BANG TO RIGHTS

It seems Sherlock Holmes never actually said, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

It’s a case of misattribution, like: ‘Alas, poor Yorrick, I knew him well’, ‘Come up and see me sometime’, ‘Play it again, Sam’, and ‘I believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction’ – part of the collective memory, but never uttered in fact.

Not long after Sherlock’s time, however, identifying villains became a lot more elementary, thanks to the introduction of fingerprints.

As long as the miscreant’s dabs were taken, and the fingerprints officer wasn’t otherwise influenced in the largely interpretive art of cross-matching by other little hints and suggestions, this was a fair way of putting Chummy where he said he wasn’t.

Bequeathing the method to the police forces of the world, Home Secretary E.R. Henry boasted of its foolproofness on the grounds that ‘everyone’s fingerprints are different’.

Most of us know this as a scientific fact, though it’s never really been proved. Certainly the indications are that it is a high probability – and the chances that the statement applies to the comparatively minimal sample of known criminals is very much higher.

But, even assuming uniqueness, as records increase, differentiation becomes more problematical, with the potential of being overtaken by the inherent margin for error.

As more and more prints were amassed, the forces of the law were forced back again on hunches and hogwash such as psychological profiling, which at least seemed to work on television.

But cometh the hour, cometh the men.

Crick and Watson let the gene genie out of the bottle and the jig was up.

Everyone’s genetic fingerprint is different. It’s a known scientific fact – so you can now be banged up for things you got away with the first time because your finger type fingerprints were smudged or a psychological profiler was looking for Hannibal Lecter.

Genetics is more scientific because it’s got so many billions of little peculiarities that only  computers and algorithms can tell one from the other. ‘Spot the difference’ for the digital age. Perhaps ‘spot the similarity’ is more to the point.

So how many of those billions of peculiarities are found at the average crime scene? A dozen? How stable, how reliable, are the dozen? Pass.

But it’s all very scientific. They scrape up what’s there, set the computer running, and Bob’s your uncle. Or possibly the Avon Lady.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

THE DESCENT OF MAN

Although enthusiastically supported by a scientific clique, on their original publication Darwin’s theories of evolution were largely dismissed and ridiculed.

The catchy and pivotal slogan, ‘survival of the fittest’, was recognised as empty tautology. That which survives in a milieu ‘red in tooth and claw’ is clearly that which was best fitted so to do.

Where it gets more complicated is in discovering or defining what makes those things which survive do so, and whether they are in fact operating in a mindless dog-eat-dog environment.

Not only current popular science but the entire political and economic system of the Western World is predicated on the rather simple-minded proposition that all things come down to this half-baked formula.

Yet Darwin himself regarded cooperation between life forms as infinitely more successful than doing in all your competitors. That way, as is more than clear when we look at post-1980s Europe and the US, lies oblivion.

Darwin’s theories are now so embedded in the scientific mind (or brain) that no other thought can be countenanced, and no other model is to be taught in schools, lest the young folk should be corrupted by independent thought.

But Darwinism isn’t science at all, just one of a number of articles of faith which, being part of the fundamental scriptures laid down by the ancient prophets, are beyond question or observation.

Today’s priesthood tells us this evolved and that evolved without the slightest evidence. Messrs Attenborough and Cox don’t even wonder about it before passing it on as holy writ.

Although the very fact of this belief has unleashed many of the most contra-survival idiocies upon the world: eugenics, fascism, racism, monetarism, scapegoating, intolerance, politico-economic short-termism and megalomania, statism and suppression – all depend on the shaky grasp of a dogma not properly inspected or comprehended – the Darwinian model is still held up, not only as some kind of universal revelation, but as an ‘explanation’ both of the ‘natural’ selection of life forms and life itself!

In fact it fails in both endeavours, most spectacularly in the latter, in which it is not merely unsuited to purpose, acting instead, in the way of all dogma, as a more or less impenetrable barrier to perception and real understanding.

We’ve all seen the familiar graphic of a monkey getting up on his hind legs and metamorphosing, through dubious pictorial sleight of hand, into a man, yet few of us seem to have noticed that the monkey was far better fitted to survive the challenges of this planet at that time than the bloke into which he has ‘evolved’.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

BRANDED – How A Person Becomes A Cipher.

Duck.

A scientific classifier makes an arbitrary judgement as to which individuals with what degree of difference or similarity, become ‘species’, ‘family’, ‘phylum’, or whatever. An  individual instantly becomes not a thing of value in itself, but a symbol or representative of all members of its imposed brand.

A solitary family sheep, pig or chicken clearly has its own personality, its own intelligence, its own aspirations and sense of pain and loss.

A mass of such animals are ‘de-personalised’, not in fact, but in the perception of the onlooker.

Individuals are viewed up close – their complicated concatenations of ideas, beliefs, purposes and so forth. Lump a few of them together and the apparency is that they are easier to understand – peasants, conservatives, Muslims, Chinese, lepers, immigrants, hippies, goths, doctors, journalists, gays, anorexics, scientists, single mothers, politicians, diabetics.

Even – or especially – if enshrined by ‘authority’ or ‘officialdom’, such labels are never more than lazy shorthand designed to dismiss annoying, time-consuminge HHHHH complications.

The material universe is not there to make sense. It neither conceives nor cares for such niceties.

Sense is applied to it by that which does have an interest in so doing – the intellect and consciousness of life.

Not a Duck.

Someone who sees a duck as a representative of all ducks is applying a useful and lazy shorthand to bring order to his or her own life.

Anyone who sees another person merely as a representative of one of the above labelled groups does not see that person at all, but merely categorises him or her to avoid so doing.

Only when you recognise that individuals are not representatives of others – not samples of some mass – can  you begin upon the path of perception and so-called intelligence.

Classification is order imposed by an observer. It does not have an existence in the absence of the intelligence that classified it. The business of understanding derives little benefit from it in the long run. Its convenience falls away as it passes into science or common usage.

The original classifier was observing reality and seeking for a ‘handle’ on it – a starting or entry point to understanding. The student or successor uses it as an axiom upon which to build a science based, regrettably, upon data which, for the purposes of expediency, at best averaged and at worst ignored most of the observable variables to arrive at a conformity convenient to, and personal to, the initial classifier.

No individual is, or becomes, another. The link is not missing; it was never there. The end of the piece of string that will cause the whole edifice of stupid, mechanistic ‘evolution’ to unravel is between the thumb and forefinger of the originator of species.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository