The Evolution of Cats and Dogs

What is a 'theory'? What does this word even mean? A podcast I particularly enjoy, and recommend to my readers, is the DarkHorse podcast hosted by Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, in which they cover a wide range of topics, focussing particularly on evolutionary theory, and on human and animal biology in the era of Covid 19. Although I haven't seen all of the podcasts, I find all the talks I've seen fascinating and stimulating. (They will upload their latest podcast later today American time by the way.) But I don't always agree with everything they say. In the sixteenth of the series, Bret presents a maverick opinion concerning the way, in his view, people misuse the word 'theory'. In Bret's view, the word 'theory' should be applied to explanations for data that have the solid backing of a scientific and general consensus. Thus we can speak of the Theory of Relativity because all physicists and most lay people believe in this theory; we can't speak of a Theory of Phlogiston because chemists have long since discarded it. (This is not to say that it wasn't once a theory. It was indeed but went extinct in the second half of the eighteenth century.) The motive behind Weinstein's claim that theories express explanations that have wide or universal scientific acceptance is that he wants to counter the people who say, "Evolution is just a theory. No one's proved it." He is contending against the religious fundamentalists who think Creationism should be taught alongside Darwinian Evolution in schools as a viable alternative. In his view, a theory begins as a notion, develops into a testable hypothesis, and then becomes a theory when it wins the support of a preponderance of experts in the particular field the initial notion fits into. A theory is something generally accepted as true. This puts Weinstein into a difficult position with respect to 'conspiracy theories' such as the theory that the moon-landing in 1969 was a hoax. In Bret Weinstein's view, this should be described as a 'conspiracy hypothesis' or perhaps only a 'conspiracy notion' rather than a 'conspiracy theory'. The only things that can be described as conspiracy theories are beliefs about conspiracies that are generally accepted to be true. Thus, although we can't talk about an Area 51 conspiracy theory, we can talk about the Watergate conspiracy theory.

I try to use language precisely and clearly. As a result, I find myself in disagreement with Bret Weinstein – I feel he is trying to redefine words to push his own agenda. In another episode, for instance, he tries to convince the audience that seals are actually bears, a counterintuitive claim that seems plausible because it is so surprising. But we should try to use language in the way it has been given to us, either by other people or by lexicographers. My dictionary defines 'theory' principally as 'a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained". There is nothing in this definition that suggests a theory must have popular support; I might have a theory that no one else in the world shares but it could still, by this definition, be a theory. Likewise, Creationism is a theory – it just so happens that it is not a theory endorsed by very many people within the biology community. Rather than say that the Theory of Darwinian Evolution is true by definition, I think that Weinstein should take the position that some theories are better, more likely to be true, than others. I actually think biology teachers at high schools should teach the controversy or at least make a nod towards it. They should say, "The theory I am going to teach you, the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, is the theory accepted by most biologists and, because this is a biology class, this is the theory I am going to teach you. Some people believe the theory that the world was created in 4004BC by God and that the Bible is literally true. There are lots of others who believe the Upanishads are literally true. But because this is a biology class, I am going to teach you biology. You can read up about the Upanishads in your own time."

In tonight's post, I am going to present a theory, an evolutionary explanation for homosexuality. I know this seems inconsistent with earlier posts – I have criticised Darwinism in the past and probably will do so again in the future. But just because I do not believe in the Darwinian evolutionary mechanism, Survival of the Fittest, does not mean I don't believe in evolution. The theory I wish to present is speculative, a notion that may not even rise to the status of hypothesis, although it does make testable predictions, as I shall describe later. I want to present it almost as a kind of thought experiment – how could homosexuality have evolved? In earlier posts, most clearly in the post "Shoplifters of the World, Unite and Take Over", I have given an alternative explanation for homosexuality but in this post I wish to explain it on another level. Some people say, "The cause of crime is poverty" and this is true, even though a particular crime, such as a robbery or mugging, has a myriad of causes, not least the free decision of the criminal. What I wish to theorise about in this post is why homosexuality is possible – I wish to account for the potentiality of homosexuality among humans. The ideas I wish to present may not be original with me. A book was published a couple of years ago that may have explored similar ideas: I haven't read it and have forgotten its name but I mentioned it in an earlier post. Bret Weinstein has also threatened to unleash a hypothesis on the world concerning homosexuality but, as far as I know, hasn't done so yet.

It is reasonable to suppose that fifteen thousand years ago, and perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years before then, humans and the ancestors of humans lived in groups, troops, of perhaps fifty individuals. The size of a typical troop is a pure guess on my part. A troop would compete against other troops for resources and there would be a strong incentive for significant cohesion within a particular troop. Children would be born to a troop and raised collectively by a troop. I would like to suggest that in this prehistoric milieux, the ancestors of modern humans were bisexual and promiscuous, like Bonobo monkeys. The exact social structure of a typical troop is difficult to determine today but anthropologists and sociobiologists could perhaps make some educated guesses about it. Between 11,500 years ago and 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution occurred – plants and animals were domesticated, a change that must have resulted in significant social alterations. For one thing, the number of individuals in a particular group would have massively increased, making it less rewarding for men to raise offspring who might not be their own. A mutation appeared and spread through human populations. Humans born with this mutation had an inclination towards heterosexual monogamy, a mutation that made it more likely that men were raising their own children and ensured that women were supported when raising their children in a culture that had become more atomised and less collective. The idea of romantic love had been born. This change in sexual behaviour and culture became the dominant mode, the new norm.

