The Most Famous Punch-up in Science, 30th June 1860

Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the protagonists

30^th June, 1860, Oxford Museum of Natural History, the scene of one of the biggest punch-ups in Science.  It was only built in the few years before and opened that year as a demonstration of how Art could reveal the science of the natural world as the Intelligible embodied expression of the Will of God. The British Association meeting of 1860 was therefore an inaugural event, but not as the authorities might have wished. 

Imagine being asked to compose a piece of music for a friend’s retirement in that location (if you happen to be a composer of Darwin-related music). A bit like being asked to put on a sketch or two at La Scala, or maybe a religious service in the Vatican. It was a bit too early for the main oratorio (see below), but a string quartet seemed be lower risk, especially if one had ever written one (I hadn’t). But it was important to rise to the occasion, as Thomas Henry Huxley did. I wasn’t up against a different world view or a skilled orator such as Bishop Wilberforce, but the intellectual history of the place seemed to require some effort.

“As the debate unfolded, Wilberforce taunted Huxley about his possible ape ancestry, to which Huxley is claimed to have retorted: 'If then the question is put to me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet employs these faculties and that influence for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.’ Admiral Fitzroy held up a bible and exhorted all to believe God rather than man.” The account is legendary, and probably embellished or distilled, but that’s essentially what contempories made of it.

I wrote last time about the Adventure of Faith in many areas, science, art and religious faith. We can’t always prove things which we believe to be manifestly true. There is no full theory of gravity which includes how it actually works (Einstein’s is the closest we have) but that doesn’t mean that things don’t fall down. But we can ‘clear the weeds’ and remove obfuscation. Huxley had that faith in the correctness of Darwin’s theory – as far as it went – and seemed to want to remove the irrelevant suggestion of social awkwardness of having apes in the family tree. But he didn’t understand the full thing, and neither did Darwin, hence the inclusion of the genetic code in Eyenigma Variations.

The first blog in this series featured the splendid student quartet who played the piece in the setting of the 30/06/1860 debate. Maybe one day a choir and orchestra will perform the full oratorio. I’m grateful to a friend with a good, traditional hand for score writing for copying out the first page of the opening chorus ‘Entangled Bank’ for me. 

Opening chorus 'Entangled Bank', hand-copied score, weighed down by ammonites

Picture Credits: National Portrait Gallery; David F Gahan copyright

Enigma Wrapped in an Eyenigma: for Edward Elgar’s Birthday

 

Edward Elgar: St Wulstans' R.C. Church, Little Malvern, at bluebell time

For those who raise an eyebrow at my thieving (or ‘Reproduction with Variation’ to use Darwin’s term) of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations title - both for this blog and my string quartet on Darwinian themes concerning the Eye – some belated justification and also my homage to the great man.

My great grandmother Margaret Delaney sang in his choir at the Catholic church in Great Malvern (so family legend says) and I also was suffused with the theology behind his greatest work, the setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius, the journey of the soul after death. I sang this with Imperial College Choir in ~1983 and absolutely love it. Although no longer a believer (by Occam’s Razor) in anything beyond nature, I greatly appreciate the Adventure of Faith: an effort to extrapolate beyond what we know (from a firm and reasoned foundation) in many areas of life and thought.

Charles Darwin had to do such an extrapolation, “These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life and from use and disuse…”  He had to take on faith that a mechanism would be found for the bit in bold. The first edition of Origin of Species contained a (wrong) guess that something he called ‘gemules’ would pass on information from parents to embryo encoding information about useful/harmful behaviours - pretty much Lamarckism – which he later disowned. If he had wanted a complete theory he would have had to wait for another hundred years for the elucidation of the DNA/RNA/protein mechanism. That’s why I included the genetic code of the Eye protein into Eyenigma variations even though anachronisitic. The enigma had a solution and Darwin’s faith was justified.

I’m sure they would have got on, Elgar and Darwin, despite differences in outlook on religion. Elgar might even have given Darwin a start since, “A study of the composer’s papers reveals that for most of his life he was fascinated by cryptography. His letters and music scores, for example, are dotted with codes and anagrams.” New Scientist. The dedication to Gerontius is AMDG: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam  "For the greater glory of God", similar to J.S. Bach’s S.D.G (only for the glory of God) dedication on most works (and of course he encoded his own name BACH in the Art of Fugue, which I take as a theme for Eyenigma Variations).

