Review : Planta Sapiens

After a string of marvellous books on animal sentience, unfortunately it's time for a bad one.

If you do a search for "plants" on this blog, you'll find my position on whether plants can be said to be intelligent or self-aware* has long been on the skeptical side of uncertain. In particular, there have been experiments claiming that plants can learn and remember, that they can make choices, and in particular that they can show Pavlovian responses. That one in particular strikes me as potentially a good route to convincing me that they have inner, conscious lives. Which makes it disappointing that the experiments have problems with reproducibility, despite some criticism being unduly harsh (you might also recall the findings hinting at fungi also being capable of making intelligent, sentient choices).

* I plan to try and define these terms a bit better in a future post, but for now I'll use them very loosely.

Likewise, I think that panpsychism is a philosophically valid, intelligent position but I just don't like it very much. The idea that everything has a consciousness, however rudimentary, just seems extremely strange and largely pointless to me. I lean considerably more favourably towards the idea of "biopsychism", in which all biological life has a consciousness, but even that I don't find especially brilliant.

Still, if you can convince me that plants are conscious, I'll be very much happier about biopsychism and would give serious reconsideration to panpsychism. As I said, some of the experiments are very intriguing, so I'm definitely persuadable on this issue.

All told, I'm the prime audience for Paco Calvo's Planta Sapiens. This purports to be a scientific account of plant intelligence written by a philosopher-turned-botanist. His aim is to convince the reader that plants do indeed have minds, but I have to say that while not without some interesting points, as it stands the book is a disappointing failure that's frequently an actively irritating experience to read.

Unlike other recent reads I can keep this to one post. Of the few genuinely interesting findings that Calvo does highlight, I'm going to have check the references and give them their own post in due course. For now, I confine myself to the book.

The review bit (skip this for stuff about plants)

Calvo begins quite properly with an exhortation to keep an open mind. And he keeps going with this. And going, and going, and going, right through the entire book. All too often I could not but help thinking, "shut up and tell me about the plants !". Strangely, he also likes to detail the exact progress of his career, making odd and irrelevant references to his own and his colleagues employers and research institutes. At times the anecdotes did help me warm to the guy despite the lack of substantive content, but by the end the final chapter was just a pointless, outright stupid rant and I wanted to tell him to get over himself.

Yeah, it's not great. It's a short book, but Calvo chooses to use most of the space for talking about non-plant related things. These include his career, the need to keep an open mind, other people's careers, socialising at conferences, the need to keep an open mind, philosophy of mind, unrelated analogies, the need to keep an open mind, and the harsh responses from mainstream botanists. Oh, and of course, the need to keep an open mind. Again.

Dude, I'm open-minded enough to be reading the damn book. You don't need to force the open-mindedness down my throat. Give me something to be open-minded about, for goodness' sake. It's bordering on insulting, to be honest. 

Worse, even when plants do make an appearance, their behaviours are rarely (but importantly not never) as interesting or as convincingly conscious as Calvo seems to think. Frustratingly, his anecdotes do at least demonstrate that he's aware of why people disagree or don't think the evidence is that convincing, but he fails to address their points. He spends a lot of time explaining why plants could be conscious, a position I'm already sold on, but my guess is that no more than 5-10% of the book actually contains anything about plant behaviour which is anywhere near interesting enough to warrant this.

Now to be fair, it's not that some of the extraneous content isn't valuable; some of it is genuine rubbish but probably about two-thirds could have some value. If this is your first encounter with the world of philosophy of mind, I suspect you could do worse : his descriptions of the problems and the histories behind them are lucid and readable, and taken on their own they're very light but perfectly decent. The problem is that without the experimental plant-related backup, all of this is just little more than wishful thinking, a thick layer of icing with precious little cake. It's a bit like having a car manual that tells you in tedious detail about what a magnificent car you own but forgets to describe how to switch on the lights.

In other words, yes, plants could be conscious. I agree. NOW BLOODY SHUT UP AND TELL ME THE EVIDENCE THAT THEY ACTUALLY ARE !

I'm giving this one 4/10. There are brief moments when something really interesting crops up, and most of the superfluous content isn't actually bad in itself*; I give further credit because Calvo does duly present concerns about experimental verification and doesn't take everything on face value. It's just that the book is too short, but not in a good way. It's like a cavalry charge without infantry support : most of the content would be perfectly good as reinforcement, but is useless on its own. It's also quite repetitive, and while I value some repetition to drive a point home, this much is excessive.

* Some is though. I don't need to know the backstory to every conference or what sort of wine you were drinking. A great deal of this feels like a blog post that hasn't translated well into a book format and just becomes outright annoying.

Even so, what blog-worthy stuff does the book contain ?

The content

1) Interesting plant behaviour

A hopeless beginning

Calvo begins unexpectedly with anaesthetics. Plants succumb to the same chemicals used to induce unconsciousness in humans. Calvo starts off gently here, highlighting that more important than this is the fact that plants do have some kind of active state that can be suppressed. And this is not at all an unreasonable claim which is worth bearing in mind

A running theme that Calvo develops early on is that plants may need intelligence precisely because they're fixed to one location. Animals, he says, have the luxury of being able to correct their mistakes. True, they have to have additional brainpower because of all the extra activities they do, but they can generally afford to try again if they mess up (think of how most animal hunts end in failure). For a plant, because its movement is largely growth-based, each failure is more costly. They can't self-correct so have a greater propensity for fatal mistakes. So they may, he argues, need to think.

But this isn't at all convincing by itself. It might be advantageous to the individual, but it's hard to see any species-wide requirement for thought : plants vastly outnumber animals and are in no danger of simply being gobbled up. Far more persuasive would be examples of plant behaviour that are too complex to explain by mere stimulus response.

Calvo believes very strongly in a softly-softly approach, so he begins with a common, simple behaviour : circumnutation. When reaching for a support, plants circle around in a lasso-like motion before finally gasping on. This can be surprisingly rapid, with a complete period of about two hours in some cases, with the final contact taking only a few minutes or perhaps less (because the rest of the motion is so slow, this is difficult to capture in time lapse).

But what's supposed to be intelligent about this I've no idea. A circular motion seems like a decent and simple enough way to cover a wide area in a search for structures. There doesn't seem to be anything about it which meets Calvos' own criteria for cognition, e.g. being adaptive, flexible, and goal-directed. Nor is there anything all that remarkable in plant's producing chemicals to influence animals. And while the ability of some plants to track the Sun on cloudy days (though not very accurately) and anticipate where it will come up the next morning is quite interesting, Calvo himself describes quite convincingly how this is due to purely physical, mechanistic processes rather than mental computation.

Slightly more intriguing are that plants sense a wide variety of external stimuli : water, light, touch, chemistry (airborne odours and soil chemistry), temperature, etc. They have to in some way compare all of these different strands of information and juggle them against their competing, individual needs. So at least some of the rudimentary requirements for consciousness are there, but it doesn't follow that they necessarily actually implement this. Everything could still perfectly well be pure stimulus response with different thresholds governing the result. Likewise, while plants undoubtedly communicate with each other through chemicals (either airborne or through direct physical contact), Calvo heavily implies that this means they must be intelligent, but why this should be so isn't at all obvious to me.

