Why Dont You Blog?

A post on Rupture the Rapture talked about atheist musicians being obliged to perform religious music and bemoaned the absence of atheist equivalents.

..Tenor voiced his frustration at the “dearth of music” heard at various humanist gatherings, conventions and the like. I may be wrong here, but what I believe Tenor is looking for is accessible music with a humanist bent - music that would be appropriate for such gatherings, but that is of such a nature that the audience could relate to and/or actually participate in. (Humanist karaoke?)…

I suppress a shudder at the prospect of an atheist equivalent of Christian rock. Please, no.

Still, I like the idea of a musical expression of humanism. I did a youtube search for atheist music. Hmm, most of it falls toward the Eastern-European-Heavy-Metal end of the spectrum but there’s plenty there. (I know there’s a well known atheist rapper but I couldn’t find a link and I remember getting distracted by the wonderful existence of genres like ‘nerdcore’ last time I tried it.)

In fact, thinking about “atheist music,” most music fits into this category. It’s not so much “atheist” as “nothing to do with religion” or inherently anti-religion in celebrating the things that organised religion tends to object to.

Sad to say, a lot of religiously-inspired music is pretty damn good. (Gregorian chants, Victorian hymns, Sufi chants, roots reggae…..)

I can’t see a problem with appreciating it as music and poetry. Music exists to move us and, among other things, it can express wonder and transcendence. Just because some people filter these emotions through religion doesn’t imply that we have to buy into their beliefs to appreciate their expression.

If everyone were to start only listening to music that precisely expresses their own beliefs, the world would be pretty silent.

(I obviously don’t like the idea but I’d have no problems recommending it to the people who think everyone else on the bus wants to listen to their tinny mono phonetunes.)

In any case, no one is put off Renaissance paintings because they tend to be brimming with biblical figures. Apart from anything else, we all understand that artists have to make a living. If you live in a world where the Church gives out most commissions, you paint the Nativity or write music for monks.

Popularity: 18% [?]

This month’s New Scientist discusses God and morality. That link is more or less useless, though, unless you have a subscription. You have to buy the magazine to get more than the first few hundred words. (Or read this, written from the smug perspective of someone who can read it all.)

Referring to Dawkins and the many others who dispute that religion is the necessary source of morality:

Their views have recently been bolstered by evidence that morality appears to be hard-wired into our brains. It seems we are born with a sense of right and wrong, and that no amount of religious indoctrination will change our most basic moral instincts.

New Scientist doesn’t want to offend readers- atheists or theists - so the discussion is quite cagey, with a general suggestion that both religion and morality are mentally hardwired.

I followed their link to some 2005 Baltimore research by Gregory Paul that argues that societies with high rates of religious adherence are those that consistently have the worst social morality.

He concluded that countries with higher rates of belief and worship had higher rates of homicide, death among children and young adults, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and abortion.

(New Scientist)

I like this paper so much, I’m going to post the abstract here and put the most salient bits in bold.

Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and antievolution America performs poorly.

Gregory Paul said that “In the United States many conservative theists consider evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction because it is amoral or worse, and because it inspires disbelief” This is fascinating. Who’d have thought that a scientific theory can be held accountable for people’s morality? “Sorry, Your Honour, but I was acting under the influence of the Second law of Thermodynamics.”

Van Jensen challenged Paul’s conclusions in another study, based on cross-cultural homicide rates research, arguing that dualistic theism - i.e. belief in God AND a Devil - is what you need to make a really murderous society.

There’s nothing really new in the argument that religion fosters immorality, though. Jensen refers to “Durkheim’s hypotheses that religious passion, as a variable characteristic of nations, is a positive correlate of homicide rates.” In English, that means: the more fanatical belief, the more murders. That’s Durkheim, born 1858 - died 1917, by the way. Some messages just don’t get through.

There’s much more interesting information in the New Scientist article. Researchers have looked at the subject from the perspectives of psychology, evolutionary biology, brain chemistry and more. Every piece of research could spark a full-scale post here, with ranting &/or raving at will.

If you are interested in religion and morality, it’s worth getting hold of a copy of New Scientist and following the links to the actual research papers.

Popularity: 29% [?]

