The residents at the Maison Des Girrafes are members of the Norfolk Smallholders’ Association, whose general sense of fatalistic humor can be judged by the title of its newsletter – Harrowing Times.

Okay, when we joined, at their first annual show last July, we had just two chickens, but whenever I mentioned this (for example, to the man selling hot-dogs made from his own Gloucester Old-Spot pigs), people would get all misty-eyed and say things like, “ah, I remember it well…” and “it’s a slippery slope…”. Maybe they were right – now we have four chickens and two more are on order.

Members of the Association regularly throw their smallholdings open to other members of the society to come and poke around: today the Gees clambered into Caroline, the Gees’ 1995 Volvo [thinks: must get the brakes looked at], and went to a smallholding a few miles down the coast, for a general consciousness-raising, bring-and-buy and barbecue.

We went with a bottle of wine and some beer – we came away with several plants, a peck of wistfulness and half a bushel of inspiration. We saw some rather hot sheep (unshorn, on a very warm day), several happy pigs, goslings, chickens, a very impressive cockerel, some truly dramatic Norfolk Black turkeys, and a litter of Airedale terrier puppies (very cute). There were lots of experienced smallholders willing to impart news on everything from the care of polytunnels to the dangers to poultry of eating slugs infected with tapeworm eggs (a new one on me, I admit).

We went home a lot quieter than when we arrived, stuffed full of Gloucester-Old-Spot bbq sausages and each dreaming a happy dream of smallholding bliss. Mrs Gee would like a pig (but not to eat, which I find strange); I’d like an orchard with some chickens pecking around below; a pond for ducks, another for fish and a couple of polytunnels to grow all the veg I want, all year round. Gee Minor (aged 10) would like a little of everything – pigs, sheep, chickens, the lot. Gee Minima (8) was sulky because we didn’t come home with one of the Airedale puppies.

Now we’re home Mrs Gee is surfing online forums about guinea pigs, chickens, smallholder-sitting services and tempting offers of plots of land for a song (or for a Wagner opera, if planning permission has already been granted).

It’s all right for a sunny day in May, I suppose. But when it’s blowing a gale in January and an incoming swan with H5N1 has sneezed all over your free-range Rhode Island Reds – perhaps not so nice.

But, well, you never know. For anyone in trouble, in need of a hand, some advice or even a trade (guinea-fowl eggs were exchanged for feed in my presence), the Smallholders’ Association is never far away. Who knows? It could happen.

Break out the champagne – today I got a royalty cheque. It was for my 1996 book Before The Backbone: Views on the Origin of the Vertebrates, which still, incredibly, generates a few sales (and citations).

On receipt of this envelope I advised Mrs Gee to put down that racing form and start combing the web for Grade-II listed Georgian rectories with several acres of chicken-friendly farmland.

And then I opened the envelope.

With receipts for sales going back two years (converted unfavourably into sterling from euros and US dollars), and a one-off payment for a Japanese translation that happened so many years ago that I’ve forgotten exactly when, the cheque came to … wait for it … wait for it … the life-changing amount of

£100.72

which after tax will be just over £60. It’ll pay for a nice dinner for two, which is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. But evidence enough that writing books for a living is not only bloody hard work, but requires a generous measure of luck.

Now, where did I put that lottery ticket?

Here’s a poster that’s recently appeared on the Norwich Road, just at the end of my street.

We take higher education very seriously here in Norfolk.

Now, I’ve had one of those manuscripts on my desk. Every time I catch its eye, it stares back at me, menacingly. It’s on a really, really difficult subject. So hard that even reading the title has the effect of making me want to chew one of my own legs off. So I’m taking the easy option – sending it out to referees.

So imagine my delight on opening my inbox this morning to read this, from a potential referee:

1. The title and abstract of this paper are so thrilling that it is impossible for me to decline your request! It will be a pleasure for me to review this paper.

Puts a spring in your step, doesn’t it? Even in one’s remaining leg.

That Richard Grant fellow has been making fun of my crocs. If that weren’t bad enough, my colleague Maxine Clarke keeps having a go at me about my feet, insinuating that they resemble those of the Proudfoot clan (whose feet were memorably big, hairy, and on the table). Thus cornered, I can only come out fighting with a clog blog.

