The great moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, famously said,'The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but rather, "Can they suffer?" Most people get the point, but they treat human pain as especially worrying because they vaguely think it sort of obvious that a species' ability to suffer must be positively correlated with its intellectual capacity. Plants cannot think, and you'd have to be pretty eccentric to believe they can suffer. Plausibly the same might be true of earthworms. But what about cows?

What about dogs? I find it almost impossible to believe that René Descartes, not known as a monster, carried his philosophical belief that only humans have minds to such a confident extreme that he would blithely spreadeagle a live mammal on a board and dissect it. You'd think that, in spite of his philosophical reasoning, he might have given the animal the benefit of the doubt. But he stood in a long tradition of vivisectionists including Galen and Vesalius, and he was followed by William Harvey and many others (See from which this picture is taken).

How could they bear to do it: tie a struggling, screaming mammal down with ropes and dissect its living heart, for example? Presumably they believed what came to be articulated by Descartes: that non-human animals have no soul and feel no pain.

Most of us nowadays believe that dogs and other non-human mammals can feel pain, and no reputable scientist today would follow Descartes' and Harvey's horrific example and dissect a living mammal without anaesthetic. British law, among others, would severely punish them if they did (although invertebrates are not so well protected, not even large-brained octopuses). Nevertheless, most of us seem to assume, without question, that the capacity to feel pain is positively correlated with mental dexterity - with the ability to reason, think, reflect and so on. My purpose here is to question that assumption. I see no reason at all why there should be a positive correlation. Pain feels primal, like the ability to see colour or hear sounds. It feels like the sort of sensation you don't need intellect to experience. Feelings carry no weight in science but, at the very least, shouldn't we give the animals the benefit of the doubt?

Without going into the interesting literature on Animal Suffering (see, for instance, Marian Stamp Dawkins's excellent book of that title, and her forthcoming Rethinking Animals), I can see a Darwinian reason why there might even be be a negative correlation between intellect and susceptibility to pain. I approach this by asking what, in the Darwinian sense, pain is for. It is a warning not to repeat actions that tend to cause bodily harm. Don't stub your toe again, don't tease a snake or sit on a hornet, don't pick up embers however prettily they glow, be careful not to bite your tongue. Plants have no nervous system capable of learning not to repeat damaging actions, which is why we cut live lettuces without compunction.

It is an interesting question, incidentally, why pain has to be so damned painful. Why not equip the brain with the equivalent of a little red flag, painlessly raised to warn, "Don't do that again"? In The Greatest Show on Earth
, I suggested that the brain might be torn between conflicting urges and tempted to 'rebel', perhaps hedonistically, against pursuing the best interests of the individual's genetic fitness, in which case it might need to be whipped agonizingly into line. I'll let that pass and return to my primary question for today: would you expect a positive or a negative correlation between mental ability and ability to feel pain? Most people unthinkingly assume a positive correlation, but why?

Isn't it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn't it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?

At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt. Practices such as branding cattle, castration without anaesthetic, and bullfighting should be treated as morally equivalent to doing the same thing to human beings.

In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn't quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not "Shall I rear a son or a daughter?" but "Shall I rear a son or two daughters?"

So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.

Note that the word 'decision' doesn't mean conscious decision: we employ the usual 'selfish gene' metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour 'as if' decisions are being made.

Interestingly, Fisher's reasoning remains intact, even in harem-based societies such as those of elephant seals, where a minority of males monopolise the females and the majority of males hang about as disconsolate bachelors. From a parent's point of view, a daughter is a 'safe' choice, likely to yield an average number of grandchildren. A son is a high risk choice. He is most likely to give you no grandchildren at all. But if he does give you grandchildren he'll give you lots. The figures balance out and Fisher's equilibrium still holds.

That's what happens in nature. But what if we are dealing with a human society in which cultural traditions over-ride the genetic imperatives (yet another example, this time not necessarily a benign one, of 'rebelling against the selfish genes'). What if the religion of a country fosters a deep-rooted undervaluing of women? What if there is an ancient culture of despising women, whether for religious or otherwise traditional or economic reasons?

