I only just caught up with the news that Seymour Benzer died on 30 November. This was widely covered in the US press (eg this obituary in the LA Times), but amazingly there has been nothing in the British press (not even anything in Nature, the weekly science magazine!). Benzer was 86, and still carrying out his research on the behaviour genetics of fruitflies. It was his work on learning that inspired me to become a research scientist, over 30 years ago. That's also why I pretentiously took "Benzer" as my first pseudonym in revolutionary politics (there were many others. Maybe I'll write about them one day). Anyway, poor old Seymour is dead, although at 86 you can't complain. He should have won the Nobel for his discovery of the genetic bases of biological clocks. You can read more about Seymour in this book by Jonathan Weiner. There's a picture in there I took of Tim Tully wearing one of Pavlov''s hats.
Everyone on the planet is supposed to be no further than 7 "handshakes" from anyone else. That also works in the fourth dimension - time.
I am listening to the BBC Radio 4 programme, Desert Island Discs (infuriatingly not available on Listen Again on the BBC website). The invitee this week is the classical cellist Steven Isserlis. He just told a story about how his father (now aged 90), as a boy, went with HIS father to try and rent a flat in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. The concierge was about 100, and all was going well until Isserlis' grandfather mentioned that he was a musician.
At this point the concierge refused to rent the flat to him. When asked what the problem was, the concierge replied that her aunt had a lodger who was a musician, and who she remembered had been foul-tempered, made a terrific noise and spat on the floor. What was his name? asked Isserlis' grandfather. "Beethoven" replied the old lady.
Isserlis thinks his father is probably one of the few people alive to have met someone who met Beethoven. I thought that was quite amazing.
I can't beat that, but when I lived in Paris, I did know Raymond
Molinier very well. Molinier was a well-known figure in French far-left
circles in the 1930s, and he greatly impressed Trotsky because of his
energy and initiative (he retained this up until he death, in his late
80s). So I met a man who knew Trotsky, who knew Lenin, etc etc. In
fact, the Lenin connection goes two ways, as my history teacher
interviewed Kerensky in the 1970s, and played the tape to us at school.
Kerensky died in Blackpool - not many people know that...
I've just started reading a new book by paleontologist Michael Novacek, "Terra", about the possibility of a
new, human-driven, mass extinction event.
This kind of perspective reminds me of W H Auden's poem, "The Fall of Rome", in particular the two final fantastic stanzas. ["Cerebrotonic" can be taken as a synonym of "effete"]"The geological perspective of 'Terra' is bizarrely reassuring. Humans will
presumably be gone within a few million years, perhaps sooner. If the past
that Novacek describes is a guide to the future, global ecosystem processes
will be restored some tens of thousands to a million years after our demise,
and new forms of life over the ensuing millions of years will exploit the
denuded planet we leave behind. Thirty million years on, things will be back
to normal, albeit a very different 'normal' from before. It is good to be
optimistic. The problem is living here in the meantime."
This more or less sums up some of the key dilemmas that run through my view of the world, which are also indicated in the overall title of my blog.
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
I don't suppose many people outside of France have heard of Les Rita Mitsouko. They were a noisy, talented rock group made up of two people - Catherine Ringer (vocals) and Fred Chichin (guitar). They helped write the soundtrack for my Paris from the mid-80s to the mid--90s. Fred has just died, aged 53, of an extremely aggressive cancer, which killed him in two months. Serge Gainsbourg was snotty about them, claiming that Ringer was vulgar, but I thought they were great. This is one of their big hits, C'est Comme Ça. Ciao, Fred.
One of the main contributions by the British to the French Resistance in WW2 was the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of the armed forces set up by Churchill in summer 1940 with the order to "set Europe ablaze". Many brave men and women died trying to help local resistance forces do exactly that. After the war, SOE - which was officially wound up in 1946 – commissioned William Mackenzie, an Oxford historian, to write its history. This massive document was classified secret for over 50 years, and was finally published only in 2000 as "The Secret History of SOE".
The Introduction to the 2000 edition is written by M. R. D. Foot, who used to work at Manchester University and has published a number of excellent books on SOE (including "SOE in France"). In his Introduction, Foot describes how Mackenzie - who was Professor of Government at Manchester from 1949-1966 – used to keep an (entirely illegal) copy in his office in Dover Street "where Engels used to entertain Marx in the 1860s."
This house was at number 58, and Engels apparently rented it out. On 25 January 1865, Marx wrote Engels a letter about various problems to do with the International Workingmens' Association. At the end, he added: "P.S. I left a pair of winter boots (shoes) at your house in Dover Street, ditto new pair of knitted stockings, and probably the 2 silk handkerchiefs as well. I only mention it so that you can drop a word to your landlords ‘some time or other’ so that they know that an eye is kept on them."
