eggs, pesto and Tolkein: my bachelor weekend

I'm a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, but must admit to my shame that I find the films more accessible than the book - I'm on my third attempt to get to the finish and, being halfway through The Two Towers, am further than I managed to get to either as a schoolboy or ten years ago.

A few months ago I bought a book - the first of a series called The Wheel of Time - that offered to "mine the world Tolkein hinted at"; I got through a few hundred pages then came to a phrase "slowly he began to breathe slowly". (Minora calls me a pedant, which really annoys me, because she puts the stress on the wrong syllable.)

As I threw it in the bin, I resolved to spend my weekend alone - Maxima having taken the girls to the other end of the Fens to visit her parents - reacquainting myself with the films, which have helped me power through the book no end.

As usual with one of my "bachelor weekends", I raided the "reduced to clear" section of the local supermarket to make one of my experimental meals that the women in my life tend to frown on.
The goal, I decided, would be something meatball-ish. So I emptied three cans of mince and onions into bowl, and grated two big wodges of blue cheese into it. I'd come home with a pack of eight factory eggs which had been going for a song because there should have been ten. I'm not overly chuffed at the concept of factory farming, but it beats me how people can look virtuous when buying their free-range eggs laid by hens bred to produce the extra-large ones, either not thinking or not caring why the shells have blood on them. Anyway, I couldn't decide how many eggs to use, so in went the lot. Then the best part of a jar of pesto went in. I like pesto. It's the nearest you'll get to a culinary proof of a deity other than an epiphany in your pantry, especially at times when you find yourself wondering why a loving God would create something like carrots.

Anyway, I grated a chunk of parmesan into the concoction, mixing while some penne bubbled away, then dropped teaspoonfuls of it onto a hot frying-pan with plenty of oil. (Helping make pancakes at the Rectory on Shrove Tuesday, Rector Pellegrina asked me to reduce the amount of oil in my pan. When I did, people grumbled that my pancakes suddenly weren't as nice.) They ended up more like flat coins than balls, but tasted sublime in a sauce of blue cheese, mushroom soup and eggs.

It was, in fact, a meal suitably epic to accompany a marathon session of all three videos from which I emerged square-eyed but happy. I have the book with Tolkein's Foreword to the Second Edition, in which he tries to dispel speculation that the work is a religious analogy. I accept that, but it was also a labour of love for the author and expert on the Anglo-Saxon and early English languages, and as such I believe that the childhood convert to Roman Catholicism dug deep into the mines of his spirituality to inform the ethics of his morality-tale. What's really becoming clear to me as I read The Lord of the Rings this time is that his first-hand experience of the horrors of the Great War wedded to frustration with the politics of appeasement directed towards Hitler - despite Tolkein's denial - come through in the backstory of the powers of Middle Earth standing back while the treacherous Sauron consolidates his hold on Mordor, to use it as a base for launching his bid to enslave the fantastic world.

And my cooking? I enthusiastically showed the remainder of the panful to Maxima on her return, at which she winced and told me to go get everybody a Chinese. Was it the eggs?

climate change and Copenhagen - no sacrilege intended

The principle has been known for centuries:

The greater thy carbon footprint, the more severely shalt thou be taxed, unless thou hast good connections. Therefore be not lifted up by any offsets that thou hast; but rather fear concerning the allocation which is given to thee. If it seemeth to thee that thou knowest many things, and understandest them well, know also that there are many more things which thou knowest not. Be not high-minded, but rather confess thine ignorance. Why desirest thou to lift thyself above another, when there are found many more learned and more skilled in climate change than thou? If thou wilt know and learn anything with profit, love to be thyself unknown and to be counted for nothing.

I hope my many online friends from the Roman Catholic Church and other churches will maintain their prodigious patience with me: no sacrilege was meant in my adapting the text of Thomas à Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter II, paragraph 3.

What à Kempis was writing about, of course, was how to live an ascetic life as a Christian, especially if one was cloistered. But his book has become a classic hailed by individuals and groups across the Christian spectrum and is therefore sure to be raided by the votaries of the new religion.

I'm happy to admit that there are some truths in James Lovelock's theory that some of earth's systems contain compensatory mechanisms - that's how volcanoes work, why the Himalayas are getting taller, and what makes winds to blow my aerial over whenever there's a good rugby game on. (And I have to profess admiration for a man brave enough to suggest that the way to preserve the rainforest in the Amazon basin from development is to bury nuclear waste there.) What gave his theory of what one might call natural checks and balances legs, though, was a suggestion from his fellow villager William Golding, as they walked to the pub, that he swap the various long-winded names for his theory for one word: Gaia - "wide-bosomed Earth" in Hesiod's Theogony. Thus began a series of books and free lunches.

But what we're experiencing right now - in Britain at least - is a dearth of information about what's happening at the much-vaunted Copenhagen conference (Cop15 - the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009) at which, we're told some Hard Decisions are going to be made, mostly by people who will not bear their brunt. That's not me being waspish: I've just listened to Matt McGrath's short broadcast from the conference with heavenly ideals, describing the very earthly consequences of herding 34,000 delegates into a centre built to hold 15,000:



But how to convince the people? Affecting to present the facts is the refuge of last resort, especially in the age of Web 2.0, as real facts have an annoying habit of being brought to light. I would highlight veteran climate-change blogger and meteorologist Anthony Watts, of Watts up with That who consistently teaches the apostles of manmade global warming the lesson that every bully learns sooner or later: eventually you meet somebody who's not prepared to back off.

Again faith finds its treasures ransacked. In his Spiritual Exercises, Jesuit founder St Ignatius of Loyola advises in Exercise number 47 of a type of meditation that consists of seeing "with the sight of the imagination the corporeal place where the thing is found which I want to contemplate". Just so, in the age of what my Mum used to call "the god in the corner", the collective enhanced imagination feeds us adverts where a factory chimney spewing out fumes is recontextualised to become a car exhaust-pipe; a child asks her father whether the bedtime story of a dying earth will have a happy ending and is told to wait and see; and even an advert for a credit card (MasterCard) goes through the prices of various "green" items then delivers the punchline "Helping Dad save the earth: priceless". One advert, whose disingenuousness is even more sickening than its imagery, shows polar-bears falling from the sky in an attempt to get us to fly less (public service note: so many flights took delegates to Copenhagen that some had to park in Sweden until the city's airport could take them).

