Philosophy

The Universe Next Door, published in 2002, is much more interesting for my money than his more recent book on quantum theory. The title is part of a quote from e.e. cummings.

It comprises three parts divided into a total of 12 chapters, the three parts are headed:

1)      The Nature of Reality;

2)      The Nature of the Universe; and

3)      Life and the Universe.

I am not sure that this sub-division achieves very much more than the chapter headings alone.

Chown’s purpose is to widen our imagination by showing us some fairly recent speculative hypothesising by various eminent theoretical physicists. Some of these conjectures are more grounded than others but the basic pattern is the same: state some facts; ask some questions; express complete puzzlement; come to the rescue with suggested meanings from a scientist or two; scatter around words such as, ‘Astonishing’ ‘Amazing’ ‘Remarkable’ or even ‘Astounding;’ move on to the next topic.

Some of the chapters deal with fairly well-worn ideas such as ‘Many worlds’ ‘Panspermia’ and ‘the Multi-verse’ but there were others that I had not previously encountered including the possibility of the arrow of time running backwards, mirror particles (not to be confused with anti-matter) and interstellar dust comprising bacteria (a variation of panspermia).

The last example emerges from the puzzle that stars should be brighter than they appear but they have been dimmed, apparently, by clouds of dust each particle of which has been calculated to be the precise size of a single bacterium. From this the late Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe (two eminent cosmologists) speculate that passing comets pick up some of these possible bacteria and release them as the comet nears the sun. The solar wind then scatters them to all corners of the universe and some, inevitably, will fall on to planets. We know how hardy bacteria can be, surviving extremes of heat and cold, just waiting for favourable conditions before bursting into life and dividing. This is how life might have arrived on earth in its formative stages just waiting for it to cool sufficiently for liquid water to provide ideal living conditions. If true, life is probably common in the cosmos but intelligent life rare as it would not have had sufficient time to develop much beyond where we are now. The evidence is interesting without being compelling. The trouble with this conjecture is: where did the cosmic bacteria come from in the first place? Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are silent.

‘Many worlds’ is based on the peculiarities of the wave function in quantum mechanics. It states, briefly, that all possible realities exist as parallel worlds but we can only experience the one that we are in. The ‘Multiverse’ is a logical extension of string theory whereby there are an infinite number of universes created from the vacuum, each with its own unique set of physical laws. It follows that perhaps this is the only one so far created that is suitable for life.

I must say that I rather enjoyed the book. There is more depth I felt than the one I recently reviewed by the same author. In the end though it depends for its impact on the Erich von Daniken approach in the 1970s – ‘We can’t explain x, so it must have been caused by y.’ I suppose much religious faith is based on such speculations – ‘Where did the world come from? No idea, so it must have been created by… (substitute whichever is your chosen creation myth.) Books like this rely for their success on our craving for concrete answers, our apparent need for certainty. The human mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

Strictly speaking this book should be entitled, ‘Physics Cannot Hurt You,’ as the second half of it is devoted to what Chown calls ‘Big things.’ The quantum world, of course, deals with very small things. The title gives it away as a light-hearted quick run round the current state of theoretical physics. This sort of jocular science writing for the masses, as it were, has become fashionable of late but I found the humour here laboured and many of the metaphors unoriginal. On the other side of the equation, however, the book undoubtedly works as vehicle for explaining difficult concepts lucidly and simply for us non-physicists. The depth of his scholarship and the love he has for his subject are also evident throughout. I particularly liked his sparing use of footnotes as a way of giving us the real science without spoiling the narrative.

The book is divided into two parts – Part 1: Small Things and Part 2: Big Things (of course) with a vain attempt at the end to reconcile the two. His approach is to amaze us with the sheer improbability of the world we live in and to demonstrate just how counter-intuitive both quantum theory and General Relativity are. The Foreword begins with a bulleted list of unlikely things that, of course, turn out to be true. The first one, for example, states that every breath one takes contains at least one atom that was breathed out by Marilyn Monroe. There is much more of this sort of stuff in the book.

Each chapter is devoted to one physical characteristic beginning with a quote and an italicised introduction. The story begins with the discovery of the atom and what this meant for the then current state of scientific knowledge. He tries to illustrate the properties of the atom with various metaphors. For example, he quotes Tom Stoppard’s famous analogy suggesting that if the nucleus of a Hydrogen atom were the size of a fist then the whole thing would be equivalent to the interior of St Paul’s and its single electron would flutter about the cathedral like a tiny moth.

