Christ and the clitoris

When I was a schoolboy, a theology teacher with a particularly specious angle on the Argument from Design told me that he thought the clitoris was the best evidence for the existence of a benevolent God. I presume that he was 'thinking' along the following lines. The clitoris serves no purpose other than to increase women's enjoyment of sex; such a superfluous benefit could have no conceivable adaptive significance; therefore it must be God's gift to women. I hadn't thought about this moron (my theology teacher, that is, not God) for twenty years until I encountered a similar argument from my brother-in-law, two days ago. He made the excellent and inarguable point that pigs eat shit and turn it into bacon. He went on to suggest that they are unlikely to be doing this for their own benefit, so there must be a benevolent God. Frankly, I doubt whether this argument would resist sustained critical assault. There's a bit of a philosophical leap of faith from premise to conclusion. Mind you, we were well into the third bottle of wine by the time N skated onto the thin ice upon which his faith rests and the quality of his linguine with prawns (and the poverty of his education) excuses a lot of theological confusion.

My kids (aged four and almost six) have started coming home from school and telling me all about Jesus and his father, God. They have quite detailed knowledge of the latter's capabilities. Pieter was beside himself with excitement after having discovered that Jesus's dad lives in the sky and has special powers even stronger than Ben Ten's. Pieter's young mind can't really grasp anything that would beat Ben Ten's watch in a straight shoot out.

Call me a grumpy old fart but I am REALLY, REALLY ANGRY that I am supposed to put up with Mrs Brown and Miss Paddock teaching my children the Bible story, as though it were mathematics. Trust our children, my wife tells me. They will draw their own conclusions, if you let them. Putting the opposite case will only result in a reaction and you'll end up with Jehovah's Witnesses for kids. Maybe. But our poor, innocent, ignorant children are immersed in a soup of shite, almost from the beginning. It breaks my heart to listen to Pieter singing, in his little piping voice, about Jesus dying for us on the cross.

Is there anyone out there who agrees with me or is everyone else happy to stand by and watch their children being force fed shit (prior to conversion into bacon) through a fire hose?

Beauty

I love the English countryside. Low, undulating hills punctuated by copses and spinneys; newly ploughed fields as rich and enticing as fruit cake; spaniels barking; horses clip-clopping along bridleways; real beer in real pubs. These things make me go all John-Majorish and mushy. But what I really, really hate about the English countryside is electricity pylons. Why, oh why, did the politicians in charge at the time decide that it was OK to defile virtually every decent view in the land with these monstrous bearers of he National Grid? Why couldn't they have buried the cables instead? Why? Why? Why?

When Corinne and I were looking for a property to buy near Bath, she quickly learned that a pylon in the view meant a veto from me. Apparently others can filter pylons from their mental representation of the scenery but I can't. To me they leap out and make me wish I had access to a lot of TNT until I look deliberately somewhere else.

Last week some hard working men from Yorkshire arrived to construct a new polytunnel that I had ordered to protect a valuable collection of peonies that I have recently acquired (more of which in another post). To me it is a thing of beauty. I cannot imagine how anyone could look upon it and feel anything other than love. But I have discovered that one man's polytunnel is another man's pylon. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but, as Miss Piggy has noted, it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

Proof that astrology works

Sometimes in life it is necessary simply to admit that one was wrong. I have been dismissive of astrology in the past on the (spurious, it turns out) grounds that the constellations are more worried about the eventual heat death of the universe than human affairs. Well, I was wrong and I'm big enough to admit it.

This morning I was drinking a cup of tea. I noticed that the mug from which I was sipping bore a remarkably prescient description of me (and presumably all other Capricorns). My Mum gave me this mug when I was a child. Goodness knows what a Freudian would make of that but I'm pretty sure that I'd be banged up if I gave a similar 'gift' to one of my kids. I'm thinking of starting a support group for other talentless losers born under the sign of the goat. Contact me if you're interested in joining.

In my greenhouse

June. From the bleak vantage point of the winter solstice, summer seems like an implausible, evanescent dream. It is a fairly safe bet that the earth will once again tilt on its axis, winter will release its grip and life will return to the land but it isn't hard to understand why our ancestors felt it expedient to sacrifice a few virgins to the relevant god, just to be on the safe side. Since virgins are apparently now rarer than hen's teeth (see here), perhaps it's no bad thing we live in an age of reason and enlightenment (see here).