Polar bears are interesting. In Sigmund Freud's 1913 apotheosis of racist western ethnocentrism Totem and Taboo, the psychoanalyst defines the characteristics of an animal chosen to embody the tribe:

As a rule it is an animal, either edible and harmless, or dangerous and feared...which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. The totem is first of all the tribal ancestor of the clan, as well as its tutelary spirit and protector; it sends oracles and, though otherwise dangerous, the totem knows and spares its children. The members of a totem are therefore under a sacred obligation not to kill (destroy) their totem, to abstain from eating its meat or from any other enjoyment of it. Any violation of these prohibitions is automatically punished. [Corrected for transcribers' spelling mistakes]

The polar-bear has become a totemic representation for the new tribe which believes that if we do not lower our emissions of greenhouse-gases, the polar bears' deaths will herald our own destruction as sure as Nemesis punishes hubris. The reason I'm so interested by Ursus Maritimus is that Dr Mitchell Taylor, an international expert on the beasties, says that polar bear numbers are higher now than they were when he started studying them 30 years ago. "Anathema sit!" cried those of his colleagues for whom this was in inconvenient truth, and barred him from a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group which was convened earlier this year to raise awareness about how their numbers were falling, and falling because of climate change that the experts/high priests lay at the door of humankind's actions.

Freud's contemporary psychoanalyst of Violet Mary Firth practiced as an occultist under the name of Dion Fortune. Having voiced her admiration for the Rite of Mass, she may have drawn deeply from the wells of à Kempis and Loyola, as she prefaced one of her books with the epigram This is not to inform the mind but train it. The sinister puppeteers of the anthropogenic climate-change panic, which one can only assume to be a deception until reliable evidence proves otherwise, have also learnt well.

And what of Gaia? Having created her consort Ouranos (or Uranus, depending on whether you like Retsina or Chianti), he showed his gratefulness by eating their children. He was made to regurgitate them, of course, but there is a principle involved...That's why one of my favourite images from the early Church is a carving of Jesus using Ouranos' head as a footstool. Poor old Gaia might have applauded the scoundrel's fate, had either of them existed.

it's a dog's life...

We Brits are fond of our pets, but have mixed feelings about using them to characterise people. For example, we might say that a sprinter goes like a whippet, or apiculturists might even refer to Muhammad Ali's stinging like a bee. But to call somebody catty is generally seen as a semi-veiled insult (unless you're into camping it up, in which case it might be a compliment).

But there are limits in civilised society, even for the master of bon môts Winston Churchill, who, after being accused of drunkenness by a lady, replied: "Madam, you are ugly: tomorrow I will be sober". Another apocryphal story has him confronted by a female politician who called him a "toothless bulldog on a tattered union jack"; he replied that, as much as he disagreed with the lady, he would hesitate to call her a dog.

Yesterday, the Telegraph's Tom Whitehead reported a Government press release stating the principle that "it is wrong to hit girls" would be included in schoolchildren's education as part of an initiative to combat violence against women. Very laudable, of course - witness the high-profile case in the US this year when singer Rihanna, used as a punchball by her boyfriend Chris Brown, briefly returned to him. But given that this comes in Labour's twelfth year of power, I wondered how women were faring against man's other best friend (or at least his equal in terms of dependence and intelligence).

Labour was elected on 2 May 1997, with a manifesto commitment for a Parliamentary vote on whether hunting with hounds should be banned by legislation.

Vulpes vulpes, the red fox, is a member of the Canidae family and is therefore a cousin of Rover, Rex and even Afterglow The Big Tease. Two years after Labour took power, then Home Secretary Jack Straw instigated a six month governmental enquiry into foxhunting, and after great deliberation and an Amazon of documents, hunting with hounds (ie traditional foxhunting) was made illegal in England and Wales in 2004.

It was, of course, a political move: Labour had identified its traditional base as subsisting in cities, and didn't see itself losing many votes in pandering to its those traditional prejudices of its members involving rural matters.

Just so, the 1997 manifesto, while stating that "Labour has taken the lead in proposing action to tackle the problems of stalking and domestic violence" (17 words), also promised that "We will ensure greater protection for wildlife. We have advocated new measures to promote animal welfare, including a free vote in Parliament on whether hunting with hounds should be banned by legislation" (32 words, before a bizarre paragraph on angling).

The 2001 Labour Party manifesto has nothing to say on domestic violence, but continues to rattle the class-war sabre:

The House of Commons elected in 1997 made clear its wish to ban fox-hunting. The House of Lords took a different view (and reform has been blocked). Such issues are rightly a matter for a free vote and we will give the new House of Commons an early opportunity to express its view. We will then enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on this issue. If the issue continues to be blocked we will look at how the disagreement can be resolved. We have no intention whatsoever of placing restrictions on the sports of angling and shooting.

In 2005, the pendulum started to swing back, with nothing on hunting, but the promise of "Expanding specialist courts to deal with domestic violence and specialist advocates to support the victims of such crime and of other serious crimes like murder and rape" (27 words).

But 27 words do not a safer country for women make. At a recent course I attended on domestic violence, a shocked hush fell over the room a the trainer, a powerful, passionate and energetic speaker, informed us that in Britain there were 300-odd womens' shelters, and over 3000 homes for stray or rescued dogs.

While the question of whether it's better for a fox to be killed by dogs or by snare is a vexed issue by itself, my blood runs cold at the thought of Labour politicians using the issue of violence against women as a vote-gathering stunt, and doing so by the classical Platonic top-down method; by casting every boy as a wife-beater. There are already educational means in place, and all those MPs, including Labour ones, who quietly work to keep them in place and improve upon them must be praised. For example, when I returned from the domestic violence course, the first thing I said to Minora was that if she meets a boy whose last girlfriend does not have a name but is constantly referred to as "bitch" and such epithets, she should walk. "Da-ad!" she replied. "That's what the teachers tell us!"

A friend told me recently she'd had her Chinese Horoscope done, resulting in her being a Dog of some composition. I refrained from commenting, but wondered if she should thank her lucky stars.

Related post: Women and children first

altruistic octopodes* and going the extra mile

The Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) is not an animal that I'd given any thought to before, but after it's all-too-brief appearance on the Open University documentary Life, which aired on BBC1 tonight, I've thought of little else. (The pic, to the right, is from the Royal BC Museum in Canada, photographed by Jim Cosgrove.)


Other animals featured in this first instalment - called Challenges of Life. There were three cheetah bringing down an ostrich, and a grasshopper that presumably thought things were bad enough when it was caught on a spider's web before a toad's tongue sucked it off. And, in a mammoth 3-month operation involving HMS Endurance, Antarctic sailor Jérôme Poncet in the Golden Fleece and veteran wildlife film-maker Doug Allan off Rosenthal Island, a leopard seal, with teeth bigger than a lion's and jaws that can open 180°, flaying a penguin chick mouthful by mouthful (which left Allan exhilarated at catching some action at last but sad to see the chick's fate).

What caught my attention about the mother Giant Pacific Octopus is the devotion (that word being used by Attenborough) with which it tends the eggs wherein tiny octopi mature. Blockading herself into an underwater cavern, she blows water over the eggs even as she starves, and expires shortly after her hatchlings swim away.

I don't predicate any knowledge of sacrifice of the Giant Pacific, any more than I do intention to bring a crisis to Christianity of the Ichneumonidae, no matter how many times Richard Dawkins gleefully recounts the wasps' method of using a paralysed caterpillar to bring up baby.

But it seemed the closest thing to altruism I've seen in the animal kingdom yet. Possibly Attenborough's foreseeing the anthropomorphic temptation was the reason he injected a note of caution into his avuncular narration to remind us that surviving long enough to pass on our genes is "ultimately...what life is all about".

In a way, he has a point. There would be no point in Mrs Giant Pacific embarking on her epic fast without her youngsters in their eggs beneath her.

But what of altruism after one's progeny has entered the picture - is it then no longer possible? Many human mothers (and fathers) make sacrifices for their children that the childen would survive perfectly without - but they do it for love. The sacrifices kids appreciate most aren't the ones that result in ostentatious presents they can show-off at school for a couple of days, but rather involve the parent's time that could so easily be spent in a number of other places both physical and mental.

On the other hand, there are things that look like altruism which are anything but - take Hilary Clinton's visit to the Stormont estate in Belfast yesterday. Giving Unionist members of the Northern Ireland assembly a barracking about ending the impasse over further devolution of the police force won't do her standing any harm in the eyes of those of her Democrat supporters who would always put a coin in the NORAID can, while Sinn Féin, whose voters have to live with the realities caused by volatile horse-trading, called for loyalists to be given time to think.

At the end of the original version of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins writes that "we can...discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world".

Maybe he's been meditating on the life and death of arthropods for too long. For altruism, don't look at politicians, or even at poor Mama octopus; look at, say, a tired mother taking delighted children out to learn about toadstools, or Dad making time after his nightshift to see the kids before they go to school. Or, indeed, any of many possible examples of going the extra mile.





*I originally referred to the cephalopods of the title as "octopi" but was taken to task by Professor Calculus, who reminded me of the word's Greek uses and presented me with the options of "octopodes" or the anglicised "octopuses"; I chose the former.

whales and unintelligent evolution: inside nature's giants

In the late 60's in Ayrshire, in south-west Scotland, a minor sensation accompanied a showman as he travelled round showing off an embalmed whale. Perhaps slightly misreading his Bible, he had christened the beast "Jonah the Whale"; we kids dutifully ooh'd and aah'd because the thing had been so hyped-up by the Mums at nursery school, but we were expecting a leviathan from our storybooks, and this creature was about the length of two cows standing nose-to-tail. And, as I recall, it was peeling a bit.

On the other hand, the whale featured in tonight's Inside Nature's Giants on Channel 4 was truly colossal. A fin whale - second in size only to the blue whale - the cause of death, after collision with a ship had been ruled out, was reckoned to have been grounding herself on the sandbank on Courtmacsherry Bay in Cork where she was found, then suffocating as her huge lungs were unable to inflate under the weight of a body unsupported by water.

Again we had the same intelligent graphics with a voiceover by veterinary surgeon and presenter Mark Evans that last week were put to work teasing out the evolutionary pathway of the elephant. The first "whale", he reckoned, was Pakicetus, a primarily land-living mammal which for some reason headed for the sea and whose progeny saw no reason to leave.

First of all, the whale had to be "deflated" by making small cuts along the blubber. As a cautionary example, a clip was shown of a dead whale being cut open in Denmark and the gases which had gathered post-mortem literally exploding out. That having been done, comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg of Mt Sinai School of Medicine - described by Evans as "the queen of whale anatomy" - masterfully dissected the animal as far as she could with the help of the Irish Whale and Dolphin group. I say "as far as she could" because the skeleton had been promised to the nearby community of Kilbrittain to display. So she couldn't saw through the ribs to get the heart, which was anchored in place by structures to high up for her to reach.

But those parts she did get were a revelation. The larynx looked about the size of a German shepherd's kennel, and in the search for the hyoid bone - which, she explained, helps the whale both produce sound for echolocation and swim - she had to snap off the point where the clavicles (collar-bones) fuse: it looked like the wishbone from a Brobdingnag chicken.


Dr Reidenberg seemed a little more willing than the members of the Royal Veterinary society who autopsied the elephant in last week's programme to get into the "intelligent design" debate, saying of the multi-chambered stomach more suited to chewing a cow's cud , and the "vestigial back leg" about the size of an adult human femur, that "if evolution were intelligent we wouldn't have these handicaps - it's a mishmash".

Having never predicated intelligence of evolution, I was rather nonplussed. It's like saying that the processes of slow-cooking or printing a paper are intelligent. I believe that the ingredients of the feast or the thesis were intelligently put together, and that evolution is the inevitable working-out of the right ingredients being together at the right time and put under the right pressures on a planet in just the right place...everything is tuned to within a hair's-width. The only alternative to this scenario which physicists have forwarded is an infinity of alternative universes, each different by a hair's-width (the only half-convincing proof of this is that you never do find those lost socks).

