By Ian Stewart

Symmetry has been recognised in art for millennia as a form of visual harmony and balance, but it has now become one of the great unifying principles of mathematics. A precise mathematical concept of symmetry emerged in the nineteenth century, as an unexpected side-effect of research into algebraic equations. Since then it has developed into a huge area of mathematics, with applications throughout the sciences.

Today we usually think of symmetry as a regularity of visual pattern—the sixfold symmetry of a snowflake, the circular symmetry of ripples on a pond, the spherical symmetry of a droplet of water or a planet. Here the role of symmetry is mainly descriptive. But there is a sense in which a natural process can also be symmetric, and the mathematics of symmetry can predict the results of that process, helping us to understand how nature’s patterns arise.

The key step towards a rigorous notion of symmetry arose not in geometry, but in algebra: attempts to solve quintic equations. The ancient Babylonians knew how to solve quadratic equations, and Renaissance Italian mathematicians discovered how to solve cubic and quartic equations, but here, everyone got stuck. Eventually, it turned out that no solution of the required kind exists for the general quintic equation.

The deep reason for this impossibility lies in the symmetries of the equation, which are the possible ways to permute its solutions while preserving all algebraic relations among them. When an equation has ‘the wrong kind of symmetry’ it can’t be solved by a formula of the traditional type. And equations of the fifth degree have the wrong kind of symmetry.

Mathematicians realised that symmetry is not a thing, but a transformation: a way to move or otherwise disturb something while—paradoxically—leaving it unchanged. For example, to a good approximation a human figure viewed in a mirror looks just like the original. Mixing up the roots of an equation doesn’t change suitable formulas in which they appear. Rotating a sphere through some angles produces an identical sphere.

The collection of all such transformations is called the symmetry group of the object; the structure of this group provides a powerful way to find out how the object behaves. The upshot of this discovery was a new, abstract branch of algebra: group theory.

Groups turned out to be fundamental to the study of crystals; the form and behaviour of a crystal depends on the symmetry group of its atomic lattice. Groups are also vital to chemistry: the way a molecule vibrates depends on its symmetries. The symmetries of a uniformly flat desert determine the possible patterns of sand dunes when the flat pattern becomes unstable. The symmetries of biological tissue determine the possible patterns of animal markings, such as stripes and spots. The symmetries of a cloud of gas determine the spiral form of a galaxy. The symmetries of space and time underpin Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. The symmetries of fundamental particles constrain quantum field theory and affect the possibilities for unifying it with relativity.

Symmetry is such a huge idea, with so many diverse ramifications, that only an encyclopaedia could really do it justice. But it is possible to sketch its origins, give some idea of how the formal theory works out, sample its applications, and witness its diversity and generality. Moreover, the subject has great visual beauty and appeal: here, for once, mathematics can be a spectator sport, and audience participation is not mandatory.

I have spent much of my research career working on connections between symmetries and nature’s patterns, in fluid flow, animal movement, visual perception, and evolutionary biology—and I am just one of many. The well is nowhere near running dry. New applications are constantly being found. Symmetry is one of the truly deep concepts, possessing both visual and logical beauty. Its effects can be seen everywhere, if you know how to look.

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He is a well-established communicator of mathematics, and the author of over 80 books, including several on the subject of symmetry, such as Symmetry: A Very Short Introduction. His summary of the problems of mathematics, From Here to Infinity, and collections of his columns from Scientific American (How to Cut a Cake, Cows in the Maze), have been very successful, and his recent book Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, has been a bestseller.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Symmetrical landscape, By Johann Jaritz (Own work), Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons

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The Trojan War may be well known thanks to movies, books, and plays around the world, but did the war that spurred so much fascination even occur? The excerpt below from The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction helps answer some of the many questions about the infamous war Homer helped immortalize.

By Eric Cline

The story of the Trojan War has fascinated humans for centuries and has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries, stage plays, art and sculpture, souvenirs and collectibles. In the United States there are thirty-three states with cities or towns named Troy and ten four-year colleges and universities, besides the University of Southern California, whose sports teams are called the Trojans. Particularly captivating is the account of the Trojan Horse, the daring plan that brought the Trojan War to an end and that has also entered modern parlance by giving rise to the saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” and serving as a metaphor for hackers intent on wreaking havoc by inserting a “Trojan horse” into computer systems.

But, is Homer’s story convincing? Certainly the heroes, from Achilles to Hector, are portrayed so credibly that it is easy to believe the story. But is it truly an account based on real events, and were the main characters actually real people? Would the ancient world’s equivalent of the entire nation of Greece really have gone to war over a single woman, however beautiful, and for ten long years at that? Could Agamemnon really have been a king of kings able to muster so many men for such an expedition? And, even if one believes that there once was an actual Trojan War, does that mean that the specific events, actions, and descriptions in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, supplemented by additional fragments and commentary in the Epic Cycle, are historically accurate and can be taken at face value? Is it plausible that what Homer describes actually took place and in the way that he says it did?

In fact, the problem in providing definitive answers to all of these questions is not that we have too little data, but that we have too much. The Greek epics, Hittite records, Luwian poetry, and archaeological remains provide evidence not of a single Trojan war but rather of multiple wars that were fought in the area that we identify as Troy and the Troad. As a result, the evidence for the Trojan War of Homer is tantalizing but equivocal. There is no single “smoking gun.”

