John Mortell’s blog

Or so this Discovery magazine article suggests may be the case. Certainly the idea that we’re here and the ‘dominant species’ because of random chance is not particularly surprising (for some of us anyway) but the idea that the ‘inferior’ humans ‘won the evolutionary war’ is striking nevertheless;

But people do not easily escape from the idea of progress. We’re drawn to the idea that we are the end point, the pinnacle not only of the hominids but of all animal life. Boskops argue otherwise. They say that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves.

It’s a moot point really, but interesting nevertheless. And there’s definitely a science-fiction novel in it one imagines.

(Oh, wait. There is.) (Kinda, as it’s about Neanderthal’s rather than Boksops but…)

Really interesting piece from Ken MacLeod about how Christian denial of evolution responded to the movement of evolutionary theory from a ‘moral’ idea to one that was purely ‘amoral’

Christian anti-evolutionism, at that time, wasn’t like modern creationism. It wasn’t joined at the hip to insanities about a six-thousand-year-old Earth. It was a protest – valid enough in its own terms – against quite specious conclusions about the inevitability of human progress drawn from evolutionary thinking. (In the hands of, say, C. S. Lewis, this protest was quite compatible with public acceptance of – and private reservations about – evolution as a fact.) Even young-earthism started out (to stretch the principle of charity a little too far) at least presenting itself as as an alternate hypothesis, which could in principle be accepted even by atheists. (One can idly imagine a planet populated by all the organisms in the fossil record, devastated by a catastrophe in the recent past, leaving a spurious record of succession in the rocks, and with the actual evolution having occurred on another planet or in the deep pre-Cambrian.) But the evidence just didn’t stack up, and the creation/catastrophe argument has moved from claims of hard facts on the table to waffle about ‘presuppositions’ and ‘world-views’, in an involuntary admission of evidential bankruptcy. The creationist style of thought, preeningly self-blinkered and paranoid, has become a watering-can for the tree of crazy. Of course the outright denialist strand of thinking was there all along, but why did it become dominant, and widespread, after the 1960s?

Essentially, MacLeod points to the move away of evolutionary thinking from ‘evolution as a moral force’ to our current ‘amoral’ understanding of evolution as the reason for this change and the blow-back from religious/creationist groups. Its an interesting article anyway so have a look.

Another really cool video from the TED lecture series.. I love her definition of serendipity! Tho I am really starting to get annoyed with the video player on TED. I don’t know why, but it seems like it takes me going away from the page as an excuse to reset the video..

Is there an equivalent word for that means ‘hatred to men’? It’s just that I’ve met a few ‘feminists’ here and there who have said things that, if said by men would be called ‘misogynstic’ except, well the genders wrong. Any suggestions?

Came across this ‘Garfield is dead’ flash movie somewhat randomly today.. its a flash movie that is based off a series of ‘garfield’ strips form 1989… they’re rather dark as the feature Garfield being left alone in the house after everyone has moved away, which one would assume resulted in Garfield starving to death…

Interestingly enough,it’s lead to a group of people believing that given that the strips end with Garfield retreating into his imagination that it implies that all the Garfield strips since about 1990 (when Garfield would have starved to death) are now the result of Garfield’s ghost which is trapped in the house and refuses to realise that he’s dead.

Which is a load of bollocks really, but it’s a cool idea. And the strips are wonderfully dark….

While the strips I’m uploading are in colour, the b&w one’s that the flash movie uses are somewhat better so I’d advise people to take a look at that first…

And while we’re on the subject of depressing comic strips – this is actually worse I think and this is another great example of ‘is that actually real and written by the real author’ style comics where Walt Disney has Mickey Mouse trying to kill himself

UpdateThis site has a lot of the information about the strips as well as a really cool animation that is very similar to the actual strip and its story Continue Reading »

Just as I was trying to kill some time today I wandered into waterstone’s to see if I could find ‘Sandworms of Dune’ the final book in the ‘Dune’ series. I’ve no idea if it’ll be any good but I seem to recall enjoying the previous book ‘Hunters of Dune’ so hopefully. Oddly enough then, after going and buying this book I see on Whitechapel that apparently there’s a new ‘Dune’ movie planned. While to be honest, I doubt anything will ever live up to the planned version by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the art for which would have been by Moebius, I’ll be quite interested to see how this version of the movie turns out…

Update: there’s some pretty good informationa and artwork here

Jonathan Hickman produced one of the best comic books and general pieces of entertainment I saw last year with his book ‘the Nightly News‘. Thankfully he isn’t resting on his laurels and has got several works in the pipeline. The most recent of which being ‘Pax Romana’. Here is a link to the first issue online. It’s very very good, maintaining the impressive design sense that the ‘Nightly News’ had, while still not seeming too derivative of that work. Granted, the story sounds derivative to those of us who have read too much science-fiction but it’s still done better than a lot of those stories. As a final aside, in an era when many 22 page comics take 5 minutes to read a book like ‘Pax Romana’ is very much value for money in terms of time spent:

PAX ROMANA tells the tale of 5000 men sent on an impossible mission to change the past and save the future. It’s the end of the world: Will they succeed, or will they fail?

Also of great interest is his talking about the first issue in depth here. What he says that I’ll pass on in it is that the internet doesn’t really do his art style justice as the two page spreads are designed to be read as one image rather than two seperate pages. Anyway, I really recommend taking a look and if your that impressed there’s a preview of the second issue here

Surprisingly good documentary on horror movies and supposed ’snuff’ movies. Granted, at the start it’s more of a history of certain types of ‘video nasties’ than about snuff itself but as it goes along it shows how there have been ‘possible examples’ of snuff. Interesting also is the ‘chicken or egg’ question. Does demand creaty supply or supply demand? The moors murders example was one I hadn’t heard before.

I remember reading this article by Mark Steyn over Christmas, and it had a tremendous effect on me at the time. While, on reflection I have to wonder about a lot of the things said in it, there a number of ideas contained in the article that are great food for thought.

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Certainly, the article makes a good case for certain areas having major problems in the future with regards to ‘the demographics of society’ and it’s well worth thinking about things like Palestine in that context, however, there are plenty of areas where his thought process becomes oversimplified like this example here:

Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Granted, in some ways he has a point, but to suggest that ALL Africans are tribal in nature in somewhat simplistic, it is as much about the corruption of political institutions as it is about tribalism in many areas, Kenya at the moment being a good example. Also , the AIDS comment doesn’t take into account the continuing successes in treatment across Africa, and finally, Steyn ignores the recent growth in Chinese investment in Africa and what that means for the development of the continent.

There are plenty of interesting things within the ideas contained in the article, not least of which is the claim that given that there is not such a thing as ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Dutchness’. When this is compared to the sense of identity that comes with being ‘American’ it becomes possible to imagine that Europe will find it very hard to assimilate the incoming immigrants from the Muslim world.

Towards the end he makes a very good point which I have to agree with regarding the unwillingness that many ‘liberals’ have shown when dealing with Muslims and their claims:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

As a final comment on his article, I just have to wonder about his seeming lack of care regarding the fact that nearly a third of the worlds population live in China and India, neither of which are Muslim countries, and at least one of which is a (relatively) healthy democracy. As a gap in the argument it is pretty large. Still though, the article is well worth a look.