Think of the children!

Cerrie Burnell is a kids TV presenter currently working for the BBC's CBeebies channel. I say currently, because even though she seems like a perfectly nice person, some parents want her removed from their screens. Their reason? Her right arm ends in a stump just below her elbow.

According to a report on the Digital Spy media web site, parents are voicing their objections on the CBeebies message board. "Is it just me, or does anyone else think the new woman presenter on CBeebies may scare the kids because of her disability?" wrote one. Other comments are in the same vein. Can you imagine being Burnell herself and knowing what some parents think of her? It must be heartbreaking.

The kids these people claim to be protecting have clearly dealt with Burnell's disability - as has the rest of society. Perhaps some are actually fascinated by her arm. They're definitely more aware that we're all different in lots of ways, not just skin colour. Are they freaked out? I think not. The proof? Not one poster is claiming that their kid is actually upset about Burnell's presence on-screen. I think these posters are expressing their own aesthetic disgust, and justifying it as a child protection issue. That's far uglier than any physical disability.

In a modern, inclusive society where every reasonable person has a chance to shine, there's no place for this kind of meaningless aesthetic bigotry. People have disabilities. It's part of the human condition. Arms, legs, eyes, and many other body parts don't always look perfect. We're all freaks of nature and circumstance. Especially bigots.

Happy birthday Charles...

It's the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin today, the first man not only to describe the way that species evolve from one another, but to provide a chain of evidence to support his argument. This is a remarkable achievement; at once both an elegant and inspirational idea while being one of the simplest a human mind has ever had. It has no conditions, no special pleading, no supernatural entities guiding it. Just a long series of almost imperceivable mutations blindly offering up alternatives for members of each successive generation of a population of organisms, and possibly offering an advantage that enables one or two to cope with changing conditions oh so very slightly better than their siblings. Evolution + time = the modern world.

It's both a seemingly mundane and yet entirely awe-inspiring idea. And, while no one with a proper scientific training would ever completely rule anything out, there's an overwhelming and indeed growing weight of evidence to suggest that old Darwin was bang on the money first time. The discovery of DNA and its replication errors, the use of selective breeding, the constant battle against pathogens that adapt faster than medicine can thwart them; evolution is becoming more relevant every day. Philosophically, the only constant really is change.

What I find personally fascinating about evolution, however, isn't that people feel uncomfortable with the idea that we're part of the fabric of the universe we inhabit, rather than having been declared special and plonked here by some god or other, but that the argument in favour of so-called creationism itself has *evolved* significantly over the past few years as it tries to find an attack that will work against a mere idea. The irony is lost on so many people, and yet evolution is something that hasn't had to change to meet that challenge. It just explains, consistently and calmly, how come things are so.

"Theologians," wrote Lawrence Krauss in last week's New Scientist (p25),"have an obligation to attempt to understand the knowledge about the world that has been gained through science, because only through such knowledge can their theology possibly be consistent." One way of marrying science with faith is in accepting that science showcases creation, explains it and gives man an insight into "the mind of God", as Hawking has it. Rejecting science using its products and applications is at best a cynical, paradoxical exercise.

So, happy 200th birthday Charlie.

Surveiling the Innocent...

"Wacky" Jacqui Smith, the UK's Home Secretary, has written a letter to The Guardian defending our country's growing surveillance culture.

She says that CCTV has "helped to reclaim our town centres and public spaces for the law-abiding majority." In fact, with CCTV so ubiquitous, few consider it. Go to any town centre at closing time to see what stupid crimes are committed right in front of CCTV cameras. Indeed, some councils have started equipping them with loudspeakers to remind people they're being watched and that they face prosecution. So, what CCTV has actually done is made it easier to convict people after a crime has been committed.

Smith also defends the DNA database. "Each year," she writes, "literally hundreds of homicides and rapes are resolved with the use of DNA matches." Again, this detection is a marvel of modern technology, but it is always used after the fact. There are no statistics for crimes not committed because of CCTV or DNA matching, and so for the Home Secretary to imply that there's a quantifiable figure is, well, it's bogus.

In the same way that people don't think about CCTV, they don't think about the DNA they leave everywhere they go. After all, would there be any vicious rapes or murders of strangers if it were foremost in their minds? There's no doubt that DNA evidence and CCTV have caught thousands of dangerous criminals, but I don't understand why Smith can't understand that the opportunistic way genetic identities are also collected from the innocent who happen to come into contact with the police as part of their investigations is deeply odious to a society whose traditions include a strong sense of personal privacy.

CCTV and DNA databases are detection devices. Their ubiquity means that they're "invisible" and are therefore useless as crime prevention measures. Insisting to the contrary doesn't make it so. However, there's some good news. "In December I announced immediate steps to remove the DNA of children under 10 from the database, and set out the case for greater flexibility and fairness in the system," wrote Smith.

That's a good start, but if you've done nothing, why should the state keep tabs on your genetic identity "just in case"? To me, as a reasonable, law-abiding Englishman, and even though I'm not on this database, such arbitrary recording feels genuinely and deeply wrong. You should be free to go about your business without such a record. After all, the presumption of innocence has no statute of limitations, which is something that records in the DNA pertaining to the innocent must have in a decent, fair society.

Old Pets As New...

It's been ages since I posted. Maybe I should be using that Twitter thingy...

Anyway, I recently heard about a company in South Korea cloning puppies for people who have lost their beloved pets. This seems at first sight to be a great idea, the first of what I'm sure will become a long succession of "undo buttons" on life, but I'm not so sure.

Does anyone remember Dolly the sheep, cloned by the Roslin Institute in 1996? Dolly died early of a progressive lung disease found in much older sheep. The underlying problem is that genomes age, and as they do they become less able to repair themselves, leading to age-related diseases such as cancer, arthritis and so on. If you take the genome of, say, a five-year-old animal and create a newborn clone from it, that clone starts with a genetic age of five. It ages prematurely.

I can't help thinking that the joy felt by owners who have their dead pets cloned using today's techniques will be short-lived as they realise they may have created a replacement condemned to suffer an early death.