Most of my June evenings this year, once the children were safely in bed, featured rubber gloves, a disposable mask and a roll of extra absorbent kitchen paper. As every galanthophile will immediately recognise, these items are essential tools of the trade for twin scalers. Twin scaling is the black art of propagating certain amenable genera of plants by slicing their dormant bulbs into transparently thin slivers of tissue, each attached to a fragment of basal plate, and incubating the slices in moist vermiculite until they produce bulbils, clones of the parent bulb. I use the technique mainly to bulk up rare snowdrop and daffodil cultivars more quickly than conventional cultivation allows. If you've seen the sublime garlic slicing scene in Goodfellas (if not, watch it here), you'll have a good idea of what's involved. Paulie, more of an expert on human than Allium anatomy I'd guess, is cutting transverse slices through the bulb, whereas they would have to be longitudinal to work. His razor blade control is impressive though.

The technique relies on the fact that some bulbs are adapted to regenerate from small pieces of meristematic tissue left behind when the plant has been attacked by disease or predators. Twin scaling is essentially the deliberate wounding of bulbs - we gardeners are merciless - to stimulate this response. The tissue slivers are vulnerable to disease for the two or three months it takes bulbils to form and operating theatre standards of hygiene are essential, hence the mask, gloves and surgical spirit.

By early September the results of my misspent June evenings were visible as rice-grain sized proto-bulbs, forming at the base of the cleft between each pair of scales. I potted these up, doused them with two different fungicides and put them under the greenhouse benches. Over the last two or three weeks the first of the twin scales have started to produce shoots. So far as I can tell, emergence date is a function of both the natural emergence time of bulbs of the relevant cultivar and the date on which the scales were potted up. This year the first to appear were 'Early to Rize' and 'Farringdon Double', adult bulbs of which are also flowering in another part of the garden.

Emerging twin scales

I think that I derive more satisfaction from this moment of triumph than any other event in the gardening cycle. Of course it will take another two or three years of careful cultivation before the first of the current crop of twin scales flower but already, in my imagination, I can see vast clumps of Farringdon Double - discovered in an Oxfordshire graveyard, according to The Bible - blowing the socks off visitors just before Christmas 2014.

In my greenhouse

In April this year I spent a week on the island of Crete, in the eastern Mediterranean. My fellow travelers were Tony Avent, the inspired and irreverent proprietor of one of the world's finest nurseries (www.plantdelights.com) and Alan Galloway, who is the world's preeminent student of Amorphophallus, the genus that took botanical nomenclature to new heights of anatomically correct etymology (it's Greek for 'mishappen penis'). He has also been known to swoon over other Aroids but I can vouch for the fact that he hates Eryngium.

The ability to make jaws drop and traffic stop is as rare in plants as in human beings. A talent for making grown men dribble is very unusual indeed, in both kingdoms. Either you have it or you don't. In Crete, at altitudes from sea level to well over a thousand metres, from the Rhodopou peninsula in the north-west to the mountains south of Sitia in the east, we saw thousands of plants of Dracunculus vulgaris, erupting like an alien plague from a landscape topiarised by vast, feral herds of goats. Most individuals had not yet flowered but Alan led us to a population in the centre of the island that was in perfect, spectacular bloom. Did I mention that the inflorescence of Dracunculus emits an odor of rotten meat, an adaptation that helps attract the flies that pollinate it? Glorious!

A rare cream-coloured form of Dracunculus vulgaris in central Crete.

Like many 'bulbs' from Mediterranean climates, D. vulgaris emerges into growth in winter or early spring, flowers in late spring and then goes dormant. Just now they are emerging in my greenhouse. Life at its weirdest and most wonderful.

The thrill of the perverse.

A funny thing happened on the road to perdition

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, or so it is said. Occasionally the Devil arranges sideshows, mainly involving black comedy and pathos, presumably for the amusement of fellow travelers, en route to eternity in the fires. Last week, I found myself unwittingly involved in one such vignette.

I'd had a cold, a perfectly ordinary one, from which I was swiftly recovering when Elsje, my daughter, fell ill. It was agreed that I would babysit her the following day and I duly turned up at my former home at 7.15 in the morning. For some reason (alcohol, for once, was not involved), I was feeling terrible and I warned my wife that there was a possibility I'd have to call her and ask her to relieve me. As an aside, I realise that any woman reading this will be feeling sympathy that, measured in degrees Centigrade, would make sudden immersion in liquid helium feel positively Caribbean but, hey ho, there it is.

Anyway, I was lying on the sofa, feeling even sorrier for myself than usual. Elsje was...extraordinary. She immediately recognised that an emergency was in progress and that Milly was the solution. Milly is a hot pink, fluffy cat and Elsje's absolutely inseparable friend. Milly spent about an hour stroking me and muttering (through the mouthpiece of her mistress) 'don't worry, daddy, we'll make you better'.

Milly, the sainted cat

Lying there on the sofa, with Elsje and Milly in my arms, I wished I could preserve the moment in aspic. And then, quite suddenly, I became aware of a stabbing pain in the top, right hand side of my chest. I started to sweat and my teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. Flu, I thought, shit, my defences are down and now I've got flu. Then I started to feel worse. The sweat became menopausal and the pain in my chest seemed to clench. I noticed that my breathing was shallow. Fuck, I thought, I'm having a heart attack and I'm going to die in my five-year old daughter's arms.

I retreated to bed. Elsje and Milly followed me. What would you have done? I called my wife, asked her to come home and described my symptoms. Call 999, she said. I demurred. If you don't, I will, she said. I called 999 (conversations with Corinne tend to go this way - no offense intended). Now, extreme hypochondriac that I am, I have never in my life previously dialled 999, except once from outside a pub in Chalk Farm and that was an accident, honestly (alcohol was, on that occasion, involved).

Within a minute I was following the instructions from the ultra-calm voice on the end of the phone, scrabbling through drawers looking for aspirin and absolutely convinced I was about to die. I told Elsje, as calmly as I could (blubbing like a baby) that, if daddy went to sleep, she should help herself to a drink from the fridge and wait for mummy, who was on her way. I also tried to tell her how much I love her and, oddly enough, I think she understood. When the ambulance arrived, Elsje (I worship the ground upon which she walks) went downstairs, introduced herself to the ambulance crew and showed them upstairs to the sepulchre where I was by now resignedly awaiting death.

The ambulance crew looked at me and then at one another. 'Bit of a chest infection then?', said one of them. I was hooked up to an ECG, Elsje watching, fascinated and my ticker was diagnosed as being in perfect and unreasonable good health. I'm sure that we have all had the experience of feeling like a prat but I sincerely doubt whether many of you have felt as immersed in pratishness as I did then.

Corinne came home, confirmed with the ambulance crew that no, they were not cross about being summoned to deal with a severe case of man flu and drove me to the doctor. To my great relief, he said that I looked very sick and prescribed an antibiotic, which seems to have done the trick.

There are two saints in this story, or maybe three, and one fool. The primary saint is Elsje, who came as close that day as anyone is ever likely to, to restoring my faith in humanity. Milly, her accomplice, deserves an honourable mention. The second saint is my wife, who looked after me for the next two days, despite the fact that she was suffering from a chest infection at least as bad as mine. I will leave it to you to identify the fool.

Bonfire of the inanities

Have you ever been tempted to tear up your life and start again? When I was an undergraduate I had a postcard featuring an image of god resting on the seventh day. He was contemplating his creation, the world. His head was in his hands and he was muttering to himself, ‘perhaps I’ll finish this mess some other day’. If I’d been god, I’d have made liberal use of my arsenal of thunderbolts and started over.

Many years ago, I worked as an oil and gas credit analyst for the American bank J.P.Morgan. My job was to determine the quality of the potential borrowers in the sector and advise my firm on which of the many supplicants they should lend to and at what price. In truth, I was a very bad analyst but a very good plagiariser. I made a lucrative career out of recasting the views of more insightful minds in language intelligible and congenial to the not terribly bright chaps who handed out the wonga.

One of the best boondoggles I participated in during these years was a four day oil and gas conference in Moscow. While the other delegates listened via simultaneous translation to mud engineers from Turkmenistan discussing the impact of different grades of drilling fluid on the performance of oil wells in inner Mongolia, I explored Red Square, wandered the banks of the Moskva, circled the walls of the Kremlin and spent a lot of time in bars, reading and watching the world go by.

There are only two things I remember learning on this trip. The first is that the girls in the bar of the Grand Hotel in central Moscow are among the prettiest and most available in the world. Not free, not even cheap when price adjusted for purchasing power parity, but, as a banker I had been trained to sniff out value and my nose told me that these women were very, very close to the peak of the value curve.

