All that said, we need to observe that the effect of voice pitch was a statistical tendency, a much weaker effect than I'll bet most readers of the news stories are imagining. (Those stories exaggerated and sensationalized the results of this study; in other news, the sky is still often said to be blue, and water is still widely reported to be wet.)

In Christopher Brookmyre’s superlative One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, he invents the concept of BDQ: Bullet Deadliness Quotient. Essentially it is the rule that you can’t go changing the rules halfway. If you want dangerous realism in your action movies, it’s got to stay that way, and not turn into “your John Woo movies: zillions of rounds goin’ off an’ the only thing they ever hit is glass”.

BDQ is a fine concept and just as applicable to science fiction. And Richard Morgan’s Black Man (called the cringe-inducing Th1rte3n in the US) fails to abide by its own rules.

Black Man is set 200 years hence. Genetic ‘variants’ have been bred for the classic undesirable tasks — compliant females for prostitution, aggressive males for soldiering. The central character is one of the latter, a ‘variant thirteen’, despised by practically everyone, not allowed to breed, locked up or sent to Mars for the safety of everyone else.

This would have been fine for the sake of the story if he’d just used the “genetically engineering super-soldier” approach. They are ten a penny and not really a problem. We’ve been doing that kind of thing with crops and animals for tens of thousands of years. But instead the author decided to resurrect hunter-gatherer man from tens of thousands of years ago.

The central conceit is that since they were hunters, they were naturally stronger and faster than the farmers that succeeded them. I’m not convinced of the argument, since that would suggest there would be massive genetic differences between us flabby office workers and the few remaining nomadic hunter-gatherer societies that still exist in Africa and South America. This is not an argument or evidence I have ever heard presented.

But taking that as a done deal, we also have to assume that these old genes actually coded for smarter people too, something I find even harder to believe. Human society demands technology and intelligence — I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that would be bred out as dangerous.

But finally, and most importantly, is how the author ignores all biological repercussions of the story setup. He claims to have got the idea from reading one of science writer Matt Ridley’s books. It’s a shame he wasn’t paying attention while he did so. Not only are we to believe that the variant thirteens are stronger, faster and more intelligent but they also have more effective immune systems. Despite being pre-agriculture they can also drink alcoholic beverages without serious side-effects. Consider that even the ability to process milk is a very recent development for Europeans it all seems desperately implausible.

Notably, for someone who cites Matt Ridley (author of Nature via Nurture), he ignores the effect of nurture and environment on people’s personalities. At only one point does one of the characters mention that these so-called uebermensch were given combat training and so on from an extremely young age. The effect this would have on a person’s nature is completely disregarded by everyone else.

The rest of the book was similarly disappointing. The story had about a dozen endings before it finally stopped, abruptly. The most interesting character was a female variant thirteen: this was so unusual that the other characters didn’t know such a thing existed. It was like the scene in X Men 2 when Wolverine meets Lady Deathstryke. And then just like she is killed in the movie, this woman promptly vanishes after claiming to be pregnant. The most interesting part of the book and gets ignored from then on… The writing was a bit on the florid side for me, too. I was cringing too regularly, which is never a good sign.

The field of epidemiology studies the health of populations with any eye to detection and prevention of illness.

Disease is fascinating in any light, and as our world shrinks due to global travel we’re likely to see a lot more of it in new guises. Single cases of disease in exotic places are a potent threat to major population centres, because that single person can travel round the world in a single day.

Securing yourself against infection is a proper arms race: infectious agents and defences improving in lock-step, forever exploiting and then being beaten back.

Nothing about the above paragraphs is unique to biology. In the early hours of the 25 January 2003 the fastest-spreading global infection ever seen first began to take hold, on the internet.

The infection, known as the Slammer worm, was the first of a new kind of Warhol worm — one that would spread as fast as it could within its “15 minutes of fame”. This epidemiological analysis of the appearance, spread and weaknesses of the Slammer worm make fascinating reading for the geeky. ( This is what happened. )

I’m getting really fed up and pissed off at these utterly heartless bastards who would sacrifice someone’s health for the sake of their own paranoid fantasies.