According to the Greek literary evidence, there were at least two Trojan Wars (Heracles’ and Agamemnon’s), not simply one; in fact, there were three wars, if one counts Agamemnon’s earlier abortive attack on Teuthrania. Similarly, according to the Hittite literary evidence, there were at least four Trojan Wars, ranging from the Assuwa Rebellion in the late 15th century BCE to the overthrow of Walmu, king of Wilusa in the late 13th century BCE. And, according to the archaeological evidence, Troy/Hisarlik was destroyed twice, if not three times, between 1300 and 1000 BCE. Some of this has long been known; the rest has come to light more recently. Thus, although we cannot definitively point to a specific “Trojan War,” at least not as Homer has described it in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we have instead found several such Trojan wars and several cities at Troy, enough that we can conclude there is a historical kernel of truth — of some sort — underlying all the stories.

But would the Trojan War have been fought because of love for a woman? Could a ten-year war have been instigated by the kidnapping of a single person? The answer, of course, is yes, just as an Egypto-Hittite war in the 13th century BCE was touched off by the death of a Hittite prince and the outbreak of World War I was sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. But just as one could argue that World War I would have taken place anyway, perhaps triggered by some other event, so one can argue that the Trojan War would inevitably have taken place, with or without Helen. The presumptive kidnapping of Helen can be seen merely an excuse to launch a pre-ordained war for control of land, trade, profit, and access to the Black Sea.

In 1964, the eminent historian Moses Finley suggested that we should move the narrative of the Trojan War from the realm of history into the realm of myth and poetry until we have more evidence. Many would argue that we now have that additional evidence, particularly in the form of the Hittite texts discussing Ahhiyawa and Wilusa and the new archaeological data from Troy. The lines between reality and fantasy might be blurred, particularly when Zeus, Hera, and other gods become involved in the war, and we might quibble about some of the details, but overall, Troy and the Trojan War are right where they should be, in northwestern Anatolia and firmly ensconced in the world of the Late Bronze Age, as we now know from archaeology and Hittite records, in addition to the Greek literary evidence from both Homer and the Epic Cycle. Moreover, the enduring themes of love, honor, war, kinship, and obligations, which so resonated with the later Greeks and then the Romans, have continued to reverberate through the ages from Aeschylus and Euripides to Virgil and thence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond, so that the story still holds broad appeal even today, more than three thousand years after the original events, or some variation thereof, took place.

Eric H. Cline is Professor of Classics and Anthropology and chair of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, as well as director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University. He is Co-Director of the ongoing excavations at Megiddo (biblical Armageddon) in Israel and the author of Biblical Archaeology: A Very Short Introduction, winner of the 2011 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for the Best Popular Book on Archaeology. His recent addition to the Very Short Introductions series is The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy 1773. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo. Via Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Sebastian Amyes

 
Bacteria have achieved many firsts; they were the first cellular life-forms on the planet, they are the primary biomass on the planet; they are the most prevalent cell type in and on the human body outnumbering our own cells; they are responsible for more human deaths than any other infectious agents; and, in some parts of the world, they are the premier cause of all deaths. How did these small, single-cell organisms, that are invisible to the naked eye become so successful? Essentially this has been through rapid evolution leading to adaptability. All living organisms evolve. The speed at which they can do this is dependent on the generation time; for humans this is about 25 years whereas for bacteria it is often measured in minutes, sometimes as little as 20 minutes. It is believed that 99% of the species that have lived on the planet are now extinct; this is often because their generation time was too long for the necessary evolutionary adjustments needed to survive changes in their environment. Every year yet more species of animals and plants become extinct because they have been too specialised to adapt.

The rapid division of bacteria means that they can adapt overnight to changes in their surroundings. A prime example has been the development of antibiotic resistance in clinical bacteria. It has often been reported that the US Surgeon General indicated in the 1960s that the discovery, first of penicillin, and then of the rest of antibiotics heralded the end of clinical bacterial infections. It is now common knowledge that such a view was fatally flawed. Simple mutations in key genes during cell division provided the bacteria with a means of escaping the action of the antibiotic (resistance). Once learned and part of the bacterial DNA, these genes could then be passed on to other bacteria by the process known as conjugation (bacterial sex) so that these new bacteria benefited from the resistance “learnt” in earlier bacteria. Seventy years ago, almost all clinical bacteria were sensitive to all antibiotics; now many bacteria are resistant to some, some bacteria are resistant to most, and a few bacteria are resistant to all antibiotics. Within one human lifetime, clinical bacteria have evolved the means of overcoming all the antibiotics we can produce.

electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae

Witnessing this remarkable adaptive ability, it is hardly surprising that bacteria have been able to inhabit all parts of the planet, from hot springs to the Antarctic, from mountain tops to the bottom of the ocean. The demise of any species is often dependent on the loss of its food supply. Bacteria evolve so quickly that they can adapt to use different nutritional sources. They have evolved so that they can live off virtually any organic matter, they can even adapt to use crude oil. Like some insect populations, bacteria form colonies. Many bacterial colonies comprise one billion individual cells or more. Total eradication of that number of bacteria is difficult and often impossible. Unlike bees, ants, and wasps, for example, the survival of that colony is more egalitarian and is not dependent on a single individual, the queen. If there is a catastrophe, any one of the individual bacterial cells in a bacterial colony can go on to form a new colony if it can survive the eradication of the previous colony. When it has formed a new colony and the next threat comes, the same survival tactic is engaged.

