DIARY
STEVE JONES According to the Two Cultures crew, scientists are illiterate. They must be, to balance the literati's ignorance of science. A glance at any scientific journal shows how wrong the bi-culturists are. Because the text is scrutinised by colleagues anxious to destroy the reputation of its author, it has to be straightforward and unambigu- ous; which means, surely, stylish. Some- times technical language gets in the way — but have you read any Derrida recently? And no one can accuse scientists of being narrow-minded. Take this week's Nature. The shape of the enzyme which drives the entire economy of the body has been worked out. A few pages later, a slice of rat brain is driven into chaos by soaking it in potassium-rich soup — and rescued from mental anarchy with a cunningly timed burst of electricity; a new way, perhaps, to treat epilepsy. If that is not enough, it emerges that, after all, the universe is going to expand for ever and that the American sturgeon, once common enough to slow down shipping, is almost extinct. For those of bookish taste, there are reviews of a social history of truth, of the mechanics of the zip-fastener and of the mathematics of why buildings fall down. An art critic could find echoes of Kandinsky and Klee among the images of atoms and molecules. And although there is no lonely-hearts column, even the jobs sound interesting. What about using sedimentary acoustics to model the structure of the sea floor for the Natu- ral Environment Research Council? A pretty skilled job: post-graduate experience is called for. No chance of making a career as the post lasts for only three years — but, after all, it does pay £220 a week.
There are other pleasures in specialist magazines. From Health and Efficiency to Hi-Fl News, they are a forum for obscure controversy. Many Spectator readers will remember the bitterness that characterised the debate in Motor-caravanning Monthly as to whether it is better, after a hard day's caravanning, to put the van's legs down before or after making tea. Nature is no exception. This week, the latest in the ongoing dispute about the depiction of a dwarf mammoth on the walls of the tomb of Pharaoh Rekhmire, who died in 1430 BC. In one corner a claim — following the recent discovery that miniature elephants flourished on Wrangel Island in Siberia only three thousand years ago — that the shapeless beast is indeed a displaced mam- moth. In the other, the forces of reaction: the tusks are wrong, the hump is not fatty enough and there are important questions about the ears. What is more, the fact that the creature is small simply shows that it is insignificant: slaves are painted half the size of princes. And how did it get to Egypt — by caravan? This is the stuff of the ivory tower; and much of the ivory sold nowadays is removed from mammoths frozen into the Siberian tundra.
Ionce rather childishly dedicated a book to the funding agencies who made time for writing by refusing to support my work. Such petulance pales in comparison to that in Ward Churchill's new book Indians Are Us: Culture and Genocide in North America:
Thanks are also due in a perverse sort of way to a whole herd of hang around the forts, sell outs and 'nickel' Indians, whose collective negative example has done much to propel this book to completion. Keep it up, guys! The very nature of your braying, rumour- mongering and backbiting serves to make me look better and better to anyone possessed of a mind. .
Dr Johnson was more subtle in acknowl- edging Lord Chesterfield's less than enthu- siastic help. In the Dictionary he has 'Patron: Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery'.
An American friend of mine is in the Sierra Club, an environmental group whose triumphs make Greenpeace green with envy. He once wrote suggesting that they change their rules: all members must pledge never to go into the countryside again. This, he suggested, would do a great deal to save the wilderness. The Club demurred. Greenpeace should try the idea. I once set out to climb all the 3,000-foot mountains in Britain — the Munros, as they are known. So many people are doing the same that the crowds provided a good excuse to give up. In addition, to quote Lord Chesterfield (who was not speaking of mountaineering), the posture is ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting and the expense damnable. Now I have a more modest ambition: to walk down the rivers of Wales. The simple facts of gravity make this a more attractive prospect. So far, I have done 20. Like rock climbs, they can be graded: an A springs from the native rock, passes down decorous rapids through the grounds of a decayed mansion or two, and debouches in a fishing village. An E emerges from a culvert and reaches the sea at a marina. There must be several hundred suitable streams in these islands. What they need, like the Munros, is a brand-name to attract the crowds and set the challenge of doing them all. Each country might name their rivers after a figure emblematic of national identity — the Redwoods, the Ridleys and the Rifkinds, perhaps?
Iam thinking of moving house, pre- dictably enough to Islington (where I lived 20 years ago, when it was merely gentrified) and ideally, of course, to a Georgian ter- race. Estate agents' hype is pouring through the door. None of it mentions the central point about such houses; that they are built to the same proportions as a Greek temple. In upmarket Bloomsbury the link is obvious, stucco pillars and all. Elsewhere, it is implied. The temples were built with great mathematical subtlety, both to avoid optical illusion and to reflect what were thought to be the fundamental har- monies of nature. The floor of the Parthenon is a delicate parabola — the curve followed by a shell shot into the air — with a radius of nearly four miles. Its pil- lars lean slightly inwards and, if projected upwards, would meet at a point 8,000 feet overhead. The distance between them increases by a tiny but specific amount from centre to edge, and each pillar has a minute curvature (radius: half a mile) which follows a precise mathematical form, the conchoid curve. Even the fluting is based on a complex two-centred ellipse. The estate agents have missed this fertile field for hyperbole: imagine what a selling point it would be to describe a property in terms of the purity of its mathematics. It is, no doubt, that two-cultures problem again.
Steve Jones is professor of genetics at Univer- sity College London.
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