I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

There Ought To Be A Law Against It

They should make it illegal to talk crap. I can't think of any other way to stop the flood of bullshit that threatens to drown out all sensible discourse. It should be a crime to say or write anything for public consumption that is provably wrong at the time it was said.

The irritating and most visible manifestation of the untrue rubbish people spout is in advertising. I don't just mean ads that say processed food X is "wholesome" or  indistinguishable from real food, I mean the lying nonsense about the beneficial powers of inert food supplements, or magnetic mattresses, or "quantum energised" crystals. All that New Age quackery, all that techno-babble, all that distortion and half-truth designed to mislead!

It gets beyond mere irritation when you hear garbage spoken by politicians. Many of them (particularly on the right wing) talk about medical issues, about welfare reform, about incentives, about wars on drugs, about the criminal justice system, about education and about tax reform, as if we haven't had a century of psychological studies, sociological studies, criminology, medical science, and anthropology. The evidence is all there if they had the wit to grasp it. Yet they go on, year after year telling us the answer is more police on the streets, stiffer sentences, getting back to the three Rs, sacking civil servants, etc., etc., etc.. I know politicians are just ordinary people with monster egos, and most of them don't have the intelligence to read research reports (from actual scientists, I mean, not from "think tanks"!) but if there were criminal penalties for being caught saying untrue things in public, maybe they would actually start to care about what they say.

And, of course, politicians lying to the public (wilfully or out of ignorance) can do real harm. It can blight lives and hobble whole societies. It can kill. But the people with the real power, who can do most harm, are the corporations and their various mouthpieces. We've seen endless examples of how the tobacco companies lied about the harm they cause, how the oil, coal and gas companies have lied about global warming (and pollution in general), and how the big news media corporations lie to ensure the political outcomes they favour. Yet there are no penalties. The Big Tobacco spokesperson may be responsible for thousands of deaths, but they are not tried for mass murder. The Big Oil CEO who sponsors obfuscatory research that may lead to hundreds dying in floods and droughts, doesn't face jail time, nor do the scientists who take his money and publish his papers. And the Big Pharma PR guys who tell the doctors lies about their products, are not being prosecuted wither, and nor are the doctors who sign their names to academic papers written by those same PR guys.

We live in a world where solid scientific evidence is ignored or actively disparaged, just so that people can sell you things, or feather their nest in some other way. It is a world where religious groups are allowed to teach anti-science courses which are nothing but insupportable nonsense - presumably so that young people aren't exposed to ideas or rational thinking or something equally horrible. There seems to be nothing anyone can do about all this lying and misleading and distortion and outright fraud. Or nothing anyone is willing to do. After all, the lawmakers are among the worst offenders.

Yet if there is anything there should be a law against, this is it.

Review: The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 23rd August, 2010.)

The Artificial Ape is a book with a plausible idea, but that is all it has. If you are looking for a convincing argument that “technology changed the course of human evolution” or even some compelling evidence, this is not the book for you. However, if you like informed speculation about humanity’s prehistoric past and you enjoy surveys and summaries of this immensely long and fascinating period, The Artificial Ape will keep you turning the pages.

Taylor is a well-known and popular archeo-anthropologist and is beginning to make himself a name for controversial speculation. His Prehistory of Sex takes us back 8 million years and The Buried Soul makes some startling claims about how widespread cannibalism and vampirism were in prehistory. The Artificial Ape follows in this tradition.

Taylor’s main contention is that tool use in early hominins was a necessary step to allow us to develop our large brains. In particular, he speculates that the invention of the baby sling must have occurred about two million years ago (although there is no actual evidence). This would have allowed a hairless ape with an upright gait—and thus a restricted pelvic gap—to give birth to increasingly immature babies, ones that could not cling to their mothers and would need to be carried, thus allowing the brain to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. As Taylor puts it, turning ourselves into artificial marsupials.

He makes much of the fact that tool use in hominins began about 2.5 million years ago, long before signs of accelerated skull-size began to be seen in the fossil record (after 2 million years ago). It is a puzzle that stone tools were being made and used before Homo ergaster and then Homo erectus began to develop their larger brains, and it is this puzzle that Taylor’s hypothesis attempts to tackle.