Mrs Gee is an insulin-dependent diabetic, so she has to visit a clinic every so often so that someone can squint into her eyes, to check for diabetic retinopathy, and poke needles in her feet, to check for diabetic neuropathy. (Really, it’s no fun being a diabetic). She’s also meant to take her feet to a pederast paedophile paediatrician resident of Portsmouth podiatrist, who will shave the excess bits and pieces off her feet (she usually has to accompany her feet, as they are reluctant to go on their own) and return them to a pearly-pink splendor that would shame a Botticelli Venus

(I think Mrs Gee looks like that anyway, but then I’m biased, and anyway, she might be reading this).

However, since we’ve moved to the coast, the necessity for podiatry has receded. All that her feet require for tip-top, heel-to-toe exfoliative health (mine too, not just hers) is a barefoot walk on a sandy beach, and a paddle several times a week (weather permitting). No need for all that fuss and bother with alcohol, scalpels and discussions about where one might go on holiday or the fortunes of Norwich City FC. No wonder that Venus was born from the sea (though we don’t get scallops as big as that in Cromer – you’d probably have to go to Morston, for those).

All of which confirms me in my view that Homo sapiens is perfectly adapted for life on the beach. Although I don’t buy Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis for a moment, it remains true that no sooner had Hom. sap. evolved up country than he headed for the beach. Podiatry was a crutch, adopted when we made the ill-advised move back inland and adopted such bizarre accoutrements as shoes and socks, and could no longer walk barefoot on the sand as our ancestors once did.

So, Maxine, I shall continue to put my proud feet on the table. And, Richard, I shall wear my (sockless) crocs with equal pride. Evolution, you see, is on my side. It’s you that’s weird – not me!

The sparkling salon that is Brian Clegg’s blog has exposed a veritable portmaneau of annelids concerning the current court battle between J. K. Rowling, author of Harry Potter and the Temple of Doom and other Booker-award-winning masterpieces, and Mr Steve Noah’s-Ark, whose publisher has, perhaps rashly, proposed to produce a print version of his online Potteresque resource. I shall say no more about that here, except that Mr Noah’s-Ark and Ms Rowling are probably at this moment quoting The Comedy of Errors at their respective legal teams

1. Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
   Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised?

I should say here that I’ve read and enjoyed the entire Potterama several times over, and am currently reading my younger daughter Harry Potter and the Geranium of Fear as a bedtime story. Or perhaps it’s Harry Potter and the Enchanted Trombone? After a while they tend to merge into one (though I’ll counsel her to save Harry Potter and the Call of Cthulhu until she’s older). But repeated readings of Harry Potter and the Decerebrated Armadillo have, for me, worn holes in the imagined universe inhabited by Potter and his pals.

Over the years, it’s become very difficult to imagine how the annual output of a few schools of Witchcraft and Wizardry, feeding into an admittedly very small community of magical people, can support

• an entire Ministry of Magic

• a diverse publishing industry

• a banking system with its own currency

• a major hospital

• entire leagues of Quidditch, including a world championship attended by tens of thousands of fans

• a thriving and diverse mercantile industry

and so on. There’s a demographic deficit here. Hogwarts, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons hardly produce enough output to populate a small village, and even if some wizards are home-educated, where do all those witches and wizards come from?

I like to think I’m a discerning reader of fiction, so such matters as the internal consistency of imagined universes is important to me. Writing in Nature’s Futures series, Dan Simmons speculated that fictional universes might become real, such that people might migrate there by quantum teleportation. The existence of a fiction-generated alternate universe (and the number of people such universes might support) would be dependent on the strength of the ‘entangled-pair consciousness wavefront’ with which the universe had been imagined.

For example, 21 of Shakespeare’s 38 plays generated viable universes capable of supporting between a few thousand (Measure for Measure) and more than a million people (King Lear). The works of Dickens had generated five alternate universes that people might colonise:

1. Flaubert, it turned out, generated two complete universes — the so-called “Madame Bovary’s World” and that of Sentimental Education — whereas Alice Walker, it seems, to the frustration of American academics, had created none.