We are taken on a historical journey as one improbable atomic fact after another is discovered: wave/particle duality; uncertainty; the collapse of the wave function; non-locality; alpha decay; vacuum fluctuation; and how such an apparently diverse world can be constructed from identical building blocks. He admits where he is over-simplifying and lets us know that picturing the true nature of the atom is beyond our imagination.

Part two follows a similar pattern and is substantially devoted to Einstein’s two theories of relativity. The entire book is a mere 158 pp (excluding the glossary) so confining it to the subject of its title would make it a very slender volume indeed. Also, Chown is a cosmologist by profession and this is his bread and butter, so I expect that this part of the book did not take him very long to write. The final chapter deals with some post-Einsteinian discoveries such as Big Bang (the idea had been around for a while but it was only confirmed as a theory in the early 1960s), the existence of Dark Matter and the recent revelation that the universe is not only expanding but also accelerating driven by the mysterious Dark Energy (of which we know almost nothing). The final paragraph expresses the hope that one day (soon?) we will be able to reconcile quantum theory with General Relativity.

I would certainly recommend the book for newcomers to the subject or for those, like me, who are not specialists but would like to keep up with the present state of knowledge (it was first published in 2006). It is an easy read and a lengthy train journey or two should get it finished.

Marcus Chown is a science writer and the cosmology advisor for New Scientist

I heard this last night on Radio 4. (The link only works for a week or so)I thought it was very thought provoking. There is a transcript here if you get to this post after July 5th and miss the programme. Any thoughts?

This is an article I read over the weekend by Amir Taheri, who is described as an author. Middle Eastern politics is not an area of expertise for me but I just thought it interesting to read an alternative view to that put out by the BBC and others.

‘What do you do when you have no policy, but want to appear as if you do? In the case of Barack Obama, the answer is simple: you go around the world making speeches about your “personal journey”.

The latest example came last Thursday, when Mr Obama presented his address to the Muslim world to an invited audience of 2,500 officials at Cairo University. The exercise was a masterpiece of equivocation and naivety. The President said he was seeking “a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the world”. This implied that “Muslims around the world” represent a single monolithic bloc – precisely the claim made by people like Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who believe that all Muslims belong to a single community, the “ummah”, set apart from, and in conflict with, the rest of humanity.

Mr Obama ignored the fact that what he calls the “Muslim world” consists of 57 countries with Muslim majorities and a further 60 countries – including America and Europe – where Muslims represent substantial minorities. Trying to press a fifth of humanity into a single “ghetto” based on their religion is an exercise worthy of ideologues, not the leader of a major democracy.

Mr Obama’s mea culpa extended beyond the short span of US history. He appropriated the guilt for ancient wars between Islam and Christendom, Western colonialism and America’s support for despotic regimes during the Cold War. Then came the flattering narrative about Islam’s place in history: ignoring the role of Greece, China, India and pre-Islamic Persia, he credited Islam with having invented modern medicine, algebra, navigation and even the use of pens and printing. Believing that flattery will get you anywhere, he put the number of Muslim Americans at seven million, when the total is not even half that number, promoting Islam to America’s largest religion after Christianity.

The President promised to help change the US tax system to allow Muslims to pay zakat, the sharia tax, and threatened to prosecute those who do not allow Muslim women to cover their hair, despite the fact that this “hijab” is a political prop invented by radicals in the 1970s. As if he did not have enough on his plate, Mr Obama insisted that fighting “negative stereotypes of Islam” was “one of my duties as President of the United States”. However, there was no threat to prosecute those who force the hijab on Muslim women through intimidation, blackmail and physical violence, nor any mention of the abominable treatment of Muslim women, including such horrors as “honour-killing”. The best he could do was this platitude: “Our daughters can contribute just as much to society as our sons.”

Having abandoned President Bush’s support for democratic movements in the Middle East, Mr Obama said: “No system of government can or should be imposed on one nation by another.” He made no mention of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Muslim countries, and offered no support to those fighting for gender equality, independent trade unions and ethnic and religious minorities.