Bacteria preceded mammals by nearly four billion years. It is almost certain that they will be predominant long after humans and other mammals are extinct. There have been suggestions that bacteria arrived on Earth on meteorites; this may be true but it is more likely that they evolved here. However, we have already sent our bacteria into space on satellites and these may, at some time, colonise other planets. Here on Earth, our own bacteria will continue to thrive. As we have unearthed the fossil record, we have classified different eras in geological time, which are often colloquially rephrased as epochs such as the “Age of the Dinosaurs” or the “Age of the Fish”. As they have always been the largest biomass, the truth is that from the Precambrian era, four billion years ago, the Earth has always been in the “Age of the Bacteria” and probably will be forever.

Sebastian Amyes is Professor of Microbial Chemotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. He has specialised on the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He has published more than 500 papers on bacteria and written a number of books on the subject, including Bacteria: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae [Public Domain] via Dartmouth College

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By Tom Burns

National Mental Health week in May this year will see the launch of the eagerly anticipated DSM-5. This is the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual which defines all psychiatric diagnoses and is often referred to as ‘the psychiatrists’ bible’. How can something so dry and dull sounding as a classificatory manual generate such fevered excitement? Indeed how did the DSM compete for space in a short book such as the VSI to Psychiatry? Why does it take its place alongside acknowledged classics like Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, or RD Laing’s The Divided Self? The answer is that psychiatry is a practice that is highly sensitive to cultural and social pressures and the origins of the DSM-III, published in 1980, reflected a crisis in psychiatry’s self confidence and is a classic case of unintended consequences.

American psychiatry (which had been dominated by psychoanalysts from about 1940 to 1970) had its prestige seriously dented in the early 1970s. Two major international studies had indicated that they tended to dramatically over-diagnose schizophrenia compared to other developed nations. To make matters worse Rosenham’s famous study ‘being sane in insane places’ was published in 1973. Rosenham got eight volunteers to go to different emergency rooms and say that they were hearing voices that said ‘empty’, ‘hollow’, or ‘thud’ but otherwise to behave absolutely normally. All were admitted to hospital and kept there for several weeks, all were diagnosed with schizophrenia and none had their diagnosis questioned. Clearly this was dire, something had to be done.

DSM-III was the response, a totally new approach to diagnosis. Instead of making a diagnosis by recognising an overall pattern of the illness DSM-III introduced ‘criterion based diagnosis’. So to be diagnosed with a disorder, say depression, the psychiatrist had to identify a core symptom (criterion) of lowered mood for at least two weeks and then four more symptoms (e.g. disturbed sleep, reduced appetite, poor concentration or feelings of worthlessness) out of a list of eight. If you ‘score’ on enough symptoms you have the disorder, if not you don’t. This approach emphasises reliability; the symptoms are simply defined and explained so most doctors will agree on them. It leaves little scope for an overall judgment or deciding on the ‘feel’ of the patient’s presentation. Improving reliability and reducing the variation between different psychiatrists with sharper definitions was meant to reduce the loose over-diagnosis that had plagued US psychiatry up till then. It also should improve the reliability of the drug trials that were coming into prominence.

One should be careful what one hopes for. While the DSM criterion based system has undoubtedly made diagnosis more consistent, it has certainly not made it tighter. As we approach DSM-5 the expansion in this classification is simply staggering. DSM-I in 1952 had 130 pages and 106 diagnoses and has ballooned to DSM-IV in 1994 with 886 pages and 297 diagnoses. The number of individuals who are diagnosed with psychiatric disorders is at an all time high. There is a growing recognition that the DSM system has lead to a medicalisation of everyday life; far too many people with transitory sadness find themselves classified as depressed and prescribed antidepressants. Anxiety disorders such as PTSD and Social Phobia are all too easy to define and hence diagnose, but can they really be as widespread as current practice suggests? Most patients now end up with more than one diagnosis. Even the psychopharmacologists who agitated for DSM-III are now concerned that diagnoses are cast so widely that they undermine, rather than guarantee their trials.

The fact that one can define something and agree on the definition does not make it either real or important. For example, there was good agreement four centuries ago on how to recognise a witch, but that does not mean that these poor women were witches. Similarly having a definition for ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ in adolescents who ‘often argue with adults’ does not make it a psychiatric disorder (any more than nicotine or caffeine dependency which are, believe it or not, listed in there).

Of course we should not be too dismissive about the progress that has been made in reliability and consistency. Psychiatric practice is vastly safer, more predictable and evidence based than ever before. We can hope that DSM-5 will transcend its committee structure and weed out earlier mistakes and sharpen up and refine the range of diagnoses, perhaps deleting those that are hardly ever used. It will certainly not be dull. Since its origins two hundred years ago psychiatry has never been without its controversies and disputes and all the signs are that this is likely to continue.

Tom Burns is Professor of Social Psychiatry at Oxford University and author of Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction. He has worked as a psychiatrist in Scotland, Sweden, and London before moving to Oxford. He trained as a group analyst and worked as a full time NHS consultant for 10 years before becoming an academic. His research is focused on interpersonal relationships in psychiatry – increasingly relationships with health care staff and the best forms of care for patients with severe illnesses such as psychoses. He has authored over 200 scientific papers and chapters and is the author or co-author of five books. He was awarded a CBE for his services to mental health in 2006.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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By Charles Townshend

When the ‘global war on terror’ was launched by George W. Bush – closely followed by Tony Blair – after the 9/11 attacks, many people no doubt felt reassured by these leaders’ confidence that they knew the best way to retaliate. Some, though, found the global war concept alarming for several reasons. The notion of a ‘war’ seemed to indicate a wrong-headed belief that overt military action, rather than secret intelligence methods, was an effective response. More seriously, perhaps, this seemed to be a ‘war’ which couldn’t be won. Since it is all but inconceivable that terrorism per se can ever be eliminated by any method, the Bush-Blair crusade looked dangerously like a declaration of permanent war of an Orwellian kind.