A few promising developments

We do eventually get some more intriguing behaviours. Calvo mentions the Pavlovian experiments I referenced earlier and, to his great credit, is careful to stress that these results haven't been replicated. But he's more bullish about describing other, extremely similar results. Apparently both pea plants and strawberries are capable of learning that particular light levels (either bright or dark) are associated with higher nutrient levels in the soil, putting down roots in greater amounts in the areas of light they're been trained to associate as beneficial*. 

* Quickly skimming a later review it seems that this study was fraught with problems, however.

This is deeply frustratingly brief : the final four pages at the end of chapter three are what the whole chapter should have been about. Give me details of the experiments. Give me the criticisms and counter-claims. Don't waste me time with an enormous prelude instead ! Credit where credit is due, he does give references, so expect more on this in the future.

Having prematurely "established" to his own satisfaction that plants are probably intelligent, thinking beings, Calvo proceeds to tackle how this might be. This bit feels somewhat better. Obviously plants don't have nervous systems, and I'm entirely sympathetic to the idea that you don't need this for consciousness. But they do use electrical currents, with various external stimuli (light, gravity, touch and all the rest) being able to trigger measurable electrical impulses. And while they don't have nerves, they do have internal networks along which such signals might propagate.

There are two (!) other points about plants which are interesting. Apparently some parasitic vines behave in an extremely similar way to hunters. They have a sense of smell and can follow a trail, in time lapse sweeping back and forth just like an animal. They will adjust their hunting strategy based on what sort of trail they're following, showing a clear preference for tomatoes over wheat. 

The second point is that plants have a more developed sense of light than we might suppose. In a few cases they actually prefer darkness, apparently in response to the need to search for support structures (e.g. trees) on the forest floor. Weirdly, they can also sense colour (or at least wavelength), having preferences for different coloured poles over others.

Finally, Calvo points out that bacteria have been shown to respond differently as a result of their actions as they interact with the world, as though they're observing and learning. There's even evidence for Pavlovian conditioning. And I'll grant that if mere bacteria can do this, then it would be weird if plants couldn't, but I'd prefer to check the references before commenting any further.

The two most interesting things here to me are the possibly Pavlovian responses and the wavelength sensing. The Pavlovian behaviour I find interesting because it suggests something much more indirect than pure sensory stimulation, especially when it happens as a result of a completely unrelated activity to what the plant is seeking. This, if true, is at the very least some sort of learning; it might be a step too far to call it "reasoning", but it would be a step in that direction. The wavelength/colour issue might imply qualia. For that, the best I can come up with is that we'd need some way to create an illusion that would trick the plant into perceiving a colour that wasn't really there, but how we'd do this I don't know.

That's all there is, in the entire book, about behaviour that seems genuinely cognitive and not just automatic. It feels like scraps from the table at most.

2) The other stuff

While much of it is just standard introductory philosophy of mind stuff, there are some interesting bits in the rest of the book I do want to mention.

The first is a nice joke about vitalism :

"If you presented a dynamo to scientists of various disciplines, they would all look at it in different ways. A chemist might dissolve it in acid; a molecular biologists would take it apart and describe its components in detail. But, were you to suggest that 'an invisible fluid, electricity' flowed in the dynamo, the flow of which ceased when it was dismantled, they might 'scold you as a vitalist'."

Which is a reasonable enough point. Likewise, that biologists are apparently only just getting to grips with the idea that fish are sentient is incredibly worrying and bordering on the idiotic. Calvo is right that the flip side of anthropomorphism, which indeed we should avoid, is anthropocentrism : the idea that humans are uniquely special and superior. Both ideas would seem inherently and almost self-evidently wrong-headed; my news feed frequently comes with headlines about how scientists have "discovered" what all pet owners have known for years. I don't mean some nuance about animal behaviour, I mean bloody obvious things that they ought to be ashamed of for not realising decades ago. So I'm with Calvo on that score, especially as this seems thoroughly backed up my other recent reads.

But alas, that's just about where my sympathies end. It does not follow that, just because some ideas considered crazy in the past have become accepted into the mainstream today, that all crazy ideas deserve serious treatment. There's quite a strong whiff of the classic "they said I was maaaad !" vibe about the whole thing.

For instance, in yet another effort to encourage open-mindedness, he quotes a philosopher who bizarrely believes we can escape from Mary's Room. His analogy was... we can get used to the differences between the Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature systems. 

Da fuq ?

Riiiight. So I'll just go and imagine some new colours then, because apparently that's totally the same thing. Good grief.

And then Calvo doesn't do himself any favours by singing a paean to Martian robots but then saying it would be better if they could just grow from place to place for some reason. Good lord man, what are you talking about ? He goes off on one about the rights of plants but fails to explain what, exactly, if plants have awareness, are we ever supposed to eat without feeling massive, crippling levels of guilt, which would seem like the most obvious question in the world.

And finally there's a horrible anecdote that is unbecoming of professional scientists; here my sympathy returns partially to Calvo. As with the last book, there seem to be some appalling biases in the life sciences. For god's sake people, sort yourselves out.

"After out meeting, a group of leading plant physiologists published a paper attacking our work, without even the veneer of politeness usual in academic publishing. They argued that 'dubious ideas about plant consciousness can harm this scientific discipline', and 'generate mistaken ideas about the plant sciences in young, aspiring plant biologists.' We were not only wrong, they seemed to think, we were dangerous : 'serial speculationists' looking to dismantle respectable science from within. They urged funding agencies to refuse us and journals to reject our papers, to keep our 'prolific speculating and fantasising' out of scientific discourse."

Now some of this is inevitable : if you really think a discipline has been corrupted by pseudoscience, it needs to be called out. But you don't do it in personal terms in a paper. Just as I wish Calvo would shut up and make his actual claims, so the counterarguments should be restricted to just that. If you want to make more personal attacks, do it by all means*, but not in a journal. 

* Sometimes crackpots deserve to be treated as such.

Yet there are two sides to every story. I don't know about his papers but Calvo's book is absolutely 100% the work of a serial speculationist because there's so little bloody data in it. He might very well just be a nutter; the Michio Kaku of botany, perhaps. A very quick look at the paper in question and I think some of their claims are pointless and silly ("plant's just can't be conscious, mmkay ?") but some are very likely correct (evidence for specific experiments being wrong, evidence that Pavlovian responses can occur - surprisingly - without consciousness). From what I've skimmed, it may well be that the entire edifice of research into plant intelligence is without any foundation at all.

But for that, it seems prudent to reserve judgement and read the actual papers. Pending that, I might well revise my assessment of the book. As it stands, Calvo certainly hasn't done himself any favours with this at all.

Review : Essex Dogs

And now for something completely different.

Historian Dan Jones' Essex Dogs was actually only on my Christmas list because of a mistake. I saw his accompanying documentary about Edward III's Crecy campaign (it's very good), briefly checked out the book online, and, since I've enjoyed every single one of his other books thus far, put it on the list without hesitation.