And now the final bit of the story - where is the house that was at 58 Dover Street now? The answer would appear to be - underneath the Smith Building, the new home of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Manchester, where my office is... Did the builders find a pair of winter boots and some new knitted stockings?
This is an article I sent to the Los Angeles Times, who have published my stuff in the past. I thought it was pretty good, but they passed on it, saying they were "flummoxed". So I sent it to The Guardian, who were very rude and didn't even bother replying (thanks!). So here it is. Maybe it IS rubbish?
Over the last 15 years, scientists have made a major discovery about how animals communicate with each other – they don’t tell lies to each other.
Although there are odd cases of vervet monkeys giving fake alarm cries to call time out in fights, and many dangerous-looking insects are in fact harmless, when animals communicate with members of their own species, they generally tell the truth.
For example, the size of a stag’s antlers are a direct measure of his strength. A weedy stag cannot “lie” and grow huge great antlers – he simply would not be able to carry them. These signals are therefore “honest” because an animal cannot cheat.
Stag’s antlers are also “honest” because they are used in conflicts between males. If a weak male found a way of growing light, hollow, antlers that simply looked good, they would soon break in conflicts with other males. The female deer, who stand around and watch these jousts, generally prefer to mate with the victor. They would reject the hollow-antlered cheat and his genes would disappear from the population.
In many animals, honest communication does not involve complicated structures that require a lot of metabolic effort to create. Instead, honesty is maintained by the consequences of having a particular signal.
For example, both female wasps and male sparrows use simple patches of black tissue as a “badge” to show their status. It would be easy for a cheat – a weak wasp or sparrow – to grow a black patch. But individuals with darker patches have to resist physical challenges from potential rivals. These disputes can be very dangerous, and a weak cheat would not only lose the battle, they might even lose their life. These “badges of status” are therefore as much “honest signals” as are antlers or peacock tails.
All this inevitably raises parallels with human culture. Do we have honest signals or badges of status?
Part of the problem in identifying such signals is that not every character that expresses physical status is actually used as a signal. Baldness in men may at least partly be a consequence of high testosterone levels, but there is no evidence that bald men are seen as being more dominant or aggressive nor, alas, that women find bald men particularly attractive.
Even where a particular part of human behaviour is clearly a signal, it is not necessarily honest. Having a big car may be a sign of personal wealth, or it may simply indicate that a bank has been foolish enough to lend a large sum to someone who has very little chance of paying it back.
Ironically, probably the clearest honest signal of human wealth has now changed its signification in most cultures. Until high-calorie food became widely available around the time of the industrial revolution, the only way you could get fat was by being sufficiently well off to eat large amounts and do very little, something that only a privileged, tiny minority, could do. Obesity was an honest signal of wealth.
In some societies, being fat still indicates high social status. In the Nigerian port of Calabar, fat is fashionable, to the extent that wealthy wives are sent to “fattening rooms” where they can put on weight, to confirm the social status of their husband.
The ability to store excess calories, which was a huge advantage in our evolutionary past – a kind of metabolic savings account – drove our appetite for sugar and fat. But now, as our food environment has changed, that strong taste for what was once rare has become a mortal threat. As we all know, we are suffering from an obesity epidemic and its attendant wave of ill-health, brought about by a high-fat diet and low exercise.
Perversely, in some quarters, the honest signal of obesity has been turned on its head, and the new symbol of wealth and status is the female “size zero”. But a glance around the world shows that excessive thinness is not an honest signal of wealth and status – every day, hundreds of millions of malnourished people cheat at that game, and wish they could not.
Thankfully, we do not have to become anorexic to escape from the dangerous consequences of eating too much. We simply have to return to the conditions that most of our forebears experienced: fewer calories, more exercise. One of the reasons why many of us find that so difficult may be our bodies’ drive to store fat, an honest signal which has long since lost its meaning.
Idle clicking on the web lets you find all sorts of stuff. mozinor.com is a French site which specialises in hijacking film excerpts and over-dubbing them with daft dialogue. They're used to this, because most popular films appear in "VF" (version française - dubbed), and the lip-synch is pretty poor. Anyway, Mozinor is a dab hand at this. Here's an example from an early 007, when Bond is shown his spiffy Aston Martin. The language is extremely funny (if you're French) and at the end, a special compartment is revealed which will enable Bond to roll massive spliffs. He is very appreciative. I bumped into this on reading this article from Le Monde the other day. If you can, enjoy it!
