Surely one of the most pressing social questions of our time is why kids wear their baseball caps the wrong way around. Dr Kipling has the following explanation:

…First, you need to ask yourself what signals a male needs to transmit to a potential mate in order to advertise his suitability as a source of strong genetic material, more likely to survive than that of his competitor males. One answer is brute physical strength. Now, consider the baseball cap. Worn in the traditional style it offers protection against the sun and also the gaze of aggressive competitors. By turning the cap around, the male is signalling that he doesn’t need this protection: he is tough enough to face elements and the gaze of any who might threaten him. Second, inverting the cap is the gesture of non-conformity. Primates live in highly ordered social structures. Playing by the rules is considered essential. Turning the cap around shows that the male is above the rules that constrain his competitors and again signals that he has superior strength. I hope you will have guessed that this was a parody – it comes from Julian Baggini’s book The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten. Dr Kipling is an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s Just-so stories and Baggini is taking aim at evolutionary psychology, which applies Darwin’s theories to gain an insight into human behaviour. For its critics EP is retrofitting an explanation with the benefit of hindsight. Chomsky put it like this:

“You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes’ perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else’s. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it.“

I can see the point but I feel that EP is a powerful tool. Maybe I’m just seeking a justification for my political opinions – I have a pragmatic view of human nature. I remember when I was at university I didn’t really buy into a lot of the theories that I heard.  It just seems obvious to me that we have to be heavily influenced by our evolutionary background. This has proved unpopular with many academics who had their vision of human beings challenged; there have been heated debates about the claims of EP. Evolutionary psychology posits that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adaptations to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. (The Pleistocene goes from two million to 11 thousand years ago, the vast majority of our existence.) It is not controversial to assert that animal behaviour is influenced by their genes but when it comes to humans it becomes very divisive. Let’s take mating as an example. In the Pleistocene environment men wanted to spread their genes as widely as possible, whereas for women it was important to be fussier when choosing a partner. This still has an influence on our behaviour. Obviously a lot of other factors interact but I feel it is impossible to ignore our biological heritage.

One especially contentious area is rape. The traditional academic view was that rape had nothing to do with sex – it was a question of violence and that our culture socialised men into it. I find the argument that rape has nothing to with sex rather unconvincing. It is clear that rape takes place in the animal kingdom, including chimpanzees. Evolutionary psychologist Randy Thornhill has argued that in humans it could be the vestige of a reproductive strategy, with the violence employed to get what you want. This is not a defence or a justification of rape. Medical scientists who study who study cancer do not favour cancer. The genes can never be an excuse-; if there is no consent, it is a crime. But it is always helpful to gain insights into what the causes are.

Evolutionary Psychology opens up that whole nature v nature debate. Obviously these questions are complex and it is incredibly difficult to tease out the different factors. Perhaps the best example to illustrate this came from the popular science writer Matt Ridley: In every culture in the world men are more violent than men; But American women are more homicidal than Japanese men. We need to know about to what predispositions nature has given us. What motivates us to act the way we do is always going to invite controversy.  Some of these explanations will turn out to be wrong but we should not eliminate avenues of enquiry because they offend sensibilities.

In The Times Ben Macintyre  argues that narratives are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information: The internet is killing storytelling.

Thinking Allowed has a programme about white–collar crime and the cultural factors that are behind it.

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall there have beem a spate of articles. This article by Paul Hollander is called Murderous Idealism. It should be obvious but it is very easy to forget the lessons of the last hundred years:

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn’t mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.

The Daily Beast is a reporting and opinion website published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, whose name comes from the fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. It has a wide range of articles and has three million unique visitors per month.  Here is a sample of this week’s pieces:

Can Teen Killers Be Rehabilitated?

Tour America’s Most Mysterious Communities for Just $69.95.