What I didn't realise was this was a novel. Oops ! But no matter, I don't read enough fiction, so here's a chance for something new.

Now you might remember from that I really like the insight Jones provides in his other books by looking for broad patterns and analogies, deftly letting the text speak for itself with a minimum of guidance to the reader. He may be a popular TV historian, but he's clearly done the academic side of things as well. His books are often page-turners but they're not short on analysis either.

This book is not much like his others.

This book is EXCITING.

This book has lots of GRAPHIC VIOLENCE and ANGRY MEN WHO SHOUT A LOT.

This book has TONNES OF FUCKING SWEARING !!!

As his characters roam around medieval France complaining about the heat and the stinking French bastards*, burning down churches and smashing skulls, it has all the depth and insight into the historical mindset as you'd expect to find from a football hooligan. And it's bloomin' great.

* Which French bastards, you ask ? All of them.

It has sexual innuendo galore, lots of blood, a plot that's so linear it could be the basis for a whole new geometry, and characters who are as predictable as anything from any cheap page-turning airport novel. Jones also has a blatant, totally unveiled and burning desire to infuse it with as many historical points of interest as he possibly can, which, like the fucking swearing, feels so fucking forced and fucking unnecessary that you can't help but fucking forgive the fucking cunt. 

Did I mention it's exciting ? It's VERY exciting. It's an action novel from start to finish. And it is, genuinely, an excellent page-turner. It might be as shallow as a puddle and have characters as zero-dimensional and predictable as the cast of Love Island, but bugger me if I didn't keep wanting to know what was going to happen next. 

I'm gonna give this one a solid 7/10. It's clearly not trying to be anything other than an action novel (one exception : the character of Edward III, who is given vastly more thoughtful dialogue than the rest), and while it's nothing extraordinary in that regard, it does exactly what it needs to do. Judging it on its own terms, its only real weakness is the descriptive imagery, which varies from "poor" to "totally absent". Like the Essex Dogs themselves, it might not be pretty and it certainly isn't cultured, but it gets the job done.

Good Job, Dan. I have no idea why this is the first in a trilogy but good job all the same. Just don't stop writing the regular history books, please.

An Immense World (II)

This is the second part of my summary of the most interesting bits of An Immense World. In the first part we saw familiar senses being used in unfamiliar ways. In this concluding post, I'll look at the weirder, more exotic senses animals posses. Last time we saw colour being extended to different wavelengths, vision occurring at different speeds, and hearing revealing a world of insect communication hitherto unsuspected. These are fascinating enough, but here let's cover the senses which are completely unlike anything we've ever experienced.

Sounding

Though not the main topic of the book, as we saw last time, Yong gives some examples of how hearing can reveal surprising things about animal cognition. And the use of sound blurs the line between sensing and acting in other ways. Owls hunt using sound (though a directional accuracy of 1 degree hardly seems as impressive as Yong seems to think it is), and Yong speculates that cats might lie down to hunt to increase their sensitivity to ground vibrations. But of course some animals also use sound very much more actively. Sperm whales produce sounds of a truly staggering 236 decibels, which is frankly utterly ridiculous. What the hell are they using this for ?

Lots of things, probably. Sound like this could be used to stun or disorient prey. It could be for long-distance communication across entire oceans (elephants can use infrasound to communicate with other elephants several miles away). It could even be for sonar mapping of the ocean floor, with whales apparently behaving just as though they had such a map to work with. 

Yong explains in far more detail than Higgins just how staggeringly sophisticated animal sonar is. Bats desensitise their hearing out of phase with their chirping sequence to avoid deafening themselves, having to emit ~140 decibel blasts to achieve a decent range. They also focus their calls into narrow beams to extend the range further. Their vocal muscles are the fastest of any animal in order to produce sufficiently rapid calls. They can perceive differences in the return time of the echoes of just a single microsecond. This gives them information about their target which doesn't merely tell them how far away the whole thing is, but an imaging-like capability with literally millimetre precision. To aid this, their chirps aren't at just a single frequency, but sweep across a range of frequencies to get information on different spatial scales. There are even some bats which adjust the frequency based on the Doppler shift of their moving targets. And they adjust all this constantly to account for their own motion.

I find it nigh-on impossible to imagine what this must be like. It seems if anything to be like having a hand-held LIDAR system on you at all times. Does the bat have a mental image of its astonishingly complicated data, or does it perceive it as something else entirely ?

In one sense it doesn't matter. The important thing is the bat does get access to and makes use of this information. It uses the everyday familiar sense of hearing for a world view which is utterly alien to us. But all this is very demanding, so we may forgive the bats their occasional lapse into adorable incompetence :

They can distinguish two grades of sandpaper whose grains differ by half a millimetre, but will also plough headlong into a newly-installed cave door. They can discern flying insects by shape, but will go after a pebble launched into the air. Bats are fully capable of avoiding such errors. They're just not paying attention.

Then there are dolphins. Sound is even more potent underwater and dolphin sonar is astonishingly powerful. They can tell the difference between hollow metal cylinders that are externally identical but differ in thickness by the width of a hair. Once they've scanned an object without seeing it, they can identify it using vision alone - clear evidence that they really do understand the 3D shape of an object (with even better than visual fidelity) even if they're not using sonar to create an image per se.

And dolphins are literally living ultrasound scanners. They can tell if people are pregnant by yelling at them. They can work out the internal structure of their prey and sense their air bladders or if they have metal hooks inside them. 

Trying to imagine what it must be like to have such a sense is probably impossible. It seems very unlikely that sonar-equipped animals can process this immense level of detail in the same way that we process sound. Yong suggests that rather than being a sound-based version of vision, it might be more similar to touch - but none of our senses give us information about the internal structure of objects with anything like the capabilities of dolphin sonar, so no analogy is perfect. Of course, that's what makes it so fascinating.

Electromagnetism

While electric eels are famous for being able to electrocute potential threats, some fish can electrolocate. They create a weak electric field that surrounds them, in effect a weak current flowing through the water between electrosensors on their body. Any disturbances in the field - changes in conductivity due to different materials, changes in salinity - can be detected. For some fish this has become their primary umwelt, and then respond far more to the presence of metal in the water than they do an artificial light. Which makes sense if you live in a murky river where light isn't usually that important. To such creatures, metal shines like a light bulb, while actual light bulbs are nowhere near as impressive.

Like sonar, electrolocation can penetrate barriers. It's sensitive to both conductance and capacitance, is unaffected by turbulence. And it's instantaneous and omnidirectional, a big advantage over sonar, and may even afford something analogous to colour perception. The penalty is that creating a strong field is costly, so its range is far more limited : typically centimetres rather than metres, let alone anything further. The fish have compensated by evolving extreme agility and omnidirectional swimming capabilities, apparently oblivious to whether they're swimming forwards or backwards. What does your orientation matter if you can perceive everything in high resolution in all directions at once ?

However, while generating a field is difficult, sensing the fields deliberately generated by other fish is relatively easy. For communication purposes, electric fish can indeed perceive on scales of a few metres. And as with birdsong, the relevant information to them occurs on incredibly short timescales - microseconds. Nor is electroreception necessarily confined to fish, with evidence for a similar sense now being examined in bees and spiders. Like the ability to see ultraviolet colours or hear ultrasound, the "ultra" prefix is only a reflection of our own bias; it may, for many animals, just be normal.