In past centuries such cultures might have fostered selective infanticide of newborn girls. But now, what if scientific culture makes it possible to know the sex of a fetus, say by amniocentesis or ultrasound scanning? There is then an obvious temptation selectively to abort female embryos, which could have far-reaching and probably pernicious social consequences. I'll refrain from gloating over the possibility of Taliban-inspired woman-hating societies going extinct for lack of women.

The Guardian has a report today on 'sex selection of babies', which is described as a 'scourge' of the developing world:

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007.

The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100.

The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men - up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 - large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.

I'm sure Hvistendahl is right when she says, "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live", and when she compares it to the American wild west "with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence."

But is she right to blame Western science and governments for making sex selection possible? Why do we blame science for offering a method to do bad things? Science is the disinterested search for truth. If you want to do good things, science provides very good methods of doing so. And if you want to do bad things, again science provides the best practical methods. The ability to know the sex of a fetus is an inevitable byproduct of medical benefits such as amniocentesis, ultrasound scanning, and other techniques for the diagnosis of serious problems. Should scientists have refrained from developing useful techniques, for fear of how they might be misused by others?

Even sex selection itself and selective abortion of early embryos is not necessarily a social evil. A society which values girls and boys equally might well include parents who aspire to at least one of each, without having too large a family. We all know families whose birth order goes girl girl girl girl boy stop. And other families of boy boy boy boy girl stop. If sex selection had been an option, wouldn't those families have been smaller: girl boy stop, and boy girl stop? In other words, sex selection, in societies that value sexual equality, could have beneficial effects on curbing overpopulation, and could help provide parents with exactly the family balance they want.

But the general question I want to raise is whether the evils of what Mara Hvistendahl calls the XY generation should be blamed on "western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences." Or whether they should be blamed on the cultural and religious practices that despise and discriminate against women in the first place.

Related reading: the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs, June 7, 2011).

[This essay also published on RichardDawkins.net, where you can find an archive of essays by Dr. Dawkins, and links to his books and upcoming appearances.]

I'm writing this on a plane, having just passed through Security at Heathrow airport. An obviously nice young mother was distraught because she wasn't allowed to take on board a tub of ointment for her little girl's eczema. The security man was polite but firm. She wasn't even permitted to spoon a reduced quantity into a smaller jar. I couldn't quite grasp what was wrong with that helpful suggestion, but the rule book was implacable. All the official could do was offer to fetch his supervisor. The supervisor came and, equally polite but firm, she too was regretfully bound by the rulebook's hoops of steel.

There was nothing I could do, and it was no help that I recommended a website where a knowledgeable chemist explains, in delightfully comedic detail, what it would take to manufacture a workable bomb from binary liquid ingredients, working for several hours in the aircraft loo, using copious quantities of ice, in relays of champagne coolers helpfully supplied by the cabin staff.

The prohibition against taking more than very small quantities of liquids or unguents on planes is demonstrably ludicrous. It started as one of those "Look at us, we're taking decisive action" displays, the ones designed to cause maximum inconvenience to the public in order to make the dimwitted Dundridges who rule our lives feel important and look busy.

Same with having to take our shoes off (another gem of official wallyhood that must have Bin Laden chuckling triumphantly into his beard) and all those other classic exercises in belated stable door shutting. But let me get to the general principle. Rulebooks are themselves put together by human judgments. Often bad human judgments, but in any case judgments by humans who were probably no wiser or better qualified to make them than the individuals who subsequently have to put them into practice out in the real world.

No sane person, witnessing that scene at the airport, seriously feared that this woman was planning to blow herself up on a plane. The fact that she was accompanied by children gave us the first clue. Supporting evidence trickled in from the brazen visibility of her face and hair, from her lack of a Koran, prayer mat or big black beard, and finally from the manifest absurdity of the notion that her little tub of ointment could ever, in a million years, be alchemically magicked into a high explosive - certainly not in the cramped laboratory facilities afforded by an aircraft loo. The security official and his supervisor were human beings who obviously wished they could behave decently, but they were powerless: stymied by a rulebook. Nothing but a rulebook, which, because it is made of paper and unalterable ink rather than of flexible human brain tissue, is incapable of discretion, compassion or humanity.