Simmons didn’t mention Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but given the detail of its contrivance, I expect that it might exist, somewhere in the continuum. But I suspect that the world of Hogwarts and Quidditch, Platform Nine And Three Quarters and Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, remains firmly imaginary.

Why should this be? How can such inconsistencies arise, given the wealth and detail of planning that Rowling lavished on the Potterverse over many years? I think I have an answer and, as you’ll have suspected, it’s informed by Tolkien.

When I wrote The Science of Middle-earth my biggest problem was explaining all the properties of Bilbo’s magic ring (stop sniggering, Grant, I can hear you from here) in one self-consistent theory. The ring contains something of the personality of its creator, and its weight can vary without apparent cause – so much is explicable by finagling around with various exotic ideas about quantum gravity (though as one of my colleagues remarked, when we were discussing this – “isn’t physics bollocks fun?”).

The big problem is explaining, in physical terms, how a magic ring could make its wearer invisible along with all his clothes and anything he is carrying. This makes no sense at all. I finessed this problem by noting that the ring’s property of invisibility – and no others – was invented in The Hobbit, intended as a children’s fairy tale, and in which the audience would not be expected to ask difficult questions of the consistency of the world in which they are asked to inhabit (this despite Tolkien’s views to the contrary in his essay On Fairy Stories, in which he set out the necessary condition of the Suspension of Disbelief). The ring is (by Tolkien’s admission) the link between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which is, in contrast, a fairy-tale for grown-ups – and that’s where the problems arise. In The Hobbit, the ring is just a macguffin of the kind that one finds in fairy stories more generally. But in The Lord of the Rings, one is implicitly invited to ask questions about how such things come to be.

So much is clear from the Potterverse. The first book, Harry Potter and the Unicycling Girrafe, is plainly a ripping yarn for kids. Most of the action happens at Hogwarts school, so we are not invited to ask questions about the consistency of the universe in which the story takes place. The sense of confusion, followed by disorientation and then wonder, when confronted by a world that is exotic, fresh and new – which we experience through Harry’s eyes – blinds one to any internal problems.

But slowly, as Harry and his pals get older, the increasingly familiar world they inhabit expands until, in the final instalment, Harry Potter and the Facts in the Case of Monsieur Voldemort, when Harry is an adult, it is coextensive with the outside, ‘Muggle’ world, and Hogwarts appears only at the end. Now, this final instalment is as well-crafted an adventure as all the others (even the unintentionally anarchic Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Noise), and the craftsmanship carries the story. But the Potterverse itself has become, in my view, as evanescent as the silver fog of a failed patronus.

Some time ago I premiered, on Nature Network, noch, my world-beating eco-idea, a lawnmower powered by guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus – one must always observe the niceties, mustn’t one?) The EcoMo™ consists of a wire-frame enclosure containing aforementioned caviomorph rodents, which one moves around the lawn to where the grass is lushest. The EcoMo™ is powered by the grass it cuts, and it fertilizes the lawn as it goes. The greedy little blighters reduce an area of lawn of approximately six square feet to a clean, fine cut in the time it takes to mix a jug of Pimms, so a bank-holiday weekend should be enough to cut a medium-sized suburban lawn. Why should one spend all that time faffing around with petrol and electricity and noise and unscheduled trips to the Accident and Emergency department, severed toes clutched in a dirty hanky, when you can sit back and let the rodents chomp away, in risk-free and eco-friendly silence?

Well, now the Spring is Sprung, the EcoMo™ has come into its own. Here is our 4-GPP (guinea-pig power) model in action earlier today, shown here with its Egg-Laying Attachments (optional).

The R&D brainstorm focus group comment thread following my original post suggested that the presence of large quantities of GPp (guinea-pig poop – distinct from GPP as p53 is from p53, get the picture?) left over on the grass might be offputting to any discerning croquet-lover. Well, I’ve come up with a solution to that, too. Clearing up the GPp is easily and effectively achieved with this non-patentable heterotrophic coprophage

that consumes poop egested from a wide variety of mammalian orifices, not just its own (it’s not fussy).

