 A marrow escape The mathematician Oliver Johnson grows courgettes — zucchinis, to US readers. “This is a terrible mistake,” he says. At first, it’s great, and you make risotto and ratatouille, but the courgettes keep coming. Summer is “a race against the courgette plants,” Johnson laments. You try new recipes, you try giving them away, until “your friends will mysteriously stop answering your calls.” And then winter comes, and all your plants die, and you go from zucchini glut to zucchini drought. This is, he says, a useful metaphor for energy policy. The government in the UK, where Johnson works, wants 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2030. In 2023, 30% of its electricity came from renewable sources. But it would be naive to think that you could quadruple wind capacity and fill that gap, any more than doubling your number of zucchini plants would get you through the winter drought: “You’d have an even crazier glut in the summer, and still be courgette-less for the winter.” Proposed solutions, such as batteries or pumped storage, are nowhere near adequate for the task to be ready for 2030: “I’m still waiting to hear how that’s going to be possible.” The lesser of two weevils If you haven’t read Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, featuring a naval commander in the Napoleonic Wars and his doctor friend, then stop what you’re doing and go and do so. But if you have, then carry on. The economist Henry Farrell writes on Programmable Mutter that while the books can be read as swashbuckling adventures — which they are — they are also an inquiry into how authority should be exercised, and into the tension between modernism and tradition: O’Brian is, says Farrell, “one of the great conservative writers… [the one] most capable of bringing out the best points of conservatism in a way that non-conservatives like myself can understand.” “We [liberals and the left] are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions [than] engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help,” Farrell writes. Society progresses, but is left disconnected. O’Brian “lays out a conservative alternative — an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic.” Through the voice of Maturin, the philosophically minded surgeon, he shows the corrupting qualities of authority, but through Aubrey, the uncomplicated fighting man, he shows how it could and should be exercised, how a captain should “accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection.” Baby steps It was easy, in prescientific times, to say what made humans separate from the animals: God made them in his image, they have souls, and that was that. But post-Darwin, it became more difficult, once it was clear we were all part of one big happy family. Tool use? Apes do that. So do crows, and octopuses for that matter. Self-awareness? If you mean recognizing yourself in a mirror, lots of animals do. But there are some ways in which we seem to be unique: As far as we know, no other creature has flexible language; and our social relations are more complex than any observed in nature. Insofar as we are unique, Charles Johnson writes in Meaning Matter, there must be some evolutionary explanation: “What… set us on a divergent path from our closest cousins, the great apes?” Researchers in Germany have been coming up with a summation of research, which Johnson examines. One key point: Most ape babies are weaned at about age four, and mothers will not become pregnant again before then. Human mothers may give birth several times while her first child is still dependent on her. It means that caretaking is divided around a wider social network — in other great apes, mothers rear children alone — and that infants compete for attention almost from birth. |
