

On the one hand we have the Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Rutgers University, who says — or will say, in some future issue of the Guardian — that “If Steve Gould thought the female orgasm was a byproduct, you have to wonder how close he had ever been to that blessed event.”

On the other side, we have a really fine piece of reasoning from the Arnold and Maxine Tanis Chair of History and Philosophy of Science and Professor of Biology, at Indiana University. I’m not being ironic. It’s a beautiful piece of argument; and I am interested that none of the papers here seem to have picked it up, or her book.

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Thought for the day

Posted on June 12, 2005 by acb

Supposing that you can explain religion as supernaturalism is like supposing you can explain marriage as lust.

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Where are they now?

Posted on June 10, 2005 by acb

I wonder what has happened to the Terry Schiavo autopsy results. They were due a couple of weeks after she died on March 31. time passed. On or about May 9th there was a flurry of stories quoting the pathologist as saying he’d be another two to three weeks. It’s now four weeks since then. All that is really interesting here is whether large parts of her brain were liquid, as the CAT scans suggested. How long could that have taken to discover?

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Portable music notes

Posted on June 9, 2005 by acb

People with lives can skip this post.

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Posted in Blather | 9 Comments

Two big themes

Posted on June 9, 2005 by acb

There are two science stories which promise to change the world irrevocably. What’s interesting is that they contradict each other. The first is the optimistic one. We hear less of this since the dotcom crash, but it is still true that medicine and computer technology are advancing in the most extraordinary ways. The big drug companies worry that better knowledge1 of the genome will wipe their profits out since patients will know in advance whether a particular drug will work on them. Stem cell research and related matters will allow us to grow spare parts. Pills that might delay the onset of Alzheimer’s look perfectly credible. In rich countries we have just about emliminated mortality at the beginning of life. It’s not beyond imagination that we might eliminate it at the end of normal life too. So that’s one story, and it’s mind-boggling.

But at the same time, there is a narrative just as huge and just as difficult to grasp in its details, coming out of other sciences. The end of oil; the threat of global warming; the fear of pandemics and of nuclear war. All these stories, too, require a scientific understanding of the world to appear in their proper horror.

I know that one might, in theory, have both. The Black Death killed a third of the population of Europe, but it did not kill off the continent’s energy and may even have released quite a lot of it. There has to be a mortality beyond which a population is finally defeated — look at the American Indians — but perhaps it needs to be more than 50%. so the earth, and the human species, could probably survive a pretty large die-off.

What seems to alter that balance, though, are nukes. It’s very hard to imagine that we’re gong to get through this century without some of those weapons being used somewhere — North Korea, anyone? And once that starts, all bets are off, and the wise man starts making himself useful to the cockroaches.

1 understanding is not the right word here

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Among the undead

Posted on June 8, 2005 by acb

Spent a couple of days in Parliament earlier this week, much of it sitting on a couch in the corner of the Peers’ lobby. I kept thinking that this was a room from which, a hundred years ago, two fifths of the world was governed. It was like a ruin that hadn’t fallen down yet. The doors are all proportioned so that even the tallest meople reach less that half way up them; the distant tops of the doors are only about a third of the way to the cieling. The effect is to make all the scurrying politicians, no matter how grand they be, as transient as a termite: all that matters is that the great mound endures. It has endured an extraordinary time — the current Bishop of Rochester is the 106th of his line; until the reformation, the Bishops and abbots actually formed a majority in the House of Lords.

Within the Lords, the junior ministers and their shadows, who were all women when I watched, perched rather fetchingly on the cushions in the centre of the chamber where the dispatch box should be. The eldest children of peers listen from the steps of the throne. At one stage a bald man, shaped like a stalk of asparagus, rose and asked a question in favour of nuclear power. It was a very good question, and I realised with atavistic horror that this was Norman Tebbit, still trampling on the grave of coal.

Other sightings included George Carey, who seemed to infest the place. Eileen, failing to recognise me, gave me a vague smile — this is a woman who banned the Church Times from Lambeth Palace because of something I had written about her husband. Iain Duncan Smith, looking much thinner and happier than when people had to pretend he might become Prime Minister, loomed up behind us in the main lobby. For a moment I felt really sorry for him.

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Paging professor Myers …

Posted on June 3, 2005 by acb

I can’t wait for this comic to get to Minnesota. (via)

Posted in God | 2 Comments

a mac question

Posted on June 2, 2005 by acb

I just got my mother a mac mini (hello mum!) and while I was trying to show her how to make it work, I learnt that I can’t make all the windows zoom properly. Option-green-button causes some windows to expand to fill the free area of the screen, but not, for instance, Appleworks. this is a shame, because it means there’s little point in zooming an Appleworks window to make it easier to read. Am I missing something unobvious?

Posted in nördig | 5 Comments

Intelligent design

Posted on June 2, 2005 by acb

I was talking to Oliver Morton yesterday and he had just heard from Francis Crick’s biographer some hot news about molybdenum, which is essential to life, and was very scarce for about a billion years after the earth’s atmosphere filled up with oxygen. This has some consequences for the theory of directed panspermia, in which Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel were interested — the idea that life on earth was seeded from other planets, possibly by an alien race of entirely different chemistry. As Oliver pointed out, this is entirely ocmpatible with Behe-type intelligent design. But that proves something very important about ID, which is that it won’t serve the theological purposes it’s designed to do: no theory could entail the existence of God if it had the imprimatur of Francis Crick, who once proposed turning King’s College chapel into a swimming pool.

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