The position I embrace is hardly falsifiable, but I have a strange bedfellow in this, in that Richard Dawkins casts aspersions on Karl Popper's doctrine that a hypothesis is only scientific if it can potentially be proved to be false in The Blind Watchmaker. He believes that explanations will be found for that which cannot yet be explained; I too believe that all things will be known eventually.

Dawkins made six short appearances in the documentary, wearing a bright orange windcheater that didn't seem to shelter him from the studio lights where he was filmed. Something that surprised me was that he never mentioned the phrase "the delusion of design" which we were promised in the teaser after last week's documentary. He restricted himself to making observations that, for example, whales were even-toed ungulates (belonging to the family of mammals with cloven hooves), and arched their backs when swimming as mammals do when they gallop. As yet, the series hasn't - quite - conformed to the nightmare of the Telegraph's Ajesh Patalay, of A gory attempt to disprove 'intelligent design' theories.

Dawkins has, however, been in the very recent news, albeit in an indirect way. A British exam board has been criticised for asking GCSE students to place creationism beside evolution in explaining how we got to where we are, and critique them. The BBC remarked at the end of its article on this that "Last year, this issue led to the resignation of Professor Michael Reiss as director of education at the Royal Society."

Professor Reiss resigned from the Royal Society in the same way that a man who is shot decides to stop breathing. When he merely posited dealing with creationism in science classes when the subject arises, and in milder terms than the exam question, Royal Society member Sir Richard Roberts wrote to Lord Rees, the Society's President:

We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome. Who on earth thought that he would be an appropriate Director of Education...?

This is where Dawkins comes in: he immediately put out a statement saying "A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation - it's a Monty Python sketch." In characteristic fashion, when the job was done he had a letter published by New Scientist, saying "Perhaps I was a little uncharitable to liken the appointment of a vicar as the Royal Society's Education Director to a Monty Python sketch."

One thing I noticed was that, in considering whether the whale might be pregnant, Evans referred to the putative foetus as "a calf"; I hope people who heard the reference to the cetaceous nature of a putative unborn whale will reflect upon the humanity of an unborn child.

The old girl's skeleton will be a great focal point for the Kilbrittain community, as well as a memento mori. I'll look out for updates.

The next episode of Inside Nature's Giants deals with an autopsy on an alligator, the "ultimate predator".

You can watch Inside Nature's Giants: the Whale on Channel 4's website

Related post:Elephants, arthritis and euthanasia - inside nature's giants

elephants, arthritis and euthanasia: inside nature's giants

Minima loves elephants: she has elephant posters in her room, pictures of elephants decorating the covers of her jotters, and was heartbroken, upon watching the last instalment of Lord of the Rings, to find that the baddies rode on elephant-like thingies with spikes.

So I was careful to phone home tonight, at the end of a late shift, to warn Maxima that I was going to watch a C4 show - to which I'd been alerted by the Telegraph's Urmee Khan - called Inside Nature's Giants, which, in the first of four episodes concentrating on autopsies on iconic animals, dealt with the post-mortem examination of a lame elephant. It's the first time in a while we've gotten Minima to retire without argument on her designated bedtime for a schoolday, but that's another story.


Not being oversentimental about dead animals, I nevertheless took no pleasure in seeing the grand old dame laid out. But she was treated with respect by the professionals, including the Royal Veterinary College's Alun Williams. Evolutionary biologist Simon Watt explained, with the aid of intelligent graphics, how animals representing various branches of the Tree of Life had tried to cope with reconciling a body high enough to house a vast digestive system with mouthparts that could reach water and high bushes but the elephant is the only surviving successful model.


I didn't have any problems with this, although I realise some of my coreligionists might. What made me feel concerned was that Richard Dawkins, society atheist and professional polemicist, had been invited to record contributions to the series, but added nothing of substance to Watt's informative expatiations.

One phrase of his that interested me was, when commenting on the tendency of male elephants to grow shorter tusks since being hunted for ivory by mankind, was that it was "evolution happening before our very eyes - it can happen very fast".

This was a view that Dawkins enthusiastically espoused in his first - bestselling - popular science book, The Selfish Gene, in catastrophic changes to the Evolutionary Stable Strategy he espouses in Chapter 5. Sometime after this, he discovered that he had reinvented Stephen Jay Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium - that nothing much happens for a long time then everything changes - and was unkind to Gould in ways that could not be justified in a professional sense. In the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, he admitted - in an endnote to chapter 5, that he had been "petulant" in his criticisms of punctuated equilibrium in his 1986 The Blind Watchmaker, and that "if this has hurt anybody's feeling, I regret it". Gould had been dead for four years. Dawkins absolves himself in finishing off the endnote: "my heart was in the right place".

There were fascinating insights into elephant anatomy and physiology, as well as footage of the beasts in the wild where they belong. Also shown was their irascible side. It was a pity Minima never saw this, as I'd have liked her to appreciate how God's creatures are in reality, now that she's graduating from comfortable storybooks.

Something that affected me was the sight of how elephants treat the remains of others of their kind when they happen upon them. They caress the skulls and lift the bones, in a display that suggested grief. The narrator suggested that they were trying to identify who the dead were. I can understand that: I never knew my Granny, Julia, but I remember an old woman from my childhood in the Ayrshire moors who knew me not by my name but as "Julia's daughter's son".

What concerned me was that, after this excercise in anthropomorphising our proboscid friends - which may have been justified to a limited extent - we were treated to several statements about the extent of the poor old girl's cartilage degeneration and how "the quality of life when you get to this level of arthritis is unthinkable". I'm sorry for her (I wish I'd noted her name), but my mother had severe arthritis in every joint for a couple of decades; I won't deny that death came as a friend, but that's by no means the same as averring that humans should be brought to his domain before nature is happy to call time on behalf of God. I've had a couple of dogs put down, because they did not have the capacity to try to apply understanding to suffering on behalf of themselves, let alone others. I grieved, of course, but to apply the same standards to people is to show a fundamental misunderstanding of why our species is called Homo sapiens.