Buried within the text, possibly in the hope that few would notice, was an effective acceptance of Iran’s nuclear ambitions: “No single nation should pick and choose which nations should hold nuclear weapons.” Mr Obama did warn that an Iranian bomb could trigger a nuclear arms race in the region. However, the Cairo speech did not include the threat of action against the Islamic Republic – not even sanctions. The message was clear: the US was distancing itself from the resolutions passed against Iran by the UN Security Council.

As if all that weren’t enough, Mr Obama dropped words such as “terror” and “terrorism” from his vocabulary. The killers of September 11 were “violent extremists”, not “Islamist terrorists”. In this respect, he is more politically correct than the Saudis and Egyptians, who have no qualms about describing those who kill in the name of Islam as terrorists.

Mr Obama may not know it, but his “Muslim world” is experiencing a civil war of ideas, in which movements for freedom and human rights are fighting despotic, fanatical and terrorist groups that use Islam as a fascist ideology. The President refused to acknowledge the existence of the two camps, let alone take sides. It was not surprising that the Muslim Brotherhood lauds him for “acknowledging the justice of our case” – nor that his speech was boycotted by the Egyptian democratic movement “Kifayah!” (”Enough!”), which said it could not endorse “a policy of support for despots in the name of fostering stability”.

In other words, the President may find that by trying to turn everyone into a friend, he has merely added to his list of enemies.’

At the close of his Gifford Lectures in 1932, the great historian of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilson, quoted the 12^th century thinker Bernard of Chartres:

 “We are like dwarfs,” said Bernard, “seated on the shoulders of giants. We see more things than the Ancients and things more distant, but it is due neither to the sharpness of our sight nor the greatness of our stature, it is simply because they have lent us their own.”

 Gilson lamented the loss of this “proud modesty”:

 It is a sad old age that loses all its memories. It if were true, as some have said that St. Thomas was a child and Descartes a man, we, for our part, must be very near decrepitude.

 I don’t mention this to ask whether we tread (or even trample) on the shoulders of dwarfs. Both Bernard and Gilson demonstrate the cognitive importance of narrative. These differing modes of relation to the past – Bernard’s modest pride in development and Gilson’s gibing lament over loss – are not simply glosses to the real business of understanding the past but are inextricable constituents of such understandings.

The Open Society starts with an altogether different image.  For Popper, ours is a civilisation “still in its infancy…which continues to grow in spite of the fact that is has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind”, a civilisation still “in the shock of its birth” from, as one political philosopher has put it, “the cosy womb-like certainties of Gemeinschaft” [roughly, community where individuals’ association is, in important ways, directed to the greater whole rather than to self-interest]. This does not preclude possibilities for a developmental narrative; our society is “still in its infancy”. But this fledgling development occurs within the open society. The transition from closed to open society, by contrast, is difficult to grasp as a form of development or evolution given Popper’s broader scheme.

This scheme is well-known. History – in no pre-ordained way of course – testifies to the conflict between the closed and open society, between, on the one hand, a tribalism in thrall to magical forces and a primitive desire to live in solidarity and, on the other, a critical rationalism, which unfetters man’s capacity to reason. Notice two features. First – and I don’t wish to sound like an inquisitor – there is something Manichaean about the constellation of ideas associated with the closed and open societies. A series of binary opposites distinguish these ideal types: collectivism and individualism; passionate violence and rationality; taboo and law; ‘utopian’ and ‘piecemeal’ social engineering; liberation and slavishness; essentialism and nominalism; totalitarianism and democracy. We are invited to see something comprehensively coherent in these constellations.

Second, some attributes of these ideal types are far from unambiguous. Perhaps historicism – the idea that development laws govern history, laws on which historical prophecy can be grounded – is the classic example. In his critical review of The Poverty of Historicism, the philosopher Charles Taylor began, “It is not easy to see what kind of doctrine Professor Popper is trying to pillory under the title ‘historicism’”. (Taylor concluded that what the various thinkers whom Popper impugns as historicists share in common is that they are frequently the “whipping boys” for a certain kind of liberal thought). But even a more sympathetic reader of The Open Society, the medievalist-philosopher Peter Munz, a former pupil of Popper’s, was as baffled by the insistence on rooting the closed society in historicism as he was enthused by Popper’s sociological and ethical insights. My point here is to stress a curious tension in reading Popper. Despite his insistence, at least some of the ideas within the constellation of associations have confused rather than clarified his general scheme. Readers like Munz suggest that we can remove some of these associations without dealing a death-blow to the broader scheme. (This raises a question: how far can we go on abandoning parts before we have to abandon the whole?).  

