Twilight creator Stephanie Meyer has a gift for characterization. On first (and second, and third) reading, you might think the gift is defective, coated in Anthrax, made by slave labour in Shenzhen, China, and should be returned posthaste to the dollar store where she bought it.

But it’s true, she does write good characters…if you view characterization from a certain perspective. Complaining about Bella Swan being a bad character is like complaining about Georgi Markov’s ricin-tipped umbrella because it doesn’t keep you dry in the rain.

Bella’s supposed to have no motivations, no will, and no identifying details. This is intentional, because young girls are supposed to imagine that they are her. She’s a blank shape moving through the text with “YOUR FACE HERE” written on it. You’re supposed to close their eyes and imagine you’re Bella, being romanced by a handsome jerk. They say that cricket appeals to people because everyone thinks they’re good at it. Twilight seems like cricket – it packages a fantasy in a way that makes it seem like it could happen to you.

There are male equivalents. Ninety years before Twilight, there was a book called A Princess of Mars, where a man from our world is transported to Mars, and more or less becomes king of it, winning the heart of a beautiful woman. But Edgar Rice Burroughs made a mistake in John Carter’s characterisation – he was too tough. Tall, handsome, a soldier from the Civil War, he lacked that everyman quality. Maybe that was less of a problem in 1912, when you still met everymen who were like that, but still.

Ripoff books soon appeared that corrected this flaw. John Norman’s infamous Gor series eventually pupated into a diary of Norman’s unashamed and aberrent sexual fantasies, but the first book (Tarnsman of Gor) was a retread of A Princess of Mars with the intimidating alpha male hero changed into an unassuming college professor. That’s doing it right. To appeal to science fiction fans, you really want a nerd hero, not someone who resembles the jocks who bully them on the football field.

It creates realism problems: it doesn’t seem plausible that John Norman’s hero could so quickly pick up Bruce Lee-esque fighting abilities (at one point, defeating a dozen armed men with his hands literally tied behind his back). But that’s not the point. The hero has to code as a nerd. It doesn’t matter whether he actually does anything nerdy. It’s like The Social Network Movie – where Mark Zuckerberg effortlessly owns every conversation he’s in, has the eerie confidence of a cult leader, but he knows a lot about programming so I guess he’s a nerd.

In any case, “nerd becomes king of fantasyland” was the number one cliche of fantasy books for several decades (wielding several ancillary cliches such as “the first alien lifeform encountered on the planet is an attractive humanoid female”). It started to become annoying, because usually the author tried to both have his cake and eat it, by making their nerd suddenly a cool ass-kicking hero when the story required it.

This approach has metastasized into the world of videogames (where blank cipher Gordon Freeman is a dorky scientist who obviously can outfight teams of Black Ops specialists), as well as Hollywood movies (where the hottest girl in high school can’t get a date because she’s quirky and has a random sense of humor, or whatever).

Artists try to have it both ways, and we get characters that aren’t just fake but contradictory in a self-annihilatory fashion, like matter and antimatter mixed in a flask. Books, movies, etc are full of fat characters who wear size zero jeans, master generals who make utterly retarded decisions for the sake of author’s convenience, etc. In books, the labels always lie.

Why is suicide illegal? Because it’s a crime to destroy government property (har har)?. I’ve heard that the truth is that it gives first respondents a pretext to enact drastic measures to save your life. Under normal circumstances, people have the right to refuse medical care.

From the perspective of third parties, suicide is clearly a bad thing – a get out of jail free card when other people want you to keep playing. But how do you block the dam at the source? How do you stop people from doing it?

You’ve got to persuade them that death is no escape. Here are some methods that have been tried:

1. In the West Indies under Spanish occupation (as recorded by Girolamo Benzoni), vast numbers of men committed suicide by jumping from cliffs or by killing each other. He adds that, out of the two million original inhabitants of Haiti, fewer than 150 survived as a result of the suicides and slaughter (a number that’s hard to believe). In the end the Spaniards, seeing their labor pool dwindle, put a stop to the epidemic of suicides by persuading the Indians that they, too, would kill themselves, and would follow them into the afterlife to inflict fresh tortures. “Kill yourselves, and we’ll be there holding open the gate.”

2. In the Spanish American War, the Moros would strip naked, bind their penises and testicles with green strips of cow hide, and soak the cow hide in salt water, causing it to shrink around their genitals, causing tremendous pain. They were in such agony that they’d attack the enemy in a blind fury and feel nothing, not even a shot to the heart (apparently this is the reason the Americans switched from .38s to .45s, which is not the only time small penises and big guns have gone together, but I go off-piste). The eventual solution to these suicide attacks was to capture the Moros alive, wrap them in a pig skin, bury them up to the neck, and leave them to die. From their perspective, pork meant eternal damnation. When the Americans starting doing this, the situation rapidly returned to normal.

Is there a secular method to deter suicide? Maybe. You’d have to start out with kids, and school them the right way.

“Killing yourself? No. Doesn’t work. The universe always knows. Here’s what happens: you black out from the pills, the bloodied knife falls from your hands, you feel the galvanic surge of the train passing over and through you…and then you wake up, alive and unhurt. The kettle’s boiling. It’s time to go to school, or go to work, or go to nowhere at all. You haven’t escaped. The bottomless abyss just drops you back in other the top. I’ve tried doing it over and over. So have we all. There’s no getting out of here, and we just have to live through it.”

Wouldn’t they have heard of successful suicide victims on the news? People who apparently did what a guy on PUAHate once described to me as “manually stop breathing”?

Maybe you can explain to your kids about how time has a subjective element. For some, it’s a tumbling waterfall. For others, it’s a trickling brook. Maybe for suicide victims, it has the consistency of pitch at room temperature – apparently solid, yet flowing over the course of millions of years. As you kill yourself, your brain captures a moment, and holds it in Zeno’s paradox of increasingly smaller intervals, stretching out eternally.

People who get run over by a train? They’re still under the train.

There’s ways to make suicide seem far less attractive. It involves lying, but maybe suicide victims themselves are already deceiving themselves by imagining an escape route anywhere.

From theoretical genetics comes the idea of a “green beard” gene, which a) gives you some clear physical sign of its presence (canonically, a green beard), and b) modifies your behavior so that you’re nice to people with that physical trait. And by “nice”, we’re talking about altruism: you do things to benefit them even when there’s no benefit to yourself.

The trouble is that such a gene would have an Achilles heel: genetic freeloaders. Suppose a mutation appeared that gave you a green beard but DIDN’T affect your behavior. You’d gain the benefits of the green beard gene (green bearders would be nice to you), but wouldn’t have to pay any costs. Such a mutation would theoretically outcompete the legitimate green beard gene until the value of green beards was destroyed.

Or would it? Did cubic zirconia destroy the value of diamonds? The presence of fakers doesn’t seem to render authentic items worthless – or if it does, it does so in an arbitrary and unclear way. Certain moths have evolved the yellow and black banding of wasps (freeloading off the wasps’ “I am poisonous” heraldry)…but flying insects with yellow and black banding are still scary. It seems that there’s a delicate equilibrium between reals and fakes that can exist without tipping one way or another. After all, it benefits the fake green beard gene for there still to be some social cachet to a green beard.

None of these genes are known to exist. But there are cultural, information-based green beards.

Gang tattoos, for one. Items of religious faith (such as a cross, or a hijab), for another. These are props that signal to other gang members or believers “I am part of the in-group. Favour me.” According to the fake green beard principle, you’d expect to see lots of “fake green memes” – people who wear a cross and reap the benefits, but don’t bother going to church or paying any other price for their faith. And sure, you could put guys like Tim Lambesis in that category.

But at the same time, fake Christians aren’t wildly outcompeting true Christians. Generally people who wear crosses do go to church, and do believe. Obviously, there are limits to how far this sort of memetic fakery can reach.

Maybe this is why so many religions insist on public, costly shows of faith – to help keep the flock pure of non-altruistic green beard fakes. And maybe this explains why so many religious rites seem bizarre and strange to outsiders – they’re that way by design. Why would you insist someone do something sensible to show his faith? It’d be like a college fraternity where joining requires that you change your car’s oil, brush your teeth, and call your mom every week.

This could explain things like the Grishneshwar Temple Baby Toss, where newborns are flung from a tower to a canopy 50 feet below. No way would a fake green beard do that. Rituals like this are sieves, meant to separate the sheep from the goats, and the costlier and more dangerous, the better. Remember, fake believers water down the purity of the religion. You cannot allow freeloaders to benefit from the in-group’s altruism. And it’s ironic that this green beard memetic behavior is actually damaging its subjects at the genetic level.

This is probably Dickie Dawkins’ big contribution to the philosophy of biology: recognising that humans aren’t just a canvas for recombinant DNA, but also a canvas for information-based replicators of all kinds. DNA isn’t the only way to play this game, we have other things trying to spread themselves via our bodies – and sometimes they can even override the power of genes.

Catholic priests are celibate – a drastic act of faith that takes your reproductive fitness down to a number closely resembling “zero”. Why? To prove the seriousness of their beliefs. That seems odd to outsiders: killing off your genetic strain for the sake of making a point. But I wonder what sorts of green beard memes are currently infesting your mind.