Homo seropositivus

We read on bbcnews that:

"Humanity may split into two sub-species in 100,000 years' time as predicted by HG Wells, an expert has said. Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge (...) People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species."

It is always nice to have one's ideas confirmed by theorists. Even if 100,000 is a much too generous timespan, and a Hollywood world view has blinded the man's science. A much faster-acting splitting mechanism than sexual choosiness could be HIV/AIDS.

It won't be long (in evolutionary time) before some HIV carrier populations become resistant to AIDS. They will be able to interbreed quite happily among themselves, but any attraction non-carrier populations may feel for them will always be fatal.

The privilege of being HIV negative will over time accrue to those with access to better education and information, and the means to afford blood tests for their propective partners. These could well converge with the class that Professor Curry describes as "tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the 'underclass' humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures."

The emergent overclass may appear to have all the advantages, the best schools and hospitals, choice of mates, and the power to oblige HIV positives to be tattooed at birth with dodgy equipment; but as the pariah caste becomes stronger and more resistant to HIV's pathogenicity, it will have gained one significant genetic advantage over the HIV negative Uebermensch.

But perhaps by then the overclass boffins will have figured out a way to farm underclass blood to produce a vaccine against their heinous effluences. That way bored baronets can revert to sharing a needle with the butler and poking the parlourmaid without fear of the consequences.

Sounds like heads I win, tails you lose.

Is the Koran actionable?

Muslims in the UK and other countries trying to have incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief banned could be shooting themselves in the foot. Drafters of such a law will have to tread pretty carefully if they want to avoid having the Koran itself withdrawn from shelves.

Muslims are known to revere the text and are categorically opposed to the idea of changing one iota - or hamza - despite the book's evident need of a good editor or ghost writer to sort out its rambling, incoherent style, its ranting tone and penchant for self-serving anachronisms such as the claim that Abraham was a muslim. And that's before we even look at the legal aspects.

One group who might consider itself poorly treated if the book is allowed to continue to be available in public libraries is the growing majority of atheists which the Koran calls unbelievers. To find out if the text actually incites hatred of this group, nothing simpler than to type in the word "unbeliever" into the searchbox of the searchable online Koran.

What the search reveals is that although Allah is going to do unspeakably horrid things to unbelievers, the believers themselves are simply enjoined not to number unbelievers among their friends. So the question boils down to does sending to Coventry count as an act of hatred, or do you have to be more beastly?

An alternative way to resolve the conundrum would be to substitute the word "muslims" for "unbelievers" into the results of the search, and ask muslim lawyers if they consider the resulting sentences actionable. If so then they must be equally actionable in their original form.

They might then contend that incitement to hatred on grounds of belief does not include incitement on the grounds of unbelief . Do unbelievers not believe anything, or can it be claimed they actively believe there is no God? The simple solution to protect everyone's rights would be to insert the words "or unbelief" after belief, so that the wording reads "incitement to hatred on grounds of religious belief or unbelief".

While I feel that the book could incite impressionable minds to a paranoid world view and should therefore not be given to children, the incitement to actual hatred is not explicit enough to merit outright banning, and anyone who hates people as a result of reading it is the sort of crackpot who probably hates people without the need for literary justification.

As I said, in framing such a bill careful attention will need to be paid to the choice of words, the more so as it is too late to ask the book's author to measure his.

An ark for the Big One

One day a huge earthquake is going to make a lot of people wish they had built themselves geodesic domes.

Well of course it won't, because domes have not been on most people's radar for a while. But traditional rectangular houses have two main weak points: the right-angle joins, which fail in wooden structures; and the parallel walls, which respond in unison to directional shocks. That pretty much takes care of the whole house.

One thing which makes city planners shy away from domes is the problem of packing them together in high density districts. What do you do with the "wasted" space between adjoining circles? Also, how can you build high rise?

I have often wondered why we can't build in hexagons like bees. A bee must navigate using six cardinal points rather than our four. So our problem could be simply one of vocabulary. Were the honeycomb principle to be extended to houses or hotels with many rooms, those bodily directions - left, right, back and front - would be inadequate for giving directions to the restroom. It seems we are limited to the amount of limbs we have. If only it were second nature to think North, Earth, East, South, West and Worth - with East and West sliding down to 4 and 8 o'clock and Earth and Worth moving in at 2 and 10 - we might have less earthquake victims and more interesting brains. But to be as brainy as the bee we would need an extra pair of arms.

There is an ancient disused Koranic school out there in the Colorado desert - or is it New Mexico? - built on a honeycomb plan. When I wrote to Time's editorial board about this after the last Los Angeles quake, they buried the story.

I therefore mention it here for the benefit of Time readers who feel they are not being fully informed.

Burma: whaddya gonna do?

Corrupt dictatorships need corrupt dictatorship neighbours for mutual money laundering and, if the worst comes to the worst, as padded boltholes for overthrown leaders. China's support of hoodlum governments in North Korea, Laos, Burma and Kazakhstan is the fruit of parleys between goons who, while talking up friendship between peoples and making large scale deals in oil and lumber (and arms and opium and rubies...), respect each other for what they are: greedy slimeballs. All that's missing is the Jersey accent. As for the protesting monks, the Burmese leaders probably saw this one coming when they moved the capital 400 km northwards. To dislodge them, the marchers have a long way to walk, and they will have to get past a lot of Chinese hardware.