Incidentally, a curious feature of discussion of historicism – even in critiques of Popper’s interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, Marx and Hegel as historicists – is the assumption that religious narratives yield far more obvious examples of historicism.  Popper himself suggests that the conception of a chosen people was a tribalist precursor of modern collectivism. Of course, any student of medieval history will be familiar with the multiple ways in which Edenic aboriginality, salvation history and eschatological speculation served as nodal points in medieval thought. They are central to Augustinian thought, a notable absence in The Open Society. (The absence is glaring given the overwhelming importance of Augustine not only to medieval thought but also to Reformation thought).  We may wish to question whether and precisely how these narratives might be understood as historicist in Popper’s terms.  

 How do the Middle Ages function in Popper’s scheme? Largely, it must be said, as an intermittent spectre. Sporadic invocations of medieval totalitarianism, especially the Inquisition, serve as a kind of apotropaic charm upon which the rationalist humanitarian can call without embarrassment. But he also advances a substantial historical thesis: the constellation apparent in Aristotelian and, especially, Platonic thought found their stifling fruition, we are told, in medieval societies. We read, at the end of volume one, that Plato ultimately failed to arrest social change: “Only much later, in the dark ages, was it arrested by the magic-spell of Platonic-Aristotelian essentialism”.

Popper does not develop this in detail. But at the beginning of the second volume, he briefly speculates upon the broader picture between Aristotle and Hegel – between ancient and modern – albeit in a different way. This period might be interpreted, he suggests, not simply as the consummation of totalitarianism, but as one of conflict between the open and the closed society, in which the latter ultimately prevailed. I do not wish to subject this self-consciously speculative passage to uncharitably exacting scrutiny – Popper was not writing as a historian and medieval history, especially early medieval history, has changed dramatically since he wrote – though, even with these concessions, there are some distinctly odd points of interpretation (e.g. the idea that late fourth century church structures – and Popper seems to have such things as social action for the poor in mind – were “after the model of Julian the Apostate’s Neo-Platonic Anti-Church” is odd: the direction of influence was almost certainly in the opposite direction, as Julian himself makes clear in some of his correspondence).

In broad outline, Popper couches the conflict in the following way. The anti-idealising spirit of the “Great Generation of Greeks” was embodied in the Cynics and, later, early Christians. Martyrs died, Popper writes, for the same cause as Socrates. But the fourth-century saw a dramatic shift, hinging around Constantine, one which Popper casts as an “ingenious political move” to break the “tremendous moral influence of an equalitarian religion”. Hereafter, “the Church followed in the wake of Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” from Justinian’s sixth-century persecutions right through to the Inquisition.

Popper intensifies this outline in his rejection of voguish, Romantic eulogising of the Middle Ages (he quotes – and pours scorn on – Toynbee for mounting a sort of rehabilitating argument from the beauty of medieval cathedrals).  For Popper, such eulogies are premised upon historicist notions of “the essential Character of Western Civilisation”. That’s to say a Platonising way of doing history desensitises the historian to the baleful influence of Platonism in history. The rationalist interpretation of history, by contrast, connects this pre-Constantinian thread to the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, into modern science. At this juncture, it is tempting to raise the question of the construction of the Middle Ages, the origins and repercussions of this inherently relational form of periodisation. But I’ll leave that for another day.

Instead, I’m interested in what happens to what this thread quickly passes over. At first glance, it is perfectly intelligible that medieval societies were, in Popper’s terms, closed societies. In fact, I don’t wish to argue otherwise. The question is: does his scheme offer sufficient conceptual resources for understanding them? (There are many things which could be said of medieval societies which are both far from false and far from illuminating). And does his scheme offer any conceptual resources for understanding how the closed society of medieval Christendom could have become the fledgling open society of modernity?

