He lay on the floor where mother Mary had pushed him and moaned and protested at first, while the blows kept falling on his legs, back and head. He dared not lift his head to see which of them was hitting him at any particular time. It was a funny thing to be trying to guess. He risked peeping a couple of times and was surprised – though relieved because it justified his hating her as well – to see her wielding the switch on one side of his body and him on the other. Later, as though his body realised there was a behavioural consequence, an increase in pain every time he made a movement or a sound, he stopped. So, through degrees of pain he learned to stay quiet, or quieter, since sometimes the pain was so wicked you couldn't help the sounds coming out, even when grinding your teeth together like brake blocks on the bicycle's rusty wheel.
Unpleasant he was, and old looking round the chins, to the point where Graver thought isn't it about time you died, old man? This was just the stray thought of a child in an idle moment. But it repeated itself in daydreams as such thoughts have a habit of doing.
The Bakery. Not Jerson's, Smithson's, Palmerston's or any such distinguishing label. It was known as The Bakery to everyone. And it provided Graver with his first experience of employment. And something else as well. There was a handful of young ones, among an army of women whose children were at school and who could work part-time through the day, and a smaller force mostly of men, who baked through the early hours of each night. The younger ones, with fewer domestic commitments so it seemed, covered from 7:00 a.m. when the night shift went off. It was the breaks which were educational for him. There was Betty and her twin sister Leila and a couple of lads, and him. At first he had no idea what the girls were giggling about and why, during morning and afternoon breaks, when they were in this giggly mood, one or another of them was always going off to the sheds with one of the lads.
* * *
I spent hours in the villa observing the ceaseless activity of the tiny Pharaoh's ant, with which the building apparently was infested.
I watched the endless files of ants moving like strips of dark material, escalator-style, night and day, along the floors, up the walls, along the ceilings, usually tucked into the edges and corners, but breaking out across open areas in order to reach their goal. This would invariably be some food source. It didn't seem to matter how small.
The ants had amazing powers of concentration in large numbers around their target. Even when only an occasional ant every few centimetres scurried along, I would suddenly come upon several hundred around some unfortunate grub, or perhaps a morsel of food – a scrap of bread, or the sugar bowl – I'd thoughtlessly left on the kitchen worktop the night before.
Greasy, suppurating spores invading the brain. Lost control of the brain to the invaders. I told the doctor I could feel them. He took no notice.
Now I had encountered Pharaoh's ant, I wanted to try out various methods of testing their powers. I was impatient to proceed, yet knew I had to hold myself in check. It was going to be difficult, summoning patience and devoting my energies to scientific patterns of inquiry I'd turned my back on when abandoning my career.
I wanted to put Pharaoh's ant – the little formicas as I called them – to the test. They were little formicas to me because they reminded me of the diminutive specimens of Acanthomyops Niger which result from the queen's first brood and which she rears in total isolation. They are small because she founds a new colony by feeding the dozen or so larvae from the first eggs she lays, from her own regurgitated body juices, as her wing muscles waste after the once-in-a-lifetime mating flight. The formicas resembled niger only from a distance. Close up, they were less black and less wooden. They had an endearing habit of bending their abdomens upwards when they stopped walking, as though questing or stretching. It made me smile, this gesture. It seemed almost human, though with my scientific hat on I wondered what purpose it served. I surmised it was functional in some basic way, since they did it so often. Perhaps it was a form of scenting, to enable and encourage other ants to follow them. Or – at this stage I had neither read about them nor dissected one – maybe their olfactory glands were located in the abdomen and functioned more effectively when raised.
J
* * *
By 3:00 p.m. Tom was delivering his public lecture as Visiting Professor of Entomology to a couple of hundred staff and students in the main science lecture theatre at Peterborough University. He'd accepted the invitation on the basis that it would give a boost to the setting up of the University's new Centre for Insect Studies, headed by his former colleague, Dr Moses Livingstone.
'Ant, the word was probably amte in middle English, from the Anglo-Saxon aemelte or emmet, not exactly a term of endearment. It wasn't hard then and it isn't hard now for people to look down on ants. They're considered too small to have decent-sized brains. Instead they rely on a few clumps of ganglia or nerves, distributed in different parts of the soft tissues inside their chitinous exterior skeletons. The commonest response to an ants' nest on the path or by the house is to pour a kettleful of boiling water down the holes. Cornish people used to call English people emmets or foreigners, a term of disdain. It was common in my father's time, when you could still hear the Cornish language spoken in remote villages.
In reality, for beings so allegedly tied to instinctive drives, ants possess a remarkable facility for ecological matching – that is, responding quickly to environmental changes and seeking new food sources when existing ones become depleted.'
A stout, red-faced man near the front of the hall made a remark about his own Cornish ancestry which caused several people nearby to titter. Tom continued unchecked, as though lost in his own train of thought.
'Some species, Lasius Aalienus for example, change their nest sites frequently: they may do this on an almost daily basis, or at the slightest stimulus, such as interference by a potential predator. The so-called fire ant Solenopsis Invicta which has invaded much of the southern USA, when the water rises on flood plains forms a large raft with the queen and brood in the Centre, and at the coming of flash floods floats to safety, and may survive by anchoring the raft to bushes or other stable objects sticking out of the water. Pheidole Cephalica, which lives in tropical forests, relies on as few as one or two workers rushing through the nest in so-called alarm runs, to stimulate the entire colony to evacuate. This can save them from flash flooding, for example, where a couple of foragers return in front of advancing water.
Other species such as army ants are naturally nomadic. The predatory power of army ants is enormous. An entire colony of, say, 500,000 ants plus brood on the march can cover two hundred metres on a typical marching day, in a two – or three-week cycle of marching. Then, for a similar period, they stop in one place and consume small mammals and insects over up to three hundred square metres of forest trees and undergrowth in a single twenty-four hour period. The genus Dorylus, however, contrasts with Eciton. In the latter, whole colonies living, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa, march whereas the former send out daily raids from their huge nests of many millions of workers, and can overwhelm slow moving or immobilised animals of any size in their path. They have been known, for example, to kill pythons which are sluggish from having eaten recently, or young animals or children left while their parents are busy elsewhere. They can sting but they tend to bite their victims to death, which gives you some idea of the huge numbers which concentrate in one place to force prey to succumb. There are instances, notably quoted by Bates, the Amazon explorer, of ants tunnelling under reservoirs so the water breaks through the constraining walls. Thus, ants either may contribute significantly towards, or literally undermine, agriculture and rural development.'
Tom brought the lecture to a close soon after this example.
'Thank you, Professor Fortius. We have a few minutes for questions. Yes, that young woman in the middle.'
An earnest young woman from the Department's group of visiting research students stood up:
'I am interested in the acquisit
ion and demonstration of language among chimpanzees. You will appreciate there are many genetic and cultural similarities between humans and animals. However, would you say that only humans have the capacity to use language?'
'There are some obvious differences between chimpanzees and ants,' said Tom and this produced a ripple of mirth among some of his audience. 'I'm not qualified to comment on chimpanzees. However, I would say in general that it would be hard for any other non-human species to rival the range and sophistication of our interaction using non-verbal body language as well as spoken words. I wouldn't put it as strongly as humans are the only beings to use language. Many species of animals communicate between themselves in one way or another. Sometimes, as with chimpanzees, there is a sign language or a vocal language of a sort, with some limited verbal signals through the voice box, or gestures. Humans who are deaf use sign language rather than sounds so there are parallels. Among the social insects, there are examples of communication, the problem being that we don't have too many details, beyond the obvious case of the dancing bees.
‘Incidentally, I'm not ruling out the fact that ants may excite each other by more than one means at once. For instance, they may use pheromones as a way of speeding up the responses of other ants in the vicinity. To return to the dancing bees, in 1934, Maeterlinck's book The Life of the Bee referred to communication between bees of a food source, but it was von Hirsch who specified how precisely the forager returning to the nest signalled the distance, direction and possibly the size of the food source. The point I would make is that in the social insects, as I guess among chimpanzees, there is a sign language or a vocal language of a sort, but a very restricted form of language, limited to communication about what is happening now. Humans, on the other hand, can discuss what happened in the distant past and what may happen in the immediate and distant future.
'That gentleman at the back.'
'I have a question. Dr Fortius, would you regard the many predatory activities army ants engage in, which contribute to this extremely rigid regime, as a purely mechanical response to physiological stimuli determined by the cycle of egg-laying larval growth and hatching, or as made possible by the resourcefulness, initiative and learning powers of individuals and groups of ants?'
'A mixture of the two, I guess.'
Tom felt a growing unease. He didn't know who the questioner was, or where he was coming from, but there was something vaguely familiar about the man's voice. He couldn't see to the back of the hall, though, so had no chance of ascertaining whether he recognised him. He'd had some unpleasant brushes in the past with researchers and others angered by his critiques of the socio-biological perspective. Normally, he would wade in and damn the consequences, but this time something made him hesitate.
Another question came from the back of the hall. Tom couldn't see, but he guessed from the voice the questioner was the same man.
'Professor, I'd like to ask about your critical writing on the notion of the selfish gene. You have some rather harsh things to say about physicists, which as a physicist myself I'd like to exempt myself from. We aren't all as dogmatic as the person you describe, though I admit some of my colleagues do regard their physics in much the same way as the priest holds religious views, but I suggest we rise above sparring between the disciplines, whether through physics envy – I like your use of this term – or not, and focus on how to use our current knowledge of genes to contribute to our understanding of people. Do I take it that your main point is that genes, like physics, provide important routes to that understanding, but aren't the means of understanding everything?'
