Soviets & Cycle Tracks

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A friend in Oxford once told me of some intriguing research. It was in a religious connection, not surprisingly, but it illustrates what I have in mind. Years before, the [then] Soviet Union had got its scientists to look into chemical experiments which had been undertaken (in the USA, I think) to try and reproduce the sort of conditions under which Life might have been expected to begin on earth. The theory, a logical enough wish for the atheist soviet republic, was that if scientists could create the right kind of primaeval soup in a flask, pass electrical charges through it, and come up with chains of amino-acids, it would be possible to claim once and for all that life on earth was not created by a God.

Well, some scientists did their worst. And true to form, they duly came up with the desired primaeval soup and amino-acid chains. But it did not prove or disprove anything, for they were the wrong experiments. They were not found easy or possible to repeat elsewhere - always a poor sign. Moreover, the chemists based the recipe for their soup on certain assumptions about what rocks, gasses and other elements were expected to be present on the earth's surface and in its atmosphere - at the very time that geologists and others were discovering that their recipe was simply wrong - they should have used quite different ingredients. Not that this slight problem stopped atheists seizing on the so-called 'proof' as a very effective tool for their propaganda!

This came to mind when Jean Mariott's commented to me recently about a government advisory group who seem to be suggesting that when a road accident occurs involving a cyclist and a motorised vehicle, the driver of the vehicle should always be blamed. The notion strikes me as being so silly that it is probably an early April Fool. Or perhaps, since there seem to be other countries which have such law, its the sort of merely speculative idea that might have been dug up by an hostile press from long discarded discussion papers, to discredit the government. At least I hope it is no more than that; we have had far too much tampering with the principles of English Law for my liking.

Still, it set me pondering the sort of gently unthinking prejudice I think we are being led into, against motorists. My guess is that its authors believe themselves to be acting for our common good. But it troubles me when anyone who poses as if they are acting for the good, comes to imagine that they can promote it by using prejudice. The means really can't always justify the end.

There is good evidence - you really do not have to look for weird conspiracy theories - for thinking that even nice governments can slip into the habit of using selective information techniques to create support for policies. The theory of English government is that the people elect representatives to govern the country on their behalf, and that political parties exist to promote the interests of their supporters. The reality is quite often that once elected on the pretext that they will represent the people's interests, the 'representatives' set about deciding on behalf of their people, what it is in the people's interests to think and do - whether they like it or not.

This is something I must revisit another day. But I begin to wonder if the so-called 'research' which has brought us traffic calming; humps in the road, cycle tracks and all the rest, is in reality the same decidedly dodgy species of ideologically promoted research which claimed to 'prove' that God could not have created life....