Read the question! I've just finished marking our final year university
exams, and you'd be amazed (replace with your choice of adjective) at
the number of students who still do not read the question. If it
asks for two examples, give two examples. Not one - you haven't
answered the question fully - and not two - you're wasting your time.
If it says "between species" it MEANS "between species" and not "within
species". That having been said, there ARE times when you can define
the terms of the question, or when it is deliberately vague ("Size
matters" was one on a final paper a few years ago). But always, if it's
an essay question, read the question TWICE, make a plan, read the
question again, then start. PLEASE! If only for the poor old marker.
There's nothing more dispiriting than giving 0 to a brilliant answer to
a question that wasn't asked...
In 1914, four of the Bradley sisters got married at the same time -
this made quite a splash in the press. One of those sisters was my
paternal grandmother, Jessie. She's the one on the top left, we think.
This photo will feature on the BBC4 series about The Edwardians, going out in the UK tonight.
It belongs to Catherine Skeggs-Thirkettle, who's a grandchild of one of the other Bradley sisters, which makes her my second cousin?? Not sure about the genealogical nomenclature.
Anyway, those are marvellous bouquets the girls are carrying.
You can see more examples these Edwardian family album pictures here.
[This article by me appears in today's Los Angeles Times]
300 years ago, the man who invented the terms Homo sapiens and Cannabis sativa was born in southern Sweden. At the age of 28, Carl Linnaeus published a small book called "Systema Naturae" — a system of nature. Although it was only 14 pages long, with a limited circulation (only 29 copies still exist), this book changed the way that humanity looks at the natural world.
Linnaeus' little book provided a simple way of classifying organisms (is it an insect or a mammal?) and of naming them (Homo sapiens). Although the details of the naming system we use have changed substantially — Linnaeus divided the natural world into three kingdoms (animals, plants and minerals); scientists now talk of five kingdoms — Homo sapiens is still Homo sapiens.
Linnaeus proposed a hierarchical scheme in which each organism could be described in terms of its kingdom, class, order, genus and species — from the broadest category to the narrowest. By using Latin — the common scientific language of the time — Linnaeus was able to bypass the myriad folk names for animals and plants that made comparison of information from one country to another so difficult. He also integrated the growing conviction that like bred like, putting species at the heart of the natural world.
Above all, Linnaeus argued that organisms should be classified on the basis of a small number of physical characteristics rather than, say, their habits (this animal flies, that one swims) or their use (these plants can be eaten, those are good for medicine). In the case of plants, Linnaeus used their sexual organs to distinguish one species from another. This not only led to a more effective classification, it also inadvertently provided 18th and 19th century ladies with a discreet way of initiating themselves in the facts of life.
By the time "Systema Naturae" reached its 10th edition, in 1758, it named 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants, using Linnaeus' hierarchical scheme.
Curiously, the content of the book was as dry as this description suggests — there were no glorious prints identifying wild and wonderful creatures; it was simply a list of names.
But its simplicity was what made it so successful. "Systema Naturae" was effectively an index to all those books that did have marvelous pictures of animals and plants. Linnaeus provided natural historians with a way to compare and integrate all previous knowledge and to build on that knowledge when new, bizarre animals, such as the duckbilled platypus, were discovered.
Linnaeus' objective was to reveal the order in God's creation. Contemporary scientists use Linnaeus' system to understand something that would have been deeply shocking to the young Swede: how species have evolved.
Now that evolution is accepted, classification (how to describe an organism) also implies phylogeny (how it came to be where it is on the tree of life). This means that, for example, you are more closely related to a goldfish than a goldfish is to a shark (the shark, which has no bones, split off from the branch of life that led to the evolution of bones, which we and the goldfish share).
Humans have an obsession with classification and connections — hence the perpetual reorganizing of Linnaeus' system that has gone on over the last 270 years. But the only groupings that have any biological meaning are species and individuals. Kingdoms, phyla, genera and all the other categories beloved by Linnaeus' descendants are merely a description of the pattern we think evolution followed, rather than something linking organisms in today's world. The only thing that links lions and humans as mammals is that we have a common ancestor somewhere deep in the evolutionary past.
The magic of evolution is that the massive differences that exist between the organisms we can now see on the planet — between bacteria and humans, between dogs and snakes — all began with tiny changes, as one individual showed a slight advantage over another. Over the immense expanse of geological time, amplified by the power of natural selection, these tiny differences gradually led to the myriad varied life-forms we see today.
Where Linnaeus saw order and logic, we now see a dynamic endless process, and certainly no insight into the mind of God. That is the fate of many influential discoveries — they become important not for what their discoverer intended but for what we can do with them. On his 300th birthday, Linnaeus would no doubt be surprised, but proud, of the use we make of his system of classification.