It’s just over 6 months since Abdul Kareem got sentenced to 4 years in jail for blogging. There’s a website in support of him. You can also read a wikipedia entry although there is a caveat at the head of the page saying

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.

.. He was arrested by Egyptian authorities for posts on his blog that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On February 22nd, 2007 in his native city Alexandria. Kareem Amer was sentenced to three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and one year for insulting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Not neutral? Maybe the very mention of the sentence contravenes “neutrality”. Presumably because no sane person would think this was OK?

(If only he had just been the officer in charge of a military unit charged with war crimes, he’d be free today.)

It’s one thing - and a very pleasurable thing it can be, too - to insult Baptist evangelists from the comfort of the Atheist Blogroll. However, if you live in the Middle East, challenging Islam in your blog posts is definitely hazardous to health .

The campaign website is maintained by Kareem’s friends who disagree with what he said about Islam but still uphold his right to express his views. Unlike his family apparently.

From the Kareem FAQs:

What did his family say about all this?
Days before the jail sentence, his family publicly disowned him, and his father called for applying the Sharia on his son by giving three days to repent, followed by having him killed if he did not announce his repentance.

Give them a bit of leeway for trying to protect themselves, as I imagine they are under a fair bit of pressure to distance themselves from their wayward freethinking offspring. But still. A father who thinks his son deserves a death sentence for publishing a few challenging words is definitely so far off the scale of harsh that you would need to invent a new scale. And he’d still fall of the edge.

Disappointingly, the only UK politician mentioned as having spoken out about Kareem is from the UK Independence Party*. Euro-MP Derek Clark, raised the case in the European Parliament.

If you live in the sort of country where you might get arrested or your dad might call for your execution, Reporters sans frontieres have a page about how to blog anonymously without putting yourself in the firing line of your state’s repression.
(You can’t say this blog doesn’t give out any useful information.)

* If you’re not from the UK, there is/was (?) a joke political party called the Monster Raving Loony Party (It’s alternative comedy- it’s not funny, to steal an old Ben Elton quote.) UK Independence Party are generally considered less serious and even less funny than the MRLP. UKIP tends to substitute comical zenophobia for the MRLP’s standard slapstick approach. Luckily, they are completely unelectable and spend their time in internal squabbles. It is enough of a shock that they must have a Euro-MP, let alone that he seems to have actually spoken sense in the European Union.

Popularity: 32% [?]

This blog has a special fondness for El Morya since Black Sun Journal brought him to our attention. So, what great news on Black Sun Journal that he has a MySpace profile and MySpace friends!

I wrongly assumed that these would be standard imaginary friends of the sort the Internet is full of - invented blog personae for internet marketing blogs that don’t seem to market anything as much as fill cyberspace with empty links to other linkfarms.

But oh joy, these are real blogs to cheer your heart if you are the sort of person who finds humanity too reasonable for your taste (There must be some people who feel that.)

The El Morya MySpace profile has the fantastic El Morya picture. A young looking 99, indeed. imagine you crossed Osama bin Laden’s standard mugshot with a Victorian Sunday school picture of Christ. The profile background sound is sounding suspiciously like Handel’s take on circus music as played on those call-centre answering machine loops that make you want to beat your brains out with the headset.

(Yes, my classical music knowledge is rubbish. It’s probably some tune that everybody recognises. Well, OK, I sort of recognise it. Pomp and Circumstance? Don’t mock. I’m trying to be musically erudite here.)

El Morya’s interests include not very inspiring paintings by Nicolas Roehrich Who? He’s not Raphael that’s for sure, although I seem to remeber that one of El Morya’s cronies is supposed to be Raphael, so you think they could have got him in to do the painting.

I had to visit his MySpace friends. Given a choice between reading the posts and looking at the friends’ profiles, this wasn’t a difficult decision. I decided to stick with the ones with human pictures.

A few bits that give the flavour.
Earthstone Co-creations:

My name is Jennifer Salness, and I am a energy healer, crystal intuitive & dealer, editor, podcast co-host, ETC. Multi-dimensional!

(The exclamation mark so perfectly encapsulates this site.)