President George W. Bush delivers remarks on the Global War on Terror during a visit Wednesday, 19 March 2008, to the Pentagon.

So how was that threat read? In almost apocalyptic terms, the terrorists were said to be driven by mortal hatred of the West and to represent a deadly threat to ‘our way of life’. The first assertion was true as far as it went, the second a patent exaggeration  but one which went largely unchallenged and unexamined. British journalists showed remarkably little inclination to press ministers to explain its logic. (As, for instance, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer allocated £3 billion in the 2003 budget to cover the cost of Britain’s part in the invasion of Iraq — a figure that even then was clearly a wildly optimistic estimate.) It took the passage of nearly a decade, including two fearsomely expensive, destructive, and ineffective ‘real wars’, to undermine it. And it was not a politician but a judge who first pointed out the absurdity of trying to set the threat posed to ‘our way of life’ by terrorist groups on the same level as that posed by the Wehrmacht in 1940.

At last, four years ago, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband broke ranks and accepted that the concept of the war on terror was ‘misleading and mistaken’. Worryingly late in the day, perhaps, but better late than never. The spectre of an unending war seemed to be laid to rest. Miliband specifically criticised the notion of a ‘unified transnational enemy’ that had been evoked in the global war on terror. He had grasped that al-Qaida had not lived up to its billing.

So it came as something of a surprise when David Cameron, who had seemed unconcerned to take up this element of the Blair legacy, reacted to the January attack on the Amenas gas plant in southern Algeria by pronouncing it part of a ‘global threat’. This grim event in the deepest Sahara desert was the work of an extremist Islamist terrorist group linked, like those in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to al-Qaida, whose aim, the prime minister held, was ‘to destroy our way of life’.

If his intention was to counter the risk that the public might dismiss the attack as too distant to be worth serious consideration, fair enough. But the terms he used surely went beyond what was needed for that. He went as far as to label the threat represented by the terrorists ‘existential’. This striking echo of 2001 did not go entirely unchallenged, as it had done a decade previously. This time, journalists with real experience like Jason Burke are around to point out that al-Qaida, reeling from ‘blow after blow’ over the last five years, is only a shadow of the organisation that once did perhaps represent a threat on a global scale. And that, however deadly the Amenas attack, ‘a gas refinery in southern Algeria is not the Pentagon’.

But clearly such perspectives (shared, as Burke pointed out, by the PM’s security experts) do not meet the rhetorical needs of the moment. David Miliband’s key argument was that the more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, ‘the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common.’ What seemed by 2009 to have become no more than common sense has now been peremptorily abandoned again.

Jason Burke, maybe too charitably, described Cameron’s rhetoric as ‘dated’. That would in itself not be reassuring, but there seems to be something more going on. Though he specifically rejected the idea of a purely military solution, the prime minister’s emphasis on the ‘ungoverned spaces’ in which terrorists thrive opens up an agenda at least as indefinite as the original war on terror. His undertaking to ‘close down’ such spaces, and acceptance that this would take decades, has revived the spectre of a protracted conflict without proposing any plausible method of ending it. The function of these ‘ungoverned spaces’ is in fact highly doubtful. If such spaces exist — and the concept is highly dispuatble — they may well be useful to terrorist groups, but to suggest that they are crucial is seriously misleading. The fact that the deadliest Islamist attack in Britain was carried out by people from Leeds, Huddersfield, and Aylesbury might of course indicate that Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire are also ‘ungoverned spaces’, but the implications of that would be alarming indeed.

Charles Townshend is Professor of International History at Keele University. He has held fellowships at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. Amongst his previous publications are Political Violence in Ireland (1983), Making the Peace: public order and public security in modern Britain (1993), and Ireland: the twentieth century (1999). His most recent books are Easter 1916: the Irish rebellion (2005) and When God Made Hell: the British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921 (2010). The second edition of Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction published in 2011.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: White House photo by Eric Draper [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Monday 22nd April is Earth Day 2013. To celebrate in advance, here’s an extract from The Earth: A Very Short Introduction.

By Martin Redfern

Attempts to calculate the age of the Earth came originally out of theology. It is only comparatively recently that so-called creationists have interpreted the Bible literally and therefore believe that Creation took just seven 24-hour days. St Augustine had argued in his commentary on Genesis that God’s vision is outside time and therefore that each of the days of Creation referred to in the Bible could have lasted a lot longer than 24 hours. Even the much quoted estimate in the 17th century by Irish Archbishop Ussher that the Earth was created in 4004 BC was only intended as a minimum age and was based on carefully researched historical records, notably of the generations of patriarchs and prophets referred to in the Bible.

The first serious attempt to estimate the age of the Earth on geological grounds was made in 1860 by John Phillips. He estimated current rates of sedimentation and the cumulative thickness of all known strata and came up with an age of nearly 96 million years. William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, followed this with an estimate based on the time it would have taken the Earth to cool from an originally hot molten sphere. Remarkably, the first age he came up with was also very similar at 98 million years, though he later refined it downwards to 40. But such dates were considered too recent by uniformitarianists and by Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection required more time for the origin of species.

