Falling for Science by Bernard Beckett

Author:Bernard Beckett [Bernard Beckett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869796563
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Sailing Away

‘Reason is, and ought to be, the slave to the passions.’ So said Hume and the point he was making is by now a familiar one. We can’t reason our way to motivation: that comes from somewhere else altogether. However, our passions have a dangerous habit of subverting our reasoning faculties. When an idea packs a sufficient emotional punch we become reluctant scrutineers. One of my favourite examples, and the focus of this chapter, is the pleasure we take in tracing our ancestry. Mathematically misguided though this practice may be, it is usually harmless enough: no more than the diverting hobby of uncovering a direct bloodline link to somebody ancient, dead and famous. But when it comes to spinning the histories of entire races, it all gets murky and political, and we’re probably obliged to make more of an effort to get things right.

Let’s get the easy problem out of the way first. We have an odd tendency to get our thinking about ancestry absolutely back to front. Consider the family trees which the internet has made newly faddish. For good practical reasons, the aim is to go deep rather than broad. The mother lode — the fact will be paraded about the neighbourhood — is documented evidence that some father of a father of a father of a father … cut William the Conqueror’s hair. Starting from this illustrious forebear a chart is drawn, fanning down and out through time, all the way to you. There’s something so romantic and alluring about this chain of serendipitous inheritance: a roll call of ancients battling, farming and trading their way across the world, taking risks, winning hearts, all leading to you. And William the Conqueror! His hairdresser. Hell, you’re practically royalty. Who wouldn’t be excited?

Well, a maths geek, for one. Rather than thinking of a family tree starting at some illustrious point in the past and fanning outwards, as genealogy can encourage us to do, we might more accurately think of the situation in reverse. For you had two parents, and each of them had two parents, as did each of those and so forth. Go back twenty generations (a mere five hundred years) and it looks like you need a million different ancestors! In fact we get by on far less, thanks to the fact that the paths keep recrossing, but the deflating implication is nevertheless clear. The only reason you’re descended from royalty is that you’re descended from so very, very many people. And if a particular king from centuries past has made it into your bloodline, it’s an extremely good bet he’s also made it into the bloodline of the neighbours to whom you so proudly insist on showing your scrapbook (unless they herald from a different part of the world). So where did you come from? The same messy mix we all come from, pretty much. Such a conclusion lacks the emotional heft we’re after; so we ignore it. What is true for the amateur sleuth is also true, disappointingly, for the professional scientist.

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