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.)

I urge everyone to have a look at Mark Chu-Carroll’s discussion of the perceived differences between physical and mental illness. Read the comments too, because there’s some interesting discussion there.

When you’ve got your fill have a look at John Searle’s Chinese room argument, which I find to be a most satisfying discussion of mental processes, even if — taken to its only logical conclusion — it actually shows the opposite of what Searle wanted to prove. But hey, no-one’s perfect, eh?

So is anyone else with me in attempting, from now on, to deprecate the term mental illness? Brain condition sounds satisfyingly real and tangible, and correspondingly less mystical.

I have a physical mental illness… which is to say that I have what used to be a mental illness, many hundreds of years ago, but nowadays is considered not more interesting than a rash. Epilepsy may happen for a myriad of unknown reasons, but we know exactly what happens when it strikes (and we can even watch it on a graph in realtime). The subtler skewings of perception afforded by depression, schizophrenia or the like still seem to be unknowns for most people.

And because they affect people’s emotional states and behaviour they can be hard — impossible, even — to diagnose without prolonged observation. Like the Chinese room example: is there a difference between having a 5-minute conversation with someone who is manic, or with someone who just took several tabs of ecstacy? Is there a difference at all?

As you can guess I’m pretty much out of my depth here but I’m keen and interested to hear folks opinions on the matter.

Tomorrow night I’ll be tuning in to watch Stephen Fry’s show about (his) manic depression. Maybe you’re interested too: BBC2, 9pm, Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive.

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.

Just when the world seems to have forgotten what it is to have a sense of humour… From a Slashdot thread about using plants to grow human insulin:

And why is it [not] right? It may be obvious to you, but please spell it out to me. It’s like saying that “homosexualtiy is obviously not right” — it means nothing except “I don’t like it, and I feel self-righteous about that”.

It’s in Leviticus: “A restriction enzyme that touches a plant chromosome shall not touch an animal chromosome, lest there be an abomination.” You can’t argue with a commandment like that. Why do you hate G-d?