By the dawn of the 20th century, it had been realized that additional heat might come from radioactivity inside the Earth and so geological history, based on Kelvin’s idea, could be extended. In the end, however, it was an understanding of radioactivity that led to the increasingly accurate estimates of the age of the Earth that we have today. Many elements exist in different forms, or isotopes, some of which are radioactive. Each radioactive isotope has a characteristic half-life, a time over which half of any given sample of the isotope will have decayed. By itself, that’s not much use unless you know the precise number of atoms you start with. But, by measuring the ratios of different isotopes and their products it is possible to get surprisingly accurate dates. Early in the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford caused a sensation by announcing that a particular sample of a radioactive mineral called pitchblende was 700 million years old, far older than many people thought the Earth to be at that time. Later, Cambridge physicist R. J. Strutt showed, from the accumulation of helium gas from the decay of thorium, that a mineral sample from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was more than 2,400 million years old.

Uranium is a useful element for radio dating. It occurs naturally as two isotopes – forms of the same element that differ only in their number of neutrons and hence atomic weight. Uranium-238 decays via various intermediaries into lead-206 with a half-life of 4,510 million years, whilst uranium-235 decays to lead-207 with a 713-million-year lifetime. Analysis of the ratios of all four in rocks, together with the accumulation of helium that comes from the decay process, can give quite accurate ages and was used in 1913 by Arthur Holmes to produce the first good estimate of the ages of the geological periods of the past 600 million years.

The success of radio-dating techniques is due in no small way to the power of the mass spectrometer, an instrument which can virtually sort individual atoms by weight and so give isotope ratios on trace constituents in very small samples. But it is only as good as the assumptions that are made about the half-life, the original abundances of isotopes, and the possible subsequent escape of decay products. The half-life of uranium isotopes makes them good for dating the earliest rocks on Earth. Carbon 14 has a half-life of a mere 5,730 years. In the atmosphere it is constantly replenished by the action of cosmic rays. Once the carbon is taken up by plants and the plants die, the isotope is no longer replenished and the clock starts ticking as the carbon 14 decays. So it is very good for dating wood from archaeological sites, for example. However, it turns out that the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere has varied along with cosmic ray activity. It is only because it has been possible to build up an independent chronology by counting the annual growth rings in trees that this came to light and corrections to carbon dating of up to 2,000 years could be made.

Martin Redfern is a former science producer at the BBC Science Radio Unit and author of The Earth: A Very Short Introduction. He is now a freelance science writer.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: A composite image of the Western hemisphere of the Earth, by NASA/ GSFC/ NOAA/ USGS [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Gary Thomas

Frank Spencer’s famous assertion to Betty that ‘Every day in every way, I am getting better and better!’ is true. We are indeed getting better and better all the time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the primary schools athletics championships for New South Wales in December 2012, a 12-year-old boy, James Gallaugher, ran the 100m sprint in 11.72 seconds. This is a time that would comfortably have won him the gold medal in the 100m at the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896.

The phenomenon of continual improvement extends to IQ. Amongst psychologists the Flynn effect (so-called because it has been extensively studied by the New Zealand psychologist James Flynn) is well known: it refers to the large increases in IQ that have occurred over one hundred years of intelligence testing. Intelligence tests have an average of 100, and they do so unfailingly. You would be wrong, however, to conclude from this that intelligence remains constant in the population. The consistent average IQ of 100 is the result of the work of the psychometricians, who toil to maintain the figure of 100. The tests and their marking regimes have to be continually reconstructed to bring the average to 100 and to make the distribution of scores conform to shape of the bell-shaped normal distribution curve.

The reconstruction is needed because our performance is improving all the time. When people are asked to take intelligence tests from a previous generation their scores are consistently above those of the earlier cohort.

Which brings me to GCSEs and A levels. The results keep improving there as well. They keep improving because, unlike with IQs, no one was working (until now) to hold them at a consistent figure. If the kids answer the questions well, they get an ‘A’.

It’s all part of the narrative that rubbishes schools that says that the steady improvements in examination results are down to ‘grade inflation’. There may be an element of grade inflation, but my guess is that most of the improvement is down to a variant of the Flynn effect, which also explains James Gallaugher’s extraordinary sprint speed. You can imagine why this happens: with IQ, it’s because so much more information and so many more tools for thinking and learning are about now — kids have access to machines and experiences that previous generations couldn’t even dream of.

Instead of watching Crackerjack on the TV, as I used to do when I got home from school, today’s generation are straight onto their computers. Scattered amongst the games and the music will be the occasional Internet search, which will lead to something else … and something else — they interact with their machines. Kids are encouraged to think, to find things out, to write and communicate in a dozen different ways. They go places, see things and have access to knowledge to which once upon a time only the most privileged had access. It’s no wonder they are getting cannier.

And James Gallaugher’s extraordinary 100m sprint is just as easy to explain. Children are better fed, taller, healthier, have access to better facilities and coaching, which in turn benefits from a hundred years of research into ways of improving running. Running shoes are marvellously improved and tracks are made of high-grip material rather than ashes. Why are we surprised  that things continually improve?

So, today’s kids are not only healthier, they are also more articulate and more knowledgeable than those of previous generations. Schools are better: not only are classes smaller, but children and young people are encouraged to think where once they would have been drilled in handwriting, Latin, and the names of national heroes from history. Teaching is improving all the time: today’s teachers are better educated and better trained, understanding the ways in which children learn. The differences between schools of today and those of my generation, forty years ago, are huge. This is why IQs, exam results — and sprinting speeds — continually improve.

