DIARY
STEVE JONES The other week, for reasons too compli- cated to explain, I visited Parkhurst prison. C Wing is an oppressive place; every inmate a lifer. Once inside — and if getting out is as hard as getting in there is not much for the public to worry about — the regime seems as open and liberal as is pos- sible with what is best described as a chal- lenging group. Many of its inhabitants look, one has to say, sinister. The most villainous of all was a giant of a man, heavily tat- tooed, sitting in sullen passivity in a cell. He turned out to be a local builder engaged to help with the plumbing. To an academic, Parkhurst seems strangely familiar. The acme of the prison system, it is attained by those most steeped in crime. The residents are clearly proud to have made the grade. The architecture, the security and the stench of self-congratulation evoke an Oxford college (although Parkhurst is plan- ning in-cell sanitation). Evelyn Waugh pointed out the parallel long ago in Decline and Fall; but it is unnerving to see nature quite so faithfully imitating art.
Knowing The Spectator's interest in tra- ditional English cooking, I think it worth conveying the receipt for Chicken Parkhurst, provided by an inmate. Capture chicken, wring neck, do not pluck (this is Important). Place, with potatoes, in a metal drum. Marinate in diesel, ignite, retire. When fuel is consumed, eat.
Controversies are either resolved or forgotten. What seems crucial in one era can appear paltry in the next. The wars of religion were sparked off in part by the vexed question as to whether Christ was entirely divine or partly human: not some- thing that bothers the Church of England much nowadays (but what does?). The big issue for 19th-century biology was the evo- lution of the skull. Did vertebrates evolve a head as an extra appendage — a bonnet ornament on the biological machine — or Is the skull just a group of modified verte- brae like a dog's tail? In other words, was the ancestral chicken headless? The ques- tion was far more interesting than all that tedious stuff about genetics, and great libraries of books were written on it. For the Victorians, the answer seemed to lie in a small sea creature called Amphioxus (which, according to this week's Nature, resembles nothing more than 'a pallidly animated anchovy fillet'). The simplest ani- mal with a backbone, it is an economical beast. There is a stiffening rod in its back which runs the whole length of the body, but no sign of jaws, ears or anything even slightly cerebral. It is an ancestor sans eyes, sans teeth, sans almost everything — so where did they come from? Were they added later, or are they there in the ances- tral anchovy but invisible? Fifty years of embryology failed to find out. This week, molecular biology gave the answer. Humans, mice and chickens work from the same basic plan. In each, a group of 40 or so genes defines the entire chassis, head to toe. Amphioxus has only a few of them but, crucially, it does have those for the head. In that dim piece of undifferentiated jelly lies the progenitor of Milton's brain. Perhaps, in a century or so, Marxism and mone- tarism will get the Amphioxus treatment.
For academics the big issue is spineless- ness. Most have something from the neck up, but there is a striking absence of that stiffening rod used by self-respecting crea- tures to keep them erect. Over the past 15 years the trade has been in continuous decline: salaries down, tenure gone, more students, less research. All this with scarce- ly a complaint from those at the receiving end. The main reason for this submissive-
Typical! More sympathy for the perpetrator than the victims.' ness is one familiar to chickens: the obses- sion to be on top of whatever dung-heap is available. So basic is this to scholarly think- ing that the fact that the heap itself is slow- ly disappearing is scarcely noticed. The government inspectors' latest scheme is Quality Assessment. It tests the excellence of teaching. Assessors appear, disappear, and write reports that Must Be Taken Seri- ously. If they are not, dire penalties are threatened (there are, of course, no rewards). The worst thing a lecturer can do is lecture. Instead there must be computer- aided learning, interaction, continuous appraisal. The way to get a really high grade is to produce a course booklet with the university crest on the front. The mid- den has now laboured and brought forth a report that the Law programme at the Uni- versity of Derby is not up to scratch. For this, thousands have toiled and lifelong friendships been destroyed. My own teach- ing technique has always been the same: to stand in front of an audience and simulate insanity. It seems to work pretty well, but I have not been 'assessed' yet.
Inever cease to be amazed by how quicky the British cease to be amazed. Tell students about the latest in genetics and `that's boring, we did it at school'. Ameri- cans, though, have either a tireless capacity for fascination or a short memory. The cover of Time magazine presents, as an astonishing discovery, the fact that humans are related to apes; that (to quote W.S. Gilbert) Darwinian man, though well- behaved, is really but a monkey shaved. What's more, the piece — heavily puffing Robert Wright's new book The Moral Ani- mal.• Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life — claims that men are selfish, devious and unfaithful because inside every one is a chimp struggling to get out. Chimps are notoriously promiscuous, a male mating with dozens of females each year. Well, Darwin was the first to suggest that human behaviour has evolved (`He who under- stands baboons will do more toward meta- physics than Locke'), and the case has recently been argued with varying degrees of eloquence by scientists from Desmond Morris to Richard Dawkins. Perhaps the key is in Wright's claim that evolution gives the perfect excuse to be promiscuous — it wasn't me, darling, but the chimp within. But gorillas are just as closely related to ourselves as chimps, and a gorilla will wait for four years to mate with his female after she has given birth. The moral is — first choose your primate.
Steve Jones is professor of genetics at Univer- sity College London.
Previous page
