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Файл:Speak and Write like The Economist говори и пиши как The Economist
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Nature
Left-handed snails avoid the attentions of right-handed crabs because these dexterous crustaceans fi nd it tricky to eat lefties. For
humans, the equivalent is probably those really annoying pistachio nuts that accumulate at the bottom of the bag. They are simply more trouble to open than they are worth, and are thus likely
to be tossed aside.
Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the
male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off
their suitors, post copula, in a manner that Hannibal Lecter might have
admired. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists
believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a
meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is
actually sacrifi cing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, his
becoming a meal for his paramour somehow helps the offspring of their
union.
Pull a spring, let it go, and it will snap back into shape. Pull it
further and yet further and it will go on springing back until,
quite suddenly, it won’t. What was once a spring has become a
useless piece of curly wire. And that, in a nutshell, is what many
scientists worry may happen to the Earth if its systems are overstretched like those of an abused spring.
Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
People are not the only creatures who lie. Species from squids
to chimpanzees have been caught doing it from time to time. But
only Homo sapiens has turned lying into an art. Call it diplomacy, public relations or simple good manners: lying is one of the
things that makes the world go round.
He was a socially dangerous warm.
The old saying that where there’s muck, there’s brass has never
proved more true than in genetics. Once, and not so long ago, received wisdom was that most of the human genome— perhaps as
much as 99% of it— was “junk”. If this junk had a role, it was just
to space out the remaining 1%, the genes in which instructions
about how to make proteins are encoded, in a useful way in the
cell nucleus. more than a century and a half after Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”, biologists do not fully
111
Часть I
understand how species actually do originate. Work like this suggests one reason for this ignorance may be that they have been
looking in the wrong place. For decades, they have concentrated
their attention on the glittering, brassy protein-coding genes
while ignoring the muck in which the answer really lies.
No other season quite captures the imagination as winter does.
Among the mysteries of evolution, one of the most profound is
what exactly happened at the beginning of the Cambrian period.
Before that period, which started 541m years ago and ran on for
56m years, life was a modest thing. Bacteria had been around for
about 3 billion years, but for most of this time they had had the
Earth to themselves. Seaweeds, jellyfi sh-like creatures, sponges
and the odd worm do start to put in an appearance afew million
years before the Cambrian begins. But red in tooth and claw the
Precambrian was not— for neither teeth nor claws existed.
Using Viking epics, whaling and pollen records, log books, the debris
shed by melted ice rafts, diatoms (silicon-armoured algae found in marine sediments), ice cores and tree rings, scientists have constructed a
record of the Arctic past which suggests that the summer sea ice is at its
lowest level for at least 2,000 years. Six of the hottest years on record—
going back to 1880 — have occurred since 2004.
The rhino horn, which is merely agglutinated hair, the same stuff
as fi nger nails, has no pharmacological value. Yet its street price
has soared to over $60,000 a kilo, more than for the same weight
of cocaine or gold— aproven aphrodisiac.
New Zealand still has seven times as many sheep as people.
The 15 litres of semen from South Africa, from assorted males,
would be enough to inseminate some 324 elephants and thereby
freshen up the gene pool. But the elephant semen painstakingly
gathered for America has been sitting in Pretoria for well over
a year because of bureaucratic red tape. South African offi cials
have been slow to grant a permit to export the semen to America
simply because they have never done it before.
You know what Washington said when he crossed the Delaware? It’s
fucking cold.
112
Nature
If jelly is so fortifying, why does it wobble so much?
Cod hate cages— they don’t like being handled, are very sensitive to
changes in their environment and are very hard to breed.
Most commercial species have been reduced by over 75% and
some, like whitetip sharks and common skate, by 99%. For all
the marvellous improvements in technology, British fi shermen,
mostly using sail-power, caught more than twice as much cod,
haddock and plaice in the 1880s as they do today. By one estimate, for every hour of fi shing, with electronic sonar fi sh fi nders
and industrial winches, dredges and nets, they catch 6% of what
their forebears caught 120 year ago.