This tension between the older hunter-gatherer sexuality and the sexuality of more modern humans persists today. I shall call humans who exhibit the older behaviour 'dogs' and the humans who exhibit the more modern behaviour 'cats'. In using these tags, I am not saying anything about the sexual practice of actual dogs and cats – rather they are just useful labels. Readers of my blog may remember that when I experienced my first psychotic episode, in 2007, I formed the paranoid delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world. I believed that homosexuals were the ones having children and heterosexuals weren't, that heterosexuality was being systematically weeded out of the gene pool. In those days, I was obsessed by 'cats' and 'dogs' – I thought that I had to choose to identify as one or the other. I refused to choose because I didn't know what the terms meant. Having defined the terms in this post, I can now say that I am a 'cat', a believer in romantic heterosexual love.

In the culture we live in, we are accustomed to dividing the world into 'heterosexuals' and 'homosexuals', people who are exclusively heterosexual and people who are exclusively homosexual. This makes for a formidable problem for evolutionary biologists. How could a gene or set of genes that by definition disallows reproduction spread to an estimated 10% of the population? If we accept my theory, however, we shouldn't divide the world into heterosexuals and homosexuals. Rather we should divide the world into heterosexuals and bisexuals, cats and dogs. Men and women we are accustomed to think of as gay should be described as bisexual rather than homosexual. We don't have to look hard for evidence of this. Oscar Wilde, who was famously convicted of homosexuality, had two sons. Philip Schofield, who came out as gay at the age of 57, has two daughters. I have known men who identify as straight who have had homosexual experiences, and I have met men who identify as gay who sleep with women. If we suppose that the basic distinction is between heterosexuality and bisexuality, the problem evolutionary biologists face dissolves. Bisexuality could be hereditable and could propagate down generations. A second question arises however: if the natural distinction is between heterosexuality and bisexuality, rather than heterosexuality and homosexuality, why does our language fail to map this reality? Partly this is because heterosexuality is the norm. And partly I think this is because bisexuals are excluded from the community for reason of a lack of fitness.

The theory I have presented is similar to the kind of hypotheses advanced by evolutionary psychologists. However, it differs from regular evolutionary psychology in two key respects. First, the arguments advanced by evolutionary psychologists tend to hark back to a primordial scene in prehistory and say, "This is the origin of human nature!" I think instead that human nature changes over time. Secondly, I think that there are least two different kinds of human nature, the human nature of dogs and the human nature of cats, rather than a single, unified human nature. I would add that, although it is convenient to divide the world's human population into cats and dogs, the war between cats and dogs takes place in the heart of every human.

Having presented this theory, I shall discuss the ways it could be tested and its limitations. Hunter-gatherer groups still exist today and, if the theory is true, we would expect such hunter-gatherer societies to be very different in terms of cultural practices like marriage and child rearing. I imagine that there is an enormous amount of literature on this subject but, unfortunately, I haven't read any of it. A possible limitation is that I have described dogs as both bisexual and promiscuous and cats as both heterosexual and monogamous. Of course, there are men and women who are totally heterosexual and promiscuous, and it may be the case that there are gay men and lesbians who are totally monogamous. This is not a serious defect of the theory however. It is logical to suppose that the genes that control how attached one becomes to a sexual partner are different to the genes that code for sexual preference. Of course, as I've said in other posts, I am not a fan of evolutionary psychology because I do not see how a length of DNA can code for a behaviour. The theory I am proposing is, as I've said, an exercise in speculation.

In this post, I have presented a theory that may be false or may have a little something to it. If the reader takes anything away from it, it is the truth that bisexuality exists. I say this as a heterosexual  man who became seriously unwell a long time ago partly because I didn't believe in bisexuality. If we lived in a world in which bisexuality was recognised and bisexuals could come out, I don't believe I would have suffered in the way I have. Perhaps the lesson is simpler – perhaps the truth can be distilled to a single maxim. If in doubt, ask.

Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Group Selection vs. Inclusive Fitness

One of the most important scientific debates that has occurred and is occurring in the world today is a debate within the community of evolutionary biologists as to whether there is such a thing as 'group selection'. On one side, we have evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Bret Weinstein, all credentialed members of the Intellectual Dark Web, who denounce group selection biologists, proclaiming, sometimes vehemently, not only that there is no such thing as group selection but that there is a consensus among evolutionary biologists that that idea of group selection is bad science, heretical, and that this consensus has existed since at least the 'seventies. On the other side, we have biologists such as David Sloan Wilson, who argue that group selection is a real force acting on living beings (to use a loose metaphor). Wilson invented a new model, which he presented to the world in 2010 I believe, called 'multi-level selection', proposing that group selection can occur if there is competition between different groups within a species. Despite appearances to the contrary, there is no consensus among evolutionary biologists that group selection is wrong– it just so happens that the opponents of this 'heretical' idea are more visible than its advocates and that the gatekeepers in charge of scientific journals, knowing a little but not a lot about evolutionary biology, view use of the term 'group selection' as verboten, forcing biologists who are sympathetic to Wilson's ideas to employ alternative terminology. In tonight's post, I wish to discuss a concept closely related to group selection known as 'kin selection'. I wish to show that the theories advanced by Dawkins et al, when combined with the idea of 'kin selection', lead to a logically incoherent conclusion. This might make me a disciple of the 'group selection' model but I will postpone a declaration of fidelity to one side or the other until I have finished thinking these issues through.