Cindy

In my search for Truth of our origins, I have had some amazing spiritual experiences that has changed my life and view of God and the world forever. I believe in angels. I love to interpret dreams for Spiritual Growth and I practice Gendai-ki Reiki for energy Healing

Lauren other worlds

I am an artist, author, and life-after-death survivor, which might account for the fact that I am also a contactee, a mystic, clairaudient, clairsentient, and more. I have no doubt that we are each great souls having a human experience and it’s my mission to help others remember who they truly are, help others understand that we can learn through enlightenment rather than through pain, and also help eradicate the fear of death and any belief in separation from our own Truths. …..
My nickname is Walks Between Worlds. I’ve been to “the other side” too many times to count, my most extreme “journey” having lasted 3 days.

Look, I’m sorry to be pedantic but that isn’t a nickname. “Yozzer” is a nickname. I defy anyone to shout “Oy! Walks between Worlds!” when they spot a friend across the street.

Anyway, I’m getting bored with the human friends. (And I am becoming a tad embarrassed for my gender.) So I am impressed to see how many divine and mythical beings have MySpace profiles.
Heaven on Earth , Divine Union, Mary Hath Chosen and loads more.

Ah, God. Wow. See, there is a God. And, in the 21st century, even for the divine being, creating a MySpace profile is so much more convenient than carving words onto stone tablets. A lot of us have been feeling a spiritual void since the great Blog of the Gods has fallen out of existence, with no posts since July 11th, so I’ll quote the great man himself here…..

About me:
People call me by many names; Jehovah, Allah, Father, Yahweh, Adoni, Elohim, Ahura Mazda, Hashem, ECT…But most call me God. I’ve been around since before “The Beginning”. I’m a pretty nice guy when you get to know me. But be warned I do have a bit of a temper. A lot of People think that Evolution and science disproves my existence. But see if you got to read the full Bible you’d know that I made several humanoid creatures before I settled on Adam and Eve. And the thing you call the big bang I called “Let there be light.” Anyways. Acknowledge me, Treat others as you want to be treated, be good and we’ll get along fine. Oh and to let you know I’m very busy you’re not the only planet I have to watch over you know. So sometimes my responses to prayers are slow and some time the answers are just no.

Who I’d like to meet: I already know every one. But not everyone knows me …

Wow, it starts off almost paraphrasing the the words of the old Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil But in reverse. (Well, I thought so….)

Blimey God’s friend list is unsurprisingly even more star-studded than El Morya’s; Jesus, St. Michael, Saint Gabriel - Archangel, Archangel Raphael (Ah ha, the ascended Raphael isn’t the painter or the Mutant Ninja Turtle then, my bad), Zoroaster, Moses, Muhammed, the Peace of God be upon him, Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Peter, Saint Paul the Apostle, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Joseph, Shiva, GANESH, Tara, kuan yin, Krishna, Kali-Ma, Saint Germain, Babaji, ENKI, (who?) Tenzin Gyatso. (who?)

Is that A list or what?

Popularity: 35% [?]

Oh bugger. How easy it is to become the enemy….

This post on the Scientific Activist: Animal Rights Activists Hijack the Brains of Three Respected Scientists, the subject of which is a paper in Bioessays that suggests that cell cultures and computer modelling should replace more animal experiments.

It’s fair to say that this Scientific Activist blog post isn’t exactly supportive of the view point but it’s a reasonably argued post. It ends with this point.

As scientists, we should constantly be thinking about ways to reduce our dependence on animal research, and this paper does attempt to advance this cause. However, this should not be done at the expense of the science (and at the expense of human lives), and grossly oversimplifying the issue, as this paper seems to, does a service to no one.

Not so Pharyngula’s take on it.

Once we’ve defeated the creationists (hah!), we’re going to have to manage the next problem: well-meaning but ill-informed animal rights activists. Nick describes a recent article that tries to claim we can reduce animal use in labs — and it even has a couple of respectable scientists signing on to that nonsense.

Hmm. Well it rather looks, from the bit I quoted above, as if Nick (assuming that refers to Scientific Activist) did accept that reducing animal use was a goal to aim for, rather than “nonsense”, but Toutatis forbid that Pharyngula blogged on something without reading the whole article. (I mean WhyDontYou blog would never dream of doing anything like that. Well, not very often… )

I’m not a biologist. In fact, my schoolgirl aversion to biology was based precisely on the fact that it involved cutting up dead creatures. So, I don’t know how far slicing up animal’s bodies - or genetically manipulating them so they exist only to exhibit diseases similar to the ones humans have and so on - are necessary for the furtherance of knowledge.

But, it better had be bloody necessary before it’s OK with me.

If that makes me an enemy of reason, that’s tough. “Respected scientists” must have had their “brains hijacked” because they suggest other more animal-sparing alternatives? Those of us who think they have a point are the enemies of science, almost as if we are the wimpier wing of the creationists?

Surely biology shows us that we are animals? Mammals? That we share most of our genes with other sentient beings? But we can just ignore this whenever it suits us and act as if we have a right to do whatever we like with other species.

This form of “atheism” is basically indistinguishable from the Judeao-Christian world view that everything else in the universe is just our plaything, just without the Jahweh figure directing the show. Yada Yada… He gave man “dominion over all the beasts of the field” and so on, to do whatever we damn well please with?

How come that bit of the Bible is still gospel to a lot of atheist scientists?

Popularity: 29% [?]

The spread of the database-driven society proceeds apace. Today’s Times reports that

Senior social workers have given warning of the dangers posed by a new government register that will store the details of every child in England from next year.
They fear that the database, containing the address, medical and school details of all under-18s, could be used to harm the children whom it is intended to protect.

Not being a newspaper writer or a member of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, I don’t have an interest in claiming that the danger of child-abusers getting details is the biggest problem here. (After all, children have most to fear from people they know. ) But still, they have a point. Any database that has an estimated 33,000 users is going to be leaky as a broken sieve.

The database, which goes live next year, is to contain details of every one of the 11 million children in the country, listing their name, address and gender, as well as contact details for their GP, school and parents and other carers. The record will also include contacts with hospital consultants and other professionals, and could show whether the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether he or she needs extra help.

Every child in the country it says. So you have to love this bit:

….. information about the children of celebrities and politicians is likely to be excluded from the system.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Who is the godfather of the Internet?

Today’s Guardian Technology page identifies him as Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

But wait. What about

Mark Joyner, often referred to as the “Godfather of the Internet”

according to Articles about cable, dsl, etc?

Or Imperial College’s candidate,

… Imperial College alumnus, Donald Watts Davies, the Welsh computer genius regarded by many as the godfather of the internet.

Or Al Gore?

…Earlier today, Xeni spoke with former Vice President Al Gore, internet godfather and co-founder of Current TV,

(Phew, at least I know who Al Gore is. I have heard of Vint Cerf, but a name so unremittingly stunning would stick in the brain anyway, after one hearing. I have never heard of the others.)

Or this candidate on interandom

.. Carnegie Mellon Professor and “Godfather of the Internet” David Farber

Or this from some sort of podcast scraper list:

Thomas Prendergast, CEO of Inetekk & creator ot the Veretekk Automated Lead Generation & Online Marketing System. .. Thousands know him as “The Godfather Of The Internet”…

From MQ magazine

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered by many to be the godfather of the internet.

There are loads more Internet godfathers but I got too bored and stopped collecting them.

How many godfathers does the Internet need?
What does it mean to be an Internet godfather?
Do they insist on being called don and putting horse’s heads in the beds of adherents of traditional media?
Or do they grant wishes, like fairy godmothers? I’ll take health, wealth and happiness if they’re still going. Though I’ve never heard of fairy godfathers. Obviously shoudl have paid more attention to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and Andrew Lang’s vari-coloured Fairy books. (That’s a link to Project Gutenberg if you want to make a liar of me and find fairy godfathers aplenty.)

There are so many questions here and I’m a bit stumped by not knowing what even a traditional godfather does. I have a fuzzy impression thay promise to bring up the child they are godfathering as a Christian or mafia member, or both, according to context Give a few gifts in exchange for the family’s votes in some Latin political systems? That’s about it.

Is there a godmother of the Internet? On safer ground here. I know what a godmother does. They grant wishes and turn pumpkins into coaches.

Well I found a paltry two candidates,

Takeaway media says

…according to Esther Dyson, the godmother of the internet, we may even see by 2100 the end of life’s only two certainties, death and taxes.

