The mess we're in

I’ve been trying to understand bits of the financial crisis, but I can’t say that getting the whole picture has been my latest strength. Here’s the Subprime Primer, which may help minds alike grasp a few more bits and pieces of what’s going on.

Tyrannosaurus Cash

I feel something should be done with the monetary system, and not just in the UK, but everywhere in the world where paying by card and doing Internet transactions is common place. Retailers and other commercial businesses should allow more freedom of use of bank cards and online payments. Fees for spending amounts smaller than £5 in shops and £10 in bars should be eliminated - this would allow more spending freedom for the consumers and eventually more profits for businesses. All this would increase the velocity of the circulation of money and who knows, maybe eventually even bring down the shopping prices.


The history of people fiddling with the idea of having cards as media of payment goes back to the early 1900s. The first credit cards as we know them were introduced in 1966 and since then they've become a favored form of payment for much of the population. The digital age is here in so many ways, so what's keeping a wide-spread standardization of payments from happening? Does it really cost so much to the retailers to carry out the card transactions? I paid a 50 pence extra charge on a £3 purchase for using my card yesterday, which makes the fee over 15% of the entire purchase. As far as the pure transaction costs for banks, they are supposed to be a relatively small fixed percentage of the purchase, so to me it seems like the fixed fees applied in bars and shops are there not just to cover the transaction costs, but also to discourage the use of cards. Why does this take place? The bank charges, exactly as they are, should be transferred to the consumers instead of influencing the policies of retailers. By the way, Sweden supposedly found a way to make this all work.

If one was to push this issue further, why not think of abolishing cash and introducing a strictly card-only system? This would allow more transparency of transactions and eliminate a lot of ways in which cash is misused, but now this is probably a too-extreme measure. What can I say, I can't wait for tomorrow.

Beauty and The Beast

The topic for this post arrived into my head when I was people-watching the French on a beach a couple of weeks ago. I could see the perfect bodies, but then also the imperfections of the behaviour. Why has evolution not equalized and unified the physical beauty in human beings with their intellectual capabilities? After all, beauty is a sign of health and fitness and hence of good genetic predispositions while intelligence could be rated as one of the most important survival qualities. If evolution is preoccupied with the enhancement of the human race for the sake of the survival of the fittest, then shouldn't beauty and IQ not go hand in hand as we breed? In looking for a partner we obviously seek physical attractiveness, but also don't want to spend too much time around people who will make us fall asleep at dinner, so how has this not worked itself out over the millennia?

Life is usually easier for the beautiful ones, so there is less incentive to succeed through self-development and hard work. For the less beautiful ones, on the other hand, developing intelligence and gaining knowledge is often the only route to score in life both on a professional and a personal level. Hmm, will the world be full of supreme humans in a few centuries provided we don't destroy the earth beforehand?

A dog's life

Upon hearing about FlexPetz, I thought that it was my long-lived dream of having a dog in London finally coming true. So I thought, until I actually visited the site of the company moving to London from the States and supplying this rent-a-dog service to the busy, mobile, or the purely lazy urban dog lovers. I never thought that the shared ownership would be doable, simply because I think it requires a set of conditions that makes it convenient for the owners and not upsetting to the animal. I would guess that something along the lines a close friend or family member who lives in the same street would potentially do, but a company-facilitated dog rental? I think that the business has a potential of making some people happy, but is it really the right way to go about dog sharing? The other side of this is the money: not only does FlexPetz charge a monthly fee of 100 GBP, but on top of that requires a mandatory fee of at least 180 GBP a month for the minimum of 4 days a month it assumes you'll spend with the dog. Some of the funds FlexPetz generates do go to caring for the dogs, but ekhem, has sharing anything ever been more expensive than full ownership?

