Science of Discworld III

that nearly everybody is content to leave to the experts. Mathematics has a strange position, similar but with its own peculiar stance akin to revealed religion – mostly because it has been presented from school onwards as an arcane craft whose practitioners are the only humans with access to Platonic truths.
    Then there are the quasi 1 -sciences like astrology, homeopathy, reflexology, and iridology, which simply can’t work. They should be sharply distinguished from odd, often ancient practices like acupuncture, osteopathy and herbal treatments, which work sufficiently often but have a theoretical base that is poorly worked out in scientific terms. Many people are attracted by their homespun mix of myth and mysticism (which are all the more impressive because the treatment sometimes works ), and feel that a modern scientific investigation would somehow spoil them. It would certainly poke some holes in the traditional rationalisations, but in all likelihood it would make the treatments even better. Whereas the quasi-sciences would be (indeed, already have been, not that everyone’s noticed) demolished.
    To end that list, we add evolutionary biology, a very well-established set of models founded in the fossil record, chromosomes, and DNA, which explains similarities and differences among today’s living creatures much more elegantly and effectively than its creationist or intelligent-design rivals. Nevertheless, a very large proportion of people – especially Christians in the American Mid-West, Muslims in fanatically Islamic cultures, and fundamentalist believers in general– deny that humans evolved. To them, their own brand of authority trumps the scientific evidence, or their ‘common sense’ renders the whole concept laughable. ‘I ain’t kin to no ape!’ was the explanation given by a young schoolgirl at one of Jack’s Life on Other Planets lectures, when the teacher asked her why she didn’t believe in evolution.
    There is a general human propensity, of which much use is made in the Discworld books, to set up accepted, unexamined mental backgrounds. Mostly these result from the Make-a-Human-Being kits that each human culture inflicts on its members as they grow up through childhood and adolescence. Each of us is the result of a learning process, only a tiny fraction of which is overt ‘education’ by professional teachers. The kit includes nursery rhymes, songs, stories, the personification of nursery animals (sly foxes, wise owls, industrious litter-collecting Wombles) and human roles from fabulous postman and princess up to crime-fighting Batman and Superman. All these have their place in the unexamined basis of our day-to-day thoughts and actions. A possible explanation for Princess Diana’s undeniable popularity with the British public – indeed the world – is that she, unlike ‘real’ royalty, had imbibed the popular impression of What Princesses Do as distinct from the authentically royal version. So she did what we had all learned that real princesses do, she looked and behaved like an icon, not like genuine royalty.
    Sophisticated human beings, citizens like us – and indeed like tribesmen and barbarians 2 in today’s world, nearly all of whom have heard of Superman, Tarzan, Ronald MacDonald – all have this hotchpotchof images, models, phobias, inspirations and villains. Our day-to-day experience gives us a self whose memory-train is a succession of scenes, thoughts, experiences, and passions, all painted à la Damasio with emotional tags that say ‘Great!’, ‘Do This Again When I Can!’ or ‘Avoid At All Costs!’ when we recall them. But these sit upon a great mass of mostly unexamined structural human material, that labels us as Western Twentieth-Century Biologist or Ghetto Rabbi or Roman Centurion or Seventeenth-Century French Courtesan, or, for most people most of the time, Exploited Peasant.
    Each of those roles has a different set of emotional labels for money, for priests, for sex, for nakedness, for death, and for birth. Most people, until quite recently, underpinned that unexamined set of beliefs with a theist (personal, humanlike) God or gods, or a deist (Something Up There with Extraordinary Powers) god-structure, so the emotional tags on important memories have been strongly God-flavoured. When we remember them they may be sins, atonements, redemptions or trials. They may be mitzvahs (blessings) or revenges or charities. Religions, in bringing us into our