Gary Thomas, Professor in Education, University of Birmingham. He has spent his career working in education, first as a primary school teacher, then as an educational psychologist, then as an academic in five universities. He is the author of Education: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: By alegri/4freephotos.com [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons.

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The death of Margaret Thatcher has already prompted an outpouring of reflections upon her place in history. One aspect of her legacy that deserves attention is her use of rhetoric and the way in which, to a great degree, she helped reshape the language of British politics as well as the substance of policy. Historians divide about when original Thatcherism really was. Certainly, Thatcher’s brand of low tax, anti-union, pro-middle class politics had antecedents in the 1950s if not earlier. Yet, if her economic ideas were borrowed from others, her discursive style contained elements that were radically new.

Baroness Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

It was not that aggressive political language was unprecedented in Britain, of course. At the 1945 election, Thatcher’s political hero Winston Churchill alleged that if a Labour government were elected it would have to fall back on ‘some form of Gestapo’ – a taunt which itself owed something to his continued use of the rough-and-tumble style of the Edwardian era. And there were other post-war Conservatives, such as Quintin Hogg and Enoch Powell, whose rhetoric was in some ways more outrageous than Thatcher’s own. What was new about her, though, was her ability not merely to bring what she called ‘conviction politics’ into the mainstream but to make it all but hegemonic as an ideal of political conduct.

To understand this, we need to appreciate what she was reacting against. Again, historians differ about whether there really was a ‘post-war consensus’, whereby the leaders of the main parties reached broad agreement on the desirability of Keynesian economic management and a moderately generous welfare state. What is clear, though, is that by the late 1960s there were an increasing number of voices claiming that such a consensus did exist, and that it was an elite stitch-up aimed at marginalising dissent and suppressing the unarticulated common sense desires of the mass of the British people. As Conservative Party leader after 1975 Thatcher successfully posed as the radical spokeswoman of ordinary Britons against the cosy arrangements of the small-‘c’ conservative Establishment, which in her view encompassed everything from trades union leaders to the hierarchy of the Church of England.

Furthermore, it wasn’t just the content of the consensus to which she objected; that is to say, she did not just think that the politicians of the post-war years happened to have arrived at a mistaken set of policies. Rather, she believed that it was their very manner of conducting politics – the quest for agreement and the aspiration to avoid strife – that had inevitably led to bad outcomes. As Thatcher put it shortly before she entered Downing Street, ‘The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!’ Searching for areas of agreement with one’s opponents, then, was something she found inherently suspect.

President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Camp David in 1986

This was not the whole story, of course. Once in office she could not do away wholly with the need for compromise, policy reversals, or downright electoral caution. However, the myth of the ‘iron lady’, which the media helped perpetuate, gave her substantial political cover for any such deviations from the true path of ideological grace. It was only when she began to completely believe the myth herself that she came unstuck, gradually dispensing with ministers who were willing to challenge her, and seemingly starting to value her own inflexibility as an inherent political virtue. Cue the disaster of the Poll Tax, battles over Europe, and her eventual exit from power.

Plainly, the effects of the Thatcher years have been long-lasting, and today’s debates about welfare and austerity are conducted very much in her shadow. Her idealisation of unyieldingness (or, if you prefer, obstinacy) as form of political conduct has been of equal importance. Tony Blair was borrowing from her playbook when he boasted that he did not have a reverse gear – a fairly significant defect, one might think, in any kind of vehicle. But perhaps her most powerful trope was her populism. Her ‘conviction’ rhetoric served as token of her alleged difference from other, more conventional politicians. This language served her very well electorally, but at the same time it served to devalue the inevitable, and arguably desirable, compromises of the ordinary political process.

Today, then, Thatcher’s economic views command considerable support across the political mainstream: the market is king. Yet the politicians who preach this post-Thatcherite consensus are themselves the object of popular hostility. They are now being attacked from the right, with UKIP gaining success by painting them as out of touch with the common people – the same trick that helped bring the Tories victory in 1979. RIP Maggie Thatcher; Long Live Nigel Farage.

Richard Toye studied at the University of Birmingham and subsequently the University of Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. He is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. His books include Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007) and Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2010).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

Image credits: Margaret Thatcher By Williams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Camp David 1986. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The legacies of Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric appeared first on OUPblog.

By Owen Davies

Magic in the modern world
The recent battle between religion and science conducted in the media, spearheaded by Professor Richard Dawkins and other high-profile figures, has garnered much international attention. The debate is not new of course; it stretches back several centuries. One aspect of the debate that receives less attention today is the issue of magic: a concept which is inextricably linked to the history of science and religion. The notion of both science and religion as magic is as relevant today as it ever was.

Magic: what’s in a word?
Magic continues to pervade popular imagination and language. Today the term ‘magic’ can be used to describe the supernatural, superstition, simple illusion, religious miracles, and fantasies of the imagination.  It can also be applied to the ‘wonders’ of science, or used as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as ‘magical realism’ has considerable appeal, as demonstrated by the success of Life of Pi. Modern scientists have even incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their ‘magic acid’ (a super acid developed in the 1960s) and ‘magic angles’ (an angle of 54.7356°) .

Click here to view the embedded video.