By the Daily Mail’s own admission in the article, HPV is responsible for 700 deaths from cervical cancer every year. But they “revealed”, in their best stoke-the-controversy fashion, that the NHS is paying for this treatment “at the cost to the taxpayer of £241 per course of treatment”. So little to prevent death from cancer, but too much for the Daily Mail and the absurd arguments of the “National Family Campaign” or “Family & Youth Concern”.

The argument that being vaccinated against a sexually-transmitted disease makes you leap into bed is so silly on the face of it that it’s difficult to comprehend the kind of person that could believe it. Every single statement made in that article makes me want to reach out and slap someone, hard.

“It could be seen as helping to promote or encourage sexual activity in girls before they are physically or mentally mature.” (Hugh McKinney, National Family Campaign)

There are two points here, neither of which follow from the facts. First, that being vaccinated promotes sexual activity. Strange that the MMR vaccine doesn’t promote teenage pregnancy — even though mumps is a cause of male sterility and rubella causes developmental defects during pregnancy. Second, that vaccine can make someone have sex before they are mature. The only thing that will prevent that is adequate sex education and fewer religious twats turning sex into a forbidden fruit.

“Why should we spend so much money on vaccines against diseases which are totally preventable in other ways? We should be discouraging young people from having intercourse at an even younger age rather than promoting it.” (Dr Trevor Stammers, Family & Youth Concern)

The “other ways” hinted at here are not listed. I can only guess he means that great placebo panacea, abstinence. Of course, abstinence doesn’t prevent HPV transmission, unless what Dr Stammers really advocates is lifelong celibacy. If no-one had sex until the age of twenty five, then it would take longer before infected people spread the virus — but it would spread. There is no magical cut-off point of maturity past which HPV is no longer a threat.

Family & Youth Concern’s statement is completely irrelevant. They’re only there to issue their default opinion — promoting moral panic about the “permissive society” — which happens to align quite nicely with that of the Daily Mail.

Thankfully the commenters on the article are pretty much on the ball (for a change). There is one nutcase who seems to think that Nu Labour (sic) are doing this to “breed” the next generation of voters (!). Even amongst Daily Mail readers that’s a minority opinion. Bookdrunk also has more and some interesting links to previous HPV and sex education stories.

What do you think — are these anti-HPV campaigners seriously deluded or simply scum?

This is as much as anyone needs to know on the subject:

I mean, my only problem with creationism is it being discussed as theory instead of as pointless solipsistic wanking.

From Slashdot. I lol’d (literally).

It appears that the Archbishop of Glasgow didn’t much like me taking him to task over his poor grasp of the facts, so decided to quote-mine me and another critic of his from the same letters page.

Note that he completely ignored the largest substance of my letter where I pointed out how very, very wrong he was; and how his arguments were just warmed-over arguments from the anti-embryonic research campaigners in the United States.

(And yes, it feels deeply satisfying to have riled a full archbishop all by myself!)

Following on from my angry post about stem cells, where I mentioned in particular the specious list of “65 adult stem cell–based treatments”, that very list was invoked in yesterday’s Herald by the Archbishop of Glasgow, Mario Conti.

So I got out my quill pen and finest sealing wax, and sent my servant off on the fastest horse to the presses in the West.

You can see I managed to write more succinctly than in my blog post. I also didn’t feel the need to tread softly. Surprisingly they hardly edited anything. (In the past they have removed whole paragraphs from some letters, so that they make a lot less sense.) The only difference that I could see was omission of the word ‘utter’ from the second paragraph.

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.

I enjoyed The Selfish Gene more than Y: The Descent of Men but they have very different purposes. For a proper popular science book I’d recommend getting hold of the 30th anniversary edition of Dawkins’ book. If you want more of a sedate run through the history of (the biology of) maleness, go for Jones’ book.