Taylor also points to the fact that an ape with an upright gait has a much shorter intestine than one on all fours. This means that not only meat eating but cooking may have been essential precursors to the development of bipedalism, simply because of the difficulty of finding sufficient nourishment from a vegetarian and raw meat diet with a short gut, at a time when we would have been extremely active and burning calories at a rate rarely seen in humans today.

Interestingly, recent evidence, published after the book was released, pushes the date for tool use and meat eating back to perhaps 3.4 million years—the pre-Homo days of Australipithecus afarensis. This find gives Taylor a 1.4 million year gap to explain before brain sizes begin to increase. But it does provide more time for full bipedalism to evolve after tools for butchering meat are first seen.

Given the paucity of the evidence, much of what Taylor proposes must be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, hominin skulls are quite plentiful across the last two million years, but there are only a dozen or so before that time. The graph of brain capacity against time that he presents is quite compelling but it would not need many new data points in the pre-2 million years’ range for it to look very different. More critically for the argument, there are just three hominin pelvises that have been found covering a period of almost 3.5 million years. While they approximately match the required changes in morphology for an ape specializing increasingly in bipedalism and immature neonates, it is very little to base an argument on.

So the book is disappointing in that, having made its surprising but apparently reasonable claim, it then provides scant evidence and only weak arguments in support of it. It is disappointing in other ways, too. It contains long and frequent digressions into areas of human cultural evolution that are not strongly connected to the main argument and which tend to dilute and confuse the message.

While fascinating in their own right, Taylor’s discussion of neolithic art and culture do not contribute much. Similarly, his extended discussion of why Tasmanian aborigines had apparently “regressed” to a level of tool use and a style of living not far removed from that of chimpanzees, while a very useful antidote to Victorian condemnation of and dismay at their lifestyle (which still persists in a mild form in academic circles today), does not strengthen his argument appreciably.

Some discussion as to why other hominids (the great apes) have not taken the same evolutionary path as humans, despite the strong probability that they were as proficient with tools as our distant ancestors were, would have been worthwhile. It is likely that chimpanzees have been using tools for as long as us, yet it has not led either to bipedalism or to increased brain size. The same problem arises with birds. Modern studies show extremely surprising sophistication of tool use in crows and other species of bird, yet we do not see the same evolutionary tie to tool use that Taylor suggests for ourselves. Birds have not become “artificial avians.” Why not?

And the same problem arises with dolphins, which also use tools. Bird brains also raise the interesting problem for Taylor’s hypothesis that their brains are notoriously small. Claiming that tool use (technology) enables increases in brain size, in the face of a crow’s tiny brain, begs the question as to whether the evolution of technologies and brains is causally linked at all. It would have been useful if Taylor had addressed some of these issues.

The Artificial Ape is a good read. It is full of interesting and provocative ideas and information. Yet, while it is interesting and its main idea is appealing, in the end, it fails to make its case.

Review: Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 2nd May 2010.)

By any standards, Brian Fagan is a leading authority on archaeology, and, with 46 books on the subject to his credit, he is among the world’s leading popularizers of the field. In Cro-Magnon, he gives us an easily digested round-up of what is known about the pre-history of modern humans in Europe.

Fagan presents an essentially chronological account, starting with the Neanderthals who were already present in Europe when modern humans arrived, and taking a brief detour to look at the evolution of hominins in Africa. From the arrival of Cro-Magnons around 45,000 years ago until the spread of farming in Europe, about 8,000 years ago, the book traces the movements and developing cultures of these people who were the first homo sapiens to settle the continent. It has a good index and an extensive list of further reading in the Notes section.

If you live in Europe, or are of European descent, then the Cro-Magnons were almost certainly your direct ancestors. Fagan digests and presents for us the extremely complex evidence that reveals population movements and social conditions, without burdening us with details or much controversy. This evidence is mostly archaeological—the bones, human and animal, that were left behind, the stone tools, the excavations, and the paintings and carvings. But he also makes much use of climatological data, studies of modern and recent stone-age peoples, and recent genetic studies, again, sparing us the arguments and supplying only the conclusions.

Fagan works in a field that is massively interpretative. Controversies abound—especially in the assessment of purely social, spiritual, or linguistic aspects of ancient peoples. Yet this reviewer thinks it is a strength of his approach that he delivers what he feels is the most likely interpretation, given a broad, eclectic, yet conservative, summary of the data from many disciplines, merely indicating where there may still be some disagreement among experts. It allows him to present an extended and coherent narrative that makes sense of the whole story of Cro-Magnon settlement in Europe.