Generally, however, this was a very interesting program. I suppose Richard Dawkins generally behaved himself; it remains to be seen whether the same can be said of next week's offering, in which a fin whale is going to be autopsied in situ. Dawkins promises to reveal to us - in an opening salvo of a battle the Royal Veterinary College may not be eager to fight - "the delusion of design - it looks exactly like an engineer might have made it".

He's already got his first shot in: if we believe in a Creator, at a greater or lesser remove from the mechanics of His creation, we're deluded. I look forward to next week's programme, to hear his justification (if he deigns to give any) for why his faith in his own rectitude necessarily negates the beliefs of those he he labels as "deluded".

In the meantime, I quote a phrase of Charles Darwin's which I've never seen Dawkins referring to, as an indication of the former's breadth of intellect in the face of contradictions which would have pulled apart those who grasp fame at his coat-tails:

I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.

The first episode of Inside Nature's Giants may be viewed on the C4 website.




Related post:Whales and unintelligent evolution: Inside nature's giants

how The Simpsons made my day

Yesterday, as my faith in my ability to stand against politically correct fascism faltered, I little suspected that The Simpsons would come to my rescue.

Having a day off after my foray into London, I got a call from Minora, who'd just completed a Foundation Exam, saying that one of the questions had asked her whether it was right to use human/animal embryos in the search for a cure for Alzheimer's disease. She hadn't answered the question. I commiserated with her, trying to reassure her that I would either have left the question myself, or answered it with the contempt it deserved.

Science doesn't happen in a moral void. It always happens in an ethical framework, the question merely being which one. For example, animal testing, although not perfect, has a definite part to play in maintaining human health, a vivid example of this being when Baxter International, which is working on a vaccine for swine flu, sent avian flu vaccine containing live bird flu virus to Czechoslovakia. On taking the routine step of administering vaccine to ferrets, a subcontractor noticed that the vaccine killed the animals, and a disaster was averted. But when animal liberation fanatics get so tied up with non-human rights that they would gladly unravel the hem of the cloak of creation to salve their fevered consciences, we see big-hearted adolescents served up leading questions by exam boards in an attempt to stunt their moral and intellectual growth, thereby to reduce the ranks of free-thinking individuals who might see through their snake-oil salesmanship.

Then, I read Stephen Exley's exclusive in the Cambridge News about Cambridge University's Newnham College dropping its traditional range of Latin graces referring to Jesum Christum dominum nostrum, and substituting pro cibo inter esurientes, pro comitate inter desolatos, pro pace inter bellantes, gratias agimus - "For food in a hungry world, for companionship in a world of loneliness, for peace in an age of violence, we give thanks". My first reaction was to hope their food isn't as bland, then I realised what they were saying. A suitable paraphrase would be: for being fed and not going without, for being popular and not lacking friends, for being priveleged enough to live without fear of mixing with the uncouth, we worship here at the altar of our own worthiness. It's a fitting epitaph for a society which tries to plug the God-shaped hole in our hearts with that which comes from ourselves.

Lastly, I came upon a report about Hilary Clinton's visit to Brazil over at Don't Poke the Baby, recounting how Hilary Clinton had claimed that a hospital she visited had been packed with a disproportionate amount of women recovering from botched abortions. It appears the poor women suffered from the same condition as the snipers who fired at Clinton when she landed in Tuzla, Boznia in 1996 - an acute lack of reality. However, Baby blogger Linda deftly teases out the pertinent point in the story of a Brazilian woman who had had an abortion as her relationship with an abusive husband ended: "My sympathy is for her living in a situation where she is raped...Where are the defenders of her freedom before the pregnancy? [my italics]"

So I was feeling somewhat beaten down by the time I settled down to watch The Simpsons with my family. I like this show, and it's been praised by many Christian publications - for example the Scottish Catholic Observer - for providing a view of a nuclear, churchgoing family. But you could have knocked me over with a feather when the episode on C4 (#8, 15th season) turned out to have a pro-life lesson.

The episode was entitled "Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays", and involves the blue-haired matron's fight against members of the above society when they sideline families with children as pariahs. Their ringleader, Lindsay Naegle, affirms her belief in abortion; and when Marge tries to get her daughter Lisa to win her heart over, Naegle replies, "I hope one of my eggs I sold turns out like you".

After refusing a (literally) Satanic temptation to give up the campaign, Marge founds her own society - "Proud Parents Against Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens and Gays". After a media campaign almost sunk by her husband's best-intentioned efforts, which are often his most destructive, the denouément occurs in the school playgound, as the anti-family activists prepare to tear the school down. In a charm offensive,the children hug the adults, who are stricken with hellish ailments because they have lost their immunity to the germs that kids harbour.

As Lisa says, the protestors have been defeated by "the humblest things that God in his wisdom has put upon the earth - children". It is, of course, a send up of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds, which was to be released in a modernised version by Stephen Spielberg later in 2005. But it touches on a truth which would be sobering, were not anti-lifers so intoxicated with their own rhetoric: a society lacking sufficient respect for children to suffer them to be born is its own Nemesis. Praise God for hiding these things from the wise and the learned and revealing them to children and Matt Groening.

pigs might fly

Sometimes, the story of two runaways catches the imagination of a nation, if not a continent.

It was 1998: these two, being taken to an ignominious fate, escaped and were recaptured. Not happy with this, they escaped again and crossed the River Avon, after which the police were called out; by the time they were surrounded again the eyes of an entire media machine were upon them. But like their human counterparts, Butch and the Sundance Pig were only taken after a long fight. By this time, of course, questions had been asked in Parliament, and if they had been returned to the Malmesbury abbotoir, there would have been an international outcry: Japan had sent journalists to the quiet Wiltshire town, and American war reporter Donatella Lorch declared that the pigs had become "celebrities".

There's a lot to be said for pigs, I think - mainly because we find it easy to have empathy with them. For example, when Patricia Piccini wanted to raise awareness of human-animal hybrids, she used pigs as a model for a sculpture called "The Young Family", of which a painting is reproduced here. A scientist friend of mine experimented on mice in order to further essential research, but told me he wouldn't have been able to experiment on pigs, because they look too intelligent. In fact, if celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall had campaigned for the rights of stall-farmed pigs instead of battery hens, the whole phenomenon of intensive farming would be on its last legs right now - but Whittingstall has his own organic meat to promote, and his biggest seller is chicken.