I guess that the food chain at the Maison Des Girrafes might be tightened further were we to … ahem … harvest the guinea pigs and egest our own waste into a composting toilet. Thankfully, neither option is currently under consideration.

However, I can report that yesterday I sowed my sweetcorn into compost generated by the Noble 500. And Mrs Gee has ordered one of these:

a kind of rubber siphon thingy called a drought-buster (think of an old-fashioned pipette filler) which we’ll use to siphon our bathwater out of the window at need and into a tank, for watering the garden in the summer – for those times when our rain barrels are at their lowest and our watering needs are greatest. (Note – the yellow plastic duck is not included).

Some years ago I was perusing one of my favourite journals of record and came across an article extolling the virtues of science as a career option for women. The article featured various young women, photographically arranged in winsome poses, who were making their way in science of all kinds, from ecology to high-energy physics. Conspicuous by its absence in this article was any discussion of how shaky science is as a career – how nomadic, how insecure – and how this career structure, or lack of it, might serve as an active deterrent to women even more than it does men. I was moved by this lacuna to write a letter to the journal concerned, which they had the grace to publish in abbreviated form (well, it did go on a bit).

Some time later I met the journalist who’d written the article and congratulated her on it. Her response, as I recall, was dismissive. Perhaps she realized, as had I, that simply encouraging more women to become scientists will be counterproductive unless science itself acquires a meaningful career structure that is less demanding on the requirements of family life, and that phenomena such as the postdoc trap are consigned to history.

I also recall the occasion – it was an evening reception in a bookshop in central London at which various people were required to defend their favourite book. The initial choice of half a dozen would be winnowed down to a single one, which would win a prize. My task was to defend The Lord of the Rings, in ninety seconds, to an audience of left-wing intellectuals from the adjacent London School of Economics. Christians fed to lions could have hardly fared any worse. I went away with the booby prize – a copy of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, a diatribe which takes more than 600 pages to say what Tom Lehrer managed in just fifteen words, in Bright College Days:

Hearts full of Youth
Hearts full of Truth
Six parts Gin to one part vermouth!

Some related issues were raised in Jennifer Rohn’s lambently lucent blog, in which Dr Rohn referred to the gender balance in editorial office of journals, suggesting that it was about four-fifths women, a proportion that seems about right in my own experience. She also went on to document the entirely regrettable phenomenon of (female) editors being on the sharp end of the criticism of established (male) scientists who wonder what business these young women, all ‘failed scientists’, have making decisions about ‘their’ work, the implication being that failure as scientists (and, possibly, the fact that they are women, who, as all fans of Borat know, have no more brains than squirrels) render them incapable of making such decisions. I do not know how commonplace such an attitude is. Yes, I am an editor, but also, when I last looked, male. I’m also bigger and look fiercer than most scientists, so I don’t get the ‘failed scientist’ jibe, either. But perhaps the accusation of failure is levelled disproportionately at women. If so, that makes the matter even worse.

Railing that such attitudes are sexist will get us nowhere. Of course they are, and everyone knows it. But accusations are divisive. A while ago I ran a series of profiles in Nature called Lifelines in which scientists were asked serious questions about their careers, their attitudes to mentoring and so on, mixed in with impertinent demands to know the contents of their fridges and their most recent bedtime reading. I scrupulously invited as many women as men to participate, so it was a surprise to me to learn (as perhaps it should not have been) that women featured disproportionately rarely in the published result. I admit that this only came to my conscious notice when I was accused, rather rudely, of blatant sexism. Naturally enough I was somewhat riled by this, more so because the accuser was male (the unsaid implication that women, poor loves, wouldn’t have made such a complaint themselves). Getting editors riled is never a good way to achieve what you want. Nevertheless, I went back to my procedures, girded up my loins, and realized that I’d have to ask at least twice as many women as men in order to achieve parity at publication.

Why? A gender divide soon became apparent. Women were less likely to respond positively (or at all) to such an invitation, and when they did, were almost always too busy to complete the task. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that because women in science are outnumbered by men, they will always find themselves co-opted onto more committees and such, as well as taking on the traditional familial chores.

What, then, is to be done? The first thing is to remind those male, mid-career scientists that discrimination against people is a Bad Thing. The second is that in so doing, science is losing a potentially very great resource. If such hard-bitten old scrotes persist in the equation of women with failure as science, they should wonder precisely what it is about science that is a turn-off to women. And not just women – I looked for a career outside science when close observation of colleagues slightly older than me revealed that a to pursue science was to take an indefinite vow of poverty, if not chastity, when people my age doing other things could afford all those things that equate with an entitlement to simple human rights and dignity – a settled life; a home under a roof; and even a mortgage one could afford, noch. And should my right to such things be denied simply by my career choice?

It could be, however (now, I’m not going to be popular for saying this) that even when balanced rigorously for equality of opportunity, some activities tend to be more attractive to people of one gender rather than another. Men and women are, after all, different. There is no sexism in trainspotting (and no sex, either), but trainspotters tend to be men. Last night, I had the great pleasure of attending a dance show

in the venue whence this blog gets its name, in which my younger daughter had a small part, being a pupil of the dance school whose show this was. I learned two things from this show: the first was that it was remarkably polished and professional; the second was that of the 200 children and teenagers who took part, only three were male. Bloody Idiot Billy Elliot is alive and well. I am sure that the dance school will welcome anyone they can get – at least one of the dancers had a mild disability, and several had physiques which, to be charitable, were hardly sylph-like. So why so few boys? The answer to this is probably a long one, but all sorts of things play a part, parental expectations being less important than the peer pressure that is so important in shaping childrens’ attitudes. If you are a little girl, you’ll want to pursue activities with your friends, who will be little girls, who will do ballet, and a positive feedback loop is formed that’s hard to break. If you are a little boy, it’s more likely that you’ll be playing football. Explaining to your friends that you can be a ballet star and play football might, in some circumstances, be hard without getting smacked in the mouth teased. Not that people don’t break the mould – my niece, aged 11, is the star goalie of her school’s girls’ soccer team.

What was this journal of record, then? Some rugged, manly magazine such as Nature? No? Science, perhaps? Campanologists’ Quarterly? You And Your Goat? None of the above—it was Good Housekeeping, required reading of all Ladies of a Certain Age (and their husbands). At least you couldn’t accuse them of not trying.

Somewhere down at the chthonic end of Jennifer Rohn’s preternaturally pellucid blog, Pedro Beltrao offered this eldtrich provocative comment:

I also would like to see editors having a stronger say in the research agenda. They spend so much time reading, researching and deciding what should be interesting for a certain community, why not be more vocal about their ideas?

My first reaction on reading this was oooh, don’t tempt me! followed swiftly by be careful what you wish for, Pedro, culminating in don’t editors do this already?

Because editors usually hide under a kind of invisibility cloak, it’s easy to assume that journals function entirely reactively. Papers are submitted, some are sent for review, a fraction are published. That’s that.

But even this caricature of how a journal works conceals much subjectivity. First, there is the decision about which papers to be sent to review. At Nature, this decision is made by the editors, either individually or collectively, occasionally supplemented by external informal review. And then there is the process of peer review, a whole subject in itself. At both levels, it’s important to remember that editors and referees are not robots, but human beings.

However, editors are not simply reactive, and do work to set the agenda – though not in quite the way that Pedro envisages. Editors commission reviews and feature (‘front-half’) articles on new and emerging disciplines or topics, partly because they are interesting, but also to encourage research papers (‘back-half’) in the disciplines or topics concerned. Editors also go to conferences and visit laboratories, searching out the latest and newest.

What editors don’t do is go on the stump, making general statements about the specific subjects they’d like to see papers cover, and what they don’t like. There are many good reasons for this. The first is that all papers are welcome, simply because some of the most important papers are the most unexpected. Another, I think, is that to be too specific about what sort of things we like is to throw the game of science: editors aren’t in the business of shaping science, they are there to select the best papers for their journals. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they are distinct.

Now, I feel I have a nose for the subjects I want to see papers cover. I think I know what’s hot, and what’s not. But I’m not about to publish a list of what my priorities are. That’s for you to guess.

I think I can boil down what a Nature editor likes to see in any paper into just two words – surprise me.