What is group selection? Group selection occurs when organisms behave in ways that benefit the group to which they belong without significant benefit to themselves; in the long term, this helps the group compete against rival groups of the same species, causing the group to grow and fission into other groups. These behaviours include cooperative behaviours, in which individuals work together on common projects, for instance the way beavers cooperate to build dams. These behaviours also include altruistic behaviours in which an individual helps others within its group at a cost to itself. Group selection, it is argued, can only occur in species that live in groups; animals that don't, that disperse, such as most birds, don't undergo group selective pressure. Of course, humans are obvious examples of organisms that behave cooperatively and sometimes altruistically, but examples of such behaviours reoccur throughout the animal kingdom. This leads to the idea of an 'altruism gene'. The apparent problem with the idea of an 'altruism gene', as was pointed out in the 'sixties, is that, in a population containing both altruists and non-altruists, the non-altruists will outcompete the altruists (because they reap the benefits of others' altruism without paying any cost), and eventually the whole population will become non-altruistic. When this argument was first put forward in the 'sixties, it was seen as the clincher that killed group selection theory. The modern rebuttal of this argument, however, is that the scenario invoked doesn't consider competition between groups. Wilson argues that if inter-group competition is greater than intra-group competition altruism can win. Consider prehistoric humans. It is reasonable to suppose that, in our hunter-gatherer days, we lived in tribes of say a dozen to fifty people, and that different tribes fought against each other for resources. A tribe that could behave cooperatively, a tribe in which some members behaved altruistically towards other members of the same tribe, would win out in the fight between tribes, and so we can easily imagine the growth and spread of an altruism gene arising from the success of altruistic tribes.

Presented this way, group selection theory seems quite reasonable. But many evolutionary biologists, such as Bret Weinstein, loathe it. One reason for this is the astounding success of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The theory he popularised, known as the gene-centred view of evolution or selfish gene theory, propounds that we should look at evolution from the perspective of genes: organisms are vehicles for their genetic material, designed to survive and create as many genetic replicas of themselves as they possibly can. Individual organisms are inherently selfish – in fact, individual genes can themselves almost be described as selfish. If we accept the paradigm presented by Dawkins and his followers, we need to prove that somehow apparently cooperative and altruistic behaviours arise somehow out of self-interest, that these behaviours somehow serve the interest of an individual's DNA. Dawkins and his followers have presented several different hypotheses concerning morality that ostensibly do away with any need for group selection or an altruism gene. The three most important moral mechanisms they suggest are reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, and kin selection, and the most important of these three is kin selection. It is kin selection I shall focus on in this post.

An idea basically equivalent to 'kin selection' is 'inclusive fitness', a concept introduced to the world by W.D. Hamilton in 1964. Hamilton argued that an organism will seek to help and support all other organisms who share a significant portion of its DNA. A mother will help and support her offspring because they have 50% of her genes. An organism will help its siblings because they share (on average) 50% of its DNA. An organism will help its nephew or nieces because they share (on average) 25% of its DNA and a cousin because they share (on average) 12.5% of its DNA. An organism will help those related to it, its kin, because this is an indirect way to enable its own genetic material to survive into the future. Seen this way, kin selection also seems reasonable, but there are a number of significant problems with it, as I shall discuss.

We can start to see the problems with the kin selection hypothesis if we recognise that kin selection must follow from kin selecting behaviour and that this behaviour (by evolutionary biologists' own arguments) must be genetic. There must be a 'kin selecting allele''. If a woman is born who lacks the kin selecting allele, she will neglect and ignore her offspring, who will fail to survive past infancy, and so her lack of a kin selecting allele will not survive her. Logically, all humans must have a kin selecting allele. But this gene is also a selfish gene. And if all humans have the kin selecting gene, it is in that gene's interest for individuals to act altruistically with all other humans, regardless of how closely related they are. Combining selfish-gene theory with kin selection paradoxically leads to the evaporation of the concept of 'kin'. Dawkins is wrong, QED.

A second even more damning objection to the concept of 'inclusive fitness' is that, if it were true, logically, organisms would always mate with close kin. If I marry my sister our children would have, on average, 75% of my DNA; if I wish to ensure that I get as much of my DNA into the future as I possibly can, I would mate with those others around me who have the most exact copies of my genes. But this does not happen in the real world. I myself, although I am Caucasian, often imagine having sex with black women and asian women, even though they are only related to me very, very distantly indeed. There is an argument that humans and other animals seek out sexual partners who differ from us in important respects because this increases the likelihood that our offspring will survive and prosper. I may be weakly and anaemic but, rather than seek out another weakly, anaemic individual to reproduce with (and thus ensure that my weakly, anaemic genes pass on into the future), I instead look for a healthy, hale sexual partner to ensure that my offspring will have the best chance of succeeding they possibly can. If this argument is correct, an organism is driven to ensure it has as many offspring as it can regardless of how much genetic material its offspring have. Evolution takes place at the level of the individual, rather than the gene. Hamilton and Dawkins are wrong, QED.

There is a third objection to the concept of 'inclusive fitness'. When I presented the concept above, I said that an organism shares (on average) 50% of its DNA with its siblings. But this incorrect. Rather, I share over 99.9% of my DNA with my brother. In fact, I share over 99.9% of my DNA with all other humans. Yes, there are slight variations between humans (you might have blue eyes while I have hazel eyes) but, in aggregate, you and I are almost genetically identical. If there is an altruism allele, an allele which encourages an organism to help those who have much of the same genes, humans should help all other humans. We can go even further. A chimpanzee has 99% of the same DNA as a human, and a pig (according to a little research I carried out just now) is 84% similar at the genetic level to a human. Even bananas carry 50% of the same DNA as humans do. So, if inclusive fitness is a meaningful concept, humans should be driven to help individuals of other species because, in a sense, these other organisms are also related to us. Again, combining selfish-gene theory with kin selection paradoxical leads to the evaporation of the concept of 'kin'. Dawkins is wrong, QED.