British Bad Girl Tracey Emin’s Naughty New Work

I have just finished reading The Importance of Being Trivial by Mark Mason. This delightful book, which deals with the author’s quest to find the perfect piece of trivia, has interviews with aficionados, and scientists as the author seeks to explain the appeal of trivia and what it tells us about being human. The book is peppered with titbits and here is a selection of my favourites:

• Pete Conrad was the first man to fall over on the moon.

• George Foreman’s sons are all called George.

• Gordon Brown, who is blind in one eye, decreed that the font for Number Ten emails change from Times New Roman 12 to Arial when he became PM

• Oasis’s Liam Gallagher has an IQ of over 160.

• The only female in Lawrence is Arabia is Gladys the camel.

• The first government ban on smoking was instituted by the Nazis.

• Jack the Ripper was left-handed.

• In 1977, when Elvis Presley died, there were 170 Elvis impersonators in the world. By the turn of the millennium that had grown to 85,000. At that rate of growth, by 2019 one third of the world’s population will be Elvis impersonators.

• The leg in the famous poster for The Graduate was not Anne Bancroft’s it belonged to Linda Gray, who would go on to play Sue Ellen in the hit TV series Dallas.

I want to have a look at what trivia is. The word comes from the Latin for three ways. It referred to the arte triviale the trivium the three liberal arts (the education appropriate for a free man) taught at university namely grammar, rhetoric and logic. The other four liberal arts were the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which were considered more intellectually demanding and thus trivia came to mean “of interest only to an undergraduate”. Its modern incarnation is, rather surprisingly for me, is from the USA; two Columbia University students, Ed Goodgold and Dan Carlinsky, ran quizzes at  their university with questions about culturally significant but ultimately useless information, which they called trivia contests.

There is no doubt that trivia has its detractors. It is considered shallow and its practitioners are considered anal In English we have that rather despective word, coined by Norman Mailer, factoid, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper. I remember a teacher at school calling participants on the quiz programme Mastermind as human dustbins. It does seem to be a particularly masculine activity drawing on the male brain that is dedicated to systemising.

One thing that is clear is the incomplete nature of knowledge. There are so many things we think we know but that turn out to have no basis in truth. Facts once they get out seem to have a life of their own. Sometimes we do it ourselves when we fill in the gaps in our memory by unconsciously inventing something. The programme QI has a section called General Ignorance where they debunk myths that have gained acceptance: Marco Polo was in fact Croatian and his name means Mark Chicken. Nelson’s last words were not “Kiss me, Hardy” or “Kismet, Hardy” but “Drink, drink. Fan, fan Rub, rub.” The steam engine was actually invented in ancient Greece. I guess that in the Internet age we have learnt that the truth is complicated.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that I don’t agree with the critics of trivia. If you look on the right hand side I have a category dedicated to it. I am an intellectual dilettante a knowledge junkie. I love finding out about theories and ideas but I do enjoy that special feeling when I discover a magical piece of trivia. I do agree that facts without theory is trivia and theory without facts is bullshit. But trivia is a way of making knowledge attractive and is just great fun. And that’s more than enough for me.

# Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend – if you have one.  George Bernard Shaw (to Winston Churchill)
Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend second – if there is one. Churchill’s reply

#  It’s a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what’s between her ears instead of her legs. Hepburn on Sharon Stone.

 #  He is racist, he’s homophobic, he’s xenophobic and he’s a sexist. He’s the perfect Republican candidate. Bill Press (about Pat Buchanan)

# I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up. Groucho Marx

#  He couldn’t ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner. Johnny Carson (about Chevy Chase)

#  Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.  Clive James

 #  Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty has only Ten! Georges Clemenceau on Woodrow Wilson

#  Michael Jackson’s album was only called “Bad” because there wasn’t enough room on the sleeve for “Pathetic.” The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (about Michael Jackson)

#  Fame has sent a number of celebrities off the deep end, and in the case of Michael Jackson, to the kiddy pool. Bill Maher

#  He hasn’t just lost the plot, he’s lost the whole library!  Melody Maker (about Michael Jackson, 1992)

#  Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband’s penis, which explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee. Conan O’Brien

#  Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.  Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye

#  History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon — See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil. Robert J. Dole

#  It all makes sense after 14 pints. Everything makes sense after 14 pints. John Redwood looks sane. Michael Portillo looks loyal. After 14 pints, even William Hague looks like a prime minister. Tony Blair after William Hague’s claim that he used to regularly sink 14 pints in the pub.

