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Snails, whales and males
« on: 2003-09-01 14:23:29 » |
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Rhyme or reason
Steve Jones is trapped in a labyrinth of facts about snails, whales and males
Source: The Guardian
Author: Steve Jones
Dated: 2003-08-30
My best writing was over long before I started my first book. Although every paragraph was intensely researched and passionately composed, almost nobody saw it and I threw it away a decade ago. That magnum opus was as long as Y: The Descent of Men, my recent volume on the biology of males, albeit with fewer jokes. It was the accumulation of a dozen grant applications to a variety of scientific funding bodies. All failed. To compose them took several years and was, in retrospect, a complete waste of time. Admittedly, much of the graft happened during the Thatcher Terror, when nothing that did not promise an instant return had much chance; but some of my colleagues were being funded and, as I looked with despair at the three-inch pile of A4 before binning it, I had to conclude that I was too stupid, too out of fashion or just too damned rude to the good old boys who dole out the cash to keep up a research career.
Plenty of middle-aged scientists face that dilemma. They have two choices: administration or vulgarisation. I turned to the second. Twelve years ago, when my first book, The Language of the Genes, was published, popular science had a few first-rate writers and a modest rack of published works. Now it's an industry.
Science is a broad church full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less. Any technical paper anchors itself within a framework of new data and of evidence from the literature, all double-checked. A letter in Nature may appear opaque and clumsy to most laypeople, but those in the know read it as a work of grace and elegance.
Such a literary apprenticeship is a terrible constraint for scientists who try to escape into the wider world of words. At the keyboard I find myself trapped in a labyrinth of facts, each sentence with its own nugget of information. I write like the Human Genome Project. It sequenced our DNA by chopping it into arbitrary lengths and assembling the fragments into a coherent whole by looking at the overlaps between each bit. I do much the same - dig out a mass of apparently unrelated pieces of information about snails, whales, males or whatever, hurl them into the air and bolt the fragments together in various ways until some internal logic emerges.
That's pretty close to defining the scientific method itself. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr compared it to washing dishes: dirty plates, dirty water, dirty cloth - and, miraculously, clean crockery (philosophy, he said, is the same, but without the water). Bohr's detergent - the magic ingredient of science - is fact, a corpus of more or less undisputed truths about nature that can be added to, reinterpreted and even subtracted from when - delightful moment - an error turns up in a rival's work.
Writing Y: The Descent of Men was not entirely like that. Certainly there are plenty of amazing facts about males. Who would have guessed that Viagra makes its users see the world in blue? Or that the average British man claims twice as many sexual partners as his female equivalent (for 40-year-olds, it's 9.9 versus 3.4, since you asked), which is - given the fact that it takes two to tango - impossible? Or that men die at a greater rate than women from all causes except childbirth (including being struck by lightning - proof of a gene for thunderbolts)?
I enjoyed digging out such arcane information and (I hope) assembling it into a coherent whole. Often, though, I found myself in terra incognita, surrounded by unfamiliar beasts. I had wandered unthinking on to the territory of the Arts Faculty, a dangerous place for any scientist. In that generous land, opinion is sacred while facts are, if not free, then on a far longer leash than we are used to. Confident statements by one author are denied with equal certainty by another. Do wife-beaters have more testosterone? Is circumcision good for sexual health? Do women and men use their brains in the same way? Are boys born with ambiguous genitalia happy when they are surgically changed into girls? The answers to each of those questions are yes, no and maybe, depending on whose data you choose to believe - and it cannot all be right.
To kick a particularly limp straw man when he is down, I quote Lacan on the penis: "The erectile organ comes to symbolise the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in its form of an image, but a part lacking in the desired image: that it is equivalent to the square root of minus 1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier." But that is too easy. The problem is a deeper one and goes to the heart of science: those involved are letting their opinions cloud their facts; for them, what should be is what is. That doesn't happen much in chemistry, but does creep into biology (into genetics in particular) - and the study of males is awash with it.
To give the Arts Faculty its due, I was filled with panic when someone asked me to write a novel. I do, however, have a proposal for a technical book about snails, if anybody is interested.
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