On this day in 1859, or thereabouts (matinee on Wednesdays, concessions for senior citizens and guide dogs), Chaim Dershovitz, a man born into grinding poverty (indicentally, why is poverty always ‘grinding’, in the same way that indictments are always ‘damning’?) as fifteenth child in a family of eleven, son of a poor carpenter, in a manger in a stable on the outskirts of Chelm, because there was no room at the Linnean Society inn, published (under a pseudonym) his epic memoir How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Descent With Modification And they are still talking about it. But some people are talking about it more than others.

Over on the Fight the Future forum, which discusses stories in the weekly Futures SF column in Nature, we’ve been discussing the latest entry – a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tale by Martin Hayes warning all school leavers against joining the Space Corps. As the Editor of the column, I enjoyed the references to Alien but what resonated most with me were echoes of older SF tales such as Harry Harrison’s Bill The Galactic Hero and Hoe Haldeman’s The Forever War.

The piece is written from a very male perspective, which is fine, so I was irked by a comment from someone too shy to share their identity, which read

All aspiring members of the space corps are male? Come on, Nature, you can do better than this!

To which my reply was, more or less, that it is the job of writers to entertain, not to be constrained by political correctness. I loathe PC in all its forms – it is a discriminatory and unjust tyranny imposed by hypocrites who loudly claim that everyone should have the right to believe what they want, provided that it happens to accord with their own narrow, puritanical views.

Practically, I am not going to write back to an author of a piece like this – nor, indeed, any piece – and say things like ‘yes, OK, it’s great, but lets have some female space-corps members, and make sure we have the requisite quota of people with disabilities and who come from ethnic minorities’.

As an editor I think that such deliberate tampering with pieces to make them look more PC is woefully insincere, and is easily seen as the blatant social engineering it is. Any author who received such an edict would tell me to get lost, and quite right too.

Me? I stand for the sunshine and blue skies of self-expression, and against the dismal fog of political of social censorship.

This has made me so cross that I am going to take the dog

for a very long walk.

Some people clearly don’t deserve the Futures column. I suggest they stick to The Guardian, where they belong.

The recent monomania of my nemesis adversary friend RPG brings to mind the close association between science and science fiction. Let’s face it, we’re all space cadets at heart. But what, precisely, is the relationship between science and SF? How well does SF interpret science? Can it predict the future? Does science draw from SF? Such are the themes to be discussed in a panel discussion on SF film to be held in a couple of weeks, in which I am involved, and which you are invited to attend (for a small fee). Matinee Wednesdays. Restrictions may apply.

I’ve just come across David Sloan Wilson’s inaugural blog on SciBlogs which is entitled, in part,

Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God

I don’t think I’ve read or heard anything more misleading all day, and in this post I hope to explain why I am so concerned.

Many years ago when the world was young, I was putting together an anthology of Nature papers on Chinese paleontology, for the University of Chicago Press. The idea was to mark the explosion in our knowledge of the history of life, directly precipitated by spectacular fossil material from China from the late ’90s onward. I was aided and advised my my colleague and friend Dr Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

“What’s the title going to be?” asked Luo, during one of our many, long transatlantic conversations.

“I don’t know yet”, I replied. "I do have a working title, though: Enter The Dragon " – a cheesy reference to Kung Fu movies of yore. Either Luo didn’t get the reference, or he did, but passed swiftly on.

“I have a better title: Rise of the Dragon”, he said.

The Daily Nimbyist Bungaloid Curtain Twitcher unclogged the deepest recesses of its own nadir a couple of days back (HT: Carl Zimmer. And don’t hit me, I’m a palaeontologist) with this startling story on the newly described pterosaur Darwinopterus whose headline reads, breathtakingly

THE TERRIFYING FLYING DINOSAUR THAT COULD UNLOCK THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

I shall now go away and chew one of my own legs off calm down before I examine this pitiful piece any further.

I received a tweet yesterday evening from Dr. R. B. O’H, soon to be formerly of Helsinki. The tweet read, in its entirety,

Hey, Henry. Will there be a CISB10 next year?

And that set me thinking.

I’m in the foothills of another book project. I’m going to tell you about the process, as a way of proscrastinating prevaricating letting you know of a little-known part of the book-writing process – writing a book proposal.

You’ll have heard by now that a 14-year-old girl died a few hours after being treated with Cervarix, a vaccine against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a leading cause of cervical cancer. My first thought when I heard this was – oh no, not again.

Here I am at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) meeting in Bristol, doing my Nature Editor thing of hanging around in bars. Except that this year, I am co-presenting a poster; the first time I’ve done anything with my PhD work for seventeen sixteen years (Palaeontologists can’t count reliably beyond three – Ed.). It’s a long story.