Magic and primitivism
Since the Enlightenment – which the study of magic reveals as a problematic historical concept in itself – magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development, and yet across the modern globalised world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic  and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. While in the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalism decries the continued public threat posed by magic, and in our pluralistic spiritual democracy some have redefined magical practices as a form of religion.

Global magic
The debate over religion, magic, and science in the modern world is also too often conceived within a Judaeo-Christian western framework of intellectual development, with the magical and religious beliefs of much of the rest of the world ignored in general histories and debates. The magic of the literary cultures of China, India, and Asia are as rich and ancient as those of the Mediterranean world and are equally important to understanding what influenced developments in western magic. Understanding how different cultures have negotiated the relationship between science, religion and magic over the centuries and millennia also help us put Western developments in context. The influence of the Bible and Koran on magical traditions in Africa, the Americas and the Middle East are equally illuminating. The vast resource of oral traditions regarding magic, science, and religion in non-literary cultures also needs to be considered on an equal footing in our consideration of past and present human understanding. It is only by studying and comparing oral and literary magic cultures of the world that we can breakdown notions of primitiveness based on western assumptions.

Magic in your car
Twentieth-century technology is not immune from magical interference. Across the globe today talismans are placed in cars to protect them as much as the occupants. Ethnographers working in the bocage region of Normandy during the 1970s and 1980s found that car accidents or breakdowns were sometimes blamed on witchcraft. This notion is merely a technological version of the frequent accusations in earlier European sources that witches caused cart wheels to break or wagons to get stuck in the mud. In parts of Africa the introduction of tractors added a new dimension to agricultural witchcraft disputes. A study of road travel in Ghana found that the wrecks of cars and lorries at accident black spots on otherwise good, new road surfaces attracted suspicions of witchcraft.

Wishful thinking: magic?
We all have our magic moments. Have you ever urged your car to go faster as it struggles up a slope? Have you ever made a wish or believed that an event was more than coincidence? A desire for something to happen – ‘I hope she loses her job’ – may be expressed rationally, but if it comes true it may be interpreted magically. These are phenomena of our waking hours. In our dreams our minds lead us into magical worlds and activities. Far from espousing a rational view of the world, parents from cultures across the globe actively encourage magical thinking in pre-school children. It provides explanations to satisfy children in their early stages of inquisitiveness about why things work or happen. Children’s books feed magical fantasies, and early-years children’s television present magical worlds that bear no relationship to the real world. Why do we nourish magical thinking? It shields our ignorance, helps parents avoid uncomfortable questions, and provides a satisfying shared realm of adult and infant imagination and escapism.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, and ghosts, including Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (OUP, 2009), The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave, 2007), Paganism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2011), and Magic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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By Chloe Foster

We had 13 wonderful Very Short Introductions authors taking part in our series of Very Short Soapboxes at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival last week. The change of venue, from the usual marquee at Christ Church to the warmth and comfort of Blackwell’s bookshop, was a blessing (who wants to stand in a tent with a snow blizzard outside? Although some would say our authors are that good). From Medical Law to The Napoleonic Wars, from The Gothic to The British Empire, there was a subject for everyone to enjoy. Here are a few highlights.

• Barry Cunliffe gives a talk on The Druids

   

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• All eyes on Barry Cunliffe for his excellent talk

   

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• Lynda Mugglestone speaks to a captive audience about Dictionaries

   

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• Some audience members come and chat to Lynda after her talk

   

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• Klaus Dodds speaks about The Antarctic

   

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• Klaus Dodds

   

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• Elleke Boehmer accompanies her talk with some props!

   

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• Elleke Boehmer talks about Nelson Mandela

   

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The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Mike Rapport will be giving a free talk at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23 March 2013 at 1.15 p.m. to talk about The Napoleonic Wars. The Very Short Introductions ’soapbox’ talks will be running twice a day during the festival.

By Mike Rapport

Modern wars, someone once wrote, are fought by civilians as well as by armed forces. In fact, it is of course a truism to say that civilians are always affected by warfare in all periods of the past — as the families left behind, by the economic hardship, by the horrors of destruction, plunder, requisitioning, siege warfare, hunger, and worse. The involvement of civilians in modern wars, however, became more intense because, with the advent of ‘total war’, belligerent states began to mobilise the entire population and material resources of the country. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were an early example of the ways in which a modern war could grind millions of people up in its brutal cogs, whether as conscripts in the firing lines of Europe’s mass armies and navies, or as civilians caught in the path of the oncoming battalions and trapped in the crossfire of the fighting itself. At the Oxford Literary Festival on 24 March, I will be speaking about the non-combatants who, in one way or another, found themselves entangled in the wars.

Civilians were of course victims. Four years ago Karen Hagemann published a fine article on the civilian experience of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, the largest battle in European history before 1914. The local people started as horrified onlookers, as maimed, sick French troops retreated into the city to find treatment in makeshift military hospitals But soon the fighting arrived on their streets and doorsteps and they themselves became the victims. First, they suffered economically with the pillaging and requisitioning of tools, furniture, food and livestock. Then they found themselves under fire, huddling in churches and cellars to shelter — sometimes in vain — from the bursting shells, or they fled the carnage, carrying what they could on carts and wheelbarrows and dragging their terrified children along with them.

Yet this was a ‘people’s war’ not only because the conflict may have killed at least one million civilians (and very likely many, many more). It was also a ‘people’s war’ because the civilian population of all the belligerents mobilized behind the war effort. Economies were reoriented into supplying armies and navies, while the recruiting-sergeant and press-gang became all-too-familiar sights across Europe. In revolutionary France in 1793, the ‘mass levy’ of the entire population for the war effort gave men, women and children explicit roles to play in the mobilisation of all the nation’s resources for the sole purpose of fighting the war. Yet civilians also voluntarily engaged in the prosecution of the conflict. In France in the 1790s, communities collected money and valuables and presented them to the government as ‘patriotic donations’. Women played a pivotal role: in Germany, a ‘Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland’ raised money and collected valuables for the Prussian war effort against France in 1813: it boasted some 600 branches by 1815. In Britain, women raised subscriptions for the wounded, the widowed and collected materials and clothing for the troops: there were, again, hundreds of such organisations. In Spain, men and women joined bands of guerrillas to fight and plunder the French, although in many cases such actions appear to have been little different from banditry, since Spaniards suffered from these depredations too.

Yet it all shows that people were not simply coerced. They were stirred by propaganda fed to them by governments and by a media trying to convince them that the war was, variously, a struggle for survival, for liberty, for religion, for monarchy, or for the Emperor. The people themselves played a role in shaping the propaganda, in defining what the war was about. With an expansion in literacy in the eighteenth century, such popular support would have been impossible without an interaction between public opinion and governments. In the varieties and intensity of the civilian experience, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are a chilling anticipation of the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century.

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: Victory declaration after the battle of Leipzig, 1813 [Public Domain} via Wikimedia Commons

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Malcolm Gaskill will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23rd March 2013 at 5:15 p.m. to provide a very short introduction to Witchcraft. This event is free to attend.

By Malcolm Gaskill

I’m looking at a photo of my six-year-old daughter wearing her witch costume — black taffeta and pointy hat — last Halloween. Our local vicar marked the occasion by lamenting in the parish magazine this ‘celebration of evil’. All Hallows’ Eve, the night when traditionally folk comforted souls of the dead, is not, in fact, evil, but did once have evil in its margins. Spirits on the loose might be bad as well as good, and for humans to manipulate them was witchcraft. The perception of evil, concentrated in the figure of the witch, was once powerfully real. Kate’s fancy dress character, however winsome, has a profound cultural connection to a terrifying dimension of the past and, as we’ll see, the present too.

Myths about the ‘witch-craze’ abound. One version has it that millions of medieval women were persecuted by the church, aided by the prejudices of benighted peasants. Witchcraft accusations, we like to think, were a good way for people stupider than us to get rid of people they didn’t like or chose to scapegoat to explain misfortune in an unscientific age. This picture is essentially false. The ‘witch-hunt’ resulted in the execution of around 50,000 people (a fifth of them men), mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A key development at that time was the rise of the state, with its laws and tribunals, and it was this, far more than the Catholic church, which made witch-hunting possible. Insofar as religion was involved, it was the ferocious energy unleashed by the Protestant Reformation that did most harm. Finally, if witchcraft was a pretext to bump off enemies, it wasn’t a very good one: about half of all suspicions — the few that made it into court — ended in acquittals. In England, three-quarters of all trials disappointed the accusers.

And this was no cultural dark age. These were the days of Shakespeare,  Milton and Newton — no longer the Middle Ages. It was the early modern period with its new sciences and technologies, literary and artistic genius, explosions of print and commerce, global discoveries, and new ways of seeing and feeling. It’s more comfortable to think that witch-hunts preceded the Renaissance, but they didn’t, and if we look closely we can see why. The search for truth, and growing human confidence to find it, underpinned the inquisitorial legal process, replacing blind faith in judicial ordeals and unlimited torture. Statutes against witches and the will to use them, combined with social and economic tension caused by demographic change, largely explain the rise of witch-trials after 1500. Witches were made officially real by law and reason long before the same law and reason made them unreal by undermining the evidence on which they were tried.

What is remarkable, even in the heyday of witchcraft prosecutions, was just how much restraint was shown in most places, at most times. There was no witch-holocaust because communities and authorities alike were preoccupied with order, and condemning innocent people did not serve that end. England had a few years during the Civil Wars when settled life was disturbed, puritan magistrates and clergy became powerful, and the normal administration of justice was interrupted. Once restraints were removed, what followed was the most savage witch-hunt in English history, with perhaps three hundred East Anglian women and men accused, and a third of them executed.

But throughout Europe and colonial north America, such events were the exceptions that proved the rule, the rule being that witch-crazes were uncommon and undesired by most. During our Halloween fun, it’s worth remembering both those who died and those who were sufficiently sceptical and fond of communal harmony to keep mass witch-hunts at bay. And we might also remember that the distance between us and such outrages is not just a few hundred years, but a few hundred miles.

On 6 February this year Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old mother of two living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, was accused of bewitching a six-year-old boy to death. Villagers stripped and bound her, then dragged her to a rubbish dump where she was tortured with hot irons until she confessed. The police arrived, but were held back by locals who doused Leniata in petrol and burned her alive. The UN human rights office explained that this was just the latest of numerous lynchings, each conforming to a pattern found in many parts of the developing world where witch-beliefs are strong and uncontained by law or authority.

The persecution of witches in any age says a lot about the society that allows it or cannot resist it — its structures, institutions, and social organization of power. If we in the West have successfully neutralized our most deadly fears and packaged our persecutions as harmless trick-or-treating, then perhaps we should be shouldn’t be too worried about celebrating evil. Recent events in Papua New Guinea suggest that we barely know the meaning of the word.

Malcolm Gaskