Some words actually hinder our understanding, because they delude us into
thinking that we have a grip on a problem. We seem to believe that as long as we
have a word for something, we’re in business, we can cope, we can hypothesise.
We can even write books that are published by the learned press. The reality is
that we confuse our invention—the word—with the external state of
things. We mistake the word for what it is supposed to represent. Language is no
substitute for reality, nor is it interchangeable with it. We should not be
using words for what cannot be described in words. Of course, we must invent
words, create languages, because without them we can’t even begin to discuss
things, let alone think about them. The words I object to are the ones we create
to take the place of thought and understanding.

Nor should we confuse mathematical terms with physical reality. It’s possible
to have numbers which are less than zero, and we can divide space and time into
infinitesimal proportions, as Zeno of Elea did, so that Achilles never reaches
the tortoise. This should serve as a warning that mathematics may not
necessarily have meaning so far as the physical Universe is concerned.

Yet we often ignore this principle. As a result, we mire ourselves in
meaningless hypotheses, like the medieval Schoolmen who endlessly debated what
happened when an “irresistible” force met an “immovable” object. Empty words,
empty arguments. And we still do it, wasting our time and energy describing a
“singularity” that existed at the beginning of time as an “infinitesimal” point
with zero volume, “infinite” density, “infinite” temperature and “infinite”
pressure. Or using “space-time foam” to indicate what things were like before
that, before the infinitesimal point with its infinite characteristics, when
space and time were all higgledy-piggledy and one couldn’t be told from the
other. Or, going back further, pronouncing on the “absolute nothingness” that
preceded that, after which we describe the qualities and properties of this
absolute nothingness. We have regressed back to the Schoolmen, back to Zeno, and
call it scientific progress. We create a desert of mental chaos and call it
cosmic order. What we have are assertions, not science. Assertions are proof of
nothing, they tell us nothing—except about the asserter.

We are employing these words for metaphysics, not science. Perhaps we can be
indulgent and call it philosophy, another word that has an infinite variety of
meaning—and an infinitesimal depth of tangibility. Or perhaps we should be
less indulgent and just call it bad science.

Its practitioners are—make no mistake—real scientists, real
physicists, real cosmologists. They may be called doctor or professor and hold
the posts or chairs to prove it. Our bookshelves groan and sag with their
publications, which feature terms in their titles such as astrophysics, quantum
mechanics, cosmogenesis or even God (another word that doesn’t have nearly
enough meaningful substance).

When we use terms such as singularity or space-time foam, or refer to the
absolute nothingness that gave birth to the Universe (“one of those things that
happen from time to time”, as the American cosmologist Edward Tryon reminds us),
we are saying only one thing: we do not know what we are talking about. This can
be interpreted in two ways. Either it’s patronising and insulting. Or it’s an
honest admission of our hopeless plight. Sometimes our physics breaks down, and
all we can do is hope that somebody will eventually be able to make sense of it,
if only partial, tentative, limping sense. For that is what science is meant to
do: make sense.

But what can he mean? Our imagination is evidence for nothing, except
for the
functioning, or dysfunctioning, of our brain. I am not sure in what “sense”
impossible events or phenomena become possible when we imagine them. Throughout
history people have imagined and given meticulous descriptions of unicorns,
dragons, giants, mermaids, gods, devils, angels, heavens that revolve
around the
Earth, and much else, and all to little or no purpose so far as reality
goes.

It is true that certain things have never been observed because they are
statistically improbable, though not absolutely impossible. But it is physical
law, not our imagination, that determines whether a thing is possible. For
instance, it is impossible—not merely very unlikely—that a heavier
mass will orbit a lighter one. The “fact” that we can imagine the Sun orbiting
the Earth does not change matters and is not evidence for such a thing
happening. And if parapsychological phenomena are proven to be real “in some
sense”, that sense will be external physical law and not because philosophers
and others have been imagining them. This is so obviously the case that only a
philosopher would fail to register it.

The trouble with philosophers and their intellectual
cousins—psychologists, sociologists and historians—is that
when they
write in their knowing way about hard science, they eventually come up against
the problem that trips up all earnest amateurs: the actual facts. It is
rarely a
good idea to write too authoritatively about things we do not know that much
about. But such considerations have seldom restrained philosophers and the like
from attempting to put science in its place. So far as they are concerned, its
place is somewhere where they won’t be out of their depth.

This is what we might call a philosophical dilemma. Since philosophers
are so
out of their depth with science, any attempt they make to tow it into shallower
waters will be seized upon by scientists and cited as frivolous, uninformed and
unacceptable. And when faced with demands that they prove they know what they
are talking about, before they begin talking about it, philosophers complain
that this puts them in an unfair position. This is not what philosophers do,
they argue. Alas, life is full of injustice and philosophers have to suffer
their share of it with the rest of us.

Modern philosophers are only too happy to remind us that the word
“słŠŸ±±đČÔłÙŸ±ČőłÙ”
was not invented until 1840, and that until then persons who practised science
were known as “natural philosophers”. This is unfortunate. For the past two
hundred years or so, since the time of Immanuel Kant—among the last
people
to attempt, with some success, to write knowingly about science without first
being trained and educated in it—philosophers have been trying to
pull off
the same trick. You could, perhaps, get away with it before then, but you
cannot
now. Science has become too complicated, too full of facts, too diffuse, too
immense.

Between the two world wars there was in Vienna a philosophical debating
society which came to be known as the Vienna Circle. Unlike other such
societies, it had many physicists among its members, and they decided to turn
the tables on philosophers and become scientists who wrote about philosophy.
They went so far as to invent their own philosophy, calling it “logical
positivism”. Sadly, this turned out to be no philosophy at all, but rather a
scientific approach to things. It claimed that people who did not know about
science should not attempt to comment authoritatively on it. Philosophers were
offended by this cavalier attitude.

According to the tenets of logical positivism, anything one can say about
reality is either true, false or metaphysical, that is to say philosophical.
That would seem to leave the field free for philosophising—except that
logical positivists equated “metaphysical” with “meaningless”. The eminent
physicist Wolfgang Pauli was greatly influenced by the Vienna Circle, and it is
said that he once dismissed a colleague’s hypothesis as “not even wrong”. Pauli
could be very sarcastic.

Logical positivism faded out as a philosophical school in the 1950s and
1960s, not because it was wrong but because it was too obviously the case.
Meanwhile, philosophers and their ilk continue to be ardent supporters of the
notion that what is real is what happens inside our head. Without our minds,
they say, reality is, at best, a mere possibility waiting to be made real, by a
mind, a thought, a philosopher.

Some day, when philosophers have learnt something about science, who knows
what might happen? It is worth hanging around for, but we should anticipate a
long wait. Philosophers have talked about science for about 2500 years now. Who
can say what another 2500 years might bring?

A panel, appointed by the Clinton administration in early 1994 to look into these matters, has so far documented 400 government-backed biomedical experiments involving human exposure to radiation conducted between 1944 and 1975. At the moment, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Energy are arguing with each other over the value of these experiments. Their purpose may never be fully known.

The people on whom these experiments were run were soldiers, prisoners, those considered to be mentally defective (both children and adults), hospital patients with terminal illnesses, and pregnant women – if the women were poor. Permission or informed consent to carry out these experiments was generally not sought at all or not given. It is not certain when these experiments ceased but they were still going on in the mid-1970s.

Food laced with radioactive substances would be fed to the subjects and an attempt made to monitor their physical condition over the ensuing years. The subjects would not be informed about the details, either of the experiments or their results. Occasionally they were told that they were receiving extra vitamins. More often they were not told anything. All these projects were top secret. The Cold War was in full swing, so the experiments and the secrecy surrounding them were judged to be “essential” (Science, 28 January 1994).

Much can and must be said about the politicians, generals and bureaucrats under whose auspices these experiments were held, not to mention the doctors and technicians whose assistance was vital to the successful completion of the tests, but I’ll leave that to others. What interests me here are the scientists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, was one of the main research bodies that carried out these experiments. MIT is one of the most prestigious scientific research centres in the world, and deservedly so. Other universities and research institutes were also involved. Their professors and their scientists were in charge of many of the tests – indeed, this work could not have taken place without them and their unstinting collaboration.

During the Second World War medical research on human beings without their consent was carried out by scientists in Nazi Germany and Japan, but this, as we know, was only superficially similar and so need not concern us as no real comparison can be drawn between the two cases. For one thing, these earlier experiments had nothing to do with radiation poisoning; for another, they were performed under the orders of vicious, depraved and murderous tyrannies. These things can certainly not be applied, in any degree of fairness, to the US administrations of the time, with their well-known respect for human life, human dignity and human values.

It was the American scientists who, unlike the people they experimented on, knew what they were doing, even if they didn’t know what the results might be. Many of these scientists are still alive, no doubt some are retired but many must still be there, at their labs, conducting their seminars, beavering away at their research, preparing lecture notes, helping their graduate students with their PhD theses. I wonder what’s going on inside their heads. Call it idle curiosity on my part.

I would like, for instance, to have them give me their own, personal definition of science: what do they think it is, what does it consist of, what are its purposes and who do they think they are? I would like to learn a lot of things directly from them. Maybe I could write it up in a report or something. Do they believe it’s a good thing that the work they did for the government is now being made public, and if not why not? I might ask them if they’re consciences are easy or if they now wish they hadn’t run these experiments and why. But let’s leave this too.

So where does that leave us, we who haven’t conducted any of the experiments, who knew nothing of things until now? If we are scientists or even just like me, interested in science because we like its rationality, its reasonableness, its humaneness, its openness and integrity, its imperatives about truth above all other things, what are we now?

Well, we are very sorry, of course. But that’s not exactly what I have in mind when I ask my question about what we are and what we have become. For knowledge changes us, gives us new perspectives, broadens our horizons, deepens our search into ourselves. Perhaps I ought to rephrase the question: what are we to do, we who have praised science, seen its values, its results, its triumphs, not merely in material terms, but in terms of nonmaterial things – even “spiritual” things, if I might use that word, stealing it for a moment from the philosophers and the metaphysicians and the worshippers of this god or that, those who have greedily held on to the word “spiritual” for so long that they, and we, have begun to think it really belongs to them. Can we afford to believe that the word “spiritual” has nothing to do with science and let the word-spinners and god-makers keep it for their own? 51¶ŻÂțs ought to object loudly to such a surrender of such a word – but will they?

They might say that without the spirit of science, and of course scientists, our world is lost, the future is lost, humankind is lost. For, without science there can be no seeking after truth, no real seeking at any rate, just the pretence, the guise of seeking. Science, they might say, is a great disturber of pretence and guise, it shouts scorn and cocks a snook at the humbug and the moral cant that we see around us, and inside us, and it says to us: reality is this way, over here, in this direction. You’re free to follow or not, suit yourself, but you won’t get there any other way and you should know this, whether you like knowing it or not. You might not like the truth when you see it but you should know that there’s one thing science never does: it never lies.

51¶ŻÂțs might say all this, and much else besides. It will be true. But it will no longer be sufficient because the scientists are not following their own principles.

In the meantime, while I wait, I want those scientists at MIT and at all the other places – the ones who performed the experiments we’re now just learning about twenty or fifty years on – to ask themselves what they are. Only, I don’t want them to tell me afterwards, because I’m angry.

Socrates was a great needler or, as he called it, a gadfly. It did not
win him any friends among the needled and in the end it backfired on him,
as wisdom so often does on the wise when they come into contact with the
foolish. And so he ended up with the cup of hemlock in his hand – proof
that the mindless hath its reasons the mind knows not of but had better
learn about if it wants to go on living.

The greatest knowledge we can possess, Socrates maintained, the only
knowledge that matters a damn, is the awareness of our boundless, fathomless
ignorance, something his greatest disciple and diligent biographer Plato
could never quite grasp, for all his obvious, peacocking spectacle of brilliance.
In some ways this is the easiest knowledge to obtain, but in some ways it
is the most difficult. Socrates claimed to be totally ignorant, but of course
to be totally ignorant is to be not even aware of that ignorance and its
limitless extent and depth. So ignorance is not enough. We have to know
about it in some detail. We will always possess an infinity of ignorance
whatever our knowledge and understanding. In fact, Socrates said, our knowledge
and understanding, such as we have, can only be of our ignorance. The best
we can hope for is that we might chip away a few molecules from the infinite
monolith of our ignorance, knowing full well of the infinite monolith which
will remain.

Virtually all we know of Socrates and his notions we know because of
what Plato wrote down. Socrates wrote nothing for posterity. (It’s a point
that ought not to be lost on those of us who write lots of things down,
for posterity or whatever). Plato wrote. In his Republic, Plato wrote that
society should be ruled by what he called ‘philosopher kings’. And these
philosopher kings were people who bore a remarkable resemblance to Plato.
I’ve yet to come across a philosopher who writes: ‘What the world needs
are people altogether different from me’. If the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche had predicated his superman on this basis, I might have sat
up and paid attention. But he didn’t. In fairness to him I have to say
I don’t know of any philosopher who did. So much for the philosophers who
came after Socrates and wrote lots of things down.

And then there is the question of who appointed these philosophers to
bring wisdom to mankind. It seems they appointed themselves, a rather immodest
thing for them to do when you stop to think about it. This is the sort of
thing that happens when we are ignorant of our ignorance. The Greeks had
a word for it: hubris. Nothing called down the wrath of Nemesis on the head
of its possessor quicker and surer than hubris, the wilful ignorance of
our ignorance, the ignorance of the ignoramus, rather than the ignorance
of Socrates, which has its roots in wisdom or the knowledge of our second-ratedness.

The ignoramus in his unknowing ignorance points to the knowing ignorance
of the wise man and proclaims all things are therefore possible – flying
saucers from Venus, astro- logy, extrasensory perception, the gods, ghosts,
and all the rest of the endless paranormal, supernatural menagerie. Look,
the ignoramus asserts, science admits it is abysmally ignorant about the
nature of things. So, you see, I’m free to believe in whatever I like.

Here is the pride of ignorance, ignorance in all its glory and all its
hubris, ignorance doing what it does best: behaving like an idiot and revelling
in its role. But there is also the ignorance of Socrates, which is a different
sort of ignorance altogether, the sort which refuses to allow a Roman orgy
of nonsense and unreason, of illogic illogically arrived at and fatuously
hyped, an ignorance which demands from us modesty, rational thought and
gentle restraint.

Remember Plato, who demanded that the people in his Republic believe
in the gods, even though they did not exist, because this made the state
run smoothly. Plato called this a Noble Lie, so noble in fact that those
who did not practice it would be executed. Remember Plato, who paraded his
knowledge and who had all the answers. And remember Socrates, who had no
answers, just a whole lot of questions and vast, boundless ignorance and
who was reckoned by the Delphic oracle to be the wisest man in Greece.

No wonder the ignorant men of Athens killed him. And no wonder the philosopher
Plato missed the whole point of it.

Ralph Estling is a retired schoolteacher living in Somerset.

The book, to be entitled Yes, We have No Hosannas, will be sent free
of charge to all scientists who insist there is no contradiction, or hypocrisy,
in their devotion to science and to the gods (whether Judaeo-Christian-Moslem,
pagan, Hindu, Shinto, animistic, pre-Columbian or post-Reagan American).

51¶ŻÂțs espousing this dual approach to the nature of truth are asked
to write to me, disclosing their personal experiences, revelations, doctrinal
inclination, and favourite aphorisms.

Ralph Estling Ilminster Somerset

The problem arises because the diagrams are drawn on a page in a book.
Such pages are, unless you drop them in the bath, two-dimensional. Space-time
is four-dimensional. Two-dimensional drawings of four-dimensional scenes
leave a lot to be desired.

I’ve been thinking hard about this problem of curved world lines. Even
though physicists insist such lines are shorter than straight ones, I believe
the straight ones are shorter. We are told to draw analogies with arcs of
a great circle, the shortest distances on the surface of a sphere, such
as Earth, which, when placed on a Mercator projection, are longer than a
straight line between the two points. World lines have to include a fourth
dimension, time, but the example is similar, we are told. Curved world lines
are the shortest distance between two points when the surface involved is
curved. Sounds simple. We should stop thinking about the lines, we are directed,
and think instead of the kind of surface they traverse. The trouble is,
the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere is a
straight line – not the arc of a great circle – that makes use of the third
dimension and tunnels through the sphere from one point to the other. You
can make a lot of money by asking intellectuals what is the shortest distance
between two points that are on the surface of a sphere, and when they smugly
answer, ‘The arc of a great circle, peasant,’ bet them they’re wrong, then
go out and get an orange and a long pin, reminding them that you have said
nothing about the route to be taken, that is, you did not say that that
had to be on the sphere’s surface, only that the points to be connected
were.

A curved world line is the fourth-dimensional analogue of that long
pin skewering a three-dimensional orange. This should please my friend’s
friend because it shows that straight lines are shorter than curved ones,
point to point. It all depends on the route’s topography and what is meant
by ‘straight’, that is to say, how many dimensions you have in mind. If
you are excited by all this you can start thinking about shortest distances
in four or more spatial dimensions; for example, what is the shortest distance
between two points in a hypersphere? In a Klein-Kaluza 10-dimensional space?
And so on. In all cases, the answer is ‘a straight line’ (or geodesic).
It all comes down to just what is meant by ‘a straight line’ in the particular
dimension you are dealing with.

The answer to lots of ‘intractable’ questions often comes down to what
we mean by the words we use. Two men, for separate and unrelated reasons,
decide to go to the market at the same time. They meet in the market. Is
their meeting determined or indeterminate? I have not made up this conundrum;
Aristotle did in his Physics, Book II, Chapter 5. The answer is, of course,
what do you mean by those words? Depending on what we mean by them, we
can then easily go on to decide whether their unplanned meeting is ‘determined’
or not. A lot of quantum theorists would make things a lot clearer to themselves
and the rest of us poor souls if they took the trouble to define what they
mean by ‘determined’ and ‘indeterminate’, by ’cause’ and ‘effect’. The two
men’s meeting in the market seems to be the effect of a cause, or a number
of causes. But has the meeting been determined, is it the effect of causes(s),
or are there no causes that brought about this effect and is the meeting
indeterminate? It’s all a terrible dilemma – until we say how we are using
the words, then the dilemma disappears.

Other words like ‘chance’ and ‘random’ need defining too. This may take
time but in the long run it will save us a good deal of unnecessary confusion.
Radioactive atoms decay in ‘random’ order that is unpredictable. Does this
mean that decay is ‘uncaused’? Light exhibits either particle – or wave-like
characteristics, depending on the instrument we use to observe it. Does
this mean that light is both a particle and wave alternately? I bounce a
tennis ball on a firm, hard surface. The ball reacts a certain way. I bounce
the same ball on a sticky, soft surface. The ball reacts differently. I
drop it down a 12-metre well. It doesn’t seem to react at all. The ball
possesses a ‘complementarity of bounceabilities’? Well, that’s one way of
putting it. But is it the explanation that accounts for the most facts most
simply? I suspect it isn’t. I suspect our problem with the ‘dual’ nature
of light (and particles) is a problem we have constructed by asking the
wrong questions, using the wrong words, or rather, not really defining how
we are using the words.

I suspect that, at the nitty-gritty level, many of our ‘insoluble’ dilemmas
in physics and elsewhere are the result of sloppy words. Physicists are
rarely much good with words, so they prefer talking in mathematics, forgetting
that maths is just another, more concentrated, form of language and no better,
no more accurate and precise, than our definitions of the forms and principles
involved. Things may happen in such-and-such a way in mathematical models,
but that does not necessarily mean it happens that way in the real world
of time and space, the one ‘out there’.

We are all amused by the story of the paranoiac-schizophrenic: a passer-by
says ‘Hello, how are you?’ and the paranoiac-schizophrenic eyes him beadingly
and asks ‘What do you mean by that?’ Do we ever wonder what we do mean
by that? Perhaps it is time we started wondering exactly what physicists
do mean by all the wonderful things they say.

Ralph Estling is a retired schoolteacher living in Somerset.

He regarded the mangosteens with a bilious eye. Then he looked up at
me. His expression did not seem to change all that much.

‘Where’s the Ernst Mayr book?’ he asked in a low, measured monotone.

‘Ernst Mayr?’ I mused airily.

‘Yes, Ernst Mayr! One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis
of Modern Evolutionary Thought. And don’t muse airily at me!’

I sat down on the floor of the cage and sighed. ‘You couldn’t have finished
The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee yet! You’ve only had it one day!’
I protested, trying to sound hurt and not mention that the Mayr book, less
than 200 pages long, was retailing for a cool Pounds sterling 17.99. My
generosity knows lots of bounds.

‘Oh, yes I have!’ He put a panto rhythm on to his voice, glowered, took
the mangosteens, and shovelled them all in without so much as a ‘thanks-old-man’.
Well, really. But, then what can you expect from an ape?

‘I’ve read as far as page 21. So I’ve read it, thank you very much.’
He spluttered a bit on the fruit.

I was aghast.

‘Well, that’s not finished!’

He grinned his little lopsided grin. ‘It is so far as I’m concerned,
old boy.’ He chewed, swallowed, and a dozen mangosteens, purchased from
Fortnum & Mason that very morning for I won’t tell you what, vanished
forever. I could barely keep from going for that fatuous, pompous, little
hairy, greedy bastard. ‘So, man is the Third Chimpanzee, is he? Frankly,
I prefer choosing my close relations, if it’s all the same to you and Jared
Diamond.’ He licked some mangosteen juice from his palm.

I jumped up. ‘I’m not buying you Ernst Mayr at 18 flaming quid when
you skim through 21 flipping pages of Jared Diamond and then chuck the whole
thing!’ I shouted. I was livid. ‘Do you know what Colin Tudge wrote about
Diamond? Well, do you? ‘Some biologists are just scientists; but some truly
are thinkers. Jared Diamond is one of the latter.’ That’s what Tudge wrote!’

Jugjug licked his palm to get the last bit of mangosteen juice. ‘I suppose
I just want my biologists to be scientists and settle for that,’ he murmured
without looking up. Flippant, smug oik. I tried to be reasonable.

‘Why don’t you bite the bullet and try to read on past page 21,’ I wheedled
and sat down again.

Jugjug snorted, wearily got up, fetched the book from the tyre that
hung from the ceiling, and opened it. I couldn’t tell but I felt it must
be somewhere at around page 21. He hummed while his finger slowly descended
the margin. Then he grunted. ‘Listen to this: ‘Blah, blah, blah, another
school of taxonomy, called cladistics, argues that classification should
be objective and uniform, based on genetic distance or times of divergence.’
I must say, I like that ‘objective and uniform’ bit!’ He looked up at me
with his annoying simian sneer.

‘All that Diamond is saying,’ I reasoned before he could continue, ‘is
that chimps and humans share 98.4 per cent of their DNA! Now that must indicate
something about their relationship!’ Jugjug scratched his crotch. ‘The fact
that human and chimp DNA is more than 98 per cent alike is certainly important.’
He stopped his scratching and gestured with the hand. ‘But all that that
means is that the remaining less-than-2 per cent must be of overriding significance,
id est, mere numbers by themselves don’t mean that much! Do I make myself
clear? Let me explain. The fact that human and rabbit DNA is 70 per cent
(or whatever it is) identical doesn’t mean that you are 70 per cent rabbit
or rabbits are 70 per cent people. You can’t quantify relationships in such
a way.’

I opened my mouth but Jugjug was now in full flow.

‘And it is missing the point. The point, dear boy, is that the share
of DNA gives historical information about when divergences among species,
genera and the rest took place, as well as information about physical relationships.
But no one is arguing about the close physical relationship between apes
and men! The point is the mental relationship, the functional use of the
brain and all that follows from this!’

‘I hate it when you stress so many words like that,’ I muttered.

He closed his eyes and then opened them. ‘It is absurd to say that,
as humans and chimpanzees have 98.4 per cent of the DNA alike, this means
they are 98.4 per cent the same creature! You simply cannot quantify this
way – and you certainly can’t qualify this way! This is reductionism gone
mad. Or aren’t I making myself clear?’

‘What Diamond is saying. . . ‘

‘Is bilge. Look at this. Page 21: ‘There is no doubt, however, that
whenever chimpanzees learn cladistics, or whenever taxonomists from outer
space visit Earth to inventory its inhabitants, they will unhesitatingly
adopt the new classification’ – the new classification being that chimps,
gorillas and humans are all one genus! But the real point, the point that
doesn’t seem to occur to Diamond, is that chimps are not going to learn
cladistics – ever! And until extraterrestrial taxonomists give their opinion,
their opinion doesn’t exist and, accordingly, is pointless to speculate
on! It seems to me that cladistic categorisations are naive in the extreme,
wilfully obscurantist, and an inadequate means of explaining speciation
because their methodology is woefully oversimplified – do allow me to finish
– because they are based totally on ‘genetic distance’, id est ‘times of
divergence’, ignoring all functional traits, a la Levi-Strauss and the rest
of his deluded, mindless structuralists. They are talking philosophy, French
symbolist poetry – not science! C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas la bloody
guerre, now, is it! Have you any more of those mangosteens?’

I shook my head. ‘You scoffed the lot. A whole dozen.’ I meant it to
sound quite embittered.

‘Shame. Well, so as you see, I’ve finished Diamond’s Rise and Fall of
the Third Chimpanzee – ‘

‘At page 21.’

‘At, as you so rightly say, page 21, recollecting the remark of that
amusingly named Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, ‘I have here described the triumph of religion
and barbarism’, which, I cannot help thinking, is an apt summation of Diamond’s
little book, and would now like to get down to Ernst Mayr and some real
biological thinking. Even if it costs 18 quid. I’m afraid I’m not very interested
in the lucubrations of extraterrestrial taxonomists, intraterrestrial cladists,
or Jared Third-Chimp-from-the-left Diamond. Do I make myself clear or would
you like me to go through it once more?’ He smiled.

I thought for a while. ‘You’re pretty much of a smartass,’ I said quietly.
I got up. ‘And if there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s a chimpanzee who
has all the answers.’ I brushed at the seat of my trousers.

‘And if there’s one thing I can’t abide,’ he said with his lopsided
grin, ‘it’s a human being who thinks he has. Most amusing! When you call
by next time – with the Ernst Mayr book – please remember to bring two dozen
mangosteens, there’s a good chap.’

I slammed the cage door after me, muttering where he might wish to consider
planting both the Ernst Mayr book and the two dozen mangosteens. I heard
a guffaw but I didn’t bother to look round.

If there is one thing I cannot stand it is a smartass chimpanzee!

‘I have heard of it.’

‘51¶ŻÂțs say it is all a load of garbanzo beans, Father. They say
it isn’t blood at all. They say they can do the same miracle with some iron
salt, calcium carbonate, and sea salt.’

‘I have heard of sea salt. Does iron have salt too?’

‘Yes, Father. You find it on the sides of active volcanoes.’

‘VŽÇ±ôłŠČčČԎDZđČő?’

‘Yes, Father. Like Vesuvius. You know? The big, smoking thing across
the bay?’

‘I have heard of it. So?’

‘So? Some professori from up north came down, coagulated some sticky
brown stuff they’d made – out of iron salt, calcium carbonate . . .’

‘And sea salt. Yes. So?’

‘And when they shook or stirred it, it turned to a liquid and when they
let it alone it went solid again. They say it all has to do with thixotropic
łŸŸ±łæłÙłÜ°ù±đČő.’

‘What are thixotropic mixtures, my son?’

‘Solids that become liquids when you shake or stir them, Father.’

‘I see. Well, the Church has never claimed that when San Gennaro’s blood
liquefies, it is a miracle.’

‘Not officially, Father. But it gave the distinct impression.’

‘We are not responsible for distinct impressions. Where did you learn
of all this?’

‘In Nature. Last October. The 10th. There was a letter. In ‘Scientific
correspondence’. And the headline was: ‘Working bloody miracles’, Father.’

‘Nature is writing funny headlines? This is serious, my son!’

‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Father!’

‘Since 1389 the blood of San Gennaro has been liquefying here in Naples
in the hands of Their Excellencies the Archbishops – except in 1527, when
there was plague, 1569, when there was famine, and 1941, when the heretics
bombed Rome – Non Angli sed angeli, my left chasuble! And now you tell me,
my son, it is all a case of thixotropic mixtures?’

‘Apparently so, Father. And, what is worse, the professori even say
quite unambiguously that you can do it with clays, beeswax in alcohol, and
inorganic pigments soaked in castor oil! Castor oil, Father!’

‘I see.’

‘A trecento artist skilled in preparing his paints, or perhaps an alchemist
discovered the trick, perhaps. It is easy. Nothing to it. Just mix the right
ingredients and–presto–you have the blood of San Gennaro, solid when left
to stand, liquid when shaken or stirred. It is not like with San Martini,
who should only be stirred, never shaken.’

‘I see. This is very disturbing news, my son.’

‘I know. Father. We had enough schemozzle with the Holy Shroud of Turin
a few years ago. You remember? The Holy Shroud of Turin?’

‘I have heard of it.’

‘It wasn’t kosher, Father.’

‘No, my son.’

‘And now, with the blood of San Gennaro, another blessed miracle goes
up the ruddy spout.’

‘It is all very distressing. The Church, as you know, has never officially
declared the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro to be a miracle. Still
. . .’

‘Distinct impression, eh, Father? I mean, after six hundred years of
giving the distinct impression it was a miracle, well, you know how it is:
people gain the–er–distinct impression . . .’

‘His Holiness will not be pleased.’

‘Maybe the Polacks have never heard of San Gennaro . . .’

‘Possibly. But I wouldn’t count on it, my son. You know the saying:
what you would not touch with a 10-foot Pole, you might touch with an 11-foot
Hungarian. No, this is serious. Thixo . . .’

‘. . . tropic, Father.’

‘Thixotropic. With iron salts. Which are volcanic . . .’

‘We do happen to have a handy, nearby volcano, Father . . .’

‘It could be sheeer coincidence! . . . Do you think they’ll buy coincidence?’

‘I’m afraid not, Father.’

‘You don’t think we could run it up the flagpole and see if anybody
recites a Hail-Mary? No. You are right. We seem to be up the Tiber without
a paddle, my son.’

‘FČčłÙłó±đ°ù?’

‘Yes, my son?’

‘If the holy blood of the blessed Martyr Saint turns out to be just
a load of sticky brown stuff . . .’

‘. . . With thixotropic tendencies.’

‘With thixotropic tendencies – do you think . . . when it hits the fan
. . ?’

‘Very possibly, my son. Yes. We seem to have a busted flush on our hands.
But take heart. The Church has suffered disasters much greater than this
and still come up smelling of incense. Here. let me see. We mix a little
San Gennaro with a little San Martini. Stir, don’t shake. Olive or onion?’

‘A little iron salt please, Father.’

‘I’ll drink to that, my son!’

‘Here’s inorganic pigments in your eye, Father!’

‘Here’s uncoagulated blood of the holy saints in yours, my son!’

Ralph Estling a retired schoolteacher living in Somerset.

The dog fox must have been upwind because I was no more than twenty
yards behind him and he ignored my presence. Or perhaps it was just that
he was so intent on watching the pheasant that blundered about, beautiful
and stupid in the short grass, totally oblivious to us both, the intent,
unmoving, fixated fox, and me, breathing as quietly as I could, so spellbound
he was with that bird he could not spare the attention, he could not divide
matters in his mind so that even the slightest interest could be allowed
for me. It was all bird. His universe was whittled down to that one thing,
the pheasant strutting like an imbecile king in front of him. He was obsessed
by it.

They rear pheasants near here. There’s a farm or whatever you call a
place that raises pheasants, about a mile from my home, and in the autumn
I often hear them, squeaking like a rusty gate. They wander over to the
field behind ny house or sometimes amble right into my garden. If they had
any sense, which of course being pheasants they haven’t, they’d stay there
and not get shot. They’re reared to get shot. I’ve never seen one that could
flutter much higher than about sixty feet or longer than maybe a hundred.
You really don’t have to shoot them. If you’re in any reasonable shape you
could run one down on foot, catch it, and wring its neck. It seems like
a waste of good birdshot to shoot one. A few days before, my wife had stopped
the car because a pheasant was standing in the middle of the road. It wandered
over to the side of the car and stood there, staring off into space.

The fox suddenly moved, slowly and not directly towards the pheasant.
He was circling him, trying to keep out of the bird’s line of sight. The
grass was too short to afford any real cover so the fox moved slowly and
with an intensity and singlemindedness that was as beautiful as it was frightening
to witness. Here was death moving slowly and inexorably towards the foolish,
pretty bird, and I watched the show without making a move or a sound.

The bird saw and heard nothing. I saw the white ring round its neck
and the red flash behind its eye on its dark green head and I thought, ‘You
silly bird. You’re fox-food, that’s what you are, you’re as good as dead
and don’t even know it, fate is coming for you on four circling silent paws
and a long snout full of teeth, and all you do is strut and parade and your
head bobs forward and back in that self-important, self-adoring way and
the fox is circling ever closer and you see nothing, know nothing, suspect
not a thing.’ I thought, ‘Anything so stupid, so self-absorbed deserves
what’s coming to it.’

And then I shouted.

The pheasant squawked and lumbered and got clumsily airborne. The fox
could still have caught him if he’d chased after him but instead he ran
off to the right, towards the copse, and, in an auburn blur, disappeared
into it. I sat down on a dead ash tree that had been blown over in the last
big wind we’d had, and being human, philosophised.

When I was finished I walked home.

The philosophy didn’t amount to much. Like most philosophy there was
very little that was original about it and nothing that was important. I
thought about the absolute necessity of destruction and whether it was really
all that indispensable to the world’s welfare, to evolution and to life.
Being a humanitarian, a liberal, a protector of pheasants and therefore
an enemy of foxes – no, I would not be ‘honoured among foxes’, at least
not by this fox – I tried to convince myself it wasn’t, that truth and beauty
and natural selection all come free of charge, gratis, and for nothing.
Maybe if I were a better philosopher I might have convinced myself.

We can bemoan the way reality is. I do it all the time. So do all my
friends. But reality won’t go away for all that. I don’t think nature philosophises
much. It’s too concerned with practical matters. Philosophy is for the full-stomached
and the slow of foot. Pheasants would make good philosophers. But not foxes.
They’re too hungry and too quick. Evolution and life demand destruction,
violence sudden and unexpected, inexplicable, necessary death as their price.
And we had better pay it, we liberals, we humanitarians, we who have sound
moral principles and wonderfully all-encompassing consciences. We the virtuous
ones. We had better pay up.

I think that was the day they were killing each other in Slovenia. One
of the days. Anyway, it was the day I violated the world’s values and caused
one hungry fox to stay hungry and one stupid pheasant to stay alive for
another few months before being peppered full of birdshot to feed someone
who, like me, wasn’t hungry at all but was pretending to be a hunter, wild
and fierce, keen of eye and quick of trigger, bringing fear to the winged,
whittling things down to a fine, naturally selective state of affairs, keeping
evolution on course with the fittest surviving and causing the liberal-minded
and the gentle-conscienced to think, for a while, so that reality stirred
and ruled and whispered, ‘Remember me? You keep trying to forget me. But
I’m still here. I’ll be back.’