This is just a single example, and it may seem trivial. But you, reader, can list half a dozen similar cases from your own experience.

Last week the father of a friend was the victim of a callous rule book enforcement. His wife needed an operation to save her leg, which had suffered a damaging loss of blood owing to a heart condition. There was a good chance that, when the surgeons investigated, they would decide to remove her foot, or even her whole leg, and her very survival was not guaranteed. Her husband went home during the lengthy operation and the family waited anxiously by the telephone for the result. When he telephoned the hospital, he was told he had to come in person: they would not inform him of the result of the operation by telephone. Can you imagine the dark thoughts this must have triggered in his worried mind, thoughts that accompanied him on the whole journey to the hospital? When he finally arrived after nearly an hour's journey, he was greeted with the joyful news that the operation was a complete success: his wife, and her leg, were saved. Why wouldn't they tell him on the telephone? He could only presume it was because of some ridiculous rule, no doubt drawn up by some pen-pushing lawyer. Once again, no discretion, no human kindness.

Talk to any doctor or nurse, and hear their frustration with having to spend a substantial proportion of their time filling in forms and ticking boxes. Who sincerely thinks that is a good use of expert, valuable time, time which could be spent caring for patients? No human being, surely, not even a lawyer. Only a mindless book of rules.

How often does a dangerous criminal walk free, not because evidence has been examined but simply because of a 'technicality'? Perhaps the arresting officer fluffed his lines when delivering the official 'caution'. Decisions that will gravely affect a person's whole life can turn on the powerlessness of a judge to exercise discretion and reach a simple conclusion which every single person in the court, including the lawyers on both 'sides', knows is just.

It isn't quite as simple as that, of course. Discretion can be abused, and rulebooks are important safeguards against that. But the balance has shifted too far in the direction of obsessive reverence for rules. There must be ways to re-introduce intelligent discretion and overthrow the unbending tyranny of going-by-the-book, without opening the door to abuse. We should make it our business to find them.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/22/discretion-please-no.html/feed 94 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:04:45 +0000 Richard Dawkins
[Image, via Wikipedia: The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveller who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.]

A scientific experiment avoids confusion by holding as much as possible constant, while systematically varying some factor of interest. When you are trying to think through a complex train of thought it can be helpful to do something similar, especially when sorting out separate arguments that might be confused. My previous Boing Boing post, "Should employers be blind to private beliefs?," could be seen as raising four separate questions. These were in danger of being confused with each other, and it is helpful to consider them one at a time, setting the others on one side temporarily--the equivalent of holding other variables constant in an experiment. The four questions were:

1. Should Martin Gaskell have been turned down by the University of Kentucky? I got rid of this one by explicitly stating that I was not concerned with it. I shall continue to ignore it here.

2. Should employers ever discriminate on grounds of the beliefs of candidates? If the answer to this is no, there is no point in going on. I tried to dispose of it by reductio ad absurdum. I postulated hypothetical extremes (flat earth geographer, stork theory doctor, astronomer who thinks Mars is a mongoose egg). I presumed that everybody would agree to discriminate against such obviously preposterous extremes, and that we would therefore have a non-controversial baseline from which to move on to more subtle questions. As it turned out, I was wrong: I underestimated the emotive impact of the very word 'discrimination'. I may also have underestimated the power of the relativist doctrine that all opinions are equally worthy of respect. But in any case my purpose was not to erect a straw man and knock it down. I wanted to find a baseline of agreement, which would enable us to set Question 2 on one side, while we went on to the other questions.

