Articles

I was hoofing it down Regent Street, admiring the Christmas decorations, when I saw the bus. One of those bendy buses that mayors keep threatening with the old heave-ho. As it drove by, I looked up and got the message square in the monocle. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial. Another of the blighters nearly did knock me down as I set a course for the Drones Club, where it was my purpose to inhale a festive snifter, and I saw the same thing on the side. There are some pretty deep thinkers to be found at the Drones as my regular readers know, but none of them could make a dent on the vexed question of the buses when I bowled it their way. Not even Swotty Postlethwaite, the club’s tame intellectual. So I decided to put my trust in a higher power.

I’ll miss him. The science of human prehistory will miss him. The elephants and other endangered species in Africa would miss him if they only knew how much he did for them. Rest in peace laughing warrior, re-united with the legs that valiantly bestrode the land of your birth (and mine), rest in peace, great man.

First published in Areo Magazine, 5th January 2022.

A university is a Socratic haven of free thought: a sanctuary where any question, however searching, can be asked; any hypothesis, however outlandish, can be entertained for argument’s sake; any opinion, however unpopular, can be considered—and politely shot down. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

It is commonly, and correctly, stated that there is no evidence for homeopathy. It is further arguable that there never could be any evidence because, in any experimental test, the experimental and control dose would be identical. Homeopaths have but one defence – the extraordinary claim that water has a memory. This claim is very simply, if rather laboriously, testable by experiment. What follows is a design for such an experiment.

Extracted from Books do Furnish a Life. I took the opportunity of a book review to discuss the sense in which the illusion of design applies to whole ecosystems as well as to individual animals and plants.

Foreword to new edition by Princeton University Press of GC Williams's 1966 classic Adaptation and Natural Selection.

Reprinted in Books do Furnish a Life

Gerin Oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11 September 2001 were Gerin Oil trips: all nineteen of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniolism was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch-hunts and the massacres of Native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin Oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and of Ireland.

Naive literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor’s mighty hammer. But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened revelation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium.