By RICHARD DAWKINS - RDF ORIGINALS
Updated: Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:11:49 UTC - An RDFRS Original

You know how it is some days, you wake up with a particular tune in your head and you can’t shake it off all through the day. Why won’t it go away? Often it isn’t even a very good tune but it sticks. Just for the one day. Why that tune? Why that day?

It happened to me on Tuesday August 3rd, and the tune was “Jesus calls us o’er the tumult”. In the Ancient and Modern it is the hymn appointed for St Andrew’s Day, for the obvious reason that he is mentioned in the second verse: “As of old Saint Andrew heard it . . .”. I don’t think I had heard, or sung, that particular hymn since leaving school. Why did it come to me on that day of all days, August 3rd?

Now, there are 365 days in the year and each saint is celebrated on just one of them. What are the odds that, having not heard or sung St Andrew’s hymn for my whole life since leaving school, I would suddenly and without warning find myself humming, on St Andrew’s day and no other, that very tune? Surely it could only happen through the co-vibration of relativistically balanced quantum energy fields? Or something equally mysterious. Truly, there are more things in heaven and earth, wouldn’t you agree, Horatio?

So I went and, with bated breath, looked it up. When actually is St Andrew’s Day? With trembling fingers I typed the question into Google. The words on the screen seemed to swell to a gigantic size.

St Andrew’s Day is not August 3rd, it is November 30th.

                                               *          *          *          *          *

I hope the moral is clear. If St Andrew’s Day had turned out to be August 3rd, those who delight in the ‘uncanny’ would eagerly have repeated my story, and it would have found a permanent niche travelling round and round the memosphere. Didn't I therefore have a duty to record the occurrence of something that was not an uncanny coincidence? But if we all told such bathetic stories wouldn’t life be boring? That is exactly the point. Boring memes don’t spread. So when somebody tells us an apparently remarkable story, we need to devalue the apparent remarkableness accordingly.

I should also mention that, if August 3rd had turned out to be St Andrew’s day, there are any number of ways in which I could have subconsciously picked up the fact. Presumably churches all over Oxford (there are plenty, and the nearest one happens to be dedicated to St Andrew) were singing the hymn, and a member of a congregation might have gone past my window humming it. Or I might have heard the BBC’s Daily Service on the radio. Or I might have caught a glancing mention of today being St Andrew’s Day on my computer screen during my early surfing fix. Or, finally, one in 365 is not really very long odds, given the number of things that can happen in a day and the number of people to whom they might happen.

Richard

TAGGED: COMMENTARY, CRITICAL THINKING, HUMOR, IRRATIONALITY, REASON, RICHARD DAWKINS, SCIENCE