Well, surely a half-decent fairy godmother should be able to sort those little inconveniences out.

Flash Goddess names Lynda Weinman, although she seems unsurprisingly reluctant to claim the title, possibly because she’s not confident about her scullery-maid-to-princess skills.

Q How do you feel about being referred to as the “godmother of the internet”?
A. I’ve never heard myself referred to as that! It’s an uncomfortable and inaccurate label.

Popularity: 28% [?]

The Internet is Father. The Internet is Mother. The Internet reached out its hand and gave us all life.

So it sort of pains me to say that the goal of achieving one laptop per child may not necessarily be a good thing…

The Mission Statement of the one laptop per child foundation

… is to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of XO laptops as learning tools for children living in lesser-developed countries.

local grass-roots initiatives, sustainability, learning tools, children, lesser-developed countries? Blimey. How worthy is that? These eco-friendly words could never be used to promte a BAD THING, surely?

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a less-developed country, but I seem to remember that, after food*, the crying needs for learning tools were for pencils and paper. Pencils, ffs. They don’t cost more than a couple of pence wholesale. You could probably pass one out to every needy kid in Senegal, say, for less than the cost of a handful of these laptops.

Well the BBC said:

A team of US-based researchers, backed by a billionaire, have re-invented the computer in an attempt to revolutionise education in the developing world.

I love the “backed by a billionaire” touch. Another selfless billionaire who couldn’t possibly be looking for new products and new markets. Or have an interest in spreading consumerist values. Or in getting national governments to support setting up digital network infrastructures.

Who is this mystery philanthropist?

Well, Internet research isn’t an exact science, so bear with me here.

MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte? Wow, that name sounds oddly familiar. Well according to wikipedia, among a range of other distinctions, he

is the younger brother of John Negroponte, current United States Deputy Secretary of State.

About whom wikipedia is also pretty forthcoming. It starts with:

He is currently serving as the United States Deputy Secretary of State. Prior to serving in this capacity, he was the first ever Director of National Intelligence.
Negroponte served in the United States Foreign Service, from 1960 to 1997. He had various tours of duty as a United States ambassador, including a three-year ambassadorship to the Philippines, from 1993 to 1996. He subsequently served as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2001 to 2004, and was ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005……

What a career! Studded with involvement in such uncontroversial American adventures as Iraq and anti-Sandanista actions.

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. During this time, military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million a year, and the US began to maintain a significant military presence there, with the goal of providing a bulwark against the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which had overthrown the Somoza government and then created a state with close ties to both Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Now, I know some brothers are estranged and all that. For all I know, the Negroponte extended family observes no kinship rituals. So it’s more than possible that John and Nick don’t even exchange Christmas newsletters. And that they don’t share any social and political goals. So don’t jump to conclusions…..

Just saying.

(Compare and contrast the media fuss over government workers adding the odd “allegedly” to Wikipedia entries with uncritical media presentation of one laptop per child programme. There are also several techy blogs welcoming it as ironing out the digital divide E.g. Live stuff)

* plus a few other things like “staying alive till their tenth birthdays”, “accessible clean water”, “not getting shot”, “not living on the streets” or “not working on rubbish tips” and so on, but let’s not lose our sense of humour here……..

Popularity: 24% [?]

Imagine you work for the Australian government. There you are, sitting in your work cube in front of your PC, staring into space. You’ve finished estimating next year’s value of Western Australian lamb exports per acre. What will you do in the seemingly infinite 40 minutes till lunch-time?

Ah ha. Skim through Wikipedia. Try for the “random” entry. See something you know something about - your specialist subject, in fact - the development of the Perth Railway Modellers’ Club, 1990 to 2002.

But the entry shows the name of the 1997 Chairman as Ken Brewster and you know it was Ben Baxter!…. Blimey, you can’t allow this blatant misrepresentation of the facts. Future historians of the Perth Railway Modellers Club will be completely misled. So you make a quick correction.

Go forward a few weeks. Wikiscanner becomes available. Everyone can find out what organisation’s IP address has been used to make a wiki-edit.

This sparks a media-led conspiracy frenzy over evidence that people from various corporations or government agencies have edited encyclopeadia pages.

