This week’s poem is a meditation on good and evil and faith and logic via Principia Mathematica, based on the news this week that some genes for violent antisocial behavior have been identified.

It turns out that up to one percent of the population may have these genes. But they do not always express, because nurture and life circumstances are just as important in whether or not the person’s  actually going to turn out antisocial, or dare I say it, evil. And yet, we have so often ascribed these behaviors, throughout history, to the Devil, or to other supernatural causes.

I ended up linking this to the notion that religion exists in our mental space in a position analogous to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which in its broadest layman interpretation states that a system cannot prove its own consistency; wasn’t there something religious, in the end, in Russell and Whitehead’s belief in complete systems, in the ability of logic to put everything into order?

OK, so either you come to this blog because it sometimes leaps from game design to poems linking genetics, theology, and mathematics in rhyming hexameter — or you are wondering what the hell (no pun intended) I am on about. Shrug. Here’s the poem either way, annotated for your (in)convenience. Read More “The Sunday Poem: Modus Ponens”