What it's like, of course, is damned hard to say. Yong quotes some as likening it to touch. But the ability to have a direct sense of capacitance and conductivity is, as with sensing internal structure, really not something which has any obvious comparison.

Likewise with magnetic fields. It's well-known that some animals can navigate using the natural field of the Earth, and Yong says that turtles can sense both the inclination angle of the field and its intensity. They appear to be born with something akin to a magnetic map, enabling them to immediately navigate long journeys. It might not literally be a map as such, but a simple set of instructions : if the field is like this, go this way. But it serves the same purpose.

Higgins described two of the ways the magnetic sense could work but Yong offers a third : induction. Swimming induces a weak electric current in the water around it, and that current is affected by the magnetic field. So the animals may not be sensing the magnetic field itself but rather its affect on their electroreceptors. This would avoid much of the controversy around the other explanations, and could even apply to birds, which have conductive fluid in their inner ear which may respond to the Earth's magnetic field as they fly. Are they hearing magnetism ? We don't know. There's also evidence it's involved with their vision, so they may well be seeing it instead, or as well.

Yong closes this chapter with a look at the uncertainties, but comes across in a rather lazy footnote as having considerable skepticism about whether humans have an unconscious magnetic sense. Here I think Higgins does a much more thorough job in examining the work that's been done on this area, and it's a bit surprising to me that Yong would have kind of a problem with the notion of unconscious senses, let alone that they might not work well in all circumstances. Higgins addresses all these points quite thoroughly.

Hydrodynamics

This was the most interesting section of the book to me. While the sonar stuff is incredible, it's at least vaguely familiar. But while in What A Fish Knows (mainly concerned with cognition rather than senses) the author mentions the lateral line of fish that senses pressure changes in the water, Yong does a much better job of explaining just how amazing this is. It appears to be based on the sense of touch, but it's at least as different from our sense of touch is as sonar is from our sense of hearing. I'd go so far as to stay it's more like a direct sense of hydrodynamics.

But first, some more familiar uses. Like Higgins, Yong covers the star-nosed mole. He points out that touch can be sensitive at the molecular level, and notes that the mole in particular has an astonishingly rapid sense of touch - faster even than vision. So in stark contradiction to our intuition (at least mine), touch can be a sense that delivers as much information as vision does; after all, we don't receive the image we perceive directly, but the brain constructs it as our eyes continuously dart around. The mole can do the same with its nose, so it's entirely plausible that it creates the tactile equivalent of an image.

More familiar furry friends might be doing the same. Rats, mice and others can continuously move their whiskers several times a second, an action "delightfully known as whisking", which may be doing something very similar. Whiskers are of different lengths and orientations, and each one connects to different parts of the cortex. So again, building up something like a tactile image seems credible. 

It's marine animals where this difference becomes most apparent. Possessing a similar set of whiskers, blindfolded seals can sense the wake of a single fish from maybe as much as 200 m away, several minutes after the fish has passed. This, to a human, is altogether weird. It's a sense that provides as much information as vision, is similar to smell in that it provides information about the recent past, but it works more like touch. Seals can tell from hydrodynamics alone the size and shape of a fish, the direction it was swimming, and are so sensitive that, at close range, they can even feel the water pushed by the motion of their gills. Fish themselves, with their lateral line sensors that similarly detect the flow of water, can still form schools even when blind. Crocodiles too have special bumps on their snout that can detect flow, and apparently use this for detecting prey, mates, and their own young.

But hydrodynamic senses may not be limited to the water. Birds too have feathers that appear to be specialised for detecting airflow, while bats have hairs that do the same thing. And the most sensitive case of all is found in a spider, which can detect airflows as slow as a centimetre per minute. It can detect the absurdly small flows produced by its tiny prey, which itself may have similarly extreme powers of sensitivity. And they are, truly, extreme : "They can be deflected by a fraction of the energy in a single photon. These hairs are a hundred times more sensitive than visual receptor that exists, or could possibly exist." Why they have this outrageous level of sensitivity remains a mystery.

Conclusions

A running theme of the book is that sensory organs can be used for multiple purposes. In his conclusions Yong goes further, noting that different sensors can be unified much like in synaesthesia. For example, the platypus' bill contains both electrical and touch sensors, but with the neurons in its brain receiving signals from both together - suggesting it has a combined sense of "electrotouch". Mosquitoes have sensors that response to both temperature and chemistry, while ant antennas respond to touch and smell.

Sensors are also integral to cognition. We've seen examples of how behaviour can only be fully understood by trying to appreciate the umwelt even of very familiar animals, but it can go further than that. The brain is to an extent a prediction engine, generating what it expects to perceive and comparing expectations with reality, but how it does this - how, for instance, it can fill in details like missing or scrambled words, or remove repeated words - is a mystery. More on this when I eventually review Livewired.

While Yong doesn't go into the history of research in as much depth as Higgins, he more directly conveys the sense of frustration of certain researchers more clearly. Although he doesn't ever really got for the "lone genius" myth, it's clear that a lot of what's now taken as dogma was one dismissed within the scientific realm as quackery. Now this goes quite against my own instincts of academia but the book is so replete with examples of this that it has to be taken seriously. Perhaps there's something peculiar in the life sciences ? Then again, Yong only presents anecdotes. Someone should do a rigorous statistical history to see just how often apparently silly claims turn out to be true : what fraction of lunatic claims are just that, what fraction of the scientific community dismisses the results, how this manifests itself in papers compared to more popular writings, etc. But I digress.

I'll end with two points. First, Yong is a materialist, noting that stories about transferring our minds to other beings are simply impossible : 

"An animal's sensory world is the result of solid tissues that detect real stimuli and produces cascades of electrical signals. It is not separate from the body, but of it. You simply can't imagine how a human mind would work in a bat's body or an octopus's, because it wouldn't work."

This is a view I personally find to be extraordinarily mad. After making it clear in such detail that our perception of the world is not a "real" thing but dependent wholly upon arbitrary sensors, to then insist that our senses are directly perceiving reality itself is a truly strange claim. No, there is something out there that induces something in here, but to imply you've got a full picture of that whilst simultaneous admitting that other entities will experience something radically different is just silly nonsense, frankly. More on that here.

Finally, I began this summary/review with butterflies. As I said, Yong doesn't consider these explicitly, but there seems enough here to speculate as to how they perform such incredible feats of agility. First, their vision may not be very high resolution, but it's likely extremely fast, so they have in effect plenty of time to work out what's going on. They might have somewhat sharper vision than we guess, considering they can probably sense UV - which might at least help them further in distinguishing other butterflies from everything else, along with hypersensitive smell. And they can probably sense the tiny airflows from each other's wingbeats. The key lesson here is that there's so much more to the familiar world around us than we would ever normally suspect. It really is just as the title says : an immense world.

Review : An Immense World (I)

It's time to review another book about animal senses. This time I'm going to try and minimise any philosophical discussions and keep things as brief as I can.