I hope the fox got a rabbit or something. Though frankly I’d have preferred
he’d got the pheasant.

Ralph Estling is a retired schoolteacher living philosophically in Somerset.

We waited. The 19th century, in many ways like Lewis Carroll’s snail
giving the whiting a look askance when it contemplated the 18th, was nonetheless
at one with it in agreeing that things, including human beings (at least
of the better sort, like upper-middle-class white males), were improving
all the time.

Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer may not have seen eye-to-eye on economics
but they were firmly united in their insistence that evolution was just
another word for progress, that both in the realms of biology and sociology
the world in general and human societies in particular were every day in
every way growing better and better. This was made inevitable by the invariant
laws of nature. Communist and capitalist, atheist and Anglican shook hands
on that. Each looked to the future, and the future – in the immortal words
of Mort Sahl – lay ahead!

As the 20th century draws to its uncertain close the gloom crowds in
upon us and some of us are not so sure that the future lies ahead. The song
of the Flute Toodlers is still heard in the land, piping its merry, optimistic
tune of universal advance, despite the occasional hiccup like world war,
economic collapse, genocide, overpopulation, and the utter destruction of
the environment. But there is a rising rumble of discordance and dissonance.
A note in a querulous minor key is distinctly in evidence. The Tuba Boompers
are emerging and their music is not like that of the Flute Toodlers.

‘Natural selection is as blind as the law of gravity and does not guarantee
progress of any desired kind whatever. In fact, evolution has nothing to
do with progress. Each step is dictated by what breeds the most, and whole
species are blithely discarded that later, in an altered environment, would
have been superior in fitness to those surviving,’ grumbles Edward Harrison
in his book Masks of the Universe.

He continues the ominous vein: ‘Owing to the aura of progress investing
the notion of evolution, we use fittest, advantageous, and other such terms
that are saturated with value concepts. When we try to justify our value
concepts we find ourselves trapped in circular argumentation. Individuals
surviving are the fittest, but what are the fittest? Obviously, those that
survive. Individuals having advantageous variations reproduce and flourish,
and what are advantageous variations? Obviously, those that reproduce and
flourish. Whenever a value judgment trespasses into the physical universe,
it chases its tail. . . My modest proposal is that evolution should be used
only by astronomers, who have retained its proper meaning; natural historians
would confuse us less if they stuck to natural selection and used safe words
such as change and alteration.’

The last time someone used the term ‘modest proposal’ was when Jonathan
Swift gently suggested that the English solve the problems of Ireland by
eating Irish babies. Watch out for it. It carries undertones.

The great war between the Flute Toodlers of universal and eternal progress
and the Tuba Boompers of despair and the encroaching gloom tweedles and
rumbles on (replacing the trivial battle once fought between communists
and capitalists, which had been the 20th century’s main threnody, until
a couple of years ago).

Of course, it is the oldest war around. It is the war between the irredeemably
optimistic and the irremediably pessimistic, between those that see the
glass half full of beer, and those that see it half empty, and wage uninterruptible
battle over the view, each an army with banners, all banners in both armies
bearing exclamation marks. I hereby raise my own timorous, uncertain guidon;
it displays a field of question marks. I take a radical-middle approach.

I hold that, while it is right that evolution must not be synonymous
with progress, it seems wilfully blind to separate them entirely. The past
3.5 billion years have certainly borne witness to a kind of progress in
life on Earth, an ever increasing complexity. It is no answer to speak out
against the admittedly very dubious ‘law of progress inherent in evolution’
by pretending that there has been none, that humans and bac-teria are on
a par (or, if anything, that the bacteria are ahead, on the grounds that
they have been around a lot longer than we have), and that all attempts
to differentiate between them are idle, self-serving human value judgments.
After all, it is Edward Harrison, a human being and a professor of physics
and astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, who wrote what I quoted,
pointing out the lack of progress in evolution, and not some prokaryotic
life from existing in a sulphurous pool.

Consciousness and intelligence have grown and developed these past few
aeons, and that must be taken as progress, of a sort. If not, then how is
progress to be defined? Or are we to refuse to acknowledge it altogether,
maintain that a bacterium in its stagnant ooze and Professor Harrison in
Amherst are much alike, however we compare them? Which seems to me a wilful
and eminently silly thing for us (and Professor Harrison) to do, and clearly
self-contradictory. Only an advanced form of life could deny the advance
in forms of life that has taken place over the past 3.5 billion years.

And yet, the song of the Tuba Boompers cannot be wholly dismissed. Its
diminuendo, its rallentando, its receding, susurrant tremolo is very haunting.
It will not go away. Evolution may include progress but evolution is not
necessarily progress. Harrison is right about their being distinguishable.
He is wrong about their having no relation to each other at all.

True, these are value concepts, value judgments, and it is human being
who are making them, as well as their opposites.

And when the bacterium’s side is presented and its arguments set out
for all to see and ponder on, it is still a human who is presenting it,
and other humans who are doing the pondering. I have yet to hear or read
a word about it from a bacterium. Have you, Professor Harrison?

Ralph Estling is a retired schoolteacher evolving progressively in Somerset.