Maxima tells me that when she and her classmates were called "pigs" at school by boys who probably fancied them but were scared to admit it, the reply was that the epithet stood for "pretty intelligent girl".

But I don't think former Labour MP Helen Clark intended the word as a compliment when, tired and emotional in a bar, police were called to eject her when she became abusive to the Portuguese barmaid.

Clark was elected MP for Peterborough as a result of having been selected by Labour out of an all-woman list. After being voted out in 2005, she threatened to join the Conservative Party but didn't do so - so I guess distributing the Mae Wests and the parachutes was a waste of time.

She was an MP at a time when the police were being inundated with new paperwork and targets. I don't mean to say that as a Labour MP she was intimately involved with that - but in a sense that's the point: Tony Blair told MP's to spend more time in their constituencies, and while they did this - and I realise that in Labour, just as in any other party, there are MPs who are passionate about both their constituencies and Parliament - one of the many agendas enacted was that of trying to turn the police force from an effective body devoted to keeping the Queen's Police to a warm fuzzy group who would never stand in Labour's way again. Thankfully, due to the influence of old hands, they are yet to succeed completely.

Where this is coming from is the Miner's Strike of 1984-1985. This was ostensibly a strike over the issues of closures, pay and conditions, but what National Union of Mineworkers head Arthur Scarghill had in mind was unseating Margaret Thatcher's government, after the fashion in which the NUM had forced Edward Heath to ask Great Britain "who governs?" in 1974 under the general secretaryship of Lawrence Daly. To cut a long story short, the NUM lost, and paid for Scarghill's dream of revolution by seeing mines closed all over the country.

But there's a question I haven't answered. What became of Butch and the Sundance Pig? They were bought by the Daily Mail, are alive and well in the South of England Rare Breeds Centre & Country Park, and a film has been made of their story. From what I hear, fame hasn't gone to their heads. So far, at least - but I think they're smart enough to know when they're onto a good thing.

Clever animals, pigs.

A 45º-turn on battery farming

Recently, the Cambridge News ran a story about students from Cambridge's Anglia Ruskin University picketing a Tesco's store to try to persuade it to stop selling eggs from caged hens, a subject which becomes close to my daughters' hearts every time it gets an airing; they then bring it close to my ears. (Maybe the protesters took advantage of the student union's free bus to Tesco...)

I'm sorry that animals are living in squalour and misery to feed us for less. But, in our broken society where kids live with drug-taking parents in a narrative so bleak it would have rendered Dickens suicidal, parents look at the financial news and weep, and older folk live emptily in the carpeted gulags of some nursing-homes, the fates of our feathered friends are not that high on my agenda.

Nevertheless, I'm not made of stone, so as I had to be in town today, I had a walk down Mill Road, the cosmopolitan thoroughfare that the anti-Tesco campaigners are always going on about, and which is on Anglia Ruskin University's doorstep. My mission: to find out whether the small, independent traders whom the above state they defend are on-message as regards caged hens. My report follows:

If you want compassion for chickens, then Al Amin at number 100 was the clear winner, as it sold only eggs from free-range hens. On the other hand, Winfield Chinese Supermarket at no. 58 sold only caged chickens' eggs; I don't know the status of the quails and ducks whose produce was also available. (I only recently found out that there was such a thing as battery ducks, when Minora told me.)

Balv's Superette at no. 160 sold eggs from both caged and free-range hens, as did the Nip-In Express at no. 30. Conversely, there was no identification visible on the eggs for sale in unmarked boxes in Notun Bangla Bazar at no. 194, or in Spice-Gate International Food Centre at no. 14.

One store I dropped into was sold out of eggs, and in another where I couldn't find them a harrassed-looking lady behind the counter was trying to convince a young man that four cans of 9% lager was quite enough for him - he was rather a big chap.

I'm not quite sure why the campaigners have chosen Tesco's, which gives shoppers a choice between free-range and caged chickens and their eggs. It could be that they are yet to devise coping-mechanisms for the misery of other beings that is woven into many of our daily choices; possibly they ascribe to the view that most of us are economic automata; or maybe they just don't like Tesco's. Probably all three, and more, are intermixed.

Also to be factored in is celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's campaign against Tesco's intensive-rearing techniques. However, this man has form: in January 2008 he was unmasked by an industry watchdog as having "allowed needless cruelty" at the battery-farm he set up to show viewers the horror of it all. Apparently it wasn't horrible enough already.

I don't doubt the sincerity of the protesters at Tesco's, I merely doubt their appreciation of situations where the pennies matter. If they really want to make a difference, they could lobby the Government to make it more rewarding for farmers to breed free-range chickens than it is at present, without increasing their impact on ordinary folks' pockets. Who knows, they might even be inspired to give the many Halal meat outlets in Cambridge some friendly advice on animal welfare.

But if they still think that campaigning for eggs to come from free-range chickens is the answer, then maybe as well as picketing Tesco's they might have a look at some of the establishments I've listed above that sell eggs from caged hens.

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population

Fatal Misconception - The Struggle to Control World Population
Matthew Connelly
pp520
Harvard University Press 2008

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana

I begin with this often-misquoted phrase from George Santayana because the story of birth-control as national and transnational policy seems to be that of recurring bouts of "collective amnesia", as Connolly puts it. For example, Connelly cites a screening of the pro-life film The Great Population Hoax at IPPF headquarters which caused activists to complain about arguments using distortions of the truth; manager Julian Heddy had to admit that these were actual claims made by earlier population-control advocates.

In order to test the prevalence of population control in recent times, after the prejudices, avoidable tragedies and wilful negligence, I leafed through today's Daily Telegraph. I found a story about how Pakistan is to receive a $9 billion (£5.6 billion) loan from the IMF, but would not like a full-blown IMF program because "it would likely come with painful conditions to cut government spending that could affect programs for the poor".

Wondering what these might be, I looked through some IMF papers for other countries, and found a Senegal Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper from 2006 which contained a statement on page 38 that one of the priority objectives of this was population control.

I've already blogged about how social Darwinism evolved into eugenics. I knew that Darwin himself was horrified by the former phenomenon, but it surprised me to learn that he complained to Annie Besant during her phase as a eugenicist (before she became a mystic philosopher) that eugenics interfered with natural selection. I considered myself quite informed on these matters, but this was only one of countless revelations in Matthew Connelly's intensely-researched tome on how population control was all about controlling other folks' populations. Shortly into my first session with Fatal Misconception, I realised I was reading one of the most important books of my life.

One of the key dogmas of eugenics was maintaining the purity of one's people. When Margaret Sanger realised that those concerned about this were coalescing into a discrete movement, two of the names she thought of calling it were "neo-Malthusianism" and "race control", before she decided on "birth control". An American, her British counterpart, Marie Stopes, stated that she wanted to recruit from "healthy, well-conditioned individuals only", and that "Constructive Birth Control will fill the comfortable cradles and empty the gutters".

The Birth Control Movement was ostensibly an internationalist movement seeking a world government in order to eliminate war. But what they were about was the future of the white race (whatever that is), and at the time eliminating the "yellow peril" (although at the International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925, Indian nationalist Taraknath Das complained about the "white peril).

India was a target for Sanger and her followers from the start, and during Connelly's exposition of the whole sordid affair as a case-study I had to remind myself several times that I wasn't reading a horror story but modern history.

A measure of the morality of the Birth Control movement can be gleaned from his description of Margaret Sanger "criss-crossing" India dispensing spermicidal foam, almost totally unarmed with information as to its safety. It seems not to have bothered her that a similar foam, distributed to African Americans by "notorious racist" Lydia DeVilbiss, was causing side-effects, but finally sent her foam away for analysis upon learning that DeVilbiss' concoction had caused adverse effects when tested upon dogs.

Following the 1951 census, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru "called for free sterilisation and contraception when recommended on medical grounds, and suggested that where feasible it should be given for social and economic reasons as well". India would never be the same. (It should be noted that Hellen Keller, the deaf-blind pioneer, wrote to Sanger breathlessly congratulating her for founding the Planned Parenthood foundation in India in 1952. I find this rather strange, as Sanger referred to the blind, deaf and mute as "this dead weight of human waste" in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization - and Marie Stopes wrote her son Harry out of her will because he married a woman - daughter of "bouncing bomb" inventor Barnes Wallis - with hereditary short-sightedness.)

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) had maintained a presence in India for two decades before Nehru gave them the go-ahead, and responded to their mission with a Neitzschean optimism: "India is the cauldron in which mankind will be tested". Farce ensued immediately - during their 5-year study in the Punjab husbands and wives would answer intrusive questions about their sex-lives differently, and by the time their trial on birth-control ended, the birth-rate was greater than when it began. (They weren't the only ones falling over their own feet; a Swedish trial in nearby Ceylon - now Sri Lanka - couldn't prove the effectiveness of contraceptives after two years.)

The degree to which the Indian population control program contributed to the Emergency and its conclusion will, I think, be a subject for debate until Kingdom Come. But abuses in order to increase "acceptors" were a part of the program from the beginning. Intrauterine Devices (IUD's), which had been found to be a cause of heavy bleeding and ectopic pregnancy in programs in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Pakistan and other countries, were being used widely, and the UN promised follow-ups in India to catch complications early, despite there being one health visitor per 40,000 people in India. Men who refused sterilization were denied pay-rises and promotions, and by the late '6o's payments were being made both to be vasectomised and to recruit others.

Mass sterilisation was praised in 1960 by Time, and when the Emergency was declared in 1975 Indira Ghandi's son Sanjay commented that it was an "appropriate atmosphere" for tackling what DN Pai, director of family planning in Maharashtra, called "people pollution". What was effectively coercive for poor people became mandatory. Connelly explains:

Sterilization became a condition not just for land allotments, but for irrigation, water, electricity, ration cards, rickshaw licenses, medical care, pay raises, and promotions. Everyone, from senior government officials to train conductors to policemen, was given a sterilization quota."

One of Sanjay's circle, Ruksana Sultana, demanded that Muslims who were begging her to have the demolition of their houses stopped - the idea being that sterilization certificates be produced to get alternative accomodation - produce 300 people for sterilization in return, and had to be rescued from the resulting riot by police who eventually gained control by firing live ammunition into the crowd.

However, Gandhi had two qualities that just about all senior population controllers at the time lacked: she was a woman and a mother. She became depressed over the suffering of her people and called an election - and was robustly defeated.

Another tragedy of India is that the population control could have been different. On December 3, 1935, Margaret Sanger had an audience with Mahatma Gandhi concerning population control, and told Time, "He just didn't know much about the subject." In reality, Gandhi was a proponent of natural family planning, which he thought strengthened self-control. Connelly speculates that she didn't publicize Gandhi's views on natural family planning because "it was endorsed by a growing number of Catholics".

Sanger was, in fact, deeply anti-Catholic, and indeed when she left the American Birth Control League "when she found she could no longer control it" she called its house journal, Birth Control Review, "no different from 'all the little Catholic papers'". Connolly continues:

Whatever their differences, Sanger insisted that all these [birth control] groups shared "one common enemy, one group of opposition objecting to everything we do or say - the Catholic Church".

This attitude still thrives: in September of this year John Smeaton highlighted tactics which were contrived to be offensive to Christians in general, but to Catholics in particular, and the British HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) still excludes pro-lifers, which in some circles is taken to be a synonym for Catholic. There are, however, two things to be thankful for: firstly, Roman Catholics still swell the ranks of pro-lifers, and secondly, they have been joined by people of other religions and none - there are pro-life Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, atheists, pagans - the list goes on and on and on...

Despite the abuses of the Indian birth control campaign, in 1983 Indira Gandhi, returned to power, shared the first United Nations Population Award - with Xinzhong Qian, Soviet-trained former soldier who was one of the masterminds of the Chinese population control campaign.

Birth control being what it says on the tin, ie control, it's surprising that it wasn't embraced wholeheartedly by a Communist country before China started considering it in the late seventies.

The IPPF's program in China, states Connelly, was "no secret". Stephen Mosher, later President of the Population Research Institute, brought back reports such as that from a Guangdong village:

Eighteen women who were at least five months pregnant, "red-eyed from lack of sleep and crying", were told they would have to undergo abortions, in two cases by Caeserian section. Through such means, China registered 7.9 million abortions, 13.5 million IUD insertions, and almost 7 million sterilizations in 1979...