3. Should employers discriminate on grounds of religion per se? Here, I had thought we could establish a baseline agreement that there are at least some religious beliefs that nobody would wish to discriminate against. None of us, certainly not I, would rule out Georges Lemaître when employing a physics professor, on the grounds that he was a Catholic priest. But there could be beliefs, which might happen to have their origins in religion, but which some people might otherwise have considered grounds for rejecting a candidate under Question 2. We are not talking about discriminating against religion per se but against a counterfactual belief that happens to come from religion, and this leads me to Question 4:

4. Suppose you are one of those who will allow a yes answer to Question 2, and are prepared to contemplate at least some discrimination, say against flat-earthers. Would you allow religion to serve as a special, privileged, protective shield against such otherwise-agreed discrimination: a shield not available to non-religious flat-earthers? Should those who are prepared to discriminate against stork-theorists make an exception if it turns out that their storkism stems from religion? In other words, should we discriminate against non-religiously inspired storkers and, implicitly by comparison, discriminate in favour of religiously-inspired storkers? As I understand it, the law, at least in some countries, does sanction exactly that. You can legally rule a candidate out because he believes in something obviously absurd, but not if he can hide his absurd belief behind the protective screen of religion. This makes Question 4 a worthwhile question. But it is a question that simply doesn't arise for anybody who answers No to Question 2, which is why it was worth getting that question out of the way first.

But my main purpose today is to move on and raise - though not necessarily answer - some further issues raised by this whole discussion, which I think are genuinely interesting.

To start with, there is the intriguing psychological question of the extent to which the human mind is capable of compartmentalizing itself. A good example is the astronomer who publishes respectable work, involving calculations assuming that the universe is billions of years old, while privately holding the contradictory belief that it is only thousands of years old. If such split-mindedness is a real psychological phenomenon, that is a fascinating fact about the human brain, well worth studying in its own right. How closely intertwined are the mutually contradictory beliefs? Are they literally held simultaneously, or does the victim believe one of them on some days and the other one on other days, so that he is never literally in a state of believing a contradiction? Is this related to the well-attested multiple personality syndrome? Are there any limits to the degree of contradiction that one mind is capable of tolerating inside itself? Should the simultaneous holding of mutually contradictory factual beliefs be regarded as evidence of insanity? Do we all from time to time, in a mild way, accommodate mutually contradictory beliefs inside our heads?

Then there are some important questions of law. Why should religion in particular be singled out as grounds for shielding beliefs from scrutiny? If a South African enthusiast for apartheid pleaded that his insistence on racial separation stemmed from his deeply sincere adherence to the Dutch Reformed Church, should we respect his racialism in a way that we would not if he traced it to a deeply sincere prejudice instilled into him by his parents when he was at a sensitive age?

Should the law take a more lenient view of a wife-beater if he could plead that his behaviour was mandated by his holy book? This was explicitly done in recent years by a (female) judge in Germany. As the New York Times reported, Judge Christa Datz-Winter "cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband's prerogatives in disciplining his wife". The judge further justified her decision on the grounds that "In this cultural background, it is not unusual that the husband uses physical violence against the wife." This judge not only allowed religion to over-rule human decency, she also allowed it to over-rule the law of Germany in the particular case of a couple who were Muslims. The New York Times went on to comment, "For some, the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses. There have been a string of so-called honor killings here, in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women."

How about clitoridectomy? Should the law protect girls from such mutilation except in cases where the mutilator pleads religious justification? In Britain today this barbaric custom is practiced. It is against the law, but the police turn a blind eye for fear of being thought 'Islamophobic'.

Should we exempt halal and kosher slaughterhouses from prosecution under laws against cruelty to animals, on grounds that religious considerations trump humanitarian ones? Such exemption is widely demanded and accepted but never, as far as I have seen, coherently justified.

During the Vietnam war, conscientious objectors had to prove to a draft board that their objection really was conscientious. By far the easiest way to prove this was to plead religious conviction, but only if the religious conviction was long-established. A young man whose parents were Quakers had no trouble at all. I suspect that a young man who had written a PhD thesis on the moral philosophy of pacifism might have been given a harder time. If so, this needs to be debated. Why does our society, as represented in our laws, give religious conscience a free pass, where a secular philosophical conscience has to work really hard to earn it?

Moving on from law, we have the issue of fact versus opinion. There are those of us who see a radical distinction between a factual belief like "I believe the Earth is flat" and an opinion like "I believe Richard Nixon was a bad man." Some relativists, on the other hand, blur fact and opinion, see no reason to privilege fact over opinion, and take the view that all opinions are equally valid and equally worthy of respect.