Elgar’s most famous coded work is the delightful Enigma Variations itself. The fourteen variations all have coded initials, but these are meant to be easily ‘cracked’ as names of his close friends - amateur music makers, collaborators and family. But the underlying melody: “The Enigma I will not explain – its "dark saying" must be left unguessed”; he kept that secret to his grave (above). Here’s one proposed solution: I rather like that one, and Elgar may have liked my returned compliment in the Victorian hymn tune I cryptically embed (transferred to Lydian mode) in Eyenigma.

I have my own faith that the whole Darwiniana oratorio will someday get performed; here’s an extract (rendition) promised some time in my piece about the Southern Stars (it will get a detailed write-up another time). But there’s no doubt that Elgar’s faith is still an inspiration. I used a figure from his mighty aria Proficiscere, Anima Christiana as an input for Darwin’s words on ‘A Man Looks Forwards & Backwards’ and for the ascent of the holy mountain of Science (in Darwin's case), and the Gerontius demons (everyone’s favourite!) make a brief appearance in a location I’m sure of which Elgar would approve. So, hats off to him for his birthday (actually 2nd June - 'fat fingers' had added another digit).

From 'Three Soliloquies for baritone and c. guitar': spot the Demons!

Picture credits: Katherine Langrish, Little Malvern; David F Gahan (composition copyright)

To the Nursery!

 

"Go Forth and Multiply", she says

While waiting last Friday for our “you’re-the-experts-so-you-do-the-picking” take-away Bangladeshi menu (they chose delicious, aromatic Lamb Shatkora), I picked up a copy of The Sun - you know how you do, chaps - 8^th June. There, on the anti-Woke page, was a demographic scare story Brits face serious consequences if our birth rate continues to decline by darling-of-the-Conservative right, Miriam Cates MP: (probably saved from a speech in May but trotted out by the Sun to match with a gender-wars story on policing).

Readers of this blog will know, eg from the piece We Forgot the Begat that demographics is the future, including its relevance for how we will meet the Aliens). I read the article with interest, and also as a piece of attempted social engineering. Mrs Cates, who has a degree in genetics and been a science teacher, has impeccable pro-natalist credentials, including doing her bit. She scores highly on the Kinder, Kirche categories but it would be unfair given her present employment to insist too much on the Küche aspects (but see on). She has just picked up on the fact that UK TFR (Total Fertility Rate) has been below replacement rate for the last 50 years (since 1973), with Conservative-led administrations for 32/50 years if that alone makes a difference to women’s choices (which seems unlikely). Her Sun article makes it clear that she doesn’t like immigration as a way to population stability (which would indicate around 200k per year net immigration to be the target for stability). Instead, she calls on her own government to ‘Remove the Barriers’ to women choosing to have children. As a father of two daughters in their early thirties, I’m right with you. But she rejects free childcare, because of the choices made by her Finnish sisters, although my daughters would vote for more help there (to counter the prevailing wisdom that ‘one partner’s wages all go on childcare’, as one of them told me). Cates wants the husband’s taxes to be, effectively, fully remitted (following her link from “Until the 1990s, our tax system…” will fail to inform you of the full details).­ This is supposed to provide funding and esteem for the wife’s many years out of the world of employed work. (Cates was lucky herself that she could benefit from being Financial Director in her husband’s company to top-up her earnings and self-esteem whenever she wished). Unless you are very high-end financially, like these prominent eugenicist Pronatalists, you may wonder how far the rebate of the Standard Rate taxation (20%, and after personal allowance) of an ordinary husband’s salary – the rebate she seems to be hinting – will go towards those childcare costs. And whether that will do much to reversing 50-60 year-old trends in the UK and, successively, every single other country in the world. Mrs Cates might like to ponder on why her sisters worldwide are choosing to have fewer babies, and not just people who look like her.

It's undeniable that economics and relative taxation/subsidy does have some effect on personal choices, but that’s probably a smaller consideration vs the personal choice element. If you want to see a worked example of a policy of her government working in absolutely the opposite way to baby-booming Mrs Cates’ wishes, here’s a some food for thought. The base data for her, and me, is Birthsin England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk) – that’s everything, including useful definitions like age-specific fertility rates. The real fun bit is to go to Section 5, Figure 4, where you can see ‘austerity in action’. If you click on pause/play you can click through every year from 2001 to 2021 and see the dark blue (>2 children per woman) areas join up into a chubby bracelet stretching from Lands End to The Wash throughout the child-friendly Labour years, but scarcely beyond. Watch birth rates plummeting from the beginning of Conservative austerity showing up in the 2013 figures. Cates points out that rates “dropped dramatically over the past ten years” but doesn’t point out that the obvious fact that 2011 was at the end of a long boom period in the UK and with a large contribution from immigrant families and their choices. Not a good baseline. Neither is Singapore, a favourite nation of some of her Conservative colleagues, where the TFR is 1.2births/woman (2022 figures). My estimate of worldwide average trending to 1.6 when everyone is fully integrated into the world economy looks quite reasonable. With a standardised mean age of mother at childbirth at 30.7 years in 2020 in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics) and an average age of mothers giving birth to their first child in England and Wales at 29.1 years, my estimate of 3 generations per 100 years also seems OK. That underlies my estimate of extinction-due-to-lack-of-interest in about three thousand years.

Mrs Cates has her work cut out, but she can do a bit of good by adopting some of those child and mother friendly policies of 2001-2010.

NB, this week also marks the anniversary (10^th June), in 1956, of the first licensing of the progesterone-only hormonal ‘pill’ for menstrual disorders. The rest followed.

Picture credits: The Sun and Getty (linked)

Lampyris Noctilucae: Glowworms

 

Glowworms at work

In June 1832, Charles Darwin was exploring the Brazilian Coast. From ‘The Voyage of theBeagle’ (p29):

“At these times the fireflies are seen flitting about from hedge to hedge. On a dark night the light can be seen at about two hundred paces distant. It is remarkable that in all the different kinds of glowworms, shining elaters, and various marine animals (such as the crustacea, medusae, nereidae, a coralline of the genus Clytia, and Pyrosma), which I have observed, the light has been of a well-marked green colour. All the fireflies, which I caught here, belonged to the Lampyridae (in which family the English glowworm is included), and the greater number of specimens were of Lampyris occidentalis. I found that this insect emitted the most brilliant flashes when irritated: in the intervals, the abdominal rings were obscured. The flash was almost co-instantaneous in the two rings, but it was just perceptible first in the anterior one. The shining matter was fluid and very adhesive: little spots, where the skin had been torn, continued bright with a slight scintillation…” Much follows about the behaviour of the insects. Darwin, ‘The Man Who Walks with Henslow’, was a beetle expert from his Cambridge days and gave a proof of his zeal in Autobiography: “one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”

It's strange that, although in the opposite hemisphere, it’s now also our (British/Irish Isles) season for glowworms, as it is for fireflies where I used to live in upstate New York. I once flew from Midsummer’s Day in N.Y. to Midwinter’s Day in Brasilia and found it the same temperature, 26C, so that may have something to do with it. I’ve only ever come across glowworms once in England, on the Cotswold scarp in Gloucestershire, but there’s a splendid website which will give you a start at UK Glow worm survey home page.

I learned about the enzymatic production of light via luciferase in my biophysics classes at Imperial under Dr Nick Franks, who also ‘sparked’ my interest in rhodopsin – the basic photoreceptor in almost every eye - which became the basis for the genetic code theme in Eyenigma Variations. So, a light emitter and a light receiver, both of use to our beautiful summer glowworms and suitable to celebrate in music.

Another musical fan of these ‘living lamps’ and ‘country comets’ was the composer Richard  Rodney Bennett in his suite ‘The Insect World, setting a lovely poem from Andrew Marvell (period of King Charles II) celebrating haymaking time and his beguiling love Juliana. My wife used to sing this in girls’ choir under the amazing Mr Smith at Ross-on-Wye Grammar in the 1970s. Here’s a recording of an orchestral version with its lovely melody. I’ve not been able to resist doing a setting for classical guitar and solo voice using RRB’s amazing jazz inspired chords - but I’ll need RRB’s estate’s permission to perform it publicly. But here’s the start.

My setting of RRB's 'Glowworms'

Picture credits: Universal Editions; David Gahan (copyright for that arrangement)

I Dream of Starships

 

Bells in Flight - 50 years ago

For those who enjoyed my post Bridge of a Million Starships (for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday), you may want some music to accompany you on the trip and make it, well, more of a trip. Fifty years ago this week (25^th May 1973), just coming down from the apogee -the euphoria- of the classical ages of space flight and science fiction, Tubular Bells was released.   

It really deserved its own Space Movie, and got one in a 78min documentary film of that name for NASA to celebrate the 10^th Anniversary of the Moon Landings. But the lasting movie association is, unfortunately, ‘The Exorcist’, never a worthy movie link (atavistic mumbo-jumbo!) but good for exposure. If only Stanley Kubrick had heard a demo tape before he fixed the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mike Oldfield might have got the gig, but he was only ~14 at the time, bit early even for that amazing musical risk-taker. The bone flung up into the sky in 2001, turning temporarily into a spaceship, might have made another appearance as a bent bell, and perhaps landed back on Earth as the bone-on-the-beach on the album cover, or perhaps with holes in it like the Hohle Fels flute (world’s oldest musical instrument).

Anyway, and Tubular and its sequels were great as ‘the soundtrack’ to my science-fiction reading years, 11 and onwards. I have a particular association between the beginning to TB Side 2 and the return to a forsaken Earth by humans – but now the home to highly evolved cats, dogs (and rats!) – in Breed to Come, Andre Norton 1972. But the strongest sci-fi connection is with the grandeur, melancholy and desolation found in Arthur C. Clarke. There’s explicit identification here with track and album titles ‘The Sentinel’ and The Songs of Distant Earth (1994), itself with a forward by Clarke himself. Maybe if the AMiTe project ever inspires a space movie, Mike might come out of his recently announced retirement and give it a shot, if the aching loneliness appealed.

Anyone with something to say has a right to try composition, and it does give an insight into what ingredients go into making a composer. You have to absorb a lot of influences and then get stuck into the ‘problem solving’ which (spoiler alert) is the main job of being a composer. Mike is part of my compositional world; his natural feel for folk-type harmonies (sixthy, ninethy) have influenced me and would have pleased Ralph Vaughan Williams (a fellow folk enthusiast) and I’ve learnt something  from his bassist’s sense of off-rhythm. It’s been said that his true instrument is the bass-guitar, never mind that searing lead guitar sound - hey, Elgar was a bassoonist as well as a good violin player, ‘bass and lead’.

My contention in the AMiTe paper is that any aliens that can launch a spaceship that communicates by lasers will have hands, feet, fingers, toes. They may have syrinxes, like birds (that would be cool!) but they will probably have stringed instruments – guitars, violin-thingies – and woodwind/brass, and definitely percussions. They’d surely have a different history (maybe never having had a counterpoint era or a J. S. Bach) and use different combos, and may also include total silliness in the mix like, well… Mike is a bit of a  ‘Musical Alien’ who acquired his musical DNA over a different and unrepeatable personal trajectory. He’s still hard to write about even for good musicians who’ve missed out on part of that mix, eg, the whole ‘band’ experience (he is literally a one-man-band and thinks like that). He invented a whole different ensemble (to the classical orchestra), because those are the instruments he picked up. Etc, etc.

For opinions sharp enough to cut yourself on, read Colin Edwards: “He is utterly unique, ridiculously unique in fact and things of such rarity should be cherished.” “It’s not just the music but also, as mentioned above, HOW it sounds… raises the hairs on the arms”, and, on Incantations: “one of the clearest examples of Oldfield furiously pursing the ecstatic and achieving precisely that.”

He flings his soul out into the Void, and surely dreams of Starships.

Picture credit: Mike Oldfield Worldwide Discography

To See Ourselves as Others See Us

 

The Mighty Mark 1 - a place of pilgrimage

On the day of named-storm Eunice in 2022, I managed to keep my appointment with MikeGarrett, Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at University of Manchester and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank, with its famous Mark 1 Telescope - made out of bits of battleships! - a name to conjure with. Many visits as a boy there; a place of pilgrimage during the Apollo program. Keeping just ahead of the storm on the M6, we were inside the Alan Turing Institute when it finally hit, and it was ‘knock-you-off-your-feet’ strong when we exited 2 hours later. It was great to meet a Radioastronomy and SETI group and to present the AMiTe idea. Lots of discussion, suggestions for references and encouragement to think further about observational consequences.

While Mike’s JBCA group of 190 people have wide ranging (multi light-year!) research interests including active galaxy nuclei and giant arrays (running  e-MERLIN, the UK's radio astronomy network), they are also active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Mike is currently vice-chair of the IAAs SETI Permanent Committee.

So it’s quite fun to keep tabs on his publications. Here’s one that was publicised only in the last week: What would aliens learn if they observed the Earth? This claims to be the first proper study of the Earth’s Technosignature in 50 years and takes into account all modern human sources of radiation. We currently emit a whopping 4GW of radio noise, just from mobile phone transmission. The team has analysed databases of transmitters and considered the radiation pattern, and the potential for detection at nearby stars. These were limited to nearby systems, including Alpha Centauri, out to a maximum of 8 light-years. The conclusion:

“We worked out that an alien civilisation near these locations would, however, need much better telescopes than we have to detect the Earth’s mobile radio leakage. But that would be quite probable, given most technical civilisations are expected to be much more advanced than we are.”

It would be lovely to think that the closest stars have anciently wise civilisations, just waiting for the ‘youngsters’ (us, a mere 4.5bn years after the Earth cooled) to grow up and invent smartphones. Life may be ubiquitous (C’mon NASAPerseverance) but there again, it’s been a long, hard road here. And despite the best (breeding) efforts of Elon Musk, human numbers may start to decline as early as 2050. If the closest extant technical civilisation may be “outside theMilky Way and therefore forever inaccessible” (Brian Cox musing) then we’re going to need a pretty big ‘scope on the Cheshire Plain to detect that.

But maybe there would be a chance to detect ‘we’re here’ signals from an AMiTe point. I’m still to write up the next version of the paper with suggestions from meeting Mike, but there are some clues in the 'Brian Cox' post. Happy listening!

Picture credit: Unesco

I Salute Admiral FitzRoy – for 30th April

 

FitzRoy's grave at All Saint's, Upper Norwood (nr. Crystal Palace)

I have the deepest respect for ‘Captain FitzRoy’, whose anniversary – of death by his own hand – was on 30^th April (I’m a few days late due to a big family wedding).

An absolute aristocrat (the Fitzroy name comes as being a direct descendant of the ‘Merry Monarch’ at his merriest), he cared deeply, as second Governor of New Zealand,  for the indigenous Maori during a rapacious colonial period - and was sacked as a result. In the navy from 12, he was appointed temporary commander of HMS Beagle at 23 as a result of the madness and suicide of Captain Stokes, and had another suicide, by throat-slitting, in his family. So very wise to take along a gentleman companion on Beagle’s second voyage to keep him sane, on a ship refitted at his own expense (he kept doing that). His friend Beaufort (inventor of the ‘Force 10’ scale) came up with some suggestions. He got his second choice, Charles Darwin, and – fatefully – thrust a copy of Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ into 22yr old Charles' hands, thereby giving Darwin a vision of Deep Time (in a way, a bit like the Deep Time I am proposing for the Amity Project, although I only need 60 Million Years).

You’d think that giving Darwin his big, lucky break (again, own expense) would be enough for fame – and indeed there’s plenty more on this aspect, including his brave, principled rejection of Darwin later (including brandishing a bible at the famed Oxford Debate of 1860), and indeed his later reconciliation with Darwin (though not with evolution). But he had to continue his noblesse-oblige-from-own-pocket by founding the Met. Office and inventing Weather Forecasting (including the very term). Perhaps inspired by Beaufort systematising wind-speeds, and with the new technology of barometers and telegraph, his can-do entrepreneurialism led to the first ever weather forecast of 31/7/1861 in his own hand, which was published in the Times. His forecasts saved the lives of many ordinary sailors.

You can tell this is going to end badly. He’d betrayed God (by being Darwin’s unwitting stooge), lost his colonial job, lost his family fortune (died effectively broke), and then the trolling started. Yes, they had trolls before the internet. We used to call such newspaper letter-writers as ‘Angry of Tunbridge Wells, but the trolls included scientists who apparently thought that no forecast was preferrable to an imprecise one. From the Met. Office site:

“The constant criticism took a severe toll on FitzRoy's health and his frequent absence from the office can be traced through the increasingly sporadic presence of his handwriting in the weather reports. His final entry was written on 20th March 1865, just a few weeks before he took his own life on 30th April 1865”.

It’s rather horrible to think of a man – such a great and principled figure - haunted by those earlier suicides and visions of razor-blades, and being inevitably driven into the depression where he would follow their example.

Here’s a small example of my musical write-up mentioning his first interaction with Darwin. I had long intended to pay my respects at his grave, which I was luckily able to do while visiting family close to St Margaret / All Saints, Norwood (near Crystal Palace) recently. The grave was apparently renovated by the Met. Office in 1981 and the strange (Fuegian?) plant has grown since then. I enjoyed popping into ‘his’ church and testing the acoustics with Fr. Antonio, vicar-in-charge, who supplied interesting chat and directed me to FitzRoy’s (very modest) end-of-terrace two hundred meters down Church Road (with a green plaque).

A bit of recitative within the fugato 'Shooting, Dogs & Rat-catching'

Picture credits:

FitzRoy's grave: David F. Gahan

Musical extract: David F .Gahan