In the ‘60s (or late ’50s – I forget) Malcolm Muggeridge used to host a TV programme on the BBC called “The Question Why”. He managed to attract an interesting bunch including, as I recall on one show, Norman Mailer and William F Buckley. The point of the broadcast was to ask why things are as they are instead of the usual how.

Nothing much has changed: few people are interested in the why of things – in fact “why” has almost come to mean “how”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rantings of evangelical evolutionists who, with monotonous persistence, keep telling us how we arrived here when the only really interesting question is why we arrived here.

What brought all this up, you may be wondering? This headline from the Daily Mail:

Scientists reveal why we have an anus: Study finds genes that create the same orifice in very different species.

Of course, just as every Anglican knows why the Anglican Church of Canada has bishops, every two-year old knows why we have an anus; it takes a scientist to discover how we have one and to muddle the distinction between its function and the method of its arrival.