One of the reasons I am willing to describe flat-earthism and young-earthism as ridiculous is that they are contradicted by publicly observable facts. But there are other beliefs about fact, including scientific fact, that are not obviously true or false, perhaps because the evidence is incomplete or open to varying interpretation, or perhaps because terms are not clearly defined. "I believe the Permian extinction was caused by a meteorite impact" is a belief about a matter of fact, but neither it nor its negation are obviously silly in the way flat-earthism is. I think it would be very wrong to discriminate against a geologist on grounds of his belief about the Permian extinction. There might be other factual beliefs that are intermediate, where we might have a genuine argument. Some might nominate climate change denial as an example. Others might suggest Holocaust denial as a borderline intermediate case, a bit further towards the loony end of the spectrum.

By choosing flat-earthism and storkism as my hypothetical examples, I was trying to establish a baseline, setting aside the argument over whether discrimination of any kind is ever permissible. The purpose of choosing these palpably ridiculous hypotheticals was to make it possible to move on to the more difficult cases, where we might hope to have an interesting discussion.

If there are some people who cannot accept even this baseline, and reject all discrimination of any kind, they presumably will have nothing to contribute to the supplementary questions I have raised in the latter part of this article. But I hope others may find them worthy of honest debate. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html/feed 141 http://boingboing.net/2011/01/24/should-employers-be.html http://boingboing.net/2011/01/24/should-employers-be.html#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 06:35:07 +0000 Richard Dawkins

(Reflections inspired by the Gaskell debate in Kentucky)

The University of Kentucky has caved in and agreed a settlement, out of court, with the allegedly creationist astronomer Martin Gaskell. For a brief account of the case see [here]. The detailed legal documents are [here], and a range of views are to be found [here] and [here]. Briefly, Gaskell was rejected for the position of Director of a new university observatory, and he sued the university on grounds of religious discrimination. The university has now settled to pay him off with $125,000, while declining to admit wrongdoing.

On the face of it, Gaskell's allegation is ludicrous. You go up for a job and somebody else is preferred. It happens all the time. One candidate wins, the rest are disappointed. End of story. In this case, however, it was not the end of the story. There is good evidence that Gaskell was the top candidate on other grounds. The chairman of the search committee wrote an email to the chairman of the department, which included [the following]:

If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin's religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any basis other than religious...

Martin Gaskell claims, however, that he is not a full-blooded YEC although he has "a [lot of respect] for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible", so I want to leave his particular case on one side and look at the general principles. First, is it always wrong to discriminate against holders of certain beliefs when appointing? Second, should it make a difference if the beliefs are based on religion? Is it a good law that deems religious belief a peculiarly private matter, to which we should be conscientiously blind when appointing a candidate to a position?

Let's look at some possible scenarios, beginning with some absurd extremes.

1. A doctor believes in the stork theory of human reproduction, rejecting the sex theory. He applies for a job as an eye surgeon in a teaching hospital, is rejected because of his beliefs, and sues the hospital on grounds of discrimination. His lawyer makes the case that, since he makes no pretence to be an obstetrician, his views on obstetrics are irrelevant to his (breathtakingly superior) ability to operate on eyes and teach ophthalmology.

2. A flat-earther applies for a professorship of geography. He promises to keep his private beliefs to himself, and undertakes to adhere closely to the round earth theory in all his lectures. He is universally agreed to be a brilliant teacher, breathtakingly above the other candidates in his ability to get the (erroneous, in his view) round earth theory across to students.

I suspect that most of my readers would discriminate against both these job candidates, although some might feel uncomfortable doing so because the word 'discriminate' carries such unfortunate baggage. A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, "If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a [giant purple Mongoose]". That commentator probably felt rather pleased with his imagery, but I don't believe he could seriously defend the point he makes with it and I hope most of my readers would not follow him. There are at least some imaginable circumstances in which most sensible people would practise negative discrimination.

If you disagree, I offer the following argument. Even if a doctor's belief in the stork theory of reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically disconnected from reality. And a student could reasonably object to being taught geography by a professor who is prepared to take a salary to teach, however brilliantly, what he believes is a lie. I think those are good grounds to impugn his moral character if not his sanity, and a student would be wise to avoid his classes.