And the way he tells it, it was a long, hard struggle. Europe, for most of the time that Cro-Magnons carved out a place there, was a bitterly cold, hostile environment, more akin to Northern Siberia or Canada than to the temperate land we know today. Frozen tundra and barren steppes were what greeted those first immigrants. Yet the Neanderthals had survived there for nearly 200,000 years when we arrived. It is typical of Fagan’s non-controversial approach that he doesn’t indulge in lurid speculation about how modern humans drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It was a slow and gradual process that took place over many thousands of years. In Fagan’s view the Neanderthals simply continued to live their lives as they always had, only with Cro-Magnons hunting the same territories, times just grew harder, until their already-marginal existence was gradually pushed beyond the brink.

Yet, while the absence of detail such as the minutiae of debates about dating and statistical analyses allows Fagan to present the bigger picture with bold strokes, it also leaves you wondering about some of his assertions. He is, for example, very firm on what was men’s work and what was women’s work. How much of that is in the actual evidence, and how much is imported from modern anthropological studies, or even modern prejudices?  And the speculations about whether Neanderthals danced seem fanciful and based on slender evidence (which appears, from what is said, also to be consistent with the hypothesis that they wrestled).

And it isn’t as if there was no room for more detail or more discussion. The book proceeds at the painfully slow pace of a modern TV documentary, with considerable repetition and often tedious dramatizations of life in the late Ice Age. The material in the book could have been presented in perhaps a quarter of the number of pages if not for the slow, repetitious style. 

The book proceeds at a measured pace, to put it kindly, and, while clearly written, the language used is often clichéd and itself repetitive. (There were several points where I thought if I read the words “bestiary” or “tool kit” one more time, I would throw the book down and jump on it.) Which is disappointing because there are sections—like the discussion of Cro-Magnon art near the end—where Fagan writes with fascination and insight. If the whole book had been like that, it would have been such a joy to read. As it was, the book provides a clear, pain-free summary of what is known about the earliest Europeans—it just happens to be a bit slow.

It is a sign of the rate of change in this field that, even as Cro-Magnon comes to press, DNA analysis of a finger bone found in a southern Siberian cave suggests that a third hominin species may have co-existed with Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in that region. How would the presence of another human line affect the conclusions in Cro-Magnon? Only future editions will tell.

Review: Einstein's God by Krista Tippett

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books, where you can also find other reviews by me.

Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett
(Penguin Books, February 2010)

Krista Tippett has spent the past decade interviewing people about religion and spiritual ethics as the host of public radio’s “Speaking of Faith.” Einstein’s God is an edited selection from these interviews in which she discusses the relationship between science and religion with a number of eminent guests: some scientists, some not, some believers, some atheists—all of them leaders in their fields with interesting ideas. It’s an eclectic group of guests, and the conversations cover a very broad range of topics, including Darwin’s relationship to religion, the psychological basis of forgiveness and vengeance, and how God might have room to act within the constraints of modern physics.

Unlike most of what appears in print these days about religion’s interactions with science, Tippett’s book is not about conflict. It is about reconciling the two world-views. Its intentions are to show that scientists—even ones that have no religious belief— feel the same sense of awe and wonder at the world as believers, that even the devoutly religious can and should respect the study of the natural world, and that scientists themselves can be practicing believers and feel no contradiction within themselves.

Tippett is attempting in this book what, for many people on both sides of the religion vs. science “debate,” must seem impossible. She is speaking candidly and respectfully to scientists, theologians, and artists about their spirituality and beliefs, seeking to find the common ground between these extremely different world-views. In the process, whether you feel she succeeds or not, she achieves something just as helpful: She finds the common humanity in all these seekers, and gives us a basis for mutual respect and a sense of fellowship.

Within this framework, some of the interviews work better than others. The first interviewee in the book is the main reason I wanted to read it, physicist Freeman Dyson discussing Einstein’s spirituality. Yet the conversation was dry, if not dull. It covered ground that would be well known to anyone interested in Einstein. The only point of real interest it made was the idea that the feeling Einstein had about the Universe and how it is put together, about the “miraculous” way mathematics is able to describe nature (there being no reason anybody knows why it should), is very close to the religious sense that believers have when they contemplate Creation.