To my surprise, the second revelation of the trip came during one of my rare attendances at the conference. I had arrived during a break and was on my fourth cup of coffee and trying to look inconspicuous when a tall, American lawyer, beaming from every orifice engaged me in conversation. After a few seconds of grim small talk, during which it became clear that I knew nothing about oil and gas and he knew nothing except about oil and gas, I asked him in desperation how the legal situation in Kazakhstan – where his badge said he worked – was for oil companies. It was as if I had asked a Jehovah’s Witness to summarise his reasons for loving god. Of the tirade that followed I remember nothing except an increasingly excruciating pain in my bladder and my lawyer friend’s assertion that oil and gas legislation in Kazakhstan is superior to, and vastly more workable than, its equivalent in either the USA or the UK. ‘Why?’ I must have croaked, through the eye-watering agony, or perhaps he put the question rhetorically to himself. ‘Because’, he said triumphantly, ‘they started with a blank canvas and wrote down on a few pages what a hundred years of post-hoc modifications and amendments have failed to achieve in the West.’

He paused, still leaking beams from his anus, presumably waiting for applause. I fled and pissed like a recently slaked stallion, sobbing with relief, in the nearest urinal.

I’m not sure whether the lawyer’s words have stayed with me just because of the near death experience that accompanied them. I felt, even at the time, however, that they exemplified an important insight. Faced with the need to add another appendix, close a loophole, build a loft extension or invent an epicycle, might it not be worth considering whether the structure, real or abstract, is worth saving? Perhaps, with the board wiped clean, new, grander possibilities will become evident.

This dilemma faces scientists confronting recently exposed weaknesses in an established theory; architects trying to make old cities serve contemporary needs; governments attempting to maximise tax revenues and discouraged middle-aged men and women surveying the wreckage of their first shot at life.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the way in which my imagination is limited by the constraints of various frames of reference. If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s presentations software, Powerpoint you will probably have come across the option to turn on a feature labelled ‘snap to grid’. This tool causes the cursor to jump between the vertices of an invisible grid underlying the picture you are drawing. It can be helpful if you want to draw straight lines or smooth curves but immensely annoying if the point you are aiming for lies ‘off grid’. I think that my mind (and perhaps yours too) has a deeply ingrained tendency to ‘snap to grid’. Faced with an idea, an emotion, a factoid or indeed any new or surprising intrusion into my mental life, I tend to confabulate. Rather than adjusting the grid to accommodate the new information, I (unconsciously) adjust the information to accommodate the grid.

This is bad, very, very bad. If this insight about the functioning of my own mind is correct, I am going to find it hard, or perhaps impossible, to think my way out of the maze I’m currently wandering. The exit lies somewhere between the gridlines. Unfortunately, unlike Powerpoint, minds don’t come equipped with useful ‘Help’ functions nor have I yet discovered my internal drop-down ‘Tools’ menu. There is, however, an industry, a vast and lightly regulated industry, the purpose of which is to fix broken human operating systems, resetting the preferences, clearing out the cookies, destroying the evidence that you’ve been looking at naughty pictures with your browser set on ‘private’ and rearranging your files so that ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ are right there next to ‘abuse’ and ‘torture’, for ease of future cross-referencing.

Psychology is the study of how minds work. Psychotherapy is the attempt to make a living out of psychology’s failure to fulfil its mission statement. In recent years I have had a great deal of experience with psychotherapy, none of it personally helpful to me, some of it positively harmful. I believe, perhaps naively, that none of the men and women I’ve encountered on this micro-odyssey has been a charlatan (except that retard at The Priory who started telling me about the ‘four different emotions’ and then forgot what the fourth one is). I also believe that any ‘successes’ they have had in their careers have been flukes. I believe that their methods are slightly less effective than voodoo (because psychotherapists these days don’t threaten to use your pancreas in herbal remedies if you don't shape up) or than placebo (because they don't wear white coats and therefore do not command unquestioning faith). If you want a laugh, try asking a therapist to describe his or her method and then request a summary of the experimental evidence that it actually works. If you don't think this is a reasonable suggestion, ask yourself whether you’d let a doctor mess with your liver on the basis of a theory that he couldn’t ground in evidence (‘I’m a holistic hepatologist – my instincts tell me we should remove your spleen’). Why would you let a stranger – typically someone with fewer qualifications than a plumber – mess with your brain?

Although I am generally too much of a shit to offer succour to my enemies, I suppose that I ought to point out here that there is, in fact, some evidence that psychotherapy ‘works’. The inverted commas are necessary because it is rarely clear what constitutes success in therapy and even less often can success be objectively measured. Published studies of outcomes in psychotherapy generally report statistically significant benefits that are attributed to the therapy. It would be unwise to take this fact at face value.