There are historical problems. To put it bluntly: we know Plato and Aristotle far more directly than a large number of the medieval purveyors of “Platonic-Aristotelian totalitarianism” did. Engagement with Aristotle was limited until the re-entry of texts in translation from the 12^thcentury or so. As for Plato, in practical terms, Western readership was mainly limited to the Timaeus until 15^th century translations of his corpus. This does not altogether dismantle Popper’s outline. There were other conduits for Platonic and Aristotelian thought. But combined with a student of early medieval history’s admittedly slender grasp of later medieval philosophy, not least its self-conscious transcendence of ancient roots – dwarfs and giants – and the peculiar scholastic emphasis on observation (or, being wary of anachronism, peculiar empiricism), Popper’s narrative is decidedly shaky.

Far more importantly, Popper’s understanding of the closed society is, if anything, excessively coherent. Not only persecution, but even pestilence is taken to be the hallmark of medieval society; and, as hallmarks, both persecution and pestilence are rendered explicable by the confluence of ideas, by that constellation of associations inextricable from the closed society: magic and taboo – and theistic historicism (“Men believed God to rule the world”) – impeded responsibility; essentialism arrested the desire for social change; and so on.  Terror, wretchedness, hardship, oppression, plagues, and even dancing manias all flowed from this cohesive ideological font, Popper declares.

Returning to my early medieval comfort zone, does Popper’s constellation of ideas help or hinder our reading of social change? Even to put the question in this way suggests a problem. Popper’s scheme appears to be largely uninterested in change within closed societies. The most notable exception is his hypothetical – and interesting – typology of changing configurations of natural and normative law, from tribal naïve monism (where nature and norms are not distinguished) to critical dualism (which separates nature and norms). But even these types are framed in terms of their relation to the critical rationalist’s demarcation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, of facts and decisions (or values): they are progressive, even if not historically inevitable. But, otherwise, there is little sense of how closed societies can change or develop, or of how medieval society did.

It is beyond my aim here to give an account of trends in early medieval historiography. But a brief foray may explain my fraught encounter with The Open Society. Post-Roman societies can no longer be viewed solely through the prism of decline and stasis, following the illumination of late antique and early medieval cultural innovation, most astoundingly and famously in the work of Peter Brown. One fundamental problem, of course, is that our material tempts us into thinking otherwise. The programme of reform attempted in a late eighth and ninth-century Carolingian context – and the morass of material produced – idealised traditionalism and corporate uniformity.  But its products – from forged papal documents to John Scotus Eriugena’s dizzying onto-theology – are best read in the context of a series of innovative social changes. There was no question of attempting to arrest social change and, if anything, it was the messy realities of enactment which arrested change.

Likewise, the broader dynamics of ‘christianisation’ and the interplay between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ religious practice problematise an overly static view of early medieval thought and social practice. Alongside the mutable constructions of ‘paganism’ as a strategy of distinction, with sometimes violent consequences, there were bursts of more self-conscious thought on the shifting boundaries of acculturation. That exceptionally influential early medieval pope, Gregory the Great, was not unusual in writing self-consciously about cultural adaptation and interchange in his widely read letter to Anglo-Saxon missionaries (which, incidentally, incorporated a discussion of prevailing taboos which was at once critical and sympathetic). For Gregory, some ‘pagan’ customs could be fruitfully absorbed or ‘baptised’ rather than eradicated.  Indeed, from Augustine to Alcuin, thinking about both missionary and pastoral activity presupposed a certain awareness of the modalities of cultural exchange. As Alexander Murray once put it, “the entire history of medieval religion is a commentary on Gregory’s letter”.

In the encounter not just with Charlemagne’s violent expansion into Saxony, but also with the multiple responses of Saxon converts and Frankish churchmen in subsequent generations, the constellation of ideas associated with closed societies – and their coherence – begins to disintegrate. This impression is consolidated when one considers later medieval developments – for example, the rebirth of the state and an increasing centralisation of power, the development of a specialised – and sophisticated – political discourse and even the multi-faceted flourishing of scholasticism. The longue duree histories of hagiography, theology and even medicine or – to put it another way – the changing dynamics of utopianism, essentialism, tribalism, magicalism and so on across this vast span all militate against the security of this constellation.

 The fundamental issue here is not primarily with Popper’s historical outline, nor am I undertaking medievalist apologetics. The key point is that the developments and energies of medieval societies, whether seen in subtly complex cultural processes or inescapably horrific atrocities, cannot be adequately grasped in the ideological terms of the closed society.