Unfortunately, this interview and the one that follows it with physicist Paul Davies, may have been recorded too early for either Dyson or Davies to be aware of a letter on religion that Einstein wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind in 1954, which became well known only in 2008. In the letter he clearly denies any belief in God—not just the “personal God” he famously rejected— saying, “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends, which are nevertheless pretty childish.” Tippett should have known about this letter and, I think, addressed the complexity it adds to Einstein’s expressed views on religion.

Once we leave Dyson behind, the interviews become more lively and engaging. Also, after the initial discussion about Einstein, the collection moves away from him, specifically, and goes off to explore the interplay between science and religion in other disciplines and through other thinkers. Sherwin Nuland, a surgeon, talks about his notion that human spirituality and religious feeling, human good and evil themselves, are the products of an evolutionary process that has selected and nurtured them. Tippett’s comment that such ideas “might richly inform many religious perspectives” is typical of the hopeful and inclusive attitude she projects throughout the book. Whatever we might think of the likelihood of this happening, it is impossible not to wish with her that it could be so.

High spots for me were the chat with Jana Levin, another world-class physicist, who talked about her novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, and about a rationalist world-view that is nevertheless filled with wonder and beauty. Psychologist Michael McCullogh talked about the evolution of forgiveness and its central, everyday role in preserving civilisation. Charles Darwin’s biographer, James Moore, was eloquent in describing the deep reverence of the Great Man for the natural world “undefaced by the hand of man.” And Esther Sternberg, a Canadian immunologist I had not encountered before, was fascinating on the complex connection between health and emotion.

Low spots included Anglican Priest (and one-time physicist) John Polkinghorne who, while decrying “God of the gap” arguments, proceeded to describe a Universe where God excludes himself from all but the most marginal influence through quantum uncertainty and chaotic processes. Polkinghorne appears to be a favorite of Tippett’s, judging by the number of times she mentions him in the book, yet I found his message that God created a self-creating Universe (i.e. He set up the initial rules and conditions but then lets it run more-or-less untended) far less intellectually satisfying (or even honest) than that expressed by V. V. Raman in another interview. Raman, a Hindu, seems able to keep his religious and scientific world-views completely separate and to experience the world in these two, quite different ways without feeling the need to find ways of fitting them together. I also found that the format of the book—essentially a series of transcripts with an overall introduction, introductory remarks before each interview, and break-out comments within (generally to give background to what is being discussed)—was rather tedious and involved a lot of repetition.

Einstein’s God swings between fascinating and infuriating with only a little dull in between. It would almost be impossible for it to do anything else with such interesting and controversial contributors involved. Tippett has attempted to move us away from the often hostile and sterile debate between science and religion, and instead demonstrate how, in the ordinary world of people’s lives, scientists and theologians are asking the same questions of and feeling the same wonder at the world they inhabit, without conflict, and with great humility and respect for the truth. And I think she has made a good job of it. However, her eclectic and inclusive approach may have worked against her to some extent. Suggesting, by their inclusion, that all religions are somehow equivalent and the content of their doctrines does not really matter, reduces them to the status of a mystical or spiritual impulse, whereby they can, indeed, be compared to Einstein’s “religious sense” of the Universe. It’s possible that some believers will be offended by this. But in the end, perhaps Tippett’s point is that it is the urge toward spirituality that is really important for most of us, and whether we satisfy it through scientific study or through religious devotion matters very little.

Hope For Intelligent Kids Who Are Unhappy

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post called "Why Ordinary People Make Intelligent Kids Unhappy". It was immediately, and still is, one of my most popular posts. It is clearly an issue that concerns many people. Yet, looking back, I see it is a post in desperate need of a follow-up. The original post merely analyses the problem and offers no solace, and certainly no solutions. Most likely, many of the people who read the post felt worse after reading it rather than better. That's OK, I suppose. The world isn't here to make us feel better. It's just a place we need to cope with, and understanding what is going on in the world can only help us cope better. However, there are some things I could say that might make some people feel better, and it's about time I said them.

