On Selling your Soul to the Devil

Ever since the soul has had market value, which is to say ever since we first decided we were special as a species, which is to say forever, people have been selling them. This goes way past the old Delta Blues meet-the-devil-at-the-crossroads-for-mean-guitar-pickin’ business:

“You traded your immortal soul for that?”
“Well, I wasn’t usin’ it.”

 It goes past Don Giovanni or even the original Faust.  Even in these highly secular times, the tradition of soul-peddling has not yet died out, but it has undergone one vital change in response to the modern economy, and that is to shift from being a small, private exchange to a large-scale business venture owned by, you guessed it, huge multinational corporations. And while the big suppliers can offer you several benefits, like imitation souls (very realistic- fools almost 80% of priests!), buy-backs at very low interest (Add just six years in Hell from every month until you’re paid back), Atheism insurance (Feel secure in your avowed disbelief. Collect up to $1 000 000 if it turns out there really is a God) and Holy-waterproof sealant (Call now and we’ll throw in your very own Voodoo Witch Doctor!), they aren’t always what they claim to be. You don’t know how many operatic heroes have made the mistake of not reading the fine print and gotten saddled with a contract they never should have agreed to.

 If you’re going into buying or selling souls as a career or as part of an investment plan, make sure you  have a trusted legal advisor on hand, preferably one with experience in the field. Lucifer’s rates are steep, but he offers free consultations and can usually handle multiple clients at a time, thanks to having three faces.

Sorry to rush lunch, fellas, but I'm meeting with a client in ten. BBM me!

If you’re looking in a lower price bracket, try the Serpent from the Garden of Eden. Not only are her rates very reasonable, but every customer gets a complimentary fruit basket. According to the Rabbinical tradition she also represents sexual desire, so don’t worry about accidentally showing up to your consultation stark naked – just be warned, the fees for her other services are quite a bit steeper than her legal fees. Careful of the fangs.

Finally, if money is really an issue, call Be’elzebub – his usual fee is one pig’s head on a stick per hour, but he accepts any type of rotting flesh you have handy, and the alarming buzzing tones of his voice are sure to intimidate your opponents.

Advisory: Under NO circumstances should you contact Be’elzebub if you are a wise and prophetic epileptic boy. You will die.

On the Watchmaker Argument

Today, William Paley made me late for English class.

That’s not as odd as it sounds, for anyone who’s wondering, “Why would Darwin’s major contemporary critic rise from the dead just to prevent you from going to class? Did you have to duel him? Was it for honour, or survival? Did he want to consume your ideology, or just your physical brain?” No, sorry, Paley would win. Besides, all good natural theologians have their bodies encased in concrete after death to prevent that precise eventuality. I mean, I assume they do.

What really happened was that my new chemistry prof, after an hour’s pleasant but uninspiring shpeil on why science is important, decided to ask a class of life sciences students to refute Paley’s Watchmaker argument. Bedlam Ensued.

My prof’s explanation was that religion and science don’t really intersect, and that it’s impossible to grasp either one from the perspective of the other. I’ve always viewed religion (Perhaps we should broaden that to ‘humanitarian and abstract philosophy’ or something. I'm turning out a pretty shit Agnostic.) as two sides of the same coin and both equally necessary, an old opinion originally applied to determinism vs. existentialism by Kant , I think (it’s always bloody Kant).  Anyway. The prof also expressed my main argument against the Watchmaker analogy, which naturally comes from Darwin – that what Paley called ‘Irreducible Complexity’ is only irreducible in retrospect.

Paley argued that the eye, like a watch, is too complex and too dependent on the orchestrated function of its many parts to have arisen in anything but its current form. But Paley didn’t consider that  simplistic versions of the eye could still have some function. Throughout the Animal Kingdom there are many modern examples of rudimentary ‘eyes’ that bear structural similarity to our own, even though they lack the sophistication of the human eye. Even watches began in inefficient mechanical forms that needed to be wound, before it was discovered that diamond or quartz could be carefully trimmed to vibrate at a set rate of cycles per second.  The ‘evolution’ of the watch isn’t quite analogous to Darwinian evolution, but we can see the same basic principle in action – useful adaptations to their design being preserved, problematic ones never being recreated. I can imagine a lot of dud watches that got scrapped because they did unhelpful things, like spontaneously implode, or things that weren't helpful after the mid-1970s, like contain hidden lasers and circular saws or unzip ladies' dresses or project an electromagnetic field that made the wearer appear human.

For the best and most elegant answer to Paley’s Watchmaker argument, take a look at what Darwin wrote on the subject. It couldn’t really be improved. Darwin doesn’t have all the evidence that has since been collected in his favour, but he doesn’t seem to need it. Darwin’s awesome like that. He was a genius not because of the complexity of his thinking – everything he said was really very simple – but because of its analytical and predictive power. Here was a man who looked at a species of bird in which the male was showier than the female and inferred not just that it had evolved that way, but that it had evolved that way because species was promiscuous, and, since female mating was limited while male mating was not, males had more to prove than the females. Here was a man who could look at these two flowers:

 and say, “Where’s the third? It should look like this:”

And that is just a tiny fragment of his revolutionary contribution to multiple fields. In short, a clever bastard. No wonder anyone from my department would jump him in an instant.

Not that I don’t respect Paley. He put into words (good words, too) the big problem that so many Creationists had, and still have, with Evolution. But logically, it didn’t stand the test of time, and it stuns me that Paley’s perspective is still so widely shared in the face of overwhelming evidence.