Many shallow-water species have highly evolved visual cortexes and
their eyes can contain up to eight different light-absorbing photopigments, compared with the paltry red, blue and green which humans possess. These extra light receptors give fi sh increased sensitivity to other
wavelengths; some species can even see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to humans.
In Africa it is said that “even the jackal deserves to drink”.
It was a Unicorn poop.
A hen is merely an egg’s way of making another egg.
Before locusts fl y, they march. Millions of juveniles crawl up to 500
meters a day, munching everything in front of them, in bands that
stretch for kilometres. This is when the Australian Plague Locust Commission tries to reduce their numbers, by laying strips of insecticide
in their path. But often a swarm changes direction without warning.
The university group, led by Jerome Buhl, suggests that such changes
of movement are mathematically similar to the behaviour of a magnetic material like iron— which, if heated above a certain temperature,
known as the Curie temperature, loses its magnetism. In both of these
examples interactions between individual particles (magnetic domains
in the case of iron, individual insects in the case of locusts) drive sudden changes in group dynamics. The iron stops being magnetic. The
locusts change direction.
Lobbyists are swarming over Capital Hill like locusts.
113
Часть I
As the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, compared with other fl ying animals the fi sh score well at 4.4:1. This makes
them more effi cient than swallowtail butterfl ies (3.6), fruit fl ies (1.8) and
bumble bees (2.5). Flying fi sh are just as effective at gliding as birds that
are known for being strong fl yers, like red-shouldered hawks (3.8) and
petrels (4). Nighthawks (9) and black vultures (17) make more impressive
gliders. When the shape of a wing creates more lift from the air passing
around it than it does drag (air resistance), an aircraft will fl y. And the
higher the ratio, the farther the aircraft will glide. This means if you cut
the engine on a small Cessna with a lift-to-drag ratio of 7:1 it would fl y
seven metres forward for each metre of descent.
Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.
What is bad news for rodents, though, could be good news for primates.
Whale meat is still occasionally served to schoolchildren in Japan as a reminder of their culture, though large-scale whaling
only really began after the war, on the orders of General Douglas
MacArthur, who oversaw America’s occupation. The aim was to
provide cheap nourishment for a famished nation. Masayuki Komatsu, Japan’s former IWC negotiator, who is notoriously blunt
and once called minke whales the “cockroaches of the sea”.
Why did the turtle stick its head in a bucket?” sounds like the sort of riddle asked by ten-year-olds in school playgrounds. But it was also asked
recently by Yuen Ip of the National University of Singapore. And his answer, it has to be said, is precisely the sort that would appeal to a tenyear-old. It is that turtles pee through their mouths. The question was,
why?
Primates apart, few mammals employ tools. Sea otters use rocks
to smash clams open, dolphins wrap sponges around their noses
to protect themselves while they forage on the seabed, elephants
swat insects with branches and humpback whales exhale curtains of bubbles to trap schools of fi sh; the grizzly bear, seems
to be the only species other than humans to have invented the
comb.
He starts at their beginning with a weighty introduction that looks at
fossils dating back to the dinosaurs, the structure of feathers and the
evolution of birds. From there on, the remaining chapters are captivating
natural history, arranged in neatly named sections: “fl uff”, how feathers
114
Nature
keep birds warm and dry; “fl ight”, how they take to the sky; “fancy”, the
myriad beauty of feathers for sexual selection in birds and decoration
for humans; and “function”, how feather structure can inform new technologies.
Nor does anyone know how to breed eels in captivity. Mr Prosek
tried to keep some in a tank but they banged their heads against
the sides until they had seizures and died.
It is old, rather than young, mosquitoes that are infectious. Only females
can transmit malaria (males suck plant juices, not blood) but they are
not born with the parasites inside their bodies. They have instead to acquire them from humans already carrying the disease, and that takes
time. Once a female does feed on infected blood, the parasites she ingests
require a further 10 to 14 days to mature and migrate to her salivary
glands, whence they can be transmitted to another host when she next
feeds.
He was a harmless gecko— a nocturnal and often highly vocal
lizard which has adhesive pads on the feet to assist in climbing
on smooth surfaces.
See that live in numbers too large to count in ways too numerous to
imagine. In that context, the discovery by Curtis Suttle of the University
of British Columbia and his colleagues of a critter they propose to call
Cafeteria roenbergensis virus, or CroV, should not be surprising. But for
those brought up on a textbook defi nition of what a virus is, it is still a bit
of a shock. For CroV is not a very viruslike virus. It has 544 genes, compared with the dozen or so that most viruses sport. And it may be able
to make its own proteins— a task that viruses usually delegate to the
molecular machinery of the cells they infect. CroV, as its full name suggests, is a parasite of Cafeteria roenbergensis, a single-celled planktonic
organism that was itself discovered only in 1988. Despite the recentness
of its discovery, C. roenbergensis is one of the commonest creatures on
the planet. It is also reckoned by some, given that it hunts down and eats
bacteria, to be the most abundant predator on Earth. It is found in every
ocean.
This month the White House appointed a carp tsar to oversee the
campaign. But government moves slowly. Fish do not.
In any case, though dinosaurs have left no usable DNA, other more recently departed creatures have been more generous. Imagine, say, al-
115
Часть I
lying synthetic biology with the genome of Neanderthal man that was
described earlier this year. There is much excitement at the idea of comparing this with the DNA of modern humans, in the hope of fi nding the
essential differences between the two. How much more exciting, instead,
to create a Neanderthal and ask him?
The Cretaceous equivalent of zebra and antelopes— the victim
species in every wildlife documentary about the dramas of the
African savannah— were herbivorous dinosaurs called ornithopods.
Such tales had to be saddled like horses, and ridden for all they were
worth.
The British empire is the Indian elephant in the living room and
the tiger under the dining table.
I’m not aware of any vegetarian tigers.
“At the approach of the rain and the wind the swallows are busy.”
Fingers are integral to art, communication, touch, love, fashion and
counting. Using complex gestures the Romans could count to 1m: the
word “digit” — the numerals below ten— originates from digitus, the
Latin for fi nger. The phraseology of fi ngers is rich: we can have a fi nger
in every pie, pull our fi nger out, twist someone around our little fi nger, let things slip through our fi ngers and, if unlucky, get our fi ngers
burned.
Fire creates evidence as well as destroys it.
He combined the cold logic of Darwinism with a military ruthlessness.
“Female baboons clearly have some Lady Macbeth issues,” observes the writer. “They all have male baboons that they want to
become more alpha.”
Coca-Cola was also bitten by a charitable bug.
Bat testes range from 0.11% of body weight in the African yellowwinged bat, to a whacking 8.4% in the generously endowed Rafi nesque’s big-eared [sic] bat. (The largest primate testes by contrast, those of the crab-eating macaque, are a mere 0.75% of body
116
Nature
mass.) And the small balls were indeed found in species where
females were monogamous (though they might be members of
harems), while the large ones were found in species where females mated widely.
Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived
in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick
in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was
130m lower.
All lagoons sooner or later become either land or sea. If we fail,
then sooner or later Venice too will become either land… or sea.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone
in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying… The dinosaur
disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment.
We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, compu ters— and thermonuclear weapons.”
What name a genuinely new species is given, though, is entirely
up to the discoverer. Hence the existence of Anophthalmus hitleri, a blind cave beetle named in 1933 after Adolf Hitler. In this
context, the recent naming of another beetle after the American
president is hardly a hanging offence, although Mr Bush may
not be fl attered by the company. But when the scientifi c underpinning of taxonomy itself is threatened by politics, different
questions arise. Last year, for example, there was a nasty row in
Turkey between Kurdish and Turkish taxonomists over whose
names should apply to some local animals. The Kurds accused
the Turks of renaming several species to remove any trace of
Kurdishness.