            Why should this be so? The intellectual and political context in which Popper was writing may offer some light: perhaps his work  is most fruitfully read as a historical document.  But another reason may stem from Popper’s philosophy of science. (At various points, Popper seems to identify the open society as a society which lives out falsification across the board: whether this is a strangely unPopperian form of utopian thinking – utopia, in the old pun, is also a no-where – is surely open to debate). I can only scratch the surface here. Popper’s justification and description of scientific practice focuses on the revolutions and ruptures wrought by falsification of theories. The famous Kuhnian response is to try to focus instead upon how the epistemological crises which lead to such revolutions might come about and also upon the stretches of theoretical stability between such crises. In terms of Kuhn’s critique, Popper’s thesis is ill-equipped to grasp how the epistemological crises which prompt such revolutions are experienced, and the nature of the relationship between a novel theory and the context from which it emerged. One consequent blind-spot is the nature of the context before theoretical revolution. And if I have understood Popper’s notion of the closed society correctly, it is perhaps for similar reasons that his historical perspectives and conceptual resources are ill-equipped to grasp medieval societies, and their relationship to modernity. This is, in part, the problem of identity. It is unclear how a closed society can turn into an open one and retain any identity given the characterisation of both. More concretely, the medieval can only relate to the modern through rupture and yet how such a rupture might have come about is difficult to comprehend on his terms.

Was Gilson completely mistaken in his lament over “a sad old age that loses all its memories”? This brings to light the possibility of a subtle omission in terms of Popper’s explicit notion of the ‘open society’. After all, are modes of relation to the past, are narratives not central to the self-understanding of ‘open societies’? Does the open society, as Popper understands it, necessitate a narrative of rupture, revolution and emancipation from the closed? Or, to adapt Gilson’s terms, does it require a kind of historical forgetting?

The Wire is about life in Baltimore. In particular it is about the issue of drugs in Baltimore and how that trade affects different aspects of the city’s life – law and order, social and economic, education, politics and journalism.

I bought a dvd of Season One of The Wire on the strength of a review in The Guardian in 2007. It claimed that The Wire was the best thing on television in the last twenty years.  Is it? Yes – because apart from anything else this allows The World At War, Fawlty Towers and, most importantly, The Phil Silvers Show their rightful place in the TV Pantheon.

What about The Sopranos? First allow me to explain why The Sopranos is not quite as good as The Wire. The Sopranos is great television, moving, funny, shocking but rarely meaningful. It’s derivative which is not necessarily a bad thing but it depends on a comprehension of references to The Godfather.The way in whichTony Soprano the vicious crime boss is sometimes depicted as Homer Simpson is, however, a touch of genius. But there’s no moment when you say to yourself, ‘That’s just like my life!’ Now I’m not ‘police’ and despite the fact I taught in an urban comprehensive in South London does not really make my life like Prez’s school in season four – but the way in which public service jobs have been reduced to target setting so that the targets are ends in themselves speaks to a very wide audience. All of the characters have their good and bad points there’s moral ambiguity all around which makes everything seem more realistic. Towards the end of Season Three where a prominent public servant is spotted in a gay bar his hypocrisy and duplicity is not dwelt upon and preached about it’s just noted – all of this resonates with our everyday experience of people. As has been pointed out already by somebody else The Wire is like a novel -you cannot skip chapters – it demands effort but rewards the viewer not just with TV entertainment but the the same reward that great literature brings. The characters are so strong and the acting is simply phenomenal – especially that of the school children.
What about The Shield? Well it too is great television brilliantly acted and superbly written – it too creates all sorts of moral dilemmas that test our consciences but for me it does not transcend the genre of a cop programme – and it is very much from a police perspective – which is fine in itself but it lacks the depth of The Wire. The viewer is given less perspective of the LA politician and little insight into gang members despite it being about much of the same subject matter. Consider what the viewer has learnt about Baltimore drug dealing or teaching or municipal politics with what we learn from The Shield.

I have never felt so evangelical about anything as I do about The Wire. I have recommended it various members of my family and numerous friends and without exception they have either enjoyed it as much as I did or pretended that they did so extremely convincingly. The five seasons are available for purchase or rent from Amazon or can be watched online.