#  I worship the quicksand he walks in. Art Buchwald (about Richard Nixon)

#  Such a little man could not have made so big a depression. Norman Thomas (about Herbert Hoover)

#  Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow and poisons our literary club for me. I class him among infidel wasps and venomous insects. James Boswell (about Edward Gibbon)

#  The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Percy? Edmund Blackadder to Lord Percy

 #  Like being savaged by a dead sheep. Denis Healey describing an attack by Geoffrey Howe.

 #  He has not a single redeeming defect. Benjamin Disraeli on William Gladstone.

 Finally, you may think cricket is a genteel, boring game…

#  Rodney Marsh….”How’s your wife and my kids…..”
Ian Botham..”The wife’s fine but the kids are retarded…”

# Shane Warne : I’ve waited two years for another chance to humiliate you.
Daryll Cullinan : Looks like you spent it eating.

Mate, if you turn the bat over, you’ll see the instructions on the back!  Merv Hughes to Robin Smith

Lingist John McWhorter asks would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages, but only one? And what if it happened to be English? The piece is called The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English.

The Daily Mash has a spoof advertising feature for a a Nick Griffin racially pure fat-reducing grilling machine. Griffin is the chairman of the far-right, whites-only British National Party.There is a quote from Griffin: “This thing just loves pork – unlike you know who…” Other stories include:

ORDINARY EUROPEANS DENIED CHANCE TO HATE TONY BLAIR

SEX WITH OBAMA ‘BETTER THAN SEX’, CLAIMS FIRST LADY

BBC World Service’s World Football asks whether homosexuality is the biggest taboo in football. And there is an interview with Raddy Antic, who’s managed both sides about the problems at Real and Atletico Madrid.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.  Charlemagne

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. Benjamin Lee Whorf

Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects. These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later. Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard

As we can see from the Charlemagne quote above, the notion that the language we speak somehow channels our thoughts goes back a long way. It clearly informed George Orwell when he created his fictional language Newspeak, the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. The rationale of Newspeak is if something can’t be said, it can’t be thought. Thus you can remove ideas such as freedom, rights and rebellion.

Newspeak seems to have been influenced by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which Wikipedia is “the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.” This is a tantalising thought but is it really true? I am very sceptical; it seems to have causation in the wrong way. I am more convinced by the argument that concepts precede vocabulary.

What is clear is that different languages express things differently. But does that mean some thoughts can only be expressed in one language? Is it possible to have thoughts in one language that can’t be translated into another? I am a big fan of the quirks of language. A while back I did a piece on untranslatable words and they are a lot of fun. The Japanese have one word, kyoikumama: for a mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement and the Germans have backpfeifengesicht: for a face that cries out for a fist in it. Does the lack of one-word English equivalents mean that English speakers are incapable of recognising these concepts? In Spanish you haves conocer and saber where in English you only have know. Does this mean that Spanish speakers are somehow more attuned to the difference between knowing a person and knowing a fact than English speakers are.

A lot of the evidence in this debate comes from analysis of tribal languages such as Hopi, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in north-eastern Arizona, USA. I am not a professional linguist so it can be a bit difficult to analyse the conclusions that the opposing sides come to. A lot of the motivation behind Whorf’s studies was to demonstrate that indigenous peoples were not “primitive.” And studies of tribal languages have shown that they are incredibly complex. But Whorf wanted to overcompensate. His description of Hopi seems to be trying to show that the Hopi language existed on a higher plane of thinking. Whorf also appear to have got the grammar wrong when he claimed that the Hopi had no words or grammar that refer to past or future time. But it appears that Hopi does have time markers.

Another tribal language that has come under the spotlight is Pirahã, an Amazonian language. This language has no words for numbers. They are incapable of performing even the most basic mathematical operation. This is said to be because their language has no words for number, they are prevented from doing maths. A more logical explanation is that it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

Some people say that they feel like a different person when they speak another language. I can’t say I have ever had that feeling. I wouldn’t want to say that language has no influence on our thinking but it is greatly exaggerated.

Boston.com has an article Let us now praise… the cliché – It’s concise, time-tested, and instantly familiar. What’s not to love?

In this Guardian piece Consistency is overrated Julian Baggini asks should there be freedom to mislead?

The Onion has this article: Television, Processed Foods Couldn’t Be More Proud Of Child They Raised

ABC All in the Mind looks at how the brain sciences are changing our understanding of addiction, and the powerful consequences for notions of free will, responsibility and culpability: Addiction, free will and self control

This is more of an update really. I have already featured Open Yale and they have recently added ten new courses, recorded during the 2008-2009 academic year:

Dante in Translation with Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta

European Civilization, 1648-1945 with Professor John Merriman

Freshman Organic Chemistry with Professor J. Michael McBride

Global Problems of Population Growth with Professor Robert Wyman

Introduction to New Testament History and Literature with Professor Dale B. Martin

Introduction to Theory of Literature with Professor Paul H. Fry

Listening to Music with Professor Craig Wright

Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior with Professor Stephen C. Stearns

The Psychology, Biology and Politics of Food with Professor Kelly D. Brownell

Roman Architecture with Professor Diana E. E. Kleiner

Here is the link:

http://oyc.yale.edu/new-courses.html

The Oxford Dictionary has a very pithy definition of a right: moral or legal entitlement to have or do something. Unfortunately in the real world actually defining what should be included as a right is more problematic. In the last 800 years we have seen The Magna Carta, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France, The United States Bill of Rights, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and more recently The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union The Universal Declaration of 1948 declares that the “…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

But humans are more complex than that and there are wildly differing interpretations of where rights come from and what they should include. There are some interesting ways of approaching the subject. In 1979 Czech jurist Karel Vasak came up with the division of human rights into three generations:

• First-generation: liberty and participation in political life – freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and voting rights.
• Second-generation: social, economic, and cultural in nature – a right to be employed, rights to housing and health care, as well as social security and unemployment benefits.
• Third-generation: the softest set of rights and have proved hard to enact – group and collective rights, self-determination, economic and social development, a healthy environment and even intergenerational equity and sustainability. Critics would argue that this is an attempt to dress up a political agenda as rights

I have forgotten the fourth generation – the right to see football on free-to-air terrestrial television.

The exponential growth of claimed rights over the last few years has led to a complicated situation of conflicting rights. In his book Shouting Fire, lawyer Alan Dershowitz has a list of rights and counter-rights:

Right to free speech – Right not to be offended
Right to life of foetus – Right to choose abortion
Rights of criminal defendants –Rights of victims
Right to keep one’s money – Right to equitable distribution of wealth
Right of gay couple to adopt right of child to be adopted by a heterosexual family
Right to know of sex offenders in neighbourhood – Right of privacy after serving sentence

This is just a sample of a list that goes on for three pages and makes fascinating reading. How can we possibly sort out all these contradictory claims?

Dershowitz takes a pragmatic view; rights come from wrongs. It is a practical viewpoint based on human experience. As we have seen what constitutes perfect justice is very controversial and will probably never be resolved definitively. Intelligent people can and do disagree about economic justice. There is however much more consensus as to what is perfect injustice. The inquisition, slavery, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust and the massacres in Rwanda show us what can happen when there is an absence of basic rights. I tend to favour a negative conception of rights. Negative liberty means that there are certain things that states and others cannot do to you. Just a few negative rules go a long way. Such things as freedom of speech, property rights, due process of law freedom of association are absolutely fundamental. Positive liberty, the right and frequently the obligation to do certain things, has often produced overblown bureaucracies and sometimes even tyranny.