So here they are:

1. There is hope. I was a bright child. I was rejected to greater and lesser degrees by my family, my schoolmates and my teachers. Being clever doesn't win you many friends. Sometimes none at all. I grew up in a working-class city in the North of England. The people around me were poor, ill-educated and, almost without exception, ignorant. Most of them were also very stupid. Yet I found a way through. I was certainly luckier than many - my mother was bright and supportive, and I got a free, university-level education. I left the place I grew up in and went in search of better places. Eventually I found them. It's a very big world and there are many, many niches in it. Keep looking and you may find yours. It helps the search if you move to a major city.

2. Other bright people can sustain you, even if you never meet them. I'm not just talking about the Internet, here, although it's an obvious place to look for like-minded people. I didn't have the Internet when I grew up, but I had books. Read widely and read good stuff (on- and off-line). You will find that many of the people who became great writers also went through what we did. One of the best moments in my reading life was when I discovered J.D. Sallinger. In his short stories in particular, I often got that heart-stopping moment of recognition when I realised that this man knew my pain. Maybe Sallinger will do it for you too. Most likely it will be someone else. Just one word of advice - especially about the Internet. While it is easy to find fellow sufferers, and wallowing in misery together can be a relief for a while, in the end, you will get more of a lift out of positive, strong people. However bright you are, you're only human and you have the same psychology as we all do. Don't get locked in a downward spiral of self-pity with someone else. You'd both be better off on your own.

3. Work can help. Clever people tend to be good at certain things. They make good scientists, engineers, writers, and so on. Even in less intellectually challenging jobs - as administrators, planners, managers, etc. - they tend to shine. They might not get the promotions, they might not get the big bucks - for that you also need social skills which cleverness does not guarantee - but they do their jobs so well that they earn the respect of their peers. Respect isn't love, it isn't necessarily acceptance, it isn't even kindness, but it's something and it is not to be sniffed at. Respect from others helps you respect yourself - and self-respect helps in many different ways.

4. Don't worry about the meaning of life. There is none. Bright people are their own worst enemy when it comes to seeing through the crap. Sooner or later, you will conclude that there is no god, there is no deep meaning to the Universe, you have no destiny, and, in fact, there is no point to anything at all. That's fine, but you shouldn't let it worry you.

'Purpose', 'meaning', 'point' and so on are ideas that people come up with , they are not things we find in nature. The 'purpose' of the rain might be to make the crops grow, but we all know that is just a semantic confusion. The physical word doesn't have purposes, only people do. In the long term - the next ten billion years, say - nothing about humanity matters at all, not least your own little wants and needs, your hopes and ambitions, your loves and hates. However, we don't live in the long term. We don't live ten billion years. We live tiny, proscribed little lives. We flicker into self-awareness and are gone in a moment.

Yet, to us, in that moment, our own feelings, desires, and purposes are everything to us. And that is important - by definition. We are the creatures who give meaning to the world. We are the ones who provide purpose to the Universe. We are the ones that imbue existence with value. While we live, while we think and feel, we bring this into reality. You and I create the meaning of the Universe, quite literally. It is ours.

So don't feel shy about the purpose of your life. If you want an iPod, if you love the boy or girl next-door, if you have a craving for a swim, or to work in outer space, each of these is, in a very real sense, the highest purpose in the world - because it's yours, right now, and that, literally, is what matters in this otherwise indifferent Universe.

5. Find out who you are and accept it. The biggest advantage of being clever isn't that you can make money, or design cool stuff, or argue everyone else under the table, it is this: you can understand yourself and the people around you. If you don't understand yourself, you will always be doing stupid things that don't make you happy. If you don't understand other people you cannot love them and you will always be doing stupid things that don't make them happy either. It took me a couple of decades of very hard work to get a deep and thorough understanding of myself and to accept who I am, warts and all. It was the most difficult intellectual challenge I have ever faced - the most difficult emotional challenge too - but it was worth it. Well worth it. It requires strict intellectual rigour. It requires ruthless, painful honesty. It may require you to throw out many myths about yourself and your world that you cherish and hide behind. Don't waste that glorious brain of yours. It's caused you a lot of pain and heartache, set you apart, driven people away. Now, for once, get some good out of it. Use it for something that will really benefit you and everyone around you.