The scientifi c name of the beetle comes from a German collector, Oscar
Scheibel, who was sold a specimen of a then undocumented species in
1933. Its species name was made a dedication to Adolf Hitler, who had
recently become Chancellor of Germany. The genus name means eyeless, so the full name can be translated as “the eyeless one of Hitler”. The
dedication did not go unnoticed by the Führer, who sent Scheibel a letter
showing his gratitude.
117
Часть I
Philosophy, religion, thinking,
wisdom, languages, truth, morality
“
«You must do the things you think you cannot do,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.
Spellbound after visiting Constantinople in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm
II of Germany wrote to his friend Tsar Nicholas II, «If I had com
there without any religion at all, I certainly would have turned
Mahomettan!»
The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller «Eats, Shoots and
Leavers» comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide
describing the diet of panda bears.
In Ireland people ask St Anthony to help them fi nd parking spaces.
How did Hobbes make so many enemies?
Human ignorance is more fundamental and more consequential
than the illusion of understanding.
As long as nothing happens anything is possible.
William Faulkner, the South’s great novelist, wrote, “The past is
never dead. It’s not even past”.
Nobody thinks a novel can be translated by a machine. Sales of translated fi ction rose by more than 600% in Britain between 2001 and 2015,
and have been growing strongly in America too.
Time is such a slippery thing. It ticks away, neutrally, yet it also
fl ies and collapses, and is more often lost than found. If scientists
agree on anything, it’s that nobody knows enough about time.
Crowds are often mad rather than wise.
English is the language on which the sun never sets.
Reality is less whiter than white.
Those of Norse descent who lived through the events of the 820s,
would not, of course, have feared the anger of a god they did not
118
Philosophy, religion, thinking, wisdom, languages, truth, morality
believe in. But they might have feared they were witnessing Fimbulwinter — three summerless years marking the onset of Ragnarok, the twilight of their own gods.
Troublemaker was his middle name.
As a Harvard philosopher, he might have no idea how to tell an
elm from a beech.
INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. Ancient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices
that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are
proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in meaning come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what
(inverted commas), and so on.
Who can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in “The Elements of Eloquence”, describes it
as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and
then Noun. “So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green
French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.”
Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and
evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the
winners.
In Mark Forsyth’s marvellous book, “The Etymologicon”, and
largely corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary, feisty, in
the sense of “spirited”, is derived from “fi st” or “feist”, meaning a
small dog. This in turn comes from the phrase “a fi sting hound”,
where “to fi st” means to fart.
The price of being on the wrong side at the wrong time was terrible.
To win an argument, Roman orators taught, fi rst win the goodwill of your audience.
One of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in ahugely
infl uential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled apause twice as
long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and
that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you
read a text aloud.)
119
Часть I
A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a haircut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to
beat the afternoon trafi k and fi nish the day relaxing in a sezlong
on her hotel teras.
The Gregorian calendar has a number of problems. It is based on the
birth of Jesus, which is not a universally relevant event; the years before
Christ are counted backwards; and there is no year zero: 1BC is followed
directly by 1AD.
A famous story tells how, in a previous life, the Buddha took pity
on a starving tigress, who might otherwise have had to eat her
newborn cubs. He sacrifi ced himself instead. The agonising question, however, is whether these brave acts do anybody any good
at all.
Alas, just because something is irrational does not mean it will not happen.
The Prophet Muhammad is even said to have shied from entering
Damascus, otherwise called al-Fayha, “the fragrant”, for fear of
entering Paradise twice.
Sherlock Holme’s maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.
But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffl e of propaganda.
There’s a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say
it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and
again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely
sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it
for the fi rst time.
Any truth, it is said, passes through three stages: fi rst it is ridiculed,
then violently opposed and fi nally it is taken as self-evident.
A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage
was just what the doctor ordered.
120
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