Galileo and the Dolphins

by Adrian Berry

  The second half of the quotation from Isaiah expresses the hope that ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore’. While the Clinton White House controls the swords, this prophecy seems gravely imperilled.

  False Alarm on Easter Island

  On lonely Easter Island in the Pacific, famous for the remains of its giant enigmatic statues, a once flourishing civilization committed racial suicide. A professor of biology now warns us that this tiny land is the ‘Earth writ small’ - that the same fate may well overtake the human race, in the same way and for the same reasons.

  Consider first the history of the island, as outlined by , of the University of California at Los Angeles, in Discover.

  When it was settled in about ad 400 by Polynesians from Asia in their ocean-going canoes, it seemed a ‘pristine paradise’. The soil was fertile, the climate was sub-tropical and food was abundant in the form of porpoises, fish and many species of land and sea-birds. The settlers also brought with them pigs and chickens.

  The island was densely forested, the predominant tree being a cousin of the Chilean wine palm which grows up to 25 metres. Its two-metre-wide trunks were ideal for building large canoes and transporting statues, and its sap yielded sugar, syrup, honey and wine.

  It was also safe from raids from neighbouring islands -there were none. The nearest habitable island to Easter is Pitcairn, 2,250 kilometres away, and the nearest land mass is the South American continent more than 3,000 kilometres distant.

  For several centuries the island prospered, despite its tiny size of 164 square kilometres. The original population grew from a few hundred to about 20,000. Then disaster came, slowly but inexorably, as if some poison was at work.

  The islanders cut down their magnificent forests to make ever more canoes and transport and erect ever more statues, using ever more trees to get them to their site, as each great lord tried to put up a more splendid one than his neighbour. Rats ate the seeds of the trees and prevented their regeneration. The edible birds that pollinated the flowers of the trees died out.

  Gradually the canoes wore out and there was no more wood to make new ones. Deep-sea fishing became impossible, and food scarce. The largest animals were lizards and rats. Cannibalism became rife. Two distinct tribes, the ‘Long Ears’ and the ‘Short Ears’, fought civil wars, exchanging such taunts as: ‘The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!’ The population level diminished still further, intermarriage became common, and there was a general decline in intelligence. By the time the Dutch explorer arrived on Easter Day, 1722 (hence the name), the settlement was a grim parody of what it once had been.

  In Diamond’s parallel between Easter Island and the larger world, American forests are remorselessly felled to provide jobs, and Hollywood moguls compete to build ever larger houses. He believes that we will destroy our resources as the islanders destroyed theirs, and then there will be no prospect but extinction. ‘We have no emigration valve, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean.’

  Happily, there is a fatal flaw in his argument - the effect of Easter Island’s isolation. He considers the distance to Pitcairn and the mainland to be an advantage since it was a barrier to raiders. But in fact the islanders’ isolation was a disadvantage as it stopped them from creating colonies and an empire.

  One of humanity’s greatest resources is the comparative proximity of the Moon, Mars and the asteroids, because they enable us to dream of migration into space. But were we in the same relative position of the Easter Islanders, these bodies would be far beyond the orbit of and undetectable. We would have no incentive to develop space travel.

  In short, the island was not a ‘pristine paradise’. It merely seemed one. It was too small and remote to be anything but a cultural trap. When Captain arrived two years after Roggeveen, he was shocked to find that the island possessed only four canoes, all of which leaked because their makers did not know about caulking. They had never developed any useful technology or science because their resources were too feeble. The human race now is in a wholly different position.

  Death of a Life Science

  Biology, the study of living things, is a dying science. It is dominated by mediocrities interested only in amassing vast quantities of information and who are hostile to new ideas.

  This is not only the view of two frustrated biologists writing in Nature. Misgivings have been expressed by , the editor of Nature, which carries a huge number of original biological papers. But these papers consist of reams of data, and are almost empty of theory or explanations of what the data really means.

  The epoch-making paper by Francis Crick and James Watson outlining the structure of DNA, which appeared in Nature in 1953, would ‘probably not be publishable today’, Maddox laments, because the referees, those anonymous ‘experts’ to whom scientific journal editors refer manuscripts for approval, would have raised niggling questions the authors might have been unable to answer.

  ‘’s theory of evolution, the bedrock of biology, might never have been accepted for publication in today’s biological journals. It would have been rejected because it lacked new data ,’ said the two protesting biologists, Virginia Huszagh and Juan Infante, of the Institute for Theoretical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at Ithaca, New York.

  Biological theorists wanting their papers published, all too often had them rejected with comments such as: ‘The author presents no new data.’ or ‘The author is advised to do the experiments first and return when the hypothesis is proven.’

  Part of the problem, they explain, is that biologists are fundamentally uneducated people who do not understand how science works.

  ‘Ph.D. students in biology receive little or no exposure to the history and philosophy of scientific thought, making their degrees meaningless. Few of them can distinguish between speculation and theories. Even fewer appreciate the need for revolutionary hypotheses, and fewer still can generate them,’ they write. ‘Those with such an attitude are blind to a vital principle of science - that the person who proposes an idea need not be the person who tests it. Where would physics be today if had had to prove his ideas by building a spaceship that approached the speed of light?’

  Much of the trouble lies in the fact that physics, a discipline which encourages speculation, and biology, which abhors it, had quite different intellectual origins. ‘Physics grew out of philosophy, while biology grew from medicine and bird-watching,’ said Huszagh. ‘Biology, in Britain and America, is dominated by an Anglo-Saxon attitude which says in effect: Just give me the facts and keep them down-to-earth with no airy-fairy nonsense. ‘ Infante goes further, ‘Biologists who build their reputations on their often excruciatingly boring collections of data are terrified of the prestige they might lose if new theories made that data irrelevant.’

  Nature and the other journals that specialize in biology can publish only what people submit to them - they cannot conjure scientific theories out of thin air - and are prone to filling pages with nucleotide sequences that resemble secret service cryptograms. Many scientists, wondering what it all means, are comparing the output of modern biology to the teachings of in Dickens’s Hard Times, who taught his children an infinity of facts and statistics, but nothing that was useful.

  Steering Clear of an III Wind

  Never leave your egg-shells unbroken in the cup

  Think of us poor sailormen and always smash them up,

  For witches come and find them and sail away to sea,

  And make a lot of misery for mariners like me.

  (1934)

  The number nine is supposed to carry with it one of the most potent of spells. It is a trinity of trinities. There were nine Muses and Hell in Paradise Lost had nine gates. swore vengeance by nine gods, and the nine of diamonds in a pack of cards, because of its heraldic links with one of the authors of the Massacre of Glencoe, is known as the Curse of Scotland. hung for nine days on the tree of life to gai
n knowledge. The witches in sang as they danced around their cauldron: ‘Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine.’ Upon this, they declared their charm ‘wound up’. The Romans, to chase away demons on Lemuria day, threw black beans over their heads pronouncing nine times: ‘Avaunt, ye spectres, from this house!’

  Superstition is still rampant, and numbers are by no means its only source. An article in History Today by the sociologist gives some hint of its full extent.

  His findings are at odds with conventional opinion. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that superstition, ‘being irrational, should recede before education, and especially science’. But this view, he points out, hardly accords with a recent American experiment in which 73 per cent of observed pedestrians stepped into the street to avoid walking under a ladder.

  Concentrating on trawlermen, a good example of people who take constant risks and are therefore prone to superstition, Gill, author of an excellent book on the topic, finds the most extraordinary taboos.*

  *Superstitions: Folk Magic in Hull’s Fishing Community, by (1993)

  A wife must never wash clothes on a sailing day, or they will wash their man away. She must never say ‘goodbye’ on his departure for sea - the word is too final and he may not come back. She must not even wave lest the waves take him. And once he has set out, he must not turn back lest at sea he shares the fate of Lot’s wife.

  The colour green is horribly unlucky, perhaps because it signifies summer that precedes dread winter. (There are few green cars on the roads.) A Hull clergyman was incautious enough to ignore this taboo and paint his church pews green. When he held a garden party for the Archbishop of York, local children pelted the dignitaries with eggs, dead cats and pieces of rotten cod.

  Many trawlermen refuse to learn to swim. This is not just to avoid prolonging the agony of falling overboard in Arctic seas. There is a belief that ‘if a man is saved the sea will simply claim someone else’. As Philippa Waring says in her Dictionary of Omens and Superstitions: ‘The cruellest belief is that one should never attempt to rescue a drowning person, for it is the will of the water gods that the person should die. If they are defied, then the rescuer himself must expect to fill the same role at a later date.

  Birds are particularly ominous to fishermen, who, like the Romans, regard them as messengers from heaven - or elsewhere. (The ravens in ’s The Hobbit provided a regular news service, with constant updates.) Few trawlermen’s families will tolerate in their homes any ornament that carries the emblem of a bird, and a bird coming down a chimney during a storm is the worst of portents. How is all this possible 2,000 years after the coming of Christianity and the Church’s hostility to superstition? concludes that people like trawlermen who face the awesome forces of nature and live close to death pay homage, like pagans, to a multitude of gods.

  Perhaps it is healthy to do so. Gill observes: ‘On the rational surface, superstitions are silly and nonsensical. But deep in our irrational emotions, intuitive taboos are essential for our survival as a species. Superstitious beliefs equip us with a daring philosophy to trust in the gods and brave the odds.’

  In this vein, one of the cleverest touches of futurism was in the film Alien in which the officer escaping from the monster insisted on first rescuing the ship’s cat with its nine lives.

  Retire and Be Famous for it!

  As Mrs Thatcher flounders in search of a role, she might do well to ponder the splendid example set by President Theodore Roosevelt who, on leaving politics, started a new career and became world-famous as a naturalist and explorer.*

  *This was written immediately after Mrs (now Lady) Thatcher lost power.