I also don’t mean to tell anybody what to think, though I make my own opinion pretty obvious in the header – only to think it in informed terms. I’ve yet to meet an outspoken Creationist I could respect intellectually, because none of them, if asked, could actually explain to me what the theory of Evolution was. I blame this not so much on xenophobic thinking as commonplace scientific illiteracy – it’s understandable to reject what you don’t understand. But ignorance is not a justification. I’d love to meet a Creationist who has studied Evolution thoroughly, grasps its point, and still does not accept it. Then, we would have a great deal to talk about.

Whatever you think, think it for a reason.

All credit to Spencer Barrett for the images of tristyly in Water Hyacinths, for explaining to us what the deuce it's all about, and for finding that missing one that Darwin predicted in a swamp in Brazil after decades of search. Read more here if you're interested.



On the Seasons

Today it is beautiful out and I can't conscience spending more than a little time in front of a computer screen, so I leave you with a poem in celebration of winter finally buggering off.

August, six o’clock

We used to go in there when it was halfway down to dark

To find our wooden paddles standing crossed against the door

Put up our palms and hook them by the ladder’s highest rung

And kick our barefoot questions into trailings on the floor

Our hands laid flat to carousel the kayak’s yellow arc

On brackish sands and flotsam of a thick swamp-magic shore

Let emptiness speak mutters in its own elusive tongue

Dove into moveless mirrors for a thousand days and more



On Apartments

Becoming an adult is sort of like abortive RNA Polymerase initiation (Yes, I’ve had a good think, and those are indeed the words I want to begin my blog with). It stops, it starts again, it sputters backward and gets things wrong and one day I expect it’ll hurl me forward into grownuphood proper, just when I least expect it. Also, it's often kick-started by the process of kissing, and that's the nerdiest joke I'm allowed all month.

When I left home for University I moved into residence, which really just meant I swapped fixing my own lunches for doing my own laundry. I no longer need to be chauffeured around because I live within spitting distance of everything important.

I’ve always thought independence started for real when you got your own apartment. Maybe when I actually get one I’ll be certain it’s when you own a house, but that’s not the point. I wanted to get an apartment by second year. But I’ve always been terrible at organizing these things and even worse at asking people awkward questions like ‘HEY DO YOU WANT TO LIVE WITH MEE’. And there are a lot of people who I like but couldn’t live with. I was sure I’d lose the roommate lottery and unsure where to begin looking, so I resigned myself to another twelvemonth in residence eating rubbery caf eggs and putting towels under my door to block out the sounds of drunken 3.00 AM conversations:

Thing 1: Dude, where's your shirt?
Thing 2: My shirt... oh, right, I had one of those. I, I, I think I left it at somewhere. The pizza place.
Thing 1: You got pizza without me?
Thing 2: I dunno, man. you weren't there. You know? You weren't there. When I needed you. For pizza.

Enter M, a friend and housemate of mine. She’s one of those quietly, understatedly hilarious people who say witty things in such a throwaway manner that you almost miss them. She had only just convinced me I had to watch BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ – which subsequently became my life, but I’ll talk about that another time – and we got onto the topic of housing plans for next year, both of us probably wishing subconsciously we had a Mike Stamford around. She was considering an apartment but didn’t know who she’d share with. And we both sort of came to the same conclusion at the same moment.

Huge relief.

We’re looking at a handful of places within walking distance of our school now. One of them has a pool. My mother, who was against me getting an apartment in second year because I’m her youngest and the moment I get an apartment she doesn’t have kids anymore (and, you know, actual concern for my wellbeing, but good parenting has never been fun to read about), heard about the pool and went ‘Oh, well then go for it!’, but I can’t help thinking that if I’m a second-year undergrad student at one of the two best universities in Canada, with good health and great friends and a bloody pool in my building, karma is eventually going to open up a hole in the crust of the earth and drag me all the way to Detroit.  I might go for the pool anyway.

The plan is to nickname the apartment ‘221B Baker Street’, no matter what the actual address is. ‘Baker Street’ or just ‘Sherlock’ for short. There probably won’t be bullet holes in the wall (although given our area of study there could well be experiments in the fridge). I’m hoping my dad will make us whatever furniture we don’t acquire through the Niflheimr, er, I mean Ikea - My dad is an erudite and delightfully professorial fellow half the time and an insane hermitic woodsman the other half. Whenever he’s not lecturing me about ancient Rome he’s in his workroom cutting up bits of wood and yelling along to loud classic rock. At some point soon I’ll recount my dad’s Adventures in the Canadian North. He is the best dad.

Anyway, the apartment. I’ve had plenty of time to build up an impressive poster collection and I know both of us have lots of books. Homes without books are not really homes; they are like a cell without a genome, dry and sterile and too tidy by half. For the brief period when we were looking for a prospective third roommate, I had the half-joking idea that we could set up a Passive-Aggressive Board, on which to write our grievances. Here is what it might look like:

The only problem with the passive-aggressive board is that eventually it would degenerate into a bunch of badly-drawn trollfaces and I would spend too much time drawing trollfaces to actually deal with any of the complaints on it, so this might bear some rethinking. Today I will be calling landlords and asking them how they feel about having trollfaces tattooed into their walls with bullets, because it’s always a good thing to make sure your landlord know what’s a joke and what isn’t.