Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

A daily-ish posting on living with chronic fatigue, thinking about stuff and finding interesting things on the internet.
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Notes and links from 31 Oct

A photograph of a public park in late October. The grass is green and a large tree has all of its leaves, although they are turning yellow. Some people are walking in the park, some with dogs. The sky is mostly clear blue and the sun is low in the sky behind the camera casting a shadow in the foreground but illuminating the rest of the park.
Prescription renewal time so off I go through the park taking this month’s photo of the tree.

Journal

Bit of a meh few days. Nothing too problematic but definitely struggling a bit with doing the human thing. Autistic traits are spiking and everything’s a mix of too hard and a threat. Probably means I’m tired.

Populist science writing

50 years of The Selfish Gene: flawed, outdated, yet still a model of truly popular science writing

Back in the late 1990s I ran a Popular Science department at Dillons/Waterstones and got a lot of pleasure from doing it well. Pop Sci was booming at the time and it felt good to be a small part of getting big ideas out there. Dawkins was one of the pioneers with the Selfish Gene and through the 90s developed this into to the activist atheism/bigotry he’s known for today. If you have a problem with him now (and there are many good reasons to have a problem with him) does that invalidate his earlier work?

In hindsight Pop Sci is a slippery category of book where the contents are not strictly scientific but written at one remove, recounting the narratives of pure science and embellishing them with meaning for a lay audience. This allows for ideology and bias to slip in unseen due to the assumption that books about science must follow the scientific method, and also that people who write about science are applying the scientific method when the write about other messy human things.

I got thinking about this because I recently discovered that the libertarian Brexiteer Matt Ridley, who crashed Northern Rock at the start of the 2008 financial crisis and hates badgers, is the same Matt Ridley who wrote Genome in 1999, the paperback of which came out around the time the Human Genome Project hit a major milestone, meaning we sold a lot to people who wanted to know what was going on.

Does it matter that to quote the LRB, it is “at once instructive and infuriating” for his right-wing interpretation of what it all means, if the baseline reporting was sound? Was the Pop Sci department actually an incubator of libertarianism? I’m not sure (though some classics do pop up in the most unlikely places). In hindsight the very label “Popular Science” should have been a warning, but they we weren’t too concerned with populist ideologues at the time.

I appear to unscrewed the lid on a can of worms here which I’m reluctant to dig through right now, so putting a pin in this for later.