6. Never forget what you are. You are a human being. You evolved from ape-like creatures, who evolved from other creatures. As clever as you are, you are still an animal. You have the physiology of an animal and, importantly, the psychology of an animal. The kind of animal you are has psychological needs for the company and intimacy of its fellow animals. You can't fight your own psychology so try not to. Being cut off from the society of people is what is making you feel bad. Going along with that and cutting yourself off even more will only make you feel worse. The smart thing to do is to understand your animal nature and to start organising your life so that its needs are satisfied. I'm not talking about sex and eating and sleep and all those other 'drives' - although they are important - I'm talking about social interactions, social approval, gossiping, sharing rituals, and finding friends. Right now, those things may seem a million miles away from where you are - but that's what all the points above are about, getting yourself into a societal niche where you fit, finding people who like having you around, ditching false notions that will add to your troubles, and becoming so comfortable inside your own skin that you can face the world on equal terms and get what you need from it.

It will always be the case that you are in a minority. Always. But you don't need six billion people to accept you. You can make a great life with just a handful of close friends and family who see the way you are as a desirable quality, not a freakish aberration.

TimeSplash the Motion Picture

I just wanted to let everyone know that my soon-to-be-published novel, TimeSplash, now has its own website - and its own blog! It also has its own promotional video :-)



And, while I'm here, let me just share this great quote from Stephen Jay Gould:

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Spot the ridiculous argument he's lampooning.

Babies Shame Mothers Into Caring For Them

At last I understand why babies cry.

I've puzzled over this for many, many years. A baby's cry is loud, grating and nerve-wracking. My own sweet little daughter used to bawl so loudly that the woman in the house across the street could hear it. And that should have been a clue. But I was so caught up in the idea that a baby's cry was to alert the mother to its needs - even if every predator for miles also gets the message that a tasty human morsel is there for the eating.

Now, research by a UK/Puerto Rican team led by Dr Stuart Semple, has shown that rhesus macaque mothers respond differently to their crying babies depending on who is nearby. If there are other adults around to be irritated and made aggressive by the baby's wailing, the mother is more likely to tend and feed the baby than if no other adults are nearby.

How many times have you seen it - a mother in a supermarket, or on a bus, with a screeching baby and everyone around frowning and tutting and muttering about what a disgrace it is? And the poor mother, cringing under the onslaught of all that social disapproval.

It's so obvious once you're told. My daughter wasn't just crying for attention from her mother, she was crying to get on the nerves of the woman across the street, so that she would put pressure on the child's mother to do something about that damned baby! That's why crying has to be so loud. That's why it has to set your nerves jangling.

Raising a child is exhausting. There comes a time when every woman needs a break from it, just ten minutes to herself! But the child's needs never take a break, and something has to be done about keeping its mother's nose to the grindstone. The baby is already using all the maternal instincts it can exploit to keep itself cared for, so what else can it use when its mother is exhausted? Social pressures, disapproval, the threat of ostracisation, even the threat of violence (particularly from males nearby).

Who's a clever baby?

Surprise, Surprise!

Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, has repeated Stanley Milgram's famous 1960's experiments and found that people are still willing to inflict severe electric shocks on other people just because an 'experimenter' tells them to.

Personally, I'm satisfied that Milgram did a pretty thorough job of investigating this effect and all its various parameters. Of course, it's nice to see replication of the results by others, and this should be encouraged - especially in a field like social psychology. What puzzles me, though, is the headline on the BBC's report of Burger's study: "People 'still willing to torture'." Well, duh! What do you think is going on at Guantanamo Bay? What do you think Mugabe is doing to all the opposition politicians who disappeared recently? What do you think Amnesty keeps banging on about if it isn't the willingness of people everywhere to indulge in torture?

There seems to be a belief, at least among journalists, that human beings will 'evolve' in som spiritual or ethical way and that, over time, we will all become better people. Well I'm sorry guys but evolution doesn't work like that. If not torturing people had survival or reproductive benefits, then it might happen. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Our only hope is that our cultures will evolve - or at least learn. Cultures are probably shaped by the same selection processes that shape species. What's more, cultures can change very quickly - unlike species. Yet here too, the elimination of torture from a society would need to have some beneficial impact on that society to make it stick. That is, a culture without torture would need to survive and even spread more easily than one with torture. As yet I see very little evidence for it.

But we can hope.