As a small boy was walking home from school one winter’s evening, he noticed an old, bearded man in a front garden, looking up through a telescope.

“What’cher doin’, mister?” the boy asked.
“Astronomy”, replied the old man.
“You’re a bit slow in’t’cha?” quips the boy. “We did that last year.”

Listen carefully, now, here comes the science part. Substitute ‘organismal biology’ for ‘astronomy’ in the anecdote above and you’d have a pretty fair approximation of the way in which old-fashioned zoology and botany are viewed (at least, from where I’m sitting) by some scientists, for whom molecules conquer all.

Writing in today’s Nature (‘Science teaching must evolve’, Nature 453, 31-32, 1 May 2008), Andrew Moore of EMBO argues that schools are backward in teaching students about molecular evolution, which he calls “the best approach yet to investigating biology’s central theory”. You can comment directly on that article here – needless to say, the opinions in this blog post what you’re reading right now are all mine, not necessarily Nature’s. But if they aren’t yours too, then all I can say is Shame On You.

“Worse still,” Moore continues, “the understanding [students] have – based on the fossil record – is easy prey to specious arguments from anti-science movements”.

It would indeed be a fine thing were students to learn about evolution at all, molecular or otherwise. And quite apart from the near-certainty that a beginning student would have more trouble grasping concepts such as molecules learned in sterile laboratory environments, rather than getting out there, seeing the diversity of real animals and plants – observing, collecting, dissecting and drawing – one is forced to contest the motivation of such an exercise. ‘Learning about evolution through molecules rather than the fossil record could be used to counter the specious arguments of anti-science movements’ – oh really?

Specious arguments remain specious, irrespective of our attitude towards them. In any case, anti-science movements are likely certain to cherry-pick their evidence to suit their needs, whatever scientists say. I disagree with PZ Myers on many things, but if we stand shoulder-to-shoulder on one point, it is that the way we do our science should, emphatically, run on our own program, and not dance to a creationist drum.

So much is clear, or should be. But Moore goes further.

“Phylogeny based on similarity of form is fundamentally unsound because of the adaptation and convergent evolution witnessed in nature. Such purely descriptive methods represent a mould out of which schoolroom biology must break to become more contemporary.”

This remark can but transport one to an alternate universe in which phylogenetic systematics, more handily known as cladistics, never happened. Cladistics uses the criterion of maximum parsimony to generate hypotheses of evolution in which convergence is at a minimum, a kind of ground state. The cladograms so generated are not wishy-washy family trees based on similarities observed subjectively, but rigorous hypotheses that can be tested, and which shed light on major evolutionary transitions in a meaningful, real-world way that molecules never can.

For example, no amount of molecules are likely to give the insight into the transition of tetrapods from water to land as great as that offered by the study of the mere morphology of fossils of Tiktaalik roseae or Acanthostega gunnari against a cladistic background in which the relative merits of various hypotheses about the evolution of major organ-systems can be tested objectively.

Evolutionary biologists were refining cladistics in the 1970s and 1980s, long before molecular evolution had the tools or, indeed, very much data. It would be funny, were it not so sad, to report that parsimony criteria formed the basis of many of the first-generation techniques of phylogenetic reconstruction used in molecular evolution.

Irony on irony, these techniques were developed largely by palaeontologists, as a specific response to the problems of evolution peculiar to the fossil record.

Irony degenerates to insult with the use of the word ‘descriptive’, which molecular biologists have appropriated as a perjorative term to describe the kind of biology which they consider outmoded – a biology of a theoretical and philosophical sophistication which still transcends the descriptive molecular stamp-collecting that masquerades as science, simply because it has big, shiny and expensive machines that go ‘ping’, which serve (among their more legitimate uses) to amplify the self-importance of their users.

This is not to say that molecular biology cannot play its part. For me, the greatest contribution currently being made by molecular evolution is helping to resolve long-standing morphological problems, such as the origin of the vertebrate head and neck, or the molecular basis for the variation in beak morphology in Darwin’s finches.

But these problems would not exist to be solved without the tradition of comparative anatomists going back hundreds of years, who defined the problems to begin with.