In an interview with The Times, Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said: “There is crass irresponsibility in some of the larger monstrosities people drive around suburbia and in London. We have to move against this kind of thing.”

Nice words from the minister, and he is promising an increase in taxes to discourage this anti-social behaviour, but there’s nothing concrete there. A government that can dream up new repressive, police-state legislation at the drop of the prime minister’s hat seems to be taking an astonishingly long time over a simple change in charges.
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The Guardian’s Reader’s Editor, Ian Mayes, for whom I have enormous respect, today brings up the interesting issue of “corrections and clarifications” on news stories in an online archive.

The paper’s policy is that these should always be immediately visible on a story (at the top) and kept to a minimum. When you think about it, there is a powerful possible shadow of 1984 over the fact that our archives are increasingly electronic – far, far easier to airbrush inconvenient pieces out of history.

I’m sometimes accused of naivety, but I tend to think that human nature, given the chance, tends towards the humane, the caring and the sensible. And sometimes those voices gain power. It is thus lovely to read about the 18th-century West African Islamic scholar, Sheikh Uthman dan Fodio.

Female circumcision was another major social issue the Sheikh delved into. This practice was in the Sudan, Somalia and was going across to his country and he stopped people from doing it. He brought the hadith of the Prophet showing that only a little bit was allowed to be removed from the tip of the clitoris, but was by no means necessary as it wasn’t really part of Islam. His argument against it, once again went into graphic details of how if men allowed this to happen then a woman would not be able to achieve her climax in a physical relationship, which would then cause their relationship to deteriorate. To have a more fulfilling relationship, they should allow her to retain what Allah gave her. This obviously was a heavy argument for the Sheikh to be making, especially in the 18th century!

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today reproducing two letters to a bereaved young widow in India by Bishop Reginald Heber, who seems to have been best known has a writer of hymns.

Heber seems to be a rather better theological controversist than consoler, however, since he spends most of his time in arcane points, particularly on the state of the soul after death and on the power of prayers for it (on which he is certainly unsound in CofE terms).

But perhaps the most fun is to be had from speculating about the cause of the young husband’s death – “the fatal accident … an instantaneous death without pain, and while engaged in innocent amusement”. Hunting maybe? The bishop would probably have considered that innocent amusement, even if we do not.

With typical sensitivity and intellectual rigour, The Sunday Times today reports Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun. There is, however, an apparently peer-reviewed science story behind it:

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.
Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

I think, however, there are more than few unanswered questions here. Do we know that only the men hunted? No. Do we have any indication that such societies practiced monogamy? No.

And quite what the quote on the end from Jilly Cooper about getting her bottom pinched has to do with paleoloithic hunters, I’m not quite sure.

The “cavewomen” might anyway have been better off on their own, judging from this study:

Marriage helps husbands to an extra 1.7 years, but it knocks 1.4 years off the average wife’s lifespan, according to the study of more than 100,000 people across Europe.

For more intelligent, but highly entertaining reading, I’d recommend an account of hominid fossil-hunting in Ethiopia.
(Hat-tip to John Hawks.)

In the British Library, a chance discovery, on the back of An Account of the Proceedings at the Guild-hall of the City of London on Saturday, September 12 1678 with the substance of Sir Thomas Plater’s Speech and the Lord Mayor’s Answer Thereunto.

At the centre of the large format pamphet is the claim of “the Duke of York being a PAPIST” – so we are of course in the “exclusion crisis”.

But what I liked was that the entire back page of the four-page pamphlet is taken up by:

Postscript
It cannot reasonably be expected the the Speech of this Worthy and Deserving Knight, nor the Lord Mayor’s generous Reply thereunto, should be published exactly, since in so great a Concourse it was hardly possible to be taken; however least so considerable Transaction should be altogether buried in silence, we have endeavoured to give as full an Account thereof, as could be done by strength of memory, which we hope will therefore be kindly accepted instead of a more Correct Copy.

You might call it an early “collections and clairifications column”, or rather a pre-emptive one. Some newspapers might want to try it today.

Mathew Parris in The Times this morning laments the creation of human deserts, wild spaces where there are no humans.

In the beginning, man is expelled from the Garden of Eden. In the end, perhaps, we shall leave it of our own accord, closing the gate behind us.

Disconnection from the wild and “the natural” is indeed a problem, but there is, I’d suggest, an equally powerful argument for leaving parts of the Earth alone. The human species has managed to invade, to change, and often to damage, every aspect of the world. Giving nature, some rest, some space, allowing for biological diversity by the exclusion of us, will help to ensure the differing ecosystems that might just save life on earth.

(I’ve always thought there’s something powerful about the line in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that has a planet expel all of its “telephone sanitisers”, advertising executives and similar “useless” individuals. And then the humans are wiped out by a disease spread through dirty telephones … In a world full of telephones (as a “human” world must be today) that disease is a hideous danger.)
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But good on the “bedroom blogger”, as the media has inevitably dubbed the 16-year-old who has organised a protest in Oxford in favour of animal experimentation. Having done some animal experiments in my agricultural science days (although luckily in ours the goat kids had a very pleasant life), I’ve seen some animal experiments that should never have been allowed. (A lively, intelligent, interested goat kid, in a metabolism cage 24 hours a day, like a battery hen, is not a pleasant sight.)

But there are some experiments that have to be done on animals – that can save large numbers of human lives (and often other animal lives too). Provided experiments are tightly supervised, the best possible welfare conditions are maintained, and the tests have a clear objective, they have to go on. And those who terrorise anyone associated with them – down to the cleaners and builders – have to be stopped.