Saturday, May 2, 2015

Wisdom Of The Week

A must read new piece from Robert Trivers - Vignettes of Famous Evolutionary Biologists, Large and Small!! A master piece stressing the importance of humility, flow of knowledge and all those little traits what makes a better scientist and a better human being.

Bill Hamilton was a naturalist of legendary knowledge, especially of insects, but he was also an acute observer of human behavior, right down to the minutiae of your own actions in his presence. Had I noticed, he asked, that lopsided facial expressions in humans are usually male? No, but I have seen it a hundred times since then. He was an evolutionist to the core, and was always heartened by news of fellow evolutionists enjoying some reproductive success. In a similar spirit I take joy in the lives of his three daughters, Helen, Ruth and Rowena, not to mention his many surviving siblings. But the loss of this ‘gentle giant’ is very great. Bill died at the age of 63 on 7 March 2000, from complications after contracting malaria during fieldwork in the Congo in January, work which was designed to locate more exactly the chimpanzee populations that donated HIV-1 to humans, as well as the mode of transmission. This was in service of a theory of HIV-1 spread into East African children via polio vaccination, one I regarded as doubtful from the outset and now firmly disproved, so in one sense, he died in service of trying to prove a falsehood, but he was strong in mind, body and spirit, with many new projects and thoughts under way, and he has been sorely missed ever since.

Bill chose to describe his preferred burial and its aftermath in biologically vivid and poetic terms. He would die in the Brazilian rain forest, his body to be scavenged by burying beetles so that he would later fly out as buzzing beetles “into the Brazilian wilderness between the stars”. But it was not to be. He died in the UK and was buried in Wytham at Oxford and it took the love of the second half of his wife, Luisa, to add her poetry, drawing on his bacterial/cloud/dispersal vision so that “eventually a drop of rain will join you to the flooded forest of the Amazon”.

I am no W.D. and my burial plan is very simple. If dead outside of Jamaica kindly cremate me—inexpensive and no place to point to. If in Jamaica dig a circular hole beneath my favorite large pimento tree, three feet wide and preferably ten feet deep and drop me head-first into the hole. Throw in some dirt and call it a day—no plaques please. I will not become a bright buzzing burrowing beetle or bacterial cloud, just a few more pimento berries when in season. I add the details on positioning my body mostly to annoy my Jamaican friends. They think I should be resting comfortably on my side in a conventional coffin, but if my way—why not standing up?—the strain on my neck upside down is too much for them to bear. I tell them all the nutritional goodness now is in my brain and upper body, hardly a thing of value is below my waist—they can trust me on that—so let’s go deepest with the best.



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