An ideal way to assess the efficacy of psychoanalysis, for example, would be to randomly assign a large group of depressed farmers from Arkansas (unlikely to have a prior understanding of psychoanalytic theory) to one of two groups. Group A would receive a dozen sessions with an experienced psychoanalyst. Group B would spend the same amount of time with an actor, who would start by explaining that psychoanalysis posits that a subject’s problems usually stem from an unremembered alien abduction but that, with the aid of therapy, the damage done by the little green men can be fixed. The ‘therapy’ sessions would be compassionately conducted but would utilise whatever outlandish and invented theories of personality the actor could make up. A group of doctors, none of them practicing psychotherapists, with no knowledge of which group each subject belonged to, would assess, using a standard questionnaire, the level of depression experienced by each subject before, during and after the study and would follow up several years later.

This would constitute a genuine test of whether psychoanalysis is a more effective form of therapy than complete horseshit. In other words, a test of whether it works. Needless to say, psychoanalysts have not felt it necessary to subject themselves to such rigorous self-analysis. What almost all studies actually do, if they bother to include controls at all, is compare outcomes in patients undergoing psychoanalysis with patients on waiting lists for therapy and (sometimes) patients in ‘treatment-as-normal’ groups. Usually outcomes are determined by asking either the patient or the psychoanalyst to rate their psychological state before and after treatment. Wait a minute. The researchers are comparing changes in the psychological well-being of people who have sought out a psychoanalyst and are receiving treatment with those who have sought out a psychoanalyst and have been told, hard luck, you’ll have to wait. Or with a group receiving a different, ongoing treatment that presumably isn’t working (or why would it be ongoing?). Imagine that you invite two groups of men to come, one at a time, to separate waiting rooms. You inform men in the first group that they have been selected to have sex, for free, with Kate Moss and that she's right there through that door. Go ahead. You tell the men in the second group the same thing, except that you add that just now she is engaged with another lucky winner but, if you wait 10 minutes, you can bang her too. Then you ask the two groups how they feel. Which group do you think would be happier? And they call this a scientific study?

In an entertaining recent exchange of opinions in New Scientist (5 October and 22 October 2010), provoked by the London Science Museum’s decision to stage an exhibition on the history of psychoanalysis, philosopher Mario Bunge wrote:

‘We should congratulate the Science Museum for setting up an exhibition on psychoanalysis. Exposure to pseudoscience greatly helps understand genuine science, just as learning about tyranny helps in understanding democracy.

Over the past 30 years, psychoanalysis has quietly been displaced in academia by scientific psychology. But it persists in popular culture as well as being a lucrative profession.

…

a meta-analysis published in American Psychologist purported to support the claim that a form of psychoanalysis called psychodynamic therapy is effective. However…the original studies did not involve control groups.’

A letter published a couple of weeks later, signed by no fewer than 54 outraged psychoanalysts (I think they must have anger management issues), included the following retort. Reading it, I was powerfully reminded of Denis Healey’s quip that being attacked by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep.

‘Psychoanalysis has developed greatly since Freud's time, producing substantial research and productive connections to other branches of science. Many basic psychoanalytic propositions have been widely accepted, such as the formative impact of early childhood relationships on adult personality. Some of Freud's specific propositions have been eclipsed by later formulations - as you would expect for bodies of knowledge evolving for more than a century, and certainly for any science. The basic idea of a dynamic unconscious that actively shapes conscious experience and relations with others has made productive connections with disciplines such as neuroscience.’

I suppose I should deconstruct every sentence of this content-free paragraph but I really can’t be bothered. Instead, lets look at another sentence from the same letter.

‘Contrary to Bunge's assertion, studies included in Jonathan Shedler's review of meta-analyses of therapeutic outcomes of psychoanalytic therapy did, of course, have control groups.’

Shall we see what Shedler himself has to say, in his review paper?

‘Another [aim of the study] was to show that psychodynamic treatments have considerable empirical support. The empirical literature on psychodynamic treatments does, however, have important limitations. First, the number of randomized controlled trials for other forms of psychotherapy, notably CBT, is considerably larger than that for psychodynamic therapy, perhaps by an order of magnitude. Many of these trials – specifically, the newer and better-designed trials – are more methodologically rigorous [than trials designed to test the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy]. In too many cases, characteristics of patient samples have been too loosely specified, treatment methods have been inadequately specified and monitored, and control conditions have not been optimal (e.g., using wait-list controls or “treatment as usual” rather than active alternative treatments...) [my emphasis]’

Let me paraphrase, Jonathan (may I call you Jonathan?)

‘Few studies have been conducted and most of these were so badly designed that they are useless. I’m going to go with the conclusion that psychodynamic treatments have considerable empirical support, however, because I really, really want it to be true.’