'Basically, yes.'
There was a ripple of laughter and some applause, which Tom put down to the brevity of his reply. He started to speak again, but slowly, partly out of a natural reticence, but impelled by the sudden wish to justify the content of his lecture.
'I don't think it's helpful to use analogies such as the brain as a computer to develop a view of how people think. It seems to me to be a denial of the social factors which contribute to human societies, that some scientists have tried to reduce complex, multi-factor explanations to the makeup of the individual.'
'But professor, research at the Centre for Psychiatry at the University of London indicates that individual genes as well as gene clusters influence children's behaviour such as shyness and adult proneness to alcoholism. Environmental experiences can either reinforce or undermine such tendencies but we can't assume a clear-cut division between nature and nurture.'
Despite himself, Tom found his argument pushing him along. 'If you're saying we need to recognise that a complex web of factors contribute to our thoughts, emotions and actions, I've got no problems with that. But I can't go along with the simplistic, reductionist view that genes for virtually every aspect of human behaviour lie waiting to be discovered by researchers. More generally, I'm not impressed by people who assume that physics is at the top of the scientific tree, that there has to be a theory of everything, that everything biological can be simplified to its physiological, chemical and physical determinants, or that human personality and behaviour are determined by the DNA and genes of the individual. Genes are important, but they need to be put in their place. Unfortunately for the genetic determinists, the entire pattern of people's lives is not locked into their DNA and genes at the moment of conception, to be unpacked in predictable behaviour throughout subsequent years. The genetic make-up of individuals cannot be held responsible for family problems, individual pre-dispositions to criminality, sexual abuse or alcoholism. Individuals who murder, and serial killers, are the products of their upbringing as well as their inheritance. It is unhelpful to polarise the debate between nature and nurture, as though all the causes have to be found either on one side or the other. People develop, and age, as a result of the ways they construct their being and their lives.'
'That's quite a mouthful, Professor. I wonder if I can pick you up on one thing you mentioned. Could you explain what you mean by reductionism?'
'Willingly, yes. People are not simply the sum total of the physical – notably biological and chemical – ingredients of which they are composed. I prefer explanations of how and why people are as they are and act as they do to be preserved in their full complexity rather than reduced to simplistic generalisations, however attractive these are to tabloid scientists.'
Tom had a sudden recollection of where he had heard these views. They reminded him of Apthorpe.
'Tabloid scientists, I like it. Have you borrowed the expression from somewhere? I don't remember seeing it.'
'Not as far as I know,' said Tom irritably, looking at his watch. He was suddenly very resentful of these questions and comments which intruded into his private world. He wanted the session to end and looked at Dr Pearson, his chairperson, for permission to escape. But if Pearson did realise, he didn't respond very quickly and the zealous questioner had time to land another.
'Would you describe yourself as something of a heretic, among your colleagues in biology?'
'I'm committed to my subject, if that's what you mean. If at times my work in the laboratory leads me to ask critical questions, so be it. What other people call me is their own affair. I don't really feel in a position to comment on that.'
At last Dr Pearson woke up to the situation and intervened. 'Thank you, Professor. I'm afraid that was the last question we had time for.'
Within a couple of minutes, with the “it only remains routine”, he wound up the entire event.
* * *
At about 7:00 p.m., Chris was driving back from Hessle on the Clive Sullivan Way through soft, persistent drizzle. For some reason, she decided to stick to the main road and branch north after crossing the River Hull. On the bridge, she was surprised to see Tom to her right, leaning over the railing, staring out past the spectacular shiplike profile of the marine aquarium tourist attraction, The Deep, into the darkness of the Humber. She turned off, parked the car and made her way back to the spot. He hadn't seen h
er. She sidled alongside him and peered over the railings.
'How did it go?’ she asked.
Tom gave a start. His words piled out. 'Where the hell did you come from? Don't get me wrong. Nice surprise.'
'You look very preoccupied.'
He tried to shrug off his mood.
'Oh that. I gave one of our research students a lift back to East Hull and thought I'd take a breather before plunging back in at the University.'
'Which is a way of avoiding my question. I was wondering how it went.'
'The lecture or the day as a whole?'
'Both, but especially the lecture, I suppose.'
'All right.'
'A man of few words.'
'Sometimes.'
'All right covers such a multitude of sins,' she persisted. 'You aren't really that British – stiff upper lip and don't talk about your feelings, like some of these hard-boiled coppers I work with. Or have I misjudged you?'
'Okay. I was happy with the lecture. But there was a persistent questioner. I couldn't see him at the back of the hall. I had a feeling I knew him – something about his voice. Or perhaps it was his views. They reminded me of a conversation I'd had, the arguments over the years with Apthorpe, you remember, our so-called rat professor. But I can't place who it was.'
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