But should this all change, if it can be shown that these eccentric beliefs are based upon religion? Should religiously inspired beliefs be privileged, protected against scrutiny, where other beliefs are not? If the eye-doctor's belief in the stork theory, or the geographer's flat-earthism, or the astronomer's belief that Mars is the egg of a mongoose, turned out to be derived directly from a holy book or 'faith tradition', should that weaken our objection? Let's look at a couple more scenarios, real ones this time, not hypothetical.

3. A senior colleague at Oxford told me of an astronomer who, on religious grounds, believes the universe is less than ten thousand years old. This man holds down a job as a competent cosmological theorist (not at Oxford, I hasten to say). He publishes mathematical papers in learned journals, taking it for granted that the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old and using this assumption in his calculations. He bottles up his personal beliefs so successfully that he is capable of performing calculations that assume an old universe and make a genuine contribution to science. My colleague takes the view that this YEC is entitled to a job as a professor of astronomy, because he keeps his private beliefs to himself while at work. I take the opposite view. I would object to employing him, on the grounds that his research papers, and his lectures to students, are filled with what he personally believes to be falsehoods. He is a fake, a fraud, a charlatan, drawing a salary for a job that could have gone to an honest astronomer. Moreover, I would regard his equanimity in holding two diametrically opposing views simultaneously in his head as a revealing indicator that there is something wrong with his head.

4. I have [previously written] about the similar case of the geologist Kurt Wise, so will not rehearse it again here. Although well qualified with a PhD in paleontology from Harvard, he published the following disarmingly ingenuous confession:

Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.

I would discriminate against both these religious men if I were on the search committee for a university job, on the same grounds as I gave for my hypothetical examples above. The fact that these particular anti-scientific beliefs happen to be grounded in religion should make no difference. Religious beliefs should never be privileged over other beliefs, simply by virtue of being religious. Either a particular belief is relevant to eligibility for employment or it is not. Whether the candidate got it from a religious 'tradition', or simply made it up, is immaterial: a traditional or scriptural belief was originally made up too - just longer ago. If you want to insist that a candidate's beliefs are private, should be respected, and should be treated as irrelevant by an appointing committee, then you should at least be consistent. You should also be blind to whether or not those beliefs have a religious provenance. Either you should say, "I don't care whether his beliefs are based on religion or not, they are private and I refuse to take them into account." Or you should join me in saying, "I don't care whether his beliefs are based on religion or not, they affect his suitability for the job, and I am going to take them into account." A law that encourages you to say, "If a candidate's private beliefs are based on religion I shall ignore them, otherwise I shall take them into account", is a bad law.

It is a bad law because, while purporting to oppose discrimination, it is actually highly discriminatory: it discriminates in favour of religious foolishness and against non-religious foolishness.

I prefer to discriminate against both.

An article written in the Journal of the American Medical Association describes the shape as an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain, including the frontal lobe, optic chiasm, brain stem, pituitary gland, and the major sulci of the cerebrum. (...) Some say the meaning of the brain in the Sistine Chapel is not of God giving intelligence to Adam, but rather that the intelligence and observation of the human brain lead directly to God without needing a Church at all. Others interpret it as a metaphor for atheism: God is an invention of the human mind, and it is actually mankind that is giving life to his imagined 'creator.'

Even those who agree with the great Christopher Hitchens that religion poisons everything might be surprised to learn that the toxin extends its reach even to football (soccer). Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, has two major football teams - indeed they are Scotland's two top teams - Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers.

By long tradition, the fans of these two teams break down by religion: Celtic represents the Catholics and Rangers the Protestants. Historically, the reason is the long association between this region of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Belfast and Glasgow have more in common than their depressed ship-building industries. The large Catholic population of Glasgow is mostly of Irish origin, while Orange Parades such as this one through the centre of Glasgow are all-but indistinguishable from their counterparts in Belfast.

If, in a crucial match between Rangers and Celtic, a referee's decision is unpopular, there is a high chance that he will be accused of sectarian religious prejudice, something that, I imagine, is not often seen in baseball or American football.