This was a very enjoyable occasion – it was just as good as last year’s with added youth and celebrity (provided by Finn and Ariane). Many thanks to all those who made the effort – I really am looking forward to the next one – I’d like to think that feeling is shared. I hope that everyone (especially those who had travelled far) managed to get back without too much fuss. Please feel free to make suggestions about the timing and location of our next meeting. I’ll add the photos as soon as I find my lead for the camera!

Our second annual lunch will be taking place at Sofra in Covent Garden.  It’s taking place on Tuesday 26th May at 1pm. It would be great to see as many of you as possible. Click here for map.

Recently banned from CiF. I stumbled across the identity of this well known commentator in a museum on the south coast…

Please find below an article by the eminent geneticist, Steve Jones.

‘It’s not done to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, nor to bite the hand that feeds you – nor, in my own profession, to criticise the research programme of the Wellcome Trust, an enormously rich charity that paid much of the bill to read the message written in human DNA. Not done, perhaps, but a pack of renegade biologists has turned on that source of nutrition to claim that what it is doing is welcome, but plain wrong.

Science has done well in studying – and even helping to treat – rare inherited diseases such as haemophilia. After the famous sequencing of the double helix, the hunt started for the genes behind the illnesses that affect most of us – stroke, diabetes, cancer – as well as multiple sclerosis and a variety of brain disorders.

The hope was (and five years ago, it was a reasonable one) that such conditions could be blamed on a small set of common genetic variants. Track them down and we would begin to understand what had gone wrong, diagnose patients before symptoms appeared, and perhaps even come up with a few cures.

The logic was to search the double helix for about half a million variants that could be used to set up a grid of diversity, scattered across the whole genome. This could then be scanned using a magic “chip”, which could identify thousands of changes at once to see whether one, or a few, of the molecular milestones might predispose a given individual to a particular disease. If so, the actual gene responsible could be close to the telltale marker.

The latest version of this grid, produced by what is known as the Wellcome Case Control Consortium, involves 120,000 samples, taken both from invalids and those who are perfectly healthy. It is a huge – and expensive – operation. Just a couple of years ago there was real optimism that a new era of understanding was around the corner. That did not last long, for hubris has been replaced with concern: like Macavity the Mystery Cat, the evidence of genetic inheritance is clear, but the genes themselves are just not there.

Take height. A good way of predicting how big a baby will grow is to measure its mother and father. Tall parents have tall children, and height is highly heritable. The molecular mappers have now used their tape measures on around 30,000 people. They find 50 or so different genes associated with being tall or short – but altogether, they account for only one part in 20 of the variation needed to explain the similarity of children and parents. Macavity has struck, and does so again and again.

To give another example, today’s explosion of obesity means that tomorrow’s greatest killer may be adult-onset diabetes. The genome scans reveal 18 different bits of chromosome that light up as culprits – but together they explain less than one part in 20 of the overall inherited liability to diabetes. At that rate, as many as 800 different genes may be behind this illness; which means that their individual value as predictors of risk is tiny.

In other words, our chances of being born with a predisposition to a common illness such as diabetes or heart disease are not represented by the roll of a single die, but a gamble involving huge numbers of cards. Some people are dealt a poor mix and suffer as a result. Rather than drawing one fatal error, they lose life’s poker game in complicated and unpredictable ways. So many small cards can be shuffled that everyone fails in their own private fashion. Most individual genes say very little about the real risk of illness. As a result, the thousands of people who are paying for tests for susceptibility to particular diseases are wasting their money.

Not all the news is bad, however. Some genes, even those that have a small influence, hint at what may be going wrong in the case of a particular malady. Several of those behind a certain age-related blindness that runs in families are involved in the immune system – an unexpected finding that hints at what its cause might be, and where to start looking for a cure.

Even so, many geneticists now think that the constant pressure to sample thousands and thousands more people for a myriad of unknown genes that have a tiny effect may be misplaced. Instead, we would be better off abandoning the scattergun approach, and reading off the entire three thousand million DNA letters of a much smaller number of individuals, healthy and unhealthy, to see in detail what might have gone wrong.

Whatever the panjandrums of science decide to do with their Everest of cash, it is time to turn to one of the few genetical proverbs, for their mountain has laboured and brought forth not much more than a mouse. And what was that adage about throwing good money after bad?’

Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London.