I read in the First Post "In a country of 55m, there are 400,000 soldiers. Add in their families and dependants and you get 2m people who live better than the rest, with their own shops, schools and hospitals, have a grip on the country's resources and see little reason to give it up." HEY! That idea was stolen from the Brits! Actually, the Japanese stole Burma from the Brits, then perfected the idea. Does that sound too confusing? They then farmed the idea out to the local generals, in return for looted hardwood and rubber. The deal is still on. It's what they call constructive engagement.

The plundering of England

It used to be simple: Normans against Saxons. You could tell which side was which by the language. Normans were the tall blond ones who spoke French, which was the official language of government in England for something like 400 years. Saxons went from being freeholders to become tenants. Now, 941 years after the Norman invasion the linguistic divide has been reduced to a few vestigial shibboleths, and a German royal family sits on a vast real estate portfolio amassed over the centuries by Norman and Tudor forebears, with former owners paying for recalcitrance with their heads, and often spilling their guts as well. Over time the gruesomeness has gone but the Domesday heist continues. The use of treason charges to increase Crown property was rendered unnecessary by the purchasing power generated by estates already under management, and calls for land reform have been democratically stymied by the landowners sitting in the House of Lords.

So are we now at peace?

In modern England the two sides have morphed into two opposing "interest groups": those who pay *interest* - or rent - and those who collect it. The former have a vested *interest* in higher inflation, which reduces their debt, while the latter have an *interest* in it staying low, and also hold the most of the levers to make sure it does. Perhaps significantly, house prices are left out of the calculation. This simple omission masks an important fact: that even when interest rates appear stable, the rising equity base on which interest is being paid means ever increasing income for the lenders.

Look at the small-ads outside Earl's Court station and you will see that all the rents asked for accommodation are higher than the wages offered for jobs. This situation would have been familiar to Saxons living under Norman landlords.

The Norman invasion's legacy is a nation obsessed by property - and blondes. Hair dye has allowed Saxons to become temporary Normans. Tabloids and trash TV create working class celebrities out of nothing, and then shoot them down when they start behaving to the manor born. Conversely, Normans have learned to jettison plummy vowel sounds when dealing with the feral underclass at home, only to rediscover them when among their own kind in foreign ski resorts.

Curiously, Brits facing eviction for unpaid mortgages still love their Queen. But if a flick through the Daily Mail is anything to go by, they still have a lot of hatred to spare, and no fixed object to pin it onto: dole fiddlers, philandering vicars, other drivers, football referees, striking railmen, pedophiles, and the judges who let them out.

Maybe by sending their brave lads to sort out other conflicts in the world, they can make their own ones disappear. Bringing home the World Cup would help. But I think we ought to draw the line at pontificating at African governments who go in for genocides, ethnic cleansing and wholesale expropriations. After all they are merely preparing the ground for constitutional monarchies of their own. And will one day learn to plunder in a more gentlemanly way.

The Soup God anyone?

Who could ever accuse Stuart Kauffman of atheism? In his creation scenario where chemicals self organise into cells, as a water droplet finds its spherical shape, internal forces are at work. Compounds begat compounds, until a quorum of compounds with catalytic action took over, an autocatalytic set was formed and creation took off big time. This is where the soup thickens, and gets too complicated for most voters. But mercifully Stu boils it down for them by saying all we need is to assume 1 or 2% of the compounds are catalysts and the whole thing ferments on its own. We don't even have to name any individual components, just do the math! The same process of self-organization is happening on the macro scale in human society.

Stu's explanations are elegant and for some, esoteric, while his writing style has reviewers divided. So how are we going to popularize his ideas to reach type A personalities and the Bible Belt voter? Stu's book At Home in the Universe is meant to be a popularization of his earlier work The Origins of Order. One thing comes through: Stu is a believer. But being clever is a lonesome business. What we need to do is figure out how we can sell the Soup God to the mathematically challenged. A hard road lies ahead.

Don't sell your huts

So Vanuatu is the happiest place on earth?

The archipelago of 83 islands in the western Pacific is the happiest place on the planet, according to a new "happy planet index" published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). The UK languishes in 108th place, below Libya, Iran, and Palestine.

Well I've got my beef about that too.

The three biggest unhappiness factors in modern society are rent, debt, and the lies of those in power. And the higher the rent, deeper the debt and more cynical the liars, the bigger is the unhappiness. What can be happy about a place where musicians can no longer afford to live, and greengrocers or fishmongers can no longer afford to set up shop? Where debts are resold behind the debtor's back at a discount he would be glad to receive himself? Where credence in disputes is given by default to the smarter dressed?

If, as many of my friends believe, the UK has gone down the pan, I am sure a lot of that is due to the Englishman's propensity to use his home as a financial instrument. And put himself in hock up to his eyeballs to do so. The only winners in putting housing out of people's reach are the lenders.

At this time of year, my picturesque little riverside village in the South of France fills up with English visitors. You can spot them with their faces glued to the photos in the real estate agent's window. On learning that I live here, one old gentleman looking for a place to spend his retirement, asked me if the area was up and coming, valuewise. He had two houses up for sale in Blighty, and could afford any of the houses here cash down. But he had lost the ability to simply decide if he liked something.

So my advice to the Vanuatu folk, faced as they are sure to be with an influx of well-to-do happiness-hunters, is: hang on to your islands. Let people visit. Let some people come to live. But don't sell them your huts.