One can only presume that the 54 signatories of the letter to New Scientist relied on the fact that few readers are likely to have access to American Psychologist. Yes, the studies used in Shedler’s review of various meta-analyses had control groups. ‘Of course’ they did. But, in Shedler’s own weasel words the controls were ‘not optimal.’ The signatories to the New Scientist letter should be ashamed of themselves but presumably, having come to terms with their deep-seated Oedipal desire to fuck their mother, father, babysitter, pet or whatever, 'shame' is no longer a part of their vocabulary.

I really don’t know whether psychoanalysis is significantly different from a crock of shit but nor, it seems, does anyone else. Most fields of study more than a century old that had found as little evidence for their underlying premises as psychoanalysis would be holed up in the Ouachita Mountains, waiting for the government to come take their guns away. How about it fellas? The Oauchitas are lovely, in spring.

In Dennett and his Critics (1993, Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts), Bo Dahlbom quotes one of American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s beautiful philosophical stories.

There was once a chap who wanted to know the meaning of life, so he walked a thousand miles and climbed to the high mountaintop where the wise guru lived. ‘Will you tell me the meaning of life?’ he asked.

‘Certainly,’ replied the guru, ‘but if you want to understand my answer, you must first master recursive function theory and mathematical logic.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No, really.’

‘Well then … skip it.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Dennett apparently uses the story to illustrate the difficulties of discussing technical philosophy with a general audience but Dahlbom argues that it also illustrates Dennett’s view that understanding mental phenomena (Dennett’s field is philosophy of mind), including consciousness (and, by implication, understanding the pathologies that afflict minds) is going to be very hard work indeed. Brains/minds are composed of staggeringly complicated interlocking modules or machines for solving quite specific problems, for example learning a language, turning streams of photons into a useful interpretation of the external world, acquiring the skills to function in a society. It is simply foolish to think that they can be understood, let alone manipulated safely and usefully by a bunch of well-meaning but basically uneducated snake oil salesmen.

When I say ‘basically uneducated’, I really mean bereft of more than a passing acquaintance with any of the fields of study relevant to answering questions about what minds do, how they do it and why they evolved in the way they did. The key word in that last sentence is ‘evolved’. Two million years ago the fossil evidence indicates that our ancestors had brains similar in size to those of modern chimpanzees. Today, we have human brains. Evolution is the process and natural selection the mechanism that resulted in the transition. If we want to understand our human psychologies, it is against an evolutionary perspective that we must try to discover the ancestral environmental contexts, selection pressures and developmental constraints that resulted in what three of the founders of Evolutionary Psychology termed ‘the adapted mind’[1]. This is a difficult enterprise, not least because ethics committees are notoriously sentimental about experiments involving child torture. It is also important to acknowledge that some terrible cowboys have raised the evolutionary psychology banner over their camps. The field is young; mistakes have been made; victory has been declared prematurely but it will surely not be long before the word ‘Evolutionary’ can be dropped from ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ because all psychology will be conducted within the purview of evolutionary biology.

If I have given the impression so far that I am not a fan of psychology, then I have misled you. Besides finding it intellectually fascinating, it is also true that if anyone needs help, it’s surely me and I’m not going to get it from Jamie Oliver. But psychology, and especially its misbegotten child psychotherapy, has only very recently emerged from almost a century in the shadows. I want to describe an example of recent work in psychology that draws on evolutionary insights, has no truck with bad studies or fraudulent researchers and comes to conclusions that are both surprising and, once you’ve gotten over the shock, liberating. Before I do that however, I have to try to show why this evolutionary perspective that I keep banging on about is so very important. It’s really not optional.

Almost no-one who has not devoted a measurable fraction of his life to pondering the evidence comes close to appreciating how crucial evolutionary theory is to explaining or understanding anything in biology, including its most egocentric product, Homo sapiens. Given that very few people are interested or motivated enough really to get to grips with the implications of evolutionary theory, the unfortunate consequence is that almost no-one has the foggiest idea how to go about answering the big questions: ‘what is the meaning of life’; ‘why did I fall in love and, ugh, why with him?; ‘did my parents fuck me up?’; and ‘why does Hello magazine outsell The Economist?’

I know, I know, this sounds like any other angry adolescent declaring that he and he alone has grasped the truth and the only problem now is to convince everyone else. What can I say? Here is my attempt to help you see the light, to see why, literally, nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution[2].