The first and third objection to the concept of 'kin selection' I have raised in this post are roughly equivalent. If individual genes are selfish, individual organisms should all be universally altruistic because the other organisms they encounter, most especially those of the same species, all carry the same kin selecting allele and are almost genetically identical. Inclusive fitness leads to a paradox. The concept of 'inclusive fitness' developed within the same matrix, the same paradigm, as Dawkin's selfish-gene theory (although Hamilton's coinage of the term predated The Selfish Gene), but this paradigm is incoherent, collapses under the weight of its own internal contradictions. I have only discussed kin selection in this post but the two other proposed mechanisms for reconciling cooperative and altruistic behaviour with selfish-gene theory, reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity, I believe can also be shown to be untenable. Evolution takes place principally at the level of the individual organism rather than the gene. And it is reasonable to hypothesise that if selection occurs at the level of the individual as well as the gene, it could also occur at the level of the group. The picture I drew earlier of hunter-gatherer tribes competing with each other during prehistory, an inter-group competition that encouraged the emergence and propagation of altruism alleles, is sufficient explanation for morality among humans today, even though tribes had become villages, then towns, then city states, then nation states, and then have finally coalesced with each other totally to become the global community we live in today. The allele remains, even though between-group competition has vanished, either because evolution hasn't had time to weed it out or because it still serves a function in the present. I guess that, insofar as I myself am an evolutionary biologists, I am in the group selection camp, although I regard the debate between group selectionists and those opposed to them as diverting attention away from the fundamental question of whether evolutionary biology is itself correct or not. Just as evolutionary biology cannot explain homosexuality, there are many other features of human society it cannot explain, such as our appreciation of music and the reason we dream. Evolutionary psychology is seductive because it promises to explain everything, all human nature and the meaning of life – if one rejects it, what can one replace it with? Nevertheless, I feel that we need better answers.

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned Bret Weinstein. Wilson suggested a little while ago that Weinstein's views on the evolution of religion made him a group selectionist and this profoundly upset Weinstein. It was as if Wilson had called him a flat-earther. Bret's reaction is viewable on Youtube. I also recommend an essay by Wilson called "What Bret Weinstein Gets Wrong About Group Selection" which can be found on the Internet under that title. Apparently, Wilson has challenged Weinstein to a public debate about group selection. If Bret ever reads this post, I would like to recommend to him that he takes up Wilson's challenge. An honest debate about this issue could only be good for the world, and I for one would watch it.

Concerning Jacinda and Julian

Recently, I've found the most difficult part of writing a post to be writing the beginning. To get people to read a post, I imagine the writer needs a punchy introduction. If you begin a post with something vapid and shapeless, or something too much to the point like "In tonight's post I want to talk about the differences between New Zealand's political system and America's", you risk putting off the audience before you've even started. You want to slide into a post laterally but I have had trouble doing this for a while. For months now, writing this blog has been more a chore than a pleasure. Readers will have noticed that I used to talk about my life a lot and haven't done so for a long time. I deal with a lot of low level depression and spend a large part of my day in bed having vivid dreams, sometimes good but often bad. There seems to be no point to anything – I think very few people read this blog and, although I often consider the possibility of writing a book of philosophy in which I present in a unified form many of the conclusions I have tentatively reached in this blog, I don't know if the 'achievement' of a non-academic self-publishing a book about ontology and epistemology, a book which no one will read, is sufficient to give a person's life meaning. Seven years ago I re-entered the Mental Health Service wanting to get it on the official record that I'm heterosexual and always have been; for much of the last seven years I have been treated by people who think I'm either lying or delusional. It seems that my current psychiatrist has finally accepted that I'm heterosexual but I'm still diagnosed schizophrenic. He appears to have no working definition of the term 'schizophrenia' at all. He asked me once not to mention him in this blog and so I won't except to say that he's just another stupid asshole. Every fortnight I go into the Taylor Centre and have a needle stuck in my backside, an injection of a long-lasting formulation of the antipsychotic olanzapine, and apart from this I have no contact with anyone in the Mental Health System at all except for a hourly appointment with my moronic psychiatrist once every two or three months, an appointment that it is simply a rubber-stamping of my diagnosis. Is it any wonder I'm unhappy?

In tonight's post I want to talk about the difference between New Zealand's political system and America's. I then want to talk about my life a little. But we'll begin with New Zealand. I watch CNN quite a bit and have noticed that my home country features much more than it used to in the American media.. Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has even featured recently on a Time Magazine cover. Twenty years ago, New Zealanders became excited if someone famous overseas even mentioned New Zealand in passing – we were accustomed to being overlooked. We are a little island nation at the bottom of the world with a current population of a little under five million and, according to popular mythology, far more sheep than people, although if you drive around New Zealand, you'll notice a lot more cows than sheep. There are several reasons why New Zealand has a higher profile today than it once did. Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings movies showcased New Zealand's stunning landscape and cinematic ingenuity, while Flight of the Concords brought to American attention New Zealanders' self-deprecating sense of humour. The Christchurch terrorist attack made world news and Jacinda's reaction to it was hailed for its inclusivity and true compassion. More recently our response to the Covid-19 pandemic has received plaudits. It is possible we may have eliminated the virus entirely although, to be honest, I worry about what may happen when we relax lockdown restriction and pass over into the winter season. The other day I read that one of New Zealand's favourite sons, Taika Watiti, had been entrusted with the task of co-writing and directing the next Star Wars movie. It seems that New Zealand today punches far above its weight.

With all the attention New Zealand has received recently, my American readers may be curious to learn a little about our political system from someone who lives here. The question you Americans may well ask is, "Why is New Zealand fortunate enough to have Jacinda while we are stuck with Trump?" Jacinda has been called the anti-Trump.  A part of the explanation for this stark difference between the two leaders is that New Zealand has a somewhat different culture than the US, a different set of values, but another part is the difference between the New Zealand and American political systems. This is what I want to talk about in this post. I will also talk about my life a little, if I can bring myself to.