... I tried, I really tried. But I still ended up having to split this one in two. In this first post, I'll give the obligatory review and cover what Yong says about some more familiar, everyday senses : smell, vision, pain and hearing. In the next post I'll look at the weirder, more exotic senses : sonar, electromagnetic, and hydrodynamic.

The Review Bit

I was a bit worried that being of such a similar topic, Ed Yong's An Immense World would be a bit too similar to Jackie Higgin's Sentient. It's not. There is some overlap, but the two are largely complementary, each providing content that the other misses. Yong is sometimes a bit more skeptical than Higgins, but more focused on the senses of animals themselves. Whereas Higgins' goal is explicitly to make comparisons with human abilities, concentrating heavily on their raw capabilities, Yong tries to grasp the animals' own experiences, which Higgins only touches on here and there. Yong tries very hard to work out not just what animals are capable of, but what's actually important and relevant to them.

Yong can sometimes be just a tad accusative and judgemental ("the once-popular series Game of Thrones"), but also has a more emotive writing style without sacrificing one whit of detail or being overly-schmultzy. Conversely, Higgin's greatest strength is explaining the agonising efforts required to do real, hard science, examining the research process itself in a thoroughly engaging way, whereas Yong largely sticks to reporting the current findings (though he does summarise the process by which these were obtained and doesn't shy away from controversy).

If I had to choose, I'd give it to Yong. Though not as in-depth as Higgins, he still conveys the uncertainty of the scientific process sufficiently well, and describes additional senses that Higgins, thanks to her own remit of comparisons with humans, does not. And, though he does have one or two throwaway remarks which are just plain silly (and some parts where I strongly disagree), I find his writing style just a nudge... better. I happily give this one an outstanding 9/10.

Right, so what's the most interesting stuff in this wonderful book ?

The Umwelt

This is a very useful concept of, quite simply, the sensory experience of the world. There is only one external world, but everything perceives this differently. You might recall my own amazement at how butterflies can perform astonishing feats of precision agility despite having much worse vision than most humans; the book doesn't look at this example directly, but provides a good many clues to understanding how this is possible.

Different umwelts mean that no organism has a unique claim on a special knowledge of reality itself. Photons perform supremely well in some situations but are useless in others. Just because vision is our primary sense in no way gives it any special claim to be observing the "true" reality, and the attempt to grasp other umwelts is intrinsically fascinating, however limited it must be.

This did make me wonder if the analogy can be useful culturally. Human sensory umwelts are mostly similar to each other, but our cultural ones - especially politically - can seem at times to be totally different. What to one person seems like a laudable improvement can be to others a terrible corruption; or more basically, an obsessive football fan experiences an entirely different world to a virtuoso violinist. Perhaps this doesn't offer anything more than the standard filter bubbles / echo chamber analogy, but it did make me wonder.

Smell

I have to mention this if only because Yong answers Higgin's irritatingly-unanswered question : are dogs really much better at smelling than we are ? Higgins gets bogged down in quantification and fails to come up with a clear answer, whereas Yong says it directly : yes. He emphasises that trying to quantify it is a mistake. Knowing how many neurons an animal dedicates to smell, or even how complex or large its sensory apparatus is, doesn't really tell you much about how much of its unwelt is smell-based. Dog behaviour, however, unarguably demonstrates that smell is much more important to dogs than people, even if the human sense of smell is traditionally underrated.

Imaging

Animal vision is weird. Although it's been reported, motion blindness in humans is incredibly rare. But apparently in spiders it's perfectly normal for some eyes to be unable to register motion at all. In animals with larger numbers of eyes, they don't all just provide imaging of different areas but do qualitatively different tasks : some give different resolution, some are dedicated to motion, some are different to different wavelengths, some are better are seeing high contrast features, some are specialised for low-light conditions, etc.

Scallops take this to extremes. They may have a sort of "distributed vision" system which each eye contributes only a small part of the whole. But weirdly, their brains are so simple it could be that they don't actually perceive vision at all - rather they've outsourced all vision-related tasks to the eyes themselves. The eyes might be triggering the appropriate response (seek food, close shell, etc.) without any processing by the brain. Yong likens this to our sense of touch, in that this too doesn't build up a 3D picture of the world around it. But it's a bit of an odd comparison, and perhaps better would be the taste buds in our internal organs - they register something but we don't perceive their stimuli. To be fair, the idea of "nociception" - sensations which are registered but are consciously unperceived - is dealt with elsewhere.

Still, I'm not much persuaded that scallops could exist in a world of perpetual blindsight. Likewise some animals appear to create colours they themselves cannot perceive, while many animals appear to have abilities we would expect to require high resolution optics even though they don't. 

This suggests there may be compensating factors (beyond their additional senses). While human vision is pretty near the top of the tree in terms of angular resolution, we're mediocre in terms of processing speed : dogs are about 25% faster, birds can be more than twice as fast, while insects can be almost six times as fast as us. So many animals have, in effect, a lot longer to scrutinise a scene and work out what they're seeing. For a fly, we may appear as nothing more than a blur, but it can take its time to work out whether that blur is approaching dangerously or just passing by.

One other example of how the different umwelt can affect our understanding of behaviour : cows. Unlike humans they perceive their visual field with equal resolution and attention across their whole field of view. So they don't turn their heads to watch passers-by not because they're lazy or uncaring, but because they just don't need to.

Remember that next time you're out in the countryside. Even if they don't turn to look at you, the cows are always watching.

Colour

Initially I thought that Yong gave a very nice overview of colour perception. I felt stupid for not realising that colour is generated in the same way was astronomers define colour : by subtracting one wavelength band from another. And two of the three wavebands that humans are sensitive to are surprisingly similar, which makes me wonder why we didn't evolved to sense more different wavelengths - an obvious question that Yong strangely doesn't raise.

... and thinking about it now, I got carried away (this is one reason I find doing these write-ups so useful). Yong also says in a throwaway statement that colour and wavelength are interchangeable but this is just not true at all*. Sure, there may well be a strong correlation between wavelength and experiential colour, but it can't possibly be the whole story, and so by the same token, neither can opponency (waveband subtraction). Yong doesn't much mention illusions either. 

* Similarly he claims audio frequency has a perfect correlation with perceived pitch. I'm not sure about this. However, he mentions this in the section on smell, noting that there's no way to match chemistry with perceived odour, so he does at least recognise the key aspect of qualia.

In fact, the more I think about it the worse this gets. Someone pointed out recently that after-image colour illusions are the result of activity in the eye which continues after the original stimulus. So Yong contradicts himself by saying that colour perfectly correlates with wavelength and then describing it as opponency, and also fails to demonstrate how this works given that there are plenty of examples in which the brain creates different colours from the same input signal. At the least, colour is not uniquely generated by instantaneous local signals : the perceived colour of one small region is affected both by what we saw previously and what we continue to see in the surroundings. Yong doesn't mention any of this.

But let's move on. While it's well-known that some animals can see wavelengths we cannot, Yong reveals that UV vision is downright common - in fact, it's the norm. I wonder if the shorter wavelength also helps compensate for their otherwise poor resolution, since the shorter wavelength means a smaller diffraction limit, but Yong doesn't mention this.

More dramatically, since colour is (I guess at least in part) formed by opponency, the more wavebands you're sensitive to, the more colours you perceive. Dogs and cats are dichromats (they don't see in black and white, but they do see fewer colours than us), humans are mainly trichromats, but a few of us and some animals can see four wavebands - which would give them the potential of seeing hundreds of times more colours than we can.

That sounds pretty awesome, but Yong pours a bit of cold water on this. Amazingly, gene therapy can allow trichromatic male squirrel monkeys to become tetrachromats, with resulting tests showing that indeed they could perceive new colours. But it didn't change their day-to-day behaviour very much. Likewise the handful of tetrachromatic humans don't seem to be going around continuously staggering with awe and their kaleidoscopic explosion of unimaginable rainbows, because for them, it's normal. Without colours having some known meaning, seeing new colours is apparently no big deal.

Of course Yong also covers the mantis shrimp. Popularised by the Oatmeal because it has no less than twelve colour receptors, sadly the comic was premature. Tests show it's not great at distinguishing colours at all. The latest theory about what's going on is that it might be sensing colours in a totally different, in some ways simpler way : each waveband doesn't overlap much with the others, so it might be seeing just twelve discreet colours instead. True, it can see circularly polarised light, but apparently the only things it needs this for are for other mantis shrimp - otherwise, this remarkable sort of vision isn't actually much of a perceptual breakthrough; its view of the world is certainly different to ours, but not especially advantageous.

As in Sentient, it's clear that sensory organs can be repurposed and might not always work the way we think we do. For instance, while the heat sensors of beetles work remarkably like photomultiplier tubes - turning minute signals into substantial ones - those sensors are unrelated to their eyes and function completely differently. How do they actually perceive this ? 

Snakes are even more of a challenge. They have heat-sensitive pits of such fidelity that their heat sense alone is enough to guide them to a specific body part of their prey when blindfolded. But while infra-red is just a longer wavelength of light, again the pits don't seem to have anything to do with their eyes. Do they perceive images from the pits directly ? Does the brain combine it as another colour with the visual signals from their eyes somehow ? Or do they sense it in a completely different way altogether, not forming an image of any kind ? We just don't know.

Pain

Yong notes throughout that animals sense what they need to sense. We've already seen examples where animals can sense but not perceive, and pain and temperature exemplify this. The pain we feel from spicy foods just isn't experienced by some animals at all, possibly because they simply don't need to sense that. Likewise temperature. Our sense of what's warm and cold is not an absolute; in all likelihood, animals that live in conditions that feel unsuitable to us don't feel so to them.

Here Yong makes another of his extremely silly statements. He says that the "unfortunate persistence of dualism" is responsible for people equating "subjective" with "woolly" and "imagined". I think this is just stupid. If anything, dualism would be more ready to accept that a subjective experience is no less valid or real than a physical one. Likewise, he says that the complexity of the brain may impose a lower limit on brain size below which consciousness is just not possible, which I think is very far from convincing (Planta Sapiens is next on my reading list).

The moral question here is of course which animals feel pain. Here Yong is much more cautious. I frequently see knee-jerk claims on the internet that of course all animals can feel pain, but we ourselves don't automatically register all damaging sensations as pain - and for the important reason that this can help us extricate ourselves from danger before the pain becomes distracting.

Because we know that we can sense some things without consciously perceiving them, it is entirely credible to suggest that some animals might have no conscious experience of pain at all. Yong errs strongly on the side of caution, noting that while crabs have apparently rudimentary nervous systems, their behaviour clearly suggests they experience pain nonetheless; squid appear to feel the effects of injuries with their whole body even when the damage is localised. About the only firm conclusion here is that the experience of many animals is clearly different to our own. The sentiment I get from this section is that we should presume but verify that animals can feel pain, and shouldn't expect it to be the same as our own - after all, many of their other senses are demonstrably different.

Hearing

Perhaps one of the clearest examples of the importance of the umwelt comes from the treehopper. These little insects produce a veritable plethora of extraordinary sounds, from rumble like an alligator to a "half moo, half scream", or a "hooting monkey with mechanical clicks". And like wandering into a silent disco, we're totally oblivious to the whole thing - not because the sounds are too faint or the wrong frequency, or because they're rare or exotic, but because they transmit them through the surface vibrations of plants rather than through the air.

When you realise an animal has all this extra information on which to base its decisions, you can't help but re-evaluate its behaviour in terms of intelligence. Yong doesn't dwell much on cognition in the book but he makes a couple of interesting remarks here. First, he describes in some detail how spiders respond to vibrations on their webs. But he also notes that spiders are fully capable of adjusting their webs to respond differently to different prey : e.g., when hungry they can increase the sensitivity to smaller items. There's an interplay here : the sensitivity of the web determines what the spider will hunt, but the spider can itself decide what the sensitivity should be. So I might be willing to cautiously revise my earlier opinion that a spider's web does not count as extended cognition.

Second, while songbirds typically have regular calls consisting of repetitive sequences, that's apparently not always what's important to them. Just as sight operates at different frequencies, so too does sound, with birds being able to distinguish very much finer structures in the sound than we can. Apparently, for some species it's this fine structure which they're listening to, not anything as crude as the major order of the notes. So while it's often claimed that no animal species has a true human-like language, this may only be a human bias in us examining things which are important from our perspective : what matters to the animals can be completely imperceptible to us. They have a wealth of different and extra information they're sending and receiving, and it's this we need to consider, not what we experience with our own senses.

Not that we should go nuts with this. Some responses do seem to be purely instinctual; while I found Higgin's claims about pheromones to be lacking in detail, Young says that some crickets have a hearing system wired directly to automatically produce responses to the song's of the opposite gender. At least some behaviours have no real thought (or at least no agency or choice) behind them at all.

Those are the familiar sorts of senses, then. I've glossed over smell because Yong doesn't really add anything new to Higgins. And I'm leaving touch for the next post, as some animals use this in such a radically different way that it's barely recognisable in terms of the kind of touch we're familiar with. Already, though, we can see that animal umwelts can be dramatically different from our own, with a running theme being that this is dependent on what animals need to be able to sense : penguins probably don't feel cold in Antarctica but rather feel normal; animals that suffer no great harm from losing a limb or a tail probably don't feel the agonising pain that we would in a comparable situation. Next time I'll look more at how radically different the umwelt can really be.

Blocking the Gender Reform Bill is authoritarian, but not for the reasons you might think

Westminster's decision to invoke section 35 and block Holyrood's gender reform bill has rightly made a lot of people very upset. And yet accusations that this is a nakedly authoritarian move, that it's a direct attack on Scottish democracy, are far from convincing. That's not to say they're without foundation, but there's probably a good dollop of hyperbole in here too.

Let me first re-iterate that I think Boris Johnson was a pseudo-fascist lying piece of shit and that Liz Truss was as thick as a plank. I'm not going to pull any punches when I think the Tories are undermining democracy for their own petty power games. I despise them to the core.

