I was driving (or indeed, being driven) back from a hard day's wedding related shopping boredom today when our progress was impeded by a motorist "driving" (and I use the word lightly) at around 10 miles an hour down Wandsworth High Street while swerving wildly across the road. What was most noticeable as we decelerated from a steady 40 miles an hour to this aggravatingly low speed, was the large Christian fish symbol (itself a perversion of the greek alpha) stuck precariously to the boot door.

As I've been feeling a bit stressed and irritable this weekend anyway, I couldn't help but start ranting wildly about how every time I see a car doing something terrifying on the roads near where I live (normally a shit hatchback with the bumper held on with gaffer tape and one wing painted a mysterious beige colour, irrespective of what colour the rest of the car is), it always seems to have a fucking fish symbol on the back. And while we're at it, is this some kind of secret code for "Watch out; Dangerously shit driver ahead."

This is sort of tacky generalisation is terribly unhelpful really, but it did make me feel better and got me thinking about correlation vs. causality and the dangers therein. This is one of the most fundamental principles of scientific methodology and I think it's cool.

It's a thought so cool in fact that it has it's own groovy catchphrase called "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" which means in latin "because of this shit, this different shit does something".

I understand this as follows:

Humans are constantly trying to figure out the world around us and when we see two events that occur together, we tend to say that one causes the other (cause and effect) but 9 times out of 10 they don't. They just happened to occur at the same time and it's us who decided that they were linked because the world is so damn complicated and our senses are so limited that if we didn't link things up (albeit wrongly) then we'd spend our entire lives hiding under the bed with forty crates of baked beans and a spear .

Check this out; this is a genuine experiment that a couple of guys in California did about 10 years ago:

If you put a foreign body (like a piece of plastic) under your skin, then your body will start to form hard connective tissue (like scar tissue) around it to protect the other soft bits that are near the bit of plastic from getting hurt. Over time, if the bit of plastic rubs against this hard tissue and keeps killing cells, then the cells have to keep re-growing constantly. And if you've got an area of fast growing cells, then you can get cells that won't die naturally and will self replicate faster than the body can destroy them.

So the researchers stuck foreign bodies (chopped up pieces of a credit card) under the skin of a mouse. Over time this led to the mouse getting immortal cells around the plastic lumps for the reasons above and the researchers published a paper with the following title:

"Credit cards give you cancer"

Now obviously this is a hideous abuse of a living creature and they got fired and fined and other stuff, but their point was (ironically) about bad science and how people (like the Media) are constantly putting two and two together and getting four hundred and seventy two thousand, six hundred and eighty.

Brilliantly, it is this exact error in logic that I wanted to apply to my thought processes about the Christian cack-wagon and its driver, in order to figure out whether I was justified in calling them a savage tool, or if it was I who was the savage tool and I should track them down to give them a personal apology and a small kiss.

In this case, my hypothesis is not "Credit cards give you cancer", it's "People with fish symbols on their cars are dangerous fucktards who should be avoided on the roads like the black plague".

To be pathologically clear, let's mark my correlating events with "E" and my causal link with "C":

E1: People who drive badly are idiots.
E2: People who are very religious are idiots.
C: Idiocy as a factor correlates, therefore very religious people who drive will always be poor drivers and must be mocked doubly.

In order to determine whether E1 and E2 do genuinely correlate or not, I need to try to examine the basis of these statements:

E1 evidence:
This is easy. If you drive badly you are in danger of death or in danger of killing others. Society classes this as a bad thing. Idiots do bad things, therefore People who drive badly are idiots. Unless being and idiot and doing something bad aren't causal. Ah. Erm. No, I've got a way round this, really. Gimme a sec.

E2 evidence:
Harder. The fish symbol in question (the Icthys) denotes an affinity with the Christian faith. Therefore, I can assume with a reasonable level of confidence that if someone has the Icthys symbol on the back of their car then they are a Christian.

Moreover, I can assume with an equal level of confidence that this person is sufficiently passionate about their religion that they want to tell other people about it. SO passionate about it in fact, that they wish to mount the symbol of their faith on what amounts to a mobile billboard so that anyone forced to drive behind them at a mandated 10 miles an hour will be forced to gaze on the symbol and think "you wanker, get a fucking move on and stop thinking about the fucking gospels for 2 minutes before I drive you off the cunting road".

My personal experience with extremely religious people is thankfully limited to followers of the Christian right, a couple of whom I've crossed swords with messily over the years. However I've managed to correlate (oops, did it again) this behaviour against the behaviour of extremists in other faiths (such as Islam) who do things that I personally disagree with like dressing up in masks and chopping off other human beings' heads with a sword and sending a video of it to a television station.

This in turn has led me to the aforementioned prejudice that "People who are very religious are idiots".

Hang on though, it's just a prejudice. There's no actual proof is there that being religious makes you an idiot, there's merely correlating events. Which means I'd need to research those underlying events. Which would turn up more correlations. With more underlying events. With more correlations. With more underlying events. With....ah....sorry, my frontal cortex just imploded.

Fuck it. The world is too complex for my brain. I must be an idiot.
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But does that make me really religious, or a bad driver?