The government of the United States has three branches: the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. My American readers will of course know this from their civics classes. What many of my American readers may not know is that when the Constitution was written and signed, in 1787, the political structure was modelled after the British system. The House of Representatives is modelled after the House of Commons, the Senate is modelled after the House of Lords, and the President essentially has the powers of a Constitutional Monarch. However, the British political system is obviously, today, very different from the American system. Although the Queen has many powers, can declare war or dissolve parliament (powers known as the 'royal prerogative'), in practice she always defers to the Prime Minister and his or her cabinet, who are elected members of the House of Commons. (The current Prime Minister is Boris Johnson.) The Queen's role is largely ceremonial or ornamental; likewise the House of Lords is more or less toothless today. In America, the legislature and the executive are quite distinct branches of Government – the President is head of the executive branch and Mitch McConell and Nancy Pelosi lead the two legislative houses. But in Britain, there is a smudging of the line between the executive and legislature. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet are elected Members of Parliament who also administer the government; they make executive decisions but also draft and pass laws. It is Boris Johnson, rather the Queen, who really leads the UK, in the sense of being the one who actually has the power to legislate and govern.

New Zealand is a member of the Commonwealth and so (this may surprise some of my American readers) our head of state is also the Queen of England. Likewise, Canada, Australia, and other Commonwealth countries have the Queen of England as their head of state. It would be impracticable to have the Queen signing off our legislation and appointing our ministers, and so she appoints, at the recommendation of the New Zealand Prime Minister, a representative to carry out her constitutional duties, known as the Governor-General. Our current Governor-General is Dame Patsy Reddy – but if you ask the average New Zealander the name of our current Governor-General, he or she will be unable to tell you. Like the Queen in Britain, the Governor-General has largely a ceremonial, ornamental function and doesn't participate visibly in the government. In 1975, as the result of a constitutional crisis, the Australian Governor-General dissolved the Australian Parliament, so the Governor-General does indeed have some powers, but in practice he or she does not exercise these powers. It is the Prime Minister and her Cabinet who, in practice, have almost all the power, who govern.

New Zealand has a single house of representatives, known as Parliament, and the Government is picked from the party who has a majority of seats or, in the case of a coalition, from the parties who have together won the most votes and can enter into a political relationship with each other. In addition to the Prime Minister, the governing parties choose other Ministers, such as the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance, Minister of Education, Minister of Defence, Minister of Arts and Culture, and so on. The senior Ministers together form a group known as Cabinet who make decisions collectively (although the Prime Minister has considerable sway over Cabinet decisions). All Ministers are also first of all elected members of Parliament. Cabinet decisions tend to become law because members of Parliament generally vote along party lines. As in the UK, there is, therefore, an elision of the distinction between the legislature and the executive. I'll try to translate this situation into American terms. It would be as if Nancy Pelosi were the officially recognised leader of the Democrat Party and picked Cabinet members, such as the Secretary of State, from among fellow Democrats elected to the House of Representatives. The President would be the equivalent of the Governor-General, largely ceremonial, ornamental, otiose, redundant. Of course this is not the case, but the thought experiment is interesting.

Another important aspect of the New Zealand political organisation is that we have an MMP voting system. I won't get into the subtleties of MMP here but it has two important consequences. It enables a larger number of parties to get into Parliament than FPP systems, such as the US has, do, and it ensures that the number of seats a party has in Parliament is roughly proportional to the popular vote it received in the last election. In America, you only have a choice between two parties: if you want to get rid of Trump, even if you don't like Joe Biden, even if you suspect that he might have dementia, you have to hold your nose and vote for him. In New Zealand, we have five parties currently represented in Parliament and the average voter can rationally pick any one of them. Going from Right to Left, these parties are ACT, the National Party, New Zealand First, the Labour Party, and the Greens. Jacinda is head of the Labour Party. I myself tend to vote for the Greens but consider this a vote for a Labour-led coalition. It may interest my New Zealand readers to learn that I actually know David Seymour, the leader of the ACT party, a little because my father's partner is his aunt.

So why does all this mean that New Zealand gets to have Jacinda while the US is stuck with Trump? We need to look at the process which led to her becoming the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Jacinda, who was born in 1980, graduated from the University of Waikato in 2001. I don't know what degree she earned but it seems reasonable to suppose that she studied Political Studies or perhaps History, because I suspect that she has been interested in politics for most of her life. Immediately after finishing her degree, she worked in Helen Clark's office as a researcher. (Helen Clark was leader of the Labour Party for fifteen years and Prime Minister for nine. She also nearly became Secretary-General of the UN.) Jacinda also worked for a time in Britain for the Cabinet Office during the 1994-2010 Labour government under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. In 2008, she was elected president of the International Union of Socialist Youth. Jacinda can fairly be described as a career politician; the term 'career politician' has a pejorative ring to it but it is not necessarily a bad thing. It can sometimes mean that a person actually knows her stuff. My American readers, knowing a little but not a lot about Jacinda, may be surprised to learn that she is quite happy for people to call her a 'socialist'. In the US, the word 'socialist' has politically ruinous connotations but New Zealanders don't have the same dislike of socialism as Americans do.

In 2008, Jacinda was elected to Parliament as a list MP (that is, an MP without an electorate). That year the National Party won the election and, under John Key, governed for the next nine years. During this time, she sat across from the Government in the Opposition seats. Also during this period, the Labour Party had five different leaders. Now, in the US, political parties don't exactly have leaders. But it is instructive to consider how Republicans and Democrats choose their presidential nominees. As I understand it, party members in a particular state vote for the person they most want to represent the party in the upcoming election and these votes are then translated into delegates who then go to a convention to formally pick the candidate. The exact protocol differs from state to state: some states allow independents and members of the opposing party to vote and some don't, and some states send a number of delegates proportional to the number of votes received while other states have a winner-takes-all approach to delegate numbers. In New Zealand, the process of picking a party leader is quite different and in fact varies from party to party. Up until 2013, the Labour Party caucus, the Labour MPs in Parliament, chose the leader. In 2013, the protocol was changed: forty percent of the vote comes from caucus, twenty percent from party members, and twenty percent from Labour Party affiliates, that is, trade unions. Even with the change in rules, sitting MPs have a great deal of say over who becomes the leader. In the lead-up to the 2017 election, the leader of the Labour Party was Andrew Little and Jacinda was the Deputy Leader, having been unanimously elected to that position in March of that year. In August 2017, the Labour Party was polling at historically low levels and Little publicly expressed doubt about whether he was best suited to lead the Party. Immediately the media turned on him and he was forced to resign. Jacinda then automatically became leader of the Labour Party.

In September, the election was held. The National Party won 56 seats and the Labour Party 46 seats. This seems like a clear-cut victory for the National Party but fails to take into account the Green Party, which, being further to the Left than the Labour Party, can only form a coalition with Labour. The Greens won eight seats. This means that Right-wing bloc consisting of ACT and the National Party had 57 seats and the Left-wing bloc, consisting of Labour and the Greens, had 54 seats. Neither side had the 61 seats necessary to govern in the 120 seat Parliament, and New Zealand First, under its leader Winston Peters, with its nine seats, was left in the position of king-maker, a situation Peters had found himself in before. After about a fortnight, Peters announced that he would support a Labour-led government. I don't remember his speech perfectly but I remember feeling that he had decided to put the good of the country ahead of his own ambition, his own short-term interests. In return for Winston's support, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and the Greens were excluded from the governing coalition, although they continue to support the Labour-led government.

We can compare Jacinda's rise to power with Trump's. Unlike Jacinda, who had spent her whole life training to become a national leader, Trump had no experience with government at all before becoming President. Bill Clinton had been Governor of Arkansas for around ten years before being elected President, George W. Bush had been Governor of Texas, and Barack Obama had served most of a term as a Senator. Trump was a failed real estate mogul and reality TV star. It seems to me that his run for President was a publicity stunt and that he didn't even expect to win. During the Primary season and into the Presidential election, the American media lavished attention on Trump. Even the commentators who thought Trump's Presidential bid absurd, people like Jon Stewart, talked about him all the time, raising his profile. Fox News further blew him up. Consequently, Trump attracted a sizeable constituency of angry and stupid white American voters. For close to four years, liberals have wrung their hands, asked themselves and each other why Americans would have voted for Trump. Different theories abound. One is that economic stagnation drove poor Americans to the insane belief that supporting a Republican candidate would be in their economic interests, that an outsider who presented himself as a saviour would somehow miraculously improve their quality of life. A second is that support for Trump grew out of resentment and suspicion created by being told what to do and think by an educated elite. A third theory is, simply, racism. I don't know the reason Americans support Trump but I do worry that, despite everything that has happened, he'll be re-elected at the end of the year.

Trump's election has been called a failure of democracy. Political pundits regularly point out that Hilary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 and that Trump was only elected as a result of the peculiarities of the Electoral College. In the final analysis, however, the reason why New Zealand is fortunate enough to have Jacinda while America is stuck with Trump is not because New Zealand is more democratic than the US but because it is less. Jacinda was selected as leader of the Labour Party largely by other MPs in Parliament. And she was gifted the Prime Ministerial role by Winston Peters. The MMP system is fairer than the American system (our system isn't bedevilled by gerrymandering) but we don't live in a pure democracy. Our government combines elements of democracy and technocracy. The term 'technocracy' can be loosely defined as 'government by the experts'. Jacinda is at once a democrat and a technocrat. She was picked by experts and is an expert on government. This is why she is so much better than Trump.

I am a patriotic New Zealander and readers may wonder how I square my faith in the goodness of New Zealand with my obvious antipathy toward its Mental Health System. Psychiatry, as a medical speciality, is the same throughout the developed world;  most of the theories and research into mental 'illness' come from the United States. With almost no exception, the psychiatrists who have treated me have been foreigners. Antony Fernando is a Filipino and I believe received his psychiatric qualification from an American university. Jennifer Murphy is Irish. I was treated by a British woman of Caribbean ethnicity. My current psychiatrist is a white American. It doesn't seem to matter which country a psychiatrist comes from, they share a common culture and subscribe to a common idiotic dogma. I believe the world would be better off if we just got rid of psychiatry entirely and put mental health issues in the hands of competent psychologists and counsellors.

At this point in the post, I wish to move away from politics and discuss someone I got to know a little, another patient,. Every fortnight I go to the Taylor Centre to receive an injection of Olanzapine; following the injection I have to wait around for two hours in case I suffer something known as 'post-injection syndrome'. During this observation period, I have the opportunity to talk to other patients who have received their injections around the same time. All of them are quite different from each other; the only thing schizophrenics and bi-polars have in common is the diagnosis of a serious mental illness and the medication they either take voluntarily or are legally forced to take. I tend to like all these other patients – the patient I wish to describe however was someone I couldn't really warm to. I first met Julian perhaps eight months or a year ago. We were sitting in the waiting room of the Taylor Centre and I noticed him sitting across the room, loudly and pointedly singing "Bohemian Rhapsody". On another occasion, I was sitting with him in the waiting room and he said to another client waiting there, a female and perfect stranger, "You're very pretty. Can I give you a hug?" During the observation period a little before or after this, we were all watching The Chase. One of the question concerned 'Gaelic football' – when I answered the question, it must have triggered Julian's paranoia. He had brought up his Key Worker and suddenly announced to the room, "He's straight and I'm gay!" This sudden pronouncement discomfited the nurses and social workers present, one of whom said, "Maybe you should keep these things to yourself."

About a fortnight later, I was outside having a cigarette when Julian approached me and asked me if I could give him a hug. I said, "I don't hug men." He then asked me how many women I'd slept with. I replied, honestly, "Four". He said that he had slept with twenty-five women, almost certainly a lie. He then added that he'd slept with men as well. I asked him, "Are you bisexual?" He replied that he'd only slept with men under the influence of drugs. About a fortnight later again, I was in the observation room with him and he asked me, "What's your view on male-male sensuality?" I replied that I wasn't a fan of it because I was neither gay nor bisexual. He said, "Would you consider having gay sex to spite the Mental Health Service?" I said, "I wouldn't have gay sex full stop."

Another fortnight later, I was in the waiting room with several people, including Julian and another patient, Seamus. Seamus asked Julian to stop sending him "creepy texts". I found out subsequently that Seamus had given Julian his cell phone number because Julian was interested in a job Seamus knew about. Since then, Julian had been sending Seamus, who is straight, texts saying, among other things, that Seamus had "a very sexy body." I believe that Seamus laid a complaint against Julian because, since that day, I never saw Julian again. I get on well with Seamus though. A little after all this, I told Seamus, "The psychiatrists think I'm like Julian." Seamus commented, "You must have had a really bad psychiatrist." Of course, I did have a really bad psychiatrist for many years, Antony Fernando.

The previous couple of paragraphs have simply been a bald narration of my interactions with Julian, a narration without interpretation. I wish to say something more, something deeper, about Julian. Obviously he is gay but has difficulty stating it and difficulty understanding that other people are not gay. Much of the ambiguity surrounding his sexuality can be cleared away if we suppose that he arrived at homosexuality quite late in life. This would explain his affinity with Freddie Mercury. It is even possible that he was coerced or bullied into homosexuality by Mental Health workers, something that could conceivably have happened to me if I'd let it. Like me, Julian was an unwilling patient and on several occasions he brought up the Human Rights Act with the implication that he felt that his human rights were being infringed. I think he has a point. Julian has a disagreeable, challenging personality but I don't believe this is sufficient grounds to force a person to take medication for the rest of his or her life. Gay men have to meet other gay men somewhere, somehow. Personally, I think gay men should only hit on other men at gay bars or through social media sites like Grinder. But in the real world perhaps gays and lesbians can meet other gays and lesbians anywhere. I think of a scene from the Peter Sellars comedy Being There in which a chap approaches Chauncey Gardiner and discreetly propositions him, saying, "Have you ever slept with a man?" Chauncy replies, "Not that I can recall."

In this post, I have discussed two people whose names both begin with the letter J – Jacinda and Julian. I want to finish this post with a little housekeeping. Just before the coronavirus started hitting New Zealand, I wrote a long essay about my whole life that I sent to the Herald. In that essay I said a couple of things that I have never shared on this blog. I have said that my worst experience of psychosis occurred in the first part of 2009 while I was taking the antipsychotic Risperidone. What I had not shared before is that the reason for my psychosis that year was my sure knowledge that I was taking a drug intended to treat homosexuality, a condition I didn't have. I also wish to make a correction. Several years ago, I wrote a post "Concerning Dreams" (the second post with that title) in which I described encountering bFM producer Jose Barbossa at the Big Day Out in 2007. This post was I admit quite badly written (I referred to the film The Human Centipede as The Human Caterpillar), and in it I said that, when I encountered Jose, I sensed that he was attracted to me. This was wrong. What I actually realised at the time was that he thought I was attracted to him – wrongly, of course, because I am heterosexual. It upsets me that Jose still thought I was gay at this time because I had brought a girl I was hitting on into the studio several times in the week or two prior to the Big Day Out being held. It is possible that the reason for my total misdiagnosis and mistreatment by the Mental Health System occurred because, either directly or indirectly, a false statement that I had hit on Jose Barbossa had reached the psychiatrist seeing me. I don't know if this happened but it makes sense to suppose that a false report that I sometimes hit on men had got into my official record right at the very beginning.

At the beginning of this post, I said it is difficult to know how to begin a post. Likewise, it is difficult to know how to end one. Perhaps I'll just quote Chris Cuomo and tell my readers, "Stay well." In these difficult times, a little optimism goes a long way.

Concerning the Fourth Dimension

In tonight's post, I intend to talk about, wait for it, the Fourth Dimension. This is not an easy topic to explore in a straightforward manner. Any discussion of different dimensions tends to evoke scenarios from science fiction, where a protagonist is transported, for instance, to an alternate reality in which cats rule the world and humans are diminutive slaves of their feline overlords. It summons up ideas of alternate Earths and the multiverse. This is not what physicists and mathematicians mean when they talk about multiple dimensions however. For a physicist or mathematician, dimensionality is the least number of coordinates necessary to determine the position of a point within a space, relative to an origin and to a frame of reference. This definition sounds a little dull and obscure when presented this way but what I wish to say about dimensionality, in particular what I wish to say about time, will I think be interesting and thought-provoking even to a mathematically uninclined reader. It sounds lie science fiction but isn't.  I don't believe I have ever read or heard these musings from anyone before. In a nutshell, until last night, I had one view of time and then, lying in bed last night, a completely different way of understanding time occurred to me. It is these two different views I want to talk about.

What is a dimension? Suppose we have a line and on this line a point we call the 'origin'. We can specify the position of any other point on this line with a single number, either positive or negative, its distance from the origin. This line is a space of dimensionality one. Suppose we have instead a plane, a piece of paper. We can specify any point on this plane with two coordinates – if the plane is oriented up-down, left-right, we can specify this point with the coordinates, x and y. The plane is a space of dimensionality two. This is Cartesian geometry, a subject most people learn something about at high school. (Note: the plane doesn't have to flat, it could be the surface of a cylinder or sphere and we could still specify the position of any point with just two coordinates.) We can go further; we can easily extend Cartesian geometry to three dimensions by specifying a point with the coordinates (x,y,z). So far, so good; three dimensional space seems to be the space we actually inhabit. But suppose we could go one step further and talk about a point located in a four dimensional space?