(photo courtesy BBC News)

This is the background to bitter storm that erupted recently, in which I seem to have become embroiled although I am neither Scottish nor a soccer fan. Hugh Dallas, czar of referees for the Scottish Football Association was fired because he passed on, in an eMail, a joke about Roman Catholic child rape. The pope is not, so far as we know, a pederast, but there is good evidence that he was deeply involved in covering up the crime and contributing to its repetition by priests moved to other dioceses and parishes. Anyway, this was the subject of the joke that was sent to Hugh Dallas, and he passed it on to somebody else.

The incident was brought to the attention of Peter Kearney, Director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, also based in Glasgow. Kearney demanded that Dallas should be fired, and the Scottish Football Association, under its Chief Executive Stewart Regan, did indeed fire him, together with two other officials in his office.

When I read about this, alerted by a Scottish contributor to the discussion forum on my website, I was outraged that a man should lose his job because he passed on a joke. It seemed to me to be a classic example of our society's craven kowtowing to the religious lobby. The rest of us, it seemed to me, learn to take jokes on the chin. But the moment a religion is 'offended', we are all expected to tut-tut and grovel, and somebody gets fired.

I was also outraged that the BBC website on which I read the story had censored the punchline of the joke, again obviously to avoid giving 'offence'.

ffence'. I was angry, and I immediately published the details here including a picture of the 'offensive' joke, with the punchline restored.

I also published the addresses of the Scottish Catholic Media Office and the Scottish Football Association and encouraged my readers to flood both with copies of this and other pope jokes. I also people to do what they could to make the 'offensive' joke go viral.

The story was picked up by Pharyngula and, the following day, by the Daily Telegraph, Britain's leading conservative newspaper, and the Scotsman, Edinburgh's - and arguably Scotland's - most respected newspaper. The Telegraph, under the headline, "Leading scientist Richard Dawkins slams Scottish Football Association over sacking of Hugh Dallas", quoted my original blog almost verbatim and offered no comment of its own. The Scotsman's report was briefer. Its headline "'Weasel' attack on Catholic spokesman in Hugh Dallas furore" is a reference to the fact that in my original blog I had called Peter Kearney a nasty little weasel. Kearney retaliated in the quote that he gave the Scotsman: "Dawkins demonstrates again that his intolerance knows no bounds."

Readers of Boing Boing may judge for themselves.

Which is the more intolerant: getting a man fired for passing on a joke, or calling somebody a nasty little weasel for doing so?

My only regret is the implied insult to weasels. Kearney cynically exploited the sectarian tensions in Glasgow to engineer that a man lost his job.

Anybody wishing to pass on a joke or other pleasantry to Peter Kearney will wish to know his address at the Scottish Catholic Media Office: mail@scmo.org.

As one commenter on my website rightly said, the Catholic church in Scotland is quick to squeal about sectarian discrimination, while doing everything to maintain it in sectarian schools.

Comments on the various websites are mostly supportive of my position. The main criticisms are

1. Hostile spamming is not a good tactic: an abuse of the power of the web, some might say. I have sympathy for this criticism. I think the tactic is defensible but only if the provocation is high. With hindsight I think that what I called the cowardice of the Scottish Football Association was not so reprehensible as the Catholic lobbying itself, and I think I should have limited the campaign to the Scottish Catholic Media Office.

2. Calling Peter Kearney a nasty little weasel is the kind of thing that gets me described as strident and shrill. It is better to stick to reasoned argument, and indeed I usually try to do so. In mitigation, once again, I plead the exceptional provocation offered by this nasty little weasel.

3. Many people wrote in from Scotland to say that I didn't appreciate the complicated socialcontext of the long-running feud between Celtic and Rangers, and the need for Scottish referees to bend over backwards to avoid sectarian bias.

It is almost as though, if a Scottish referee makes a joke about the pope, it is taken as evidence of pro-Rangers bias.

Oh please! Get your priorities right. There are more important things than football. When cardinals and popes cover up the crime of child rape, those of us who object are not being 'sectarian' or ' anti-Catholic' or pro-Glasgow-Rangers. We are being human.

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