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The Mayoral race goes to the dogs...

The Boulton & Co blog has a gem today.

Last night each greyhound at the Wimbledon racetrack competed under the name of a mayoral candidate. First, imagine the kennel negotiations...I want Ken. Fine. Boris's hair goes better with my collar, anyway...

Next, guess who romped home?

Alice Fishburn

What do a vampire bat and a conservative have in common?

This morning David Willetts appeared on Andrew Marr's Start the Week discussing the altruism of vampire bats. Much to Guido's amusement.

But as Guido concedes, the point David was making was a serious one.

A vampire bat that collects more blood than it needs for its own uses will allow others to have some of the blood even if they are not related. The idea is that reciprocity is an evolutionary strategy. It is a deep part of our human nature.

Andrew Marr immediately pipes up that Willetts is taking E.O Wilson's side in his debate with Richard Dawkins. The former argues in favour of group selection - very roughly, that we act in ways to improve the chances of the group breeding - against Dawkins's support for kin selection - the idea that we act for our relatives.

You will be relieved to hear that you will not be required to take a position on this dispute in order to contribute to the political debate. Certainly I am relieved to hear it. Following the debate took me much further into study of the feeding and sexual habits of ants than I felt I was capable of understanding.

Under both group selection and kin selection it is clear that reciprocal altruism can prove a good evolutionary strategy. And this has important implications for conservatism. It means that a philosophy that prides itself on proceeding from human nature has to have a theory of society and not just of the individual.

I rang David and asked him to recommend some reading. He suggests Ken Binmore's Natural Justice.

How Huckabee thinks kangaroos were created

Mike Huckabee, the wannabee President, says that he doesn't believe in evolution. This leads on to an important question. How does he think kangaroos were created?

In case it comes up on the hustings in New Hampshire, I thought I would provide a helpful guide. But how to work out the line to take?

Conservapedia to the rescue!

Here's your debate prep briefing on the origins of the kangaroo, Governor Huckabee, and glad to be of service:

According to the origins theory model used by young earth creation scientists, modern kangaroos are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined by baraminologists whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart. The idea that God simply generated kangaroos into existence there is considered by most creation researchers to be contra-Biblical.

Other views on kangaroo origins include the belief of some Australian Aborigines that kangaroos were sung into existence by their ancestors during the "Dreamtime" and the evolutionary view that kangaroos and the other marsupials evolved from a common marsupial ancestor which lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

In accordance with their worldviews, a majority of biologists regard evolution as the most likely explanation for the origin of species including the kangaroo.

Need more help, Governor? If the roo questions become insistent try this site - How did animals get from the Ark to places such as Australia?

Difficulties in our ability to explain every single situation in detail result from our limited understanding. We cannot go back in a time machine to check what has happened, and our mental reconstructions of what the world was like after the Flood will inevitably be deficient.

Because of this, the patterns of post-Flood animal migration present some problems and research challenges for the biblical creation model.

Brilliant stuff. Make that Huckabee man President, that's what I say.

(Hat Tip: Chris Smith)

Would Batman buy in Battersea?

Matthew Parris has been bitten by a bat and received advice from his devoted readership:

“I really would urge you,” writes kindly Alison Rasey from the admirable Bat Conservation Trust, “to visit your GP to discuss post-exposure treatment for rabies.” This she recommends “firstly with regards to your personal wellbeing, and secondly that of the public”.

Ms Rasey writes from (honestly) Battersea.

Matthew thinks it a hilarious coincidence that the Bat Conservation Trust should hail from Battersea.

He is, of course, quite wrong.

The moggy mysteries....

Hillary Clinton is in trouble for giving away Socks, the White House cat.

Perhaps she should turn to an old friend for sympathy.

Cherie Blair was famously rumoured to have killed off Humphrey, the Downing Street feline. He was later discovered alive and well in South London but never returned to No. 10.

It's tough being a power pussy.

Alice Fishburn

Quick. Someone get the cows a good PR agency...

British bovines have had a bad year. First foot-and-mouth. Now bluetongue.

Their international image is clearly suffering too - a Slate article today asks: "Why are cows in Britain always getting weird diseases?"

The answer is complex but the article does make one reassuring point :

It's also possible that British cattle are simply the victims of bad publicity. Most European countries, as well as nations in Africa, Asia, and North America, have had confirmed cases of the three major livestock diseases—mad cow, foot and mouth, and bluetongue. But the United Kingdom happens to have one of the best systems in the world for reporting these outbreaks. Since the country was struck with a devastating BSE epidemic in 1968, British health officials have developed a surveillance network with a very high degree of transparency.

Good news in a way but probably not much consolation to British farmers and their long-suffering herds.

Alice Fishburn

The Government's foot-in-mouth disease

What will ministers say now?

When the original foot-and-mouth crisis hit, the Government worked hard behind the scenes to suggest that the problem came from the private lab, rather than its own.

It got them through the original outbreak. By the time it became clear that the Government didn't have a clue, the story had died down.

Now it's back. And we know that the problem was not caused by sabotage, or a careless employee of a private company but by a pipe on a site controlled by the Government where inadequate arrangements had been made to establish who was in charge of hygiene.

So what will the ministers say now?

Acting against dangerous dogs

The terrible pit bull death raises, yet again, the question of how to control dangerous dogs. Should whole breeds be banned? Can they be?

Early last year, the incomparable Malcolm Gladwell tackled precisely this issue in a New Yorker piece. His real target was racial profiling on the Subway and why it would be a mistake, but in the process he provides some very useful information about pit bulls.

The problem with banning pit bulls, argued Gladwell, is this:

A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bullness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general.

He proceeds to argue that identifying individual dangerous dogs is the only effective method of reducing the threat they pose, before writing this concluding sentence.

It is always easier just to ban the breed.

Well, yes, it is. Which is why I am in favour of it.