So how will the dogs feel about all this? FlexPetz claims that a dog will have a maximum of 2-3 owners at one time, but how many owner will that amount to over the dogs entire life? What are the 'permanent' homes that they go to once too old and sick? In principle, they aren't all about money and convenience - all the dogs are rescued, but doesn't FlexPetz really leave them to a fate similar to the one they seek to leave, a semi-permanent life of seeking the one owner that will not get rid of them once they're inconvenient? Maybe shared dog ownership is a good idea, but one that just isn't workable on a business scale?

Micro credit

Micro credit is a form of facilitation of small loans to individuals in the developing world, who are otherwise considered not bankable and as such unable to obtain any loans in their own countries. I was first struck by the deep contrast of human existence and owning capabilities between Africa and the Western world when I read 'The Shadow of the Sun' by Ryszard Kapuscinski. It seemed utterly inconceivable that a family's income could depend on a single pot, in which they would cook a dish and sell it to the fellow villagers for a small sum of money. The book inspired me to strive to understand more aspects of poverty and inequality both in Africa and worldwide.

Micro credit focuses on supporting forms of micro entrepreneurship and employment generation for mostly community based initiatives. The project started in Bangladesh, where it has enabled impoverished people to engage in self-employment projects that allow them to generate income, begin to build wealth, and at times exit poverty. It's strange to think that so much can depend on so little.

Your feelings?

Wefeelfine is sort of an emotional search engine. The site was launched in August 2005 and is a continuously expanding statistic of human emotion around the globe. Its system searches the web for blog posts and fishes out the words associated with the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling.' The statistics are browsable through 6 different categories: the feeling (such as happy, guilty, alone; they have around 5000 of them indexed), gender, age, weather, location, and date. The interface of this webpage is a constantly self-re-organising system of particles, where each particles represents an individual and his or her feeling. I have to say, it looks really nice and is fun to fiddle with. The database expands by about 20 000 new feeling per day and thus creates a pool of information that allows everyone to investigate human perceptions around the globe. You try to find answers to questions about which locations are most depressing, how weather affects us all, and such. So how do you feel today?

Biting the bullet

Can we approach the most troubling issues of the world without a coordinated political and economical initiative? Bjorn Lomborg drew public attention to reaching a consensus on resolving the world's most troubling issues. According to the Copenhagen Consensus we should first enhance HIV prevention, fight the malnutrition occurring in the 3rd world, establish a better organised free trade worldwide, and help African countries stop malaria. Global warming was the last thing on the list of things we should strive to resolve right now, as it would require most investment to produce relatively little effect.



The talk drew my attention to the immense problems we have to face, but also to the immeasurable trivialities we seem to get caught up in while positioning ourselves politically and ideologically. How far should our perspectives reach? I'm not setting out to convince anyone that the global warming consequences or blood sheds should be left alone, but I feel that there is much more beyond to resolve and explore both in fields of technology and medical research. The human mind has evolved to understand distances we can travel and time stretches we can perceive within our lifetimes, but with our current understanding of history, space, and biology, we should strive to push ourselves and our perspectives a little further.

The agricultural history dates back roughly 2000 years and we've been developing the industrial side of our existence for only about 300. At times I feel that humanity is squabbling with itself rather than focusing on what's ahead. The European politics, with yes, some important issues, but overall with an immense amount of human potential simply flushed down the drain to short-term and short-sight visions and solutions. How come is so much of the world still so far behind compared to its current capabilities? Going back to economics, it would take $40-70 bln a year to resolve most of the disease/malnutrition quagmire by 2015. I really do not mean to bash, but the $100 bln the US is pouring into Iraq seems a little out of place right now.

God (and Gadgets) of the Lonely?

I stumbled upon this blog today - praise the word!

by Chris

I've been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I've had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I've heard from atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who've been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the psychological origins of religion. While the final answer to why people are religious is a long, long way off, I can say with some confidence that the first of the two answers above is almost certainly wrong. People's religious impulses stem from much more mundane sources than the mysteriousness of the world around us. That's not to say that religion can't serve to help explain the otherwise inexplicable, or that this isn't an important purpose of religion, but it doesn't seem to be one of the fundamental or original purposes of it. Instead, it seems that religion's social functions are actually more foundational. This leads to the second answer above -- the one that says religion is around to make us feel less lonely -- seeming plausible. Most of the research on the social aspects of religion to date, however, has been on its function in communities. A paper in this month's issue of Psychological Science, however, takes a more direct look at the role of loneliness in religion.

The paper, by Epley et al.(1), starts with the hypothesis that people may use religious thinking and other examples of perceived agency (e.g., in pets or gadgets) to reduce their feelings of loneliness. Epley et al. note that, for example, that people outside of committed relationships are more likely to have personal relationships with god, that "insecure and anxious attachments to others" are associated with stronger religious beliefs, and that the death of loved ones can increase the strength of religious beliefs. That religion serves a loneliness-reducing function seems a reasonable hypothesis, then.

In their first study testing this hypothesis, Epley et al. gave participants descriptions of four "technological gadgets," and then asked them to rate the gadgets on five anthropomorphic dimensions (whether the gadget "had 'a mind of its own,' had 'intentions,' had 'free will,' had 'consciousness,' and 'experienced emotions,' p. 115) and three non-anthropomorphic dimensions ("attractive, efficient, and strong"). Then participants then completed a loneliness scale with questions like, "How often do you feel isolated from others?"

The prediction of the loneliness hypothesis is, of course, that people who score higher on the loneliness scale will give higher anthropomorphic ratings to the gadgets than lower scorers on the scale, but that the non-anthropomorphic ratings will not be influenced by high or low loneliness. And that's what they found: the correlation between anthropomorphic ratings and loneliness was quite high (r = .53), while the correlation between loneliness and non-anthropomorphic ratings was non-significant (r = .25).

This suggests that loneliness may prime agency detection, and since our hair-triggered agency-detection mechanism is thought to underlie much of religious cognition (as I've discussed before), it further suggests that loneliness may also prime religious thoughts. So, Epley et al. conducted a second study in which they first gave participants a long personality questionnaire, and then gave them predictions about their lives that they were told were based on their personality scores. Some of the participants were told things like, "You're the type who will end up alone later in life," which should induce feelings of loneliness or desire for social connections, while other participants received statements like, "You're the type of person who has rewarding relationships throughout your life" (p. 116), which should make them feel more socially connected. After reading the predictions, participants were asked to rate how much they believed in supernatural agents like ghosts, God, the devil, etc., as well as in supernatural events like miracles and curses.

Consistent with the loneliness hypothesis, participants who'd been given the loneliness-inducing predictions gave higher belief ratings to the various supernatural agents and events (mean of 4.35) than those who'd been given the socially connected predictions (3.71). Thus, the second study provides initial evidence that loneliness and religious belief may be connected.

Finally, in order to rule out a potential alternative explanation of the results of the first two studies, that negative feelings, and not loneliness specifically, may lead to religious thoughts, Epley et al. conducted a third study contrasting fear (an obviously negative feeling) and loneliness. This time, participants watched movie clips, one of which (from the movie Cast Away, poor bastards) was loneliness-inducing, one of which (from Silence of the Lambs) was fear-inducing, and one of which (from Major League, for some reason) was supposed to be non-fear or loneliness inducing. Then the participants indicated how much they believed in supernatural agents and events, as in the previous experiment. As in the second experiment, the loneliness-inducing condition caused the participants to give higher belief ratings for supernatural agents and events (though this may have been because they wanted god to help them turn off the god-awful movie clip). The fear condition did not lead to higher belief ratings relative to the control condition.

Obviously, these studies are not conclusive. For one, most of the participants come into the lab with religious beliefs, and while some of their participants did say they were not believers, Epley et al. don't break down the data by pre-experimental belief, so it's impossible to tell whether loneliness makes disbelievers more likely to think religious thoughts. It's therefore difficult to say whether loneliness is an originating impulse for religion, or if it instead simply uses existing religious thoughts. Still, this is a nice initial set of studies on the loneliness hypothesis, and I think all of those people who've told me over the years that religion is born of (existential) loneliness and alienation can feel somewhat vindicated.

1Epley, N., Akalis, S., Waytz, A, & Cacioppo, J.T. (2008). Creating social connection through inferential reproduction: Loneliness and Perceived Agency in Gadgets, Gods, and Greyhounds. Psychological Science, 19(2), 114-120.

Monkeysphere

According to Dunbar, human beings are able to maintain stable social relationships with a maximum of 150 persons at a time. In Dunbar's theory this capacity of the human mind is related to the size of his or her neocortex. The 150 of the people one maintains social relations with may include high school friends or past colleagues with whom a person would want to reacquaint themselves if they met again. Groups above that number usually require some sort of organised control. You can see a reflection of this in news reporting and charity advertising, among others. Why is it that somehow supporting a single child in Africa is often more appealing than the idea of donating money to a school fund or infrastructural causes, which one could deem as more important than a life of a single individual? With news of fatalities, once the number is too high, doesn't the tragedy of it all get lost among the numbers?

When looking at social networking, and in particular at Facebook, you can easily come across individuals who have a 150+ number of friends. This obviously does not include everyone they have social relationships with, since some people just refuse to do Facebook and some, like the the older generations, sometimes just have no incentive to maintain their presence in the online networking sphere. Assuming that Dunbar's theory is right, would it be possible to enhance our social networking capacities? Will sites like Facebook allow us to stretch the number 150 and allow us to create and maintain more relationships? This may seem possible, as in normal circumstances we would not have the array of information percolating about our friends' activities that FB makes available via its news feeds. Whether through status updates or news on your friends' blogs and break-ups, you're more often up to date with their situation than ever before. This availability of information stimulates a more regular reacquaintance with one's friends or colleagues, even family members. Social networks have also been effective in re-connecting people who have lost touch, whether via college networks or simple name browsing. I'm convinced that a lot of people create connections on FB just for the sake of it, regardless of having created a real relationship with a person, but perhaps more and more the friends on FB won't be just a number?

A Mass Produced Reality

I've spent the past week living with a friend in London. We live in a marvellous space overlooking a square that changes its character with every minute as the sun, the clouds, and the day moves on. We've come to appreciate our little morning routine of sitting on the balcony, eating pain au chocolates, discussing life, and sneering at the people below. I'll miss these mornings, and it almost makes me want to resist the inescapable arrival of the next little routines I'll develop in place of this one.

Looking over a square with people on their way to work, wearing their suits and carrying their briefcases, we wondered about the uniformity of modern life and the human longing for uniqueness and creativity. Most of what we eat, furnish our homes with, and wear today, is mass-produced. The human touch on these things has decreased to a bare minimum. We live in a world of mass produced homes, objects, even experiences. It's like with the suits and the working hours - the rough lines of the daily flow leaves little room for independent creativity and feeling of being in control. It's as though we all hopped onto a big assembly line and now can't really afford to get off.


This is not to say that the quality of the mass produced objects is necessarily lower than those produced in limited numbers. Often great design stands behind the assembly lines and though it's hard to admit, if not for them, we probably wouldn't have it as good as we do. Unfortunately, personalised design and limited numbers usually mean higher shelf prices, which raises the red flag for most. However, there seems to be an increasingly vibrant market populated by people searching for foods that taste good and clothes that don't appear in every town of the developed world. The strive for individualism, tactility of design, and texture is increasing and more and more people supply these objects and experiences. The uniqueness and the closer interaction with the source of a given object somehow give people more contact with themselves, even if all they can determine is what their table or t-shirt looks like. It gives them a feeling of control and uniqueness, not to mention the style.

The Unexpected Pleasures of Being Human

I'm not sure what percentage of the world's population lives in urban environments today (you can check out Google, just remember not to be evil), but I'm pretty sure that it's not only the majority, but that's it's still rising. We live in an increasingly crowded and anonymous world where others become like white noise, like the background you wouldn't really care to inspect. We're given more and more choice of how to design our social networks and more social tolerance with the way we do so. Our connections are becoming ever more intricate through the development of urban life, the internet, and the wide-spread ease of travel.


Amongst ordinary days, when one really is just a passing grain of the overall texture, there sometimes happen wondrous moments when we discover other people. There is something deeply satisfying about finding a mutual connection with another, a new person. Despite the understood facts of how much we all share though our minds' wiring, emotions, goals, and troubles, for some reason the discovery of another and the unexpected intimacy of minds can be a delight. The other person becomes real and from that point you can review the background noise of surrounding people as a brain-like buzzing network of internal complexities with mutually reinforcing, snapping connections. In our rather closed-in networks of friends, colleagues, and fellow-students, these unexpected pleasures can let us refresh and rediscover our connection to the rest of the world.

From the road again

So here I am, opening another chapter in the book of wonder. (You should watch Bjork's video I posted yesterday if you haven't done your homework on those yet).

I'm leaving Budapest this morning and although it's upsetting I feel like it's just another swerve on the strange sequence of my last few years. We're slowly approaching the brighter horizon and leaving the dark hours of the sleeping city behind. I passed the corners, the lights, the rain, and the blurry-eyed people on the metro. The dark face of the city only showed a few scars this time, as it always does when you see it at its hour of weakness - when sun doesn't shine yet and the coffees of the city haven't brewed long enough to shoo away its crooked expression.


I feel like this year will be a yet another year of changes. Change seems to follow me ever since I've left home behind and in the long run it seems to be the only constant in my little life. I'm going home for a few days before I make the bigger move back to London. I felt a tickle of happiness when I saw a little Polish flag and a familiar looking license plate. But today when it's so much easier to move, what is it that drives us to go home, stay home, or have a home period? Is it the longing for familiarity and belonging? Longing for the meaning we build around our states, objects, and people? It's amazing how deep the wiring for this goes. I always get so much pleasure out of speaking Polish to shop keepers and little people when I go home, but I'm not sure that this at all shows how much I belong. I feel ever more distance to the idea of belonging to any certain place year after year. I love going home, seeing people, and re-visiting memories, but I can never quite decide if it's more than a visiting place anymore. I feel more and more comfortable around people who share this confusion of space and decide to re-create themselves and their 'homes' outside their birth-place bracket; they have become a sort of a refuge for me. Maybe later on age will bring answers to these questions.

Not so bad after all...

Bringing up baby
Jun 14th 2007
From Economist.com

EUROPE'S demographic picture has long been painted as one of low fertility and a declining population. But according to Jitka Rychtarikova of the Charles University in Prague, there is a demographic tale of two Europes. From Scandinavia to France, countries' populations are recovering and childbearing is increasing. Indeed, France and Ireland are reaching the magic replacement-level fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman in a lifetime. By contrast, from the Mediterranean through to eastern Europe, low fertility rates and ageing populations still abound. Various measures appear to encourage having more babies, from flexible working hours to removing the stigma from illegitimacy.

What's it gonna be?

I'm back! Long time no write, I know. I've been getting ready to go to Poland for Easter and arranging all my other upcoming trips and keeping busy at work, among other things. I've been really missing writing though, so here I am, back and ready to roll.

I've been discussing the future of marriage, monogamy, and birth rates with a few people recently and I think there are some - let's call them interesting for a lack of a better word, trends - going on in the society today. Parts of the new realities are worrying, while others perhaps calling for more tolerance in the social circles.

To start with marriage, which is becoming less and less of a popular thing in the West, the rates of divorce and number of couples staying together for all the reasons but the emotional ones show the future of matrimony in a pretty bleak light. People not only get married later, but also get divorced and re-marry more often than ever before. Increasingly more people live together, but do not see marriage as an essential part of their story. They also more and more often decide not to have children, whether married or not.


Western society is becoming more individualistic and in some sense, perhaps more decadent. Women's choice to have children later in life or not to have them at all has become more acceptable in Western societies and given more freedom to women's lives in professional and other ways. This trend is bringing much of a burden to especially Western European societies, which are now faced with a pretty serious birth rate problem. Is there anything we can really do about this though? Are the predictions about the future demographics of Europe really going do reverse the social trends in today's society and suddenly bring all the working women back home to raise babies?

What does marriage have to offer for most young people now that you really can live together and do most things relationship-wise without the need to be married? Civil unions for couples living together and issues such as gay marriage seem to cast yet new questions about how to define marriage, its purpose, and social value. I think the image of marriage will change even more in the coming years. Social acceptance for gay marriage and open relationships will increase in many circles, unless the society's pendulum somehow decides to swing back into conservatism. Maybe the new ways of living in relationships and otherwise will get a neutral light. Maybe just as women's going to work or being openly gay used to be controversial, these things too will find their way to meddle into modern lives?

Just an observation, I suppose.

The rise of vegetarianism?

Through the past year I've been having ups and downs in my vegetarianism. A few nights back I went to see 'The fast food nation' and it put me right back on track. I think this was the first movie I've ever seen that used the images of animal treatment on big screen and well, it worked. I support some cases of animal activism, but have always avoided looking at the pictures and videos they display in the streets - I've seen them once and don't really need a repeat. Having been 'forced' to see them again last night put me back in touch with some of the reasons why I used to be more strict about my diet.

I think everyone should read the book 'Guns, germs and steel' (or see the movie, as I lazily did). The author, Jared Diamond, sets out to explore the roots of inequality in the world's distribution of wealth today and I think has a some good points to his thesis. He starts his analysis at the point before the rise of the great civilizations and walks the reader through the development of human societies around the globe. In his thesis a society's success boils down largely to 'geographical luck' - lands that were home to most nutritious crops and most easily domestic-able animals had the winning card in the history, as they were able to produce enough food to allow a percentage of a community's individuals to not farm the land, but develop new technologies, skills, philosophies and culture. From then on, the colonization came with Euroasians' technology, animals, foods, and their immunity to diseases acquired from their long cohabitation with domesticated animals - their attributes made colonization a relatively 'smooth' process. Diamond's theory sheds light into histories of lands like Africa and societies such as the native Americans and Australians. This is not to say that his arguments fully explain the phenomenon of the rise of the modern-day West versus say China or India, which is altogether a more complex issue and perhaps depends more on cultural, economic and technological advancements.

In the developed countries, food is no longer a problem. Agricultural technologies and widespread distribution on the market has led to an ease in both providing and acquiring nutrients. True, humanity got where it is largely because of how they harvested animals, but you would think that at least in the highly developed parts of the world, societies will soon reach a level in which they can substitute meat nutrients with the variety of foods they provide. The shopping cart is one of the easiest ways to send a message to the providers around the world - a consistent message on what people want can steer production and marketing around the world. Also, through human history force and violence has become less and less acceptable in most societies - both towards other nation states and to members of the same communities. Penalties such as cutting off thieves' hands are no longer in the books, except in certain fundamental societies. Perhaps this lessening in accepting of cruelty not just to humans, but also to other creatures such as the animals we farm is going to be the way to go a 1000 years from now. Maybe in another 1000 years (if our lovely kind is still there) people will look back at factory farming and think of it as today we think of stoning women for adultery?

p.s. I don't want to send another bulk email about this, but my photo site is actually supposed to be at http://web.mac.com/paulinadavis rather than at the link i sent out in the 'just making sure...' email...sorry for the confusion everyone.

The sentimental shoe

With today's greater ease in communication I think we all get a bit of a sense of false security as far as maintaining our relationships with other people. Have you or any of your friends moved to a different country? Those who move abroad have to re-do all their homework on who their local friends are, which places they like, and what job or studies they attend, which for most people doesn't leave much time to maintain the friendships from the past.

How many of your friends have you not seen or talked to in the past year? We all email and call, but in most cases, unless the people on the other end are truly close in some way, you lose touch. After a while you could even ask yourself if it's still worth bothering to make friends anymore. If you have family abroad things get even more complicated. How often do you visit, talk, or write? How much is enough?


Through my experience of being away from home for the past 3 years, I found that the distance can have a variety of consequences on my relations with people. Some of my relationships with friends and family back home have actually gained in quality, since both sides try to make the most out of the little we have. Others, though, through negligence or having to get on with my life in new places, have slipped away. So since the good ones stay and the not-so-close go, is this in fact a good process, which works as a kind of a filter, where only the relevant ones stay? Not sure.

It's hard to be there for people and be close to them when you're away, but it can be done if only you try hard enough. If that's a kind of a life you live, and you keep going, you end up creating new communities wherever you go - what can I say - it must work, otherwise people wouldn't really want to live their lives like that, would they? Foreign places, people, cultures, always carry some excitement, freshness, and stimulation. But in all the moving, shopping, and making new friends, we should all try our best to stick to the ones we value and love - in a greater perspective those are few and far between.

Keep in touch, everyone.

This post's topic was inspired by an article I read in the IHT called 'Taking friendships with you'. Here's the link if anyone wants to read it as well: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/24/news/afriends.php

It's evolution, baby

'A New York Times survey last year showed that 55 percent of Americans believed that "God created us in our present form," while only 13 percent believed that "we evolved from less-advanced life-forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process." A similar Gallup poll in 1997 placed those numbers at 44-10; in 1991, the numbers were 47-9.'

In the first place, my stance on evolution is that it is not something you should qualify as a belief or a theory, just as the fact that the earth is round shouldn't.

For those of you who have read the previous post - this is a new one, just with the same title. I decided that the last one was too much about parental choice in education rather than about the evolution vs. intelligent design issue, which is what I wanted to write about in the first place.

So why is it exactly that evolution's popularity is so low these days? The fact that most scientists worldwide would agree that it is a scientific fact vital to the understanding of the human history, human behaviour, and the natural environment does not seem to matter very much, even today. The right side of the political spectrum has been infected with the theory of intelligent design, or creationism, which is what intelligent design could easily stand for. In the U.S. the creationists have enough leverage in education to have course books emphasize that evolution is just a theory and to always provide the alternative of intelligent design. Well, fair enough, but we're talking biology courses here.

So why do people find the idea of evolution so unattractive? Are we humans too great to even think about primates as our ancestors - is it our pride that stands in the way? Or, does the fact that evolution contradicts the bible really matter that much today? I mean how many people out there really believe in all the stories and miracles? Another thing that really strikes me is that evolution is such a recent discovery - you would think that with all the great minds that we had in our past, at least one of them would have thought of this solution to our existence.

Also, before Darwin, being atheist must have been a lot less intellectually satisfying. If all everyone knew was that God created us, then well - I guess the only option was to think 'this can't be right, but I can't really do anything but sit and wait until someone comes up with a better explanation'. And then boom, it happened, but things haven't changed all that much since. I personally find it a little disturbing that people all over the world don't embrace evolution more. I think if they did, a lot more problematic issues starting with animal treatment to sexuality would be understood and treated in a different manner.

Mind your language!

Since my coming to Budapest I have tried doing just about everything to keep myself busy. I've started doing yoga, went to Russian classes at the state university, criss-crossed the city with my camera, and researched the local wi-fi cafe market. I even tried to find jobs, but my corporate side somehow did not want to emerge. I've also visited two of Budapest's international pre-schools, where kids from Hungary and just about every other country are tortured by the never-ending flow of English coming from their carers. Whatever your parents taught you in your native tongue is wrong - sprechen Sie English! And so it goes, from their first confused screams after being left by their parents till now, they somehow master bits and pieces of English. For those of you not up to date, I do linguistics, and thought that those places could provide excellent research spots for my final year thesis, which I can choose to submit next year in London. Drawing on an analogy to slaves, these kids are often from different places and have to get along without a common language but the one offered by those above them. They are not taught English - it just becomes their only mean of survival and socializing when they are left in those pre-schools by their hurried parents.