  The prospect seems more apt when one considers how much the 44th Prime Minister and the 26th President resembled each other. Both seemed to possess almost boundless physical and mental energy. Both thoroughly enjoyed conflict. Both liked to make speeches filled with indignation and moral righteousness. Their ways of leaving power were also curiously similar. Both quarrelled with their own chosen successors, Mrs Thatcher with Mr Major and with President .

  In ’s case, which could well prove ominously similar to ’s, his quarrel with became so bitter that it split their Republican party, allowing the election of and the Democrats.

  After this, put politics out of his mind, becoming, as a friend noted, a far happier man as he plunged into his new career with all the energy he had displayed in his old one.

  As says in his history of the Amazon: ‘No one, since the defeated began his political novel on the life of , can have solved the problems of retirement from high office with more panache than .’

  After a lengthy African safari in 1909 and a trip to Britain, where he astonished the by identifying without error every bird that they saw during a walk in the New Forest, he turned his attention to the jungles of South America. He disdained the usual practice of ex-statesmen of making lecture tours in which they would proceed from one capital city to the next without taking any interest in the intervening countryside. Instead, he plunged into the hinterland, even getting an unexplored river, the Rio Roosevelt, named in his honour.

  Proceeding up the Asuncion river in the President of Paraguay’s yacht, he took pot-shots at alligators and thundered in his diaries against the savage habits of the piranha fish in the same outraged tones as he had once thundered against big business and big labour unions. Indeed, his acute observation tells us in a most vivid manner about these deadly creatures:

  ‘They will snap off a finger incautiously trailed in the water. They will devour alive any wounded man or beast in the water, for blood excites them to madness. Their razor-edged teeth are wedge-shaped like a shark’s and the jaw muscles possess great power. The head, with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes and cruel armoured jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity. When fresh from the water they uttered an extraordinary squealing sound. As they flapped around on the deck, they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself.’

  But it is from dispelling the myth of giant snakes that won his greatest fame. There had long been tales from travellers in the forests of the Amazon of huge anacondas, the biggest snakes in the world, that were alleged to have measured 30 metres or more. Indeed, early books on the region contained drawings of serpents that could have swallowed a jumbo jet.

  would have none of it. He offered a reward of $5,000, a huge sum in the aftermath of the collapse of the Brazilian rubber boom, to anyone who could produce the skin and vertebra of a snake that was more than 10 metres long. No one ever found one, and probably no one ever will (although in 1960 a 230-kilogram anaconda was shot that measured 8.5 metres).

  It has always been extraordinarily difficult for politicians who have reached the highest pinnacle of success to tear themselves away from politics and do something else. Unlike the fictitious Prince Florizel of Bohemia in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The New Arabian Nights, who gave up his throne to become a private detective, few have achieved it in real life, except of Spain and the emperor - who enraged his royal colleagues by insisting that they retire also.

  Their problem is vanity. Their successors (as they see it) cannot possibly manage affairs as well as they did because they are intellectually inferior, and they therefore have to be back-seat driven. A vicious circle sets in. Since continual back-seat driving, however discreet, is bound to be noticed, the successor’s own reputation suffers (‘if he’s back-seat driven it’s because he needs to be’), and he is unintentionally destroyed.

  I am certainly not suggesting that should go to South America and handle piranhas. Or that she should cease travelling and talking to foreign statesmen. But rather that she should report instead of advising.

  It would be wonderful to learn more about the world that she has been trying to manage for so many years. Otherwise she rather risks being told, like the character in Much Ado About Nothing: ‘I pray thee cease thy counsel, which falls into mine ears as profitless as water in a sieve.’

  Part
Three: TOOLS FOR THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

  ‘Useless’ Research

  Governments often insist that the research which they fund must be ‘useful’ - without realizing that some of the greatest advances in technology have come from people exploring ideas that seemed to have no practical value whatever.

  An example is the nineteen-century studies - by unknown researchers - into the vibrations of violin strings, which indirectly led to discover radio waves. Another is that geometric curiosity known as the Mobius strip, a looped strap with a single twist, which enabled conveyer belts to be used twice as long before wearing out.

  The German chemist had a dream in 1865 that must have seemed unlikely to be of any use to anyone. He imagined a snake which was trying to swallow its own tail. Luckily he remembered the dream when he awoke, and the experience inspired him to visualize the highly complicated structure of the benzene molecule.

  For twenty-three centuries, since proved the infinity of prime numbers (numbers like two, three, five and seven, which can be divided only by themselves and one), primes were no more than a fascinating curiosity. One of the biggest - and apparently most useless - challenges still facing mathematicians is to find a proof of ’s ‘conjecture’ of 1742 that every even number greater than two is the sum of two primes. (For example eight is the sum of the primes three and five.) Although verified for every even number up to 100,000, a proof that it is true for all even numbers greater than two has yet to be found.

  Then, in the 1970s, a James Bond-like use was found for prime numbers with the invention of the highly practical RSA cipher which depends for its security on the sheer difficulty of finding two primes that have been multiplied to make a larger number. (See also The Devil’s Digits, p. 188.)