Oh look, surprisingly (not), people from the CIA have edited entries. People working for the BBC. And, - oh my Poseidon! - people working for the Australian government have edited entries. Oh dear…. You get called into the boss’s office and shouted at. …Misusing your internet privileges…. Bringing the government into disrepute, and so on…..

Largely because some people eitehr never learned, or are incapable of applying, the most basic tests to judge the validity of information. E.g:

• Does this seem inherently reasonable?
• Who said it?
• Is this information contradicted or supported by other sources?
• Who benefits if I believe this?

Are you surprised that CIA employees have edited pages that concern the CIA or that workers for the Australian government have toned down critical articles?

If so, then it’s about time you took some courses in critical thinking and analysing information. Because you lack even the most basic skills at identifying propaganda.

Indeed, Wikiscanner might serve as a basic tool for identifying potential misinformation or propaganda, going some way towards giving an answer to the second question above.

But even so, some people sit in work reading, even editing Wikipedia, Some of these people work for corporations or government agencies. Some of them are carrying out their master’s instructions. Most are just bored workers tryng to interject some purposeful activity into the boring functionary’s day.

Some are even acting as whistleblowers.

Do we want to shut up the whistleblowers just because we are too idle to develop the thinking skills to detect spin or outright lies?

The outcome of this editing-Wiki frenzy is, surprise, surprise, that more workers get their internet access circumscribed.

In a BBC story, the Australian Prime minister reacted to the story that government employees had made edits by ruling that:

…. the department said on Friday that it had acted to block staff from editing the site.
“Defence has closed personal edit access down, though employees will still be able to browse Wikipedia for information purposes,” a spokesman said.

Throughout the world, internet access is getting curtailed for employees. In the UK, for example, at the beginning of August, the Defence Department ordered members of the armed forces to get the permission of superior officers before they blog.

The Ministry of Defence last week ordered British soldiers to stop blogging, putting videos on YouTube, joining online chats or sending text messages without a superior officer’s permission. But the soldiers carried on regardless, posting caustic commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was a mini digital mutiny.
I’m surprised the MoD has taken so long to deal with the problem of khaki samizdat. Censorship is part of military life. Imagine if Tommies had been able to blog about the trenches in October 1914. There would have been an outcry back home. The war could well have been over by Christmas.

“Oh look, this is from a government computer. It must be part of an evil government plot!” Come on. Let’s learn to evaluate information properly to protect ourselves from propaganda, rather than shut people up or jump at the first half-baked conspiracy theory that fits our prejudices.

Will ill-judged kneejerk conspiracy theory reactions based on the IPs of Wikipedia editors become the pretext for more internet censorship? Well, yes, it looks like they have. What a great win for free speech…

Popularity: 34% [?]

Delighted to see Bad Science has soundly rubbished the “girls like pink, boys like blue” nonsense that has been in the media this week.

Some neuroscience research involving a couple of hundred subjects showed that female colour preferences were slightly to the redder end of the spectrum. From which the media oddly extrapolated that this proved women preferred pink for evolutionary reasons relating to hunting and gathering skills.

Ben Goldacre, a Zoe Williams piece in the Guardian and some commenters on Bad Science have all done a great job of pointing out the flaws in this.

Most tellingly, Goldacre pointed out that colour-gender identification changes according to the cultural context. E.g. A century ago, pink was considered most suitable for boys and blue was the girly colour. In Chinese culture, where red is greatly valued, both sexes prefer reddish colours. And so on.

From birth, we are assailed by cues telling us that pink means “feminity” and blue means “masculinity”. Go to any toy store. A pink mist will rise up before your eyes when you get near the girls’ toys. Amazing that any girls can resist a general preference for pink over blue.

You could almost argue that the fact that the colour preference differences were so tiny - given the social pressure to identify pink as girly - that girls really may have an evolutionary aversion to pink…..

The media’s usual pop science distortions fall into a predictable pattern when research relates to gender. Any statistical difference between men and women that fits current prejudices is exaggerated, generalised to all men and women, then treated as indicative of innate biological difference.

Surpise, surprise, they all tend to support a view of women exemplified by a more docile version of Paris Hilton. Argh.

Popularity: 32% [?]