But just because they're a bunch of dishonest racist powermongers does not mean that every single thing the government does is infused with a sheer malevolent lust for spite, a wilful desire to go into people's homes at night and wreck up the place. Sometimes they're just unthinking idiots. Occasionally, if only through sheer fluke, they actually get things right. So which is it this time ?

On the surface it might at first seem that it's a strange thing to suggest that gender equality is a reserved power for the Westminster central government. While it's pretty obvious that things like foreign relations are necessarily not the purview of the devolved administrations, this is far less clear for things which could in principle be entirely internal matters. After all, Northern Ireland has markedly different rulings concerning same-sex marriage, abortion and the like.

But this turns out to be because the devolution rules are different in each region. While Northern Ireland does have "equal opportunities" as a transferred power, this is not the case for the Scottish and Welsh governments. And so straight away it becomes apparent that if the Scottish parliament is giving more equal gender-based opportunities, it has stepped outside of its mandate, even if that would be a progressive, desirable thing.

As I see it there are three aspects to this. There's the purely legal, whether this is permissible under law or not - the absolute bottom line. But there's also the moral, whether this would be a good thing for the affected individuals. And there's the political, the effect this will have on Westminster-Holyrood relations.

First, let's look at the legalities. I listened to Alister Jack's statement in the Commons but it was probably about 90% waffle. Fortunately the official Statement of Reasons he kept referring to is much better. As a non-lawyer it seems pretty clear to me from reading this, taking it at face value, that Westminster is on very secure legal footing here. 

The 2010 Act makes “sex” a protected characteristic and makes provisions about when conduct relating to that protected characteristic is unlawful. Section 9 of the 2004 Act provides that unless exceptions apply, the effect of a full GRC is that “for all purposes” the person’s sex becomes as certified. As a matter of general principle, a full GRC has the effect of changing the sex that a person has as a protected characteristic for the purposes of the 2010 Act.[footnote 2] This is subject to a contrary intention being established in relation to the interpretation of particular provisions of the 2010 Act.

The 2010 Act as a whole was carefully drafted in the light of, and reflecting, the specific limits of the 2004 Act and the relative difficulty with which a person could legally change their sex “for all purposes” (per s.9), including under the 2010 Act itself. The Bill alters that careful balance.

The Bill does not purport to require that a Scottish GRC issued under its terms would have any legal effect other than in Scots law; it could not, within legislative competence, have done so. It is highly problematic both in principle and practically for a citizen of the UK to have a different gender, and legal sex (including for the purposes of the 2010 Act), depending upon where they happen to be within the UK, and which system of law applies to them. It is practically and legally undesirable for all, including in particular the individual holder of the GRC, that a person will have one legal sex in Scotland and a different one in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The legislative consent motion that was passed by the Scottish Parliament alongside the GRA 2004 recognised, at that time, the desirability of having a single coherent regime for obtaining a GRC which applied uniformly across the UK. That desirability has not changed.

I mean... yeah, I can see how people being of legally different genders in different parts of the UK would be problematic. It does not at all seem like an egregious case of draconian, authoritarian overreach for Westminster to say that Acts previously agreed with the other devolved governments as national issues, which are quite explicitly reserved matters, should remain as such. Indeed, for the Scottish government to now unilaterally decide that it can legislate on this seems almost like a deliberately provocative move on their part, and conversely, Westminster is duty-bound to block this because otherwise it opens a Pandora's box of potential unfairness. It has to prevent devolved governments from acting on reserved matters, otherwise it's in a legal nightmare with no clear rules as to who can legislate on what at all.

What of the second aspect, morality ? My view is that here Westminster is more obviously at fault. It lists the reasons for making gender certification a difficult process in the 2004 Act as being "safeguards" which it views as still necessary; legal or not, it clearly doesn't approve of the new proposal. 

The amendments made by the Bill to the 2004 Act will make it quicker and easier for Scottish applicants to obtain a full GRC, removing a number of measures which the UK government regards as important safeguards, including:

• the removal of the requirement for an applicant to have or have had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (and, correspondingly, the removal of the requirement for an applicant to provide medical reports with their application)
• a reduction in the minimum age for applicants from 18 to 16
• a reduction in the period for which an applicant must have lived in their acquired gender before submitting an application, from 2 years to 3 months (or 6 months for applicants aged under 18), alongside the introduction of a mandatory 3 month reflection period
• the removal of the requirement for an applicant to provide any evidence that they have lived in their acquired gender when submitting an application
• the removal of the requirement for a Panel to be satisfied that the applicant meets the criteria, with applications instead being made to the Registrar General for Scotland.

Now, maybe in 2004 this was a progressive piece of legislation - cautious, yes, but there's nothing wrong with incremental progress. The problem is the government doesn't want to make any progress. Personally I don't see any of these conditions (except possibly the age) as "important safeguards" at all, rather as government interference in personal liberty. And to be honest, I do have some reservations about the whole notion of self-identifying one's gender. But I mean, we're talking about issuing certificates here. We're not talking about surgery. The Bill wouldn't allow anyone to wander in off the street to their nearest hospital and declare, "I demand you chop off my willy !" or, "Give me boobies, dammit !".

No, the initial caution of the original Act was fine. But the right approach would then have been to progressively relax its restrictions as it became clear that the detrimental effects of gender certification were negligible.

The third, political aspect is more complex. Is Holyrood deliberately provoking Westminster ? The vast majority of people do not care about gender certification because it will never affect them. So it would make sense for a Scottish government to deliberately demonstrate the limits of their own power and how Westminster still has all the real power. A manufactured crisis is at least plausible; that Westminster's block is legal is neither here nor there - that the Tories also don't like it on its own terms makes it easy to play as a culture war.

On the other hand, the government's declaration that it has only done this reluctantly, and that this was an option of last resort, rings very hollow. What steps, if any, have they actually taken to avoid this ? None so far as I can tell. They could at the very least have made it clear to everyone that equal opportunities are a reserved matter. They didn't. They don't appear to have engaged in any pre-emptive discussions at all, nor made any attempt to raise this as a Westminster issue. 

Saying, "if Holyrood presents us with an alternative, we'll consider it" after the fact is basically useless. What exactly are the sticking points here ? Give some indication of what should be adjusted. Is it the "safeguards" ? In that case things are probably at an impasse. But if it's the legal application of the certificates, as to whether those obtained in one region are legally valid in another, that ought to be possible to adjust. Since the Scottish Bill would apply only to those people born or ordinarily resident in Scotland, any concerns about GRC-tourism would seem to be avoided entirely. Allowing GRCs issued in one region to be legally valid across the whole UK would create a postcode lottery, but might be a way to circumvent the thorny issue reserved matters.

All this reminds me of the Supreme Court's ruling that the Scottish government cannot itself call a referendum on independence, even an explicitly advisory one. Legally, this makes perfect sense. It's a reserved matter with unavoidable practical consequences, and in many ways Scotland is not separate from the UK at all : Westminster and Holyrood are, supposedly at least, one and the same on some issues. The problem is that they don't see themselves this way, and that if Holyrood wants something Westminster isn't prepared to grant it, it has no real options at all.