Suppose you die childless. You will be the first loser in an unbroken line of winners that stretches back into deep time almost four billion years. I am not using the term ‘loser’ in the contemporary sense exemplified by the American aphorism ‘show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser’ but in the ultimate sense that you will become part of the chaff of life, winnowed from the grain in each round of natural selection. But what does it mean to ‘be the first loser in a line of winners that stretches back into deep time almost four billion years’. It means that every one of the billions of organisms that links you with the last common ancestor of all life on earth, and yet further back to the very origin of life itself survived at least long enough to leave at least one surviving descendant. If you die childless, you will be the very first (and the last) in that long, long line to fail. But what does that mean, to fail? It means to be very ordinary indeed. In every generation since the origin of life, almost every individual has failed in this, the most important sense of the word. To fail is commonplace; to succeed (in this sense) is extraordinary. You are the descendent of an unbroken, four billion year old chain of successes. Throw away those condoms and start humping brother.

Still, I sense that you don't really get it yet, not in a visceral sense, which you must do before you will be persuaded to chuck out Homer and start reading Hamilton. What links you to each of your extraordinary ancestors? The answer of course is The Code. In the beginning was The Code and you are its descendant. Your mother may have been the oven but the bun that became you was baked according to a recipe encoded in DNA. Do you accept the following simple proposition?[3] One or more features of the particular code possessed by each of your ancestors contributed, at the margins, to his or her or it avoiding being blown away with the rest of the chaff. If you accept that proposition, then you must accept its corollary, that your DNA is an archive of aeons of winning strategies; the ultimate recipe for success. If all this is making you feel in any way good about yourself, think again, especially if you chose to read Media Studies at ‘university’. This article, after all, is not about persuading you of the centrality of evolutionary biology to understanding just about everything really, but about persuading you that any attempt to explain your psychology that neglects to locate that explanation within the context of evolutionary theory is, at best, an inspired guess and will almost certainly be plain wrong. Suck on that, Sigmund.

Right, now that you are a committed, card-carrying evolutionist, I can resume.

I like an iconoclast as much as the next intellectually inadequate nobody, lacking the courage to stand up for his ideas, or ideas worth standing up for. While it is relatively easy, however, to smash icons (entropy is on your side), replacing them with something less venerable but more credible is difficult.

My current favourite iconoclast is an American psychologist, Judith Rich Harris. Her book, The Nurture Assumption, published in 1998, advanced and assimilated substantial evidence for Group Socialisation Theory (GST), a new framework for understanding child development, according to which children are socialised by their peers, not their parents, as orthodox opinion held (and, in many quarters, still holds). Before introducing GST, Harris performed a clinical but nevertheless enjoyably bloody public execution of the methods, results and leading personalities of the field of Developmental Psychology, which she showed to be a sham. The corpse was still twitching, last time I checked, but Harris recently lobbed another grenade into the bunker (No Two Alike. 2006, W.W. Norton, New York) where its last few advocates were holding out and it won’t be long before it croaks.

Like all the best writing in science, The Nurture Assumption draws together a large body of evidence, from many different sources, and weaves the strands into a new and harder-wearing fabric than the whole cloth it replaces. As if sticking the knife into a field of study that has been responsible for pointlessly creating more guilt than masturbation and adultery combined were not enough, Harris writes in a bumptious, acerbic style that is a joy to read (unless, of course, you are a developmental psychologist). I wish that I could persuade you to read the book yourself. If I were in charge of things around here, I’d require the author of every parenting advice manual to include a chapter explaining how their advice is congruent with the evidence presented in The Nurture Assumption (which would have the happy side-effect of sending Supernanny to the land fill site in which she so richly deserves to be converted into methane, a more useful form of hot air).

Sigh. I know you won’t read it, however, because you were still on page six of Awaken The Giant Within when you fell asleep on the bog four years ago and woke up to find you’d dribbled on the image of that creepy bloke on the cover. The following is my summary of the main points, as I understand them, made by Harris. If you want the evidence (and there is plenty), you’ll have to go to the original source.

• At least in the West, the belief that parents, by virtue of their style of parenting, can influence the way their children ‘turn out’ has become sacrosanct. This is the ‘Nurture Assumption’.
• The Nurture Assumption is false. Except at the extremes of parenting styles (and even here the evidence is equivocal), the way that parents rear their children has no effect whatsoever on their outcomes, however measured.
• Just to get the point across fully: whether you let your kids play computer games all day and watch horror movies all night or put a pair of headphones over your womb and blast Motzart at your poor, defenceless foetus for nine months, the outcome will be the same; zilch influence. Sorry.
• So why is it so ‘obviously’ true that kids with bad parents turn out bad and kids with good parents turn out good? Why does it just feel so darn ‘obvious’ that I can influence how my child turns out? Because your child shares 50% of your genes. About 45% of the variance in most personality traits (e.g. intelligence, extroversion, religiosity) can be explained by heredity, by shared genes. The remaining 55% of unexplained variance cannot be explained by the nature of the household in which a person grew up. You do influence your kids, it’s just that your influence pretty much stopped at conception.
• This is probably a bit hard to swallow. Too bad. You have a choice: read the evidence and, if you don’t like the implications, explain what is wrong with the analysis; or continue wasting money at the Early Learning Centre.
• Here’s a clue. The evidence comes mostly from behavioural genetics, a field of study that has used twins, both identical and fraternal, to pin down the proportion of a particular trait that heredity accounts for.
• What your children need more than you is friends, or at least peers. Without you, they will probably (see below) grow up just fine, but without a peer group they will definitely be severely fucked up.
• The one way in which parents might be able to indirectly influence the way their kids turn out is by manipulating their peer groups. If you believe that letting them play with the local crack dealer’s kids will help them gain perspective, you need to think again.
• So, can I abuse my child with a clean conscience? No, I’m afraid not. One reason is that parents (at least, mothers) are important (phew). Children who grow up without a mother are severely disabled in later life. It just doesn’t matter much who the mother is (darn). A second reason is that there is some evidence that really, really bad parents can in fact fuck up their kids. The most important reason is that, if you treat your kids like shit, they will probably end up hating you, and with good reason. They will invite their (perfectly normal) friends to dinner parties at their (perfectly normal) homes and reminisce about how their evil, evil parents screwed them up. Then they will open another bottle of wine and talk about something interesting instead.

I’ll give you a moment to get over the realisation that your child’s delightful character owes virtually nothing to you other than the contents of the egg or sperm you contributed at its conception. Or, more likely, oh feeble one, to give your brain time to start whispering ‘yes, but, that may be the case for other people…’.

The reason that I introduced Judith Rich Harris and The Nurture Assumption to this article was not to provoke you into defending your parenting style but to celebrate a beautiful example of evolutionary psychology in action and to make the positive case for iconoclasm and for starting over. Developmental Psychology is a dying discipline and soon it will be dead, thanks in no small part to Harris. This is a very good thing, because its practitioners used dubious methods and selectively interpreted their results to bolster a theory that they ‘knew’ in their hearts to be true. Except that it was false.

Which brings us back to the conference I attended long ago in Moscow. When I told the American lawyer’s story to the only person I know who is familiar with Kazakh law, he laughed and expressed the opinion that my legal friend had probably gone on to work in the private office of Nick Clegg, Deputy Leader of the UK’s Coalition for Wishful Thinking. It would be naïve to expect that tearing up 100 years’ of improvised but workable legislation and inviting ‘experts’ to write down the law as it should have been in the first place will end in anything other than disaster. The reason for this is that vested interests have a habit of putting their muddy boot prints on any blank canvas. Iconoclasts must be on their guard against vested interests.

A second risk of razing everything to the ground and starting again is that you might end up with Milton Keynes. Iconoclasts must have a vision of what they want to put in place of the icon they are destroying and it is generally best if the vision doesn’t involve too much privet.

A third consideration is that you risk discarding too much. I am fascinated, for example, to read that both group selection and the inheritance of acquired characters (epigenetic modifications passed on via egg or sperm) are quietly making a comeback in evolutionary theory. Much time has been lost.

Despite these grievous risks, I am firmly of the opinion that much more would be gained than lost if we made a vast bonfire of the inanities routinely trotted out around the world by psychotherapists. Let those of us who have wasted hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds uselessly discussing our very real problems with very sincere therapists start to push back. Psychotherapy, as currently practiced is, in the popular phrase, not fit for purpose. A new psychotherapy, grounded in the insights starting to pour out of evolutionary psychology, will eventually rise to replace what has been destroyed. In the meanwhile, the fires will rage fiercely enough that Kazakhstan can keep its oil for just a little longer. I’ll bring the matches.

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[1] Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1992). The Adapted Mind. Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. OUP, Oxford.

[2] This phrase comes from an article with the same title, published in The American Biology Teacher in 1973 by Theodosius Dobzhansky. His version included the words ‘in biology’ before ‘makes sense’. I exclude them mainly to piss off easily riled humanities students who know in their hearts that they have wasted their entire intellectual lives.

[3] If not, I can only politely suggest that you go away, acquaint yourself with the relevant evidence for and against, then come back and continue reading.

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