Yet, though the riots in India had barely died down, it was as though they had never happened - despite the repercussions of the Indian fiasco reaching not just Pakistan, but also countries as diverse as Iran, Indonesia and the Philippines and contributing to the overthrow of more than one government. Yet, says Connolly, "senior IPPF staff had their eyes wide open" regarding the China campaign, whose aims, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) were not just to reduce "overpopulation" but to "raise the quality of population from the point of view of eugenics, education and ethics". With people who could remember newsreels detailing the horrors of Belsen, Auschwitz etc at the time of their liberation still in employment, eugenics was back.

And it's back this time without necessarily being imposed from above - witness sex-selective abortions in India and China facilitated by ultrasound machines. In the light of modern preoccupations with all things genetic, Connolly refers to people "faithfully reciting a eugenic catechism without the faintest idea of where it came from or where it can lead". For example, while in Australia a child has been born after surviving an ectopic pregnancy, in Britain doctors have been given permission to screen embryos for cosmetic defects, with a view to destroying the ones that don't match expectations, the defects including squints and even hair colour.

One thing gynaecologists and obstetricians have always agreed upon is that there is no difference between a baby before birth and one after. This is why in 2006 the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists proposed infanticide for the sickest babies on the grounds, among other things, of the costs of looking after them - and Connelly notes that the population control agenda gathered steam during the financial crises of the 1930's. In the US, Senator Barack Obama is reckoned to have voted against the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which would protect babies who have survived abortion from being murdered. (In the UK, whose population is around a fifth of that of the US, fifty babies a year are estimated to survive abortion.)

What we're looking at here is an attempt to formally renunciate the broad medical concensus that once a baby has taken its first breath it is a human being. I'm reminded of Philip K Dick's 1973 short story The Pre-Persons, in which a child can be "aborted" up to the age of 12 , and even then is only safe if he/she can prove a certain degree of mathematical ability. I wish I could say it's still in the realms of sci-fi, but earlier this year Australian doctor and bioethicist Fr Joseph Tham estimated that infanticide would be "normalised" in 50 years. An online friend has alerted me to the philosophy of Dr Peter Singer, an animal liberationist who believes that animals are people but that babies can be killed up to 28 days post-birth. (Connelly refers to a pressure group called Zero Population Growth, which in 1969 wanted to exterminate humanity but give other primates an antidote so they would survive.)

What will happen? Will the "collective amnesia" of policymakers draw us to catastrophe once more, so that in the reaction we can once more cry "Never again"?

But population planners have an enemy that they cannot forever subjugate. Connelly describes how the Emergency ended - "Something more powerful, even more implacable, had finally defeated the ideology of population control: People voting, one by one."

beautiful vermin - getting to the meat of the thing

Earlier this week, Professor Calculus informed me that he'd been given a rabbit and a hare. Since he didn't have the facilities to store them, he asked me to do so, and told me to keep the hare. So I put them in the freezer, then informed Minima and Minora.

Minima wasn't bothered; but from Minora's reaction, you'd think that I'd killed Maxima and offered them her in sandwiches. Like many adolescents, she knows that she opposes something with all her heart, but she's not quite worked out what it is yet, so the issue of killing animals was as good a cause as anything to get overheated about.

I tried to tell her that wild Leporidae were vermin, but she wasn't having any of it. She replied that they were beautiful, and I agreed: they're beautiful vermin. So I asked her what she had against the farmers whose crops rabbits etc ate, at which she had a fit of procrastination and went to her room to put some thump-thump-thump music on.

Anyway, I took the rabbit up to Calculus' place after a night's thawing: he showed me how to skin and "paunch" the beast, ie take its guts out. His dog Granum had a feast, and I wondered, am I going to be able to do that with the hare?

At home, I took the hare out of its plastic bag. Its pelt was smooth, and reminded me of the fur of our cat, Magus. It had been shot in the head, which had a couple of drops of blood on it. Even so, it was a handsome beast, and I raised the knife with trepidation.

I hacked its legs off first, above the elbows. Then I cut down the belly with Maxima's sharpest knife, pausing to wipe fur off the cutting edge. Paunching it wasn't as hard as I thought: I'd been worried about piercing the gut, but thankfully this never happened. I was surprised by the amount of force that was required to remove the pelt and flesh from the corpse. So had Professor Calculus with the rabbit - maybe they're not supposed to be frozen.

Even despite the ongoing supermarket price war, I've heard talk of hares and rabbits becoming more popular as a form of nourishment because they exist, free range, up and down the countryside. Their killing is a service not only to landowners, but often also to the cereal-eating public (ie just about everybody). And it's perfectly possible to kill them cleanly; the British Association for Shooting and Conservation has an information page on shooting rabbits which includes information on choosing an airgun and ammunition for "A well-placed shot [to] result in a clean, humane kill", and advises "You should never attempt to shoot a rabbit that’s more than 35 metres away, and only then with a headshot that will kill him cleanly."



I looked up cooking times in my Gran's old cookbook then added some just to be safe - penicillin wasn't discovered until eight years after the book was published, but now antibiotics are all over the damn place, including in the water supply that's used for irrigation. The hare meat was tender and not particularly strong-tasting, and after Maxima gotten over me disembowelling the thing in her kitchen she chopped and threw in a couple of onions and tatties. She joined me in eating some of the meat, as did Minima, but Minora remained green around the gills and sat huffily watching an anime video.

At a time when the prevailing financial conditions are pushing people away from money and back to bartering (including beer for game), it looks like eating game is going to become more mainstream than I've ever seen it (although the animals I saw most often in Glasgow were pigeons, rats and foxes). Which brings up the issue of how taxation for goods and services exchanged in a non-monetary system is going to be calculated and what the penalties will be for non-payment. And, although Labour's on-off manifesto commitment to shooting is currently "on", will any of the monies raised by bartering involving game be used to appease those anti-shoot campaigners who still form a significant minority within that party?

But all that's for another day. I'm famished now - I think I'll go and finish off the hare.