I'm also slowly reading my way through Labour's 155-page report on its plans for the UK's future. And I have to agree, we are hyper-centralised, and what's worse, we're incoherent in our devolution. It doesn't make sense that Northern Ireland can have equal opportunities as a devolved matter but the other countries can't. 

So while there may well be some element of Westminster trying to browbeat Holyrood into submission, it's likely not a case of flagrant authoritarian overreach. It's a much trickier issue, a flaw in the system itself. True, another government could have taken steps to avoid the Bill being raised at all, or made it legally possible to accept. It could have accepted the need for greater devolution. But ultimately, any government in this situation would be legally obligated to reject it. What the Tories have done is inappropriately deploy their legitimate option of last resort as their first response.

This is a valuable stress-test that points to the urgent need for reform. Independence would be one solution, federalisation another : but I'll bet you anything you like the Tory "solution" will be to at best do absolutely sod-all and at worst to insult the Scots. That, not the rejection of the Bill itself, is what marks them out as authoritarian and anti-democratic : their utter refusal to engage with other points of view.

EDIT : The thread here has some very interesting and in-depth discussion on whether the Bill really does infringe on reserved matters or not. Unsurprisingly, this turns out to be complicated. The court case will undoubtedly be another must-see episode in the ongoing hit series that is Modern Politics.

Harry's Wondrous World

Prince Harry is a twat. He's a massive douchebag. In fact, he's a colossal, walking arse that just goes around bumping into things and spewing crap all over the place. He is, in short, as dumb as a plank, and I don't like him.

Honestly there's not much else I'm going to say in this post. I really, really do not care about the Prince of Thickos but the news has been so saturated with coverage lately I've decided to get things out of my system.

Actually that's a good lead-in point. Not so long ago, I would have some considerable praise for the Princes for their charitable donations in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. I also felt that there was abundant evidence that the UK media had been hugely unfair in their coverage of Harry and Megan. And that point is probably still true, but the thing is, just because there are two sides to a story doesn't mean that either is correct. In this case, I'm pretty sure that they're both shite.

What I mean is, when H&M decided to up-shop and migrate to America-land, I didn't much mind that they gave an interview to Oprah, even if it was a pretty useless and massively overrated one. Fine, you're giving an interview about how much you hate the press - but that's less ironic than it seems. By all means, get it out of your system. I totally get that. Tell your side of the story and move on. Fair enough.

But... after that, you have to shut the hell up, or your point is null and void. That's just how it works.

Did they ?

No. They've courted the media spotlight with determination that would shame a pimp. Instead of getting an actual job, they've thrived on spewing their boring tale about how much the media hates them by selling their story to the media.

Sigh.

I've not watched any of the interviews nor read the book, and I'm not going to. But I do very much like this unusually unrestrained review from the BBC :

Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent.

What other royal recollection would cover losing his virginity behind a pub, or go into such prolonged detail about a frost-bitten penis? This royal appendage gets more lines than many of his relatives. Maybe there should be a spoiler alert for the special cushion that's made.

He describes his lonely life at home, self-medicating with psychedelic drugs, drying his clothes on a radiator [my god, really ? a RADIATOR ? my heart bleeds] and planning shopping trips like military raids, to be carried out in disguise and at speed.

What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights. No one worries about paying gas bills in this book. He's back and forth to Africa like he was going a few stops on the Northern Line.

Although, that would have been more exotic for him because he says the only time he got on a Tube train was on a school trip.

He just seems to be degenerating into ever-more incoherent nonsense. That first point is for me insurmountable : you can't credibly claim to hate the media and then go on to whore yourself out to the media, it's just not possible. But then for good measure he also does things like say that his remarks about the Taliban were "taken out of context" without providing any context, blames everyone else for him leaving the royal family despite him being the one to insult everyone in public, and claims that writing the book was "therapy" without realising that writing and publishing are two different things, and claims that he was systematically abused when all that seems to have happened was some modest unpleasantness, and somehow expects that by doing all this in public things will get better because sure, everyone loves having their dirty laundry exposed for all to see. That's definitely going to have them come crawling back to poor Princess Harry.

Oh, and just like the rest of the media, he calls things "leaks", when in fact what happened was that the book was published in Spain. In no sense can actually releasing the book in a different country be called a "leak". You wanted that information in the public domain - forgetting that some people can speak different languages doesn't mean there was any impropriety here. Good grief.

Get over yourself, FFS. He's properly mental. Sure, he's experienced tragedy, but haven't we all ? You don't get unlimited passes for that. You certainly don't deserve a humanitarian award for having done pretty much sod-all.

Or more likely, he's doing it all for money. I mean, he's got all the time in the world but the book was bloody ghost written. This is stupid. What's more likely : he's making an earnest attempt at reconciliation with his self-estranged family by having someone else write a book about how awful they are, or he's a money-grabbing, attention-seeking twat ?

Now I'd despite all this, I'd describe myself as a monarchist... but not a royalist. I mean, I'm comfortable with the idea of there being a monarchical figurehead; I won't say it's the ideal system (that's another conversation altogether), but it's certainly not the worst. Having some rich twerp wave their arms and wear a crown is a lot better than an actual despot, even - perhaps especially - an elected one.

But I'm no fanboy of the royals themselves. I have as much interest in their tedious antics as the most vehement republican. I think the national anthem is a dirge and if I had to choose between listening to the William Shatner's terrible, terrible album on repeat or watch rolling news coverage of the birth of yet another stupid royal baby, it'd be even-stevens at best.

Likewise, as by now should be clear if it wasn't before, I enjoy hyperbole. I find Franky Boyle frequently hilarious. Cards Against Humanity has me in stitches and the more offensive the content, the better (more relevantly, perhaps, I find The Windsors hilarious). Laughing at jokes that would make Jimmy Carr blush does not mean I endorse the content in any way, because, you see, I'm not an imbecile. I'm perfectly capable of laughing at things precisely because they would be absolutely awful if they were intended with any seriousness, not because I secretly believe that all gingers should be drowned at birth and have finally found an outlet for my hitherto-supressed anti-ginger bloodlust.

... that Harry is in fact very very ginger, is a coincidence, I swear !

But, just as monarchist <> royalist, there's a distinction to be made here : this has to be done in its proper place. Hence I don't find anything offensive about Jeremy Clarkson's recent comments about Megan, because this was so bloody obviously not intended as anything serious (even if Megan herself was perfectly entitled to be outraged). That people are often incapable of making this rudimentary distinction is further support for my theory of psychology that holds simply that People Are Stupid.

What I mean is, by all means have your terrible feuds. Call each other whatever awful names you want. But while people too often can't see that something is not intended with any degree of seriousness, what is harmless enough in private can be genuinely damaging in public. So Harry, please, just shut the fuck up already. Leave us all alone. And, more importantly, media, stop paying him the slightest bit of attention. "Literally entitled rich dude is unhappy" is not a headline-worthy news piece. Stephen Colbert I'd hope would have known better. Sigh.

There, I've got it out of my system. As per my stipulations, I will say no more about Prince Harry, his silly wife, or their no-doubt awful children any further. Now if only everyone else would kindly do the same...