I tend to assume that my readers have some rudimentary knowledge of physics. The concept of dimensionality has been around since at least 1884 and the publication of the satirical novel Flatland, but the idea that space-time could be described as a four-dimensional manifold only first became truly popular as the result of Einstein's discovery of Special Relativity and Minkowski's showing that the interval between two points in space-time could be described as a vector in four-dimensional space, that time could be considered another dimension. Minkowski showed that a Lorentz transformation was equivalent to a rotation through a four-dimensional manifold, a change of the frame of reference. It is because of Einstein and Minkowski that we got the idea of time as a fourth dimension. According to the physics pioneered by Einstein and Minkowski, we can speak of an 'event' as a point in the space-time manifold specified by the four coordinates (x,y,z,t). This notion, that time is another dimension, the fourth dimension, is, I think, widely known. It is in fact so widely known that I wouldn't bother writing about it unless I had something new and interesting to say about the subject. And I believe I do.

One facet of the theory that has always fascinated and mystified me concerns particles. Take an electron. An electron is a point particle – it has no spatial extent. Its width, height, and depth are literally infinitesimal. But it has infinite duration. Its extent along the temporal dimension is infinite – often a typical electron has been around since the Big Bang and will continue to exist forever or until swallowed by a Black Hole. Of course, occasionally an electron is created, at the same time as its sibling particle, the positron, is created, and occasionally an electron disappears as the result of pair annihilation. But, generally speaking, an electron's life-span is vastly greater than its spatial extent. If time is simply another dimension, why this lack of symmetry between a particle's characteristics in the three spatial dimensions and its characteristics in the fourth temporal dimension?

We can conceptualise a particle as a kind of wriggly line through four dimensional space. If we pretend for the moment that there are only two spatial dimensions rather than three, an x dimension and a z dimension, and represent the temporal dimension as lying along the y axis, we can imagine a particle as a line that always goes up. Sometimes it wriggles to the left, sometimes to the right, sometimes forward and sometimes backward, but it is always rising, is even in fact constrained never to make an angle with the y axis greater than a certain amount because it can't go faster than the speed of light.  We can imagine the universe as a vast number of these lines. In the nineteenth century, particles were assumed to be eternal and indestructible – if we pretend this is true for the moment, this is equivalent to saying that the number of lines passing through the x-z plane at some y value is the same as the number of lines passing though the x-z plane at any other y value. Of course, we now know that a particle can turn into another particle, even transform into a couple of particles, but the law that the total mass-energy in the universe remains constant, that the total amount of stuff around always stays the same, can with a little fiddling be found to be compatible with this picture.

This model of the universe, as consisting of squiggly lines passing from the past into the future, is the picture I subscribed to until last night. And then a different way of looking at space-time occurred to me. This inspiration didn't come out of the blue – it was motivated by a clip I saw on Youtube explaining General Relativity. In this clip, the narrator makes a slight offhand comment that particles travel along the temporal dimension at the speed of light. When I heard this it confused me a little but then, after some reflection, it brought me to consider a quite different conception of space-time.

I'll try to explain this new, different model. A particle not only has a position in space at some time, it also has a particular velocity. That is, it has a velocity along the x axis, a velocity along the y axis, and a velocity along the z axis. All three components can have any value less than the speed of light.  It also, and this is key, has a velocity along the t axis, and this velocity is always the speed of light, c. Now, this seems confusing. The velocity along the x axis is the rate of change of x with respect to t. We are now being asked to believe that the rate of change of t with respect to t is c. How can a particle have a velocity along the temporal dimension at all? The solution to this conundrum is that, although space-time has four dimensions, the fourth dimension is not identical to time. I have put this in italics because it strikes me as important, and I'll repeat myself because it is indeed important. We live in a four-dimensional manifold but the fourth dimension isn't time.

Everything in the universe is barrelling along the fourth dimension at the same speed, the speed of light. Permit me to suppose, dear reader, that you are sitting reading this on your computer, that the distance between you and your computer remains constant, that the distance between you and your TV remains constant, that the distance between you and your front door remains constant. The reason all these distances remain constant is because you and the rest of your household accoutrements are moving through the fourth dimension at the same speed, which is very fast indeed. An analogy will make this clear. Suppose you are driving along a multi-lane highway at 100km/hour and the cars ahead of you, behind you, and on either side, are all travelling at the same speed. It will seem to you as if the world is unchanging even though the world around you is moving quite fast, by human standards. If everything is travelling through the fourth dimension at the same speed, we can't tell and live in an eternal 'now'.

This alternate picture can be clarified if we suppose it possible for objects to travel along the fourth dimension at speeds other than c. Suppose we have a four-dimensional sphere of radius r with its centre at t = 0 and its spatial coordinates smack bang in the middle of your living room. It is motionless in all dimensions. At any time before t = – r/c, the sphere doesn't exist. At t= – r/c, a point appears that grows into a sphere of radius r by t=0 and then contracts to a point that disappears at t=r/c. From your perspective, trapped in a permanent now, a point has appeared in your living room, grown into a sphere of radius r, then shrunk back to a point, and then disappeared. If it were possible for objects to travel along the fourth dimension at speeds other than the speed of light, it would seem to us as though things are continually appearing and disappearing. The law that energy is always conserved wouldn't hold true. The reason why this law is indeed valid, why things don't appear and disappear, is because everything is travelling through the fourth dimension at the same speed, the speed of light.

In this post, which I know is less clear than I would like it to have been, I have presented two ways of looking at space-time. There is a lot I haven't talked about. I haven't talked about imaginary numbers at all, even though they are central to Minkowski's theory. Some theoretical models, born from string theory, have it that there are eleven or even fourteen dimensions. I haven't discussed these either. As I said in the previous post, I still have a very shaky understanding of General Relativity. Although I am not a physicist, I hope that you still found this post interesting, and that it will stimulate you to think about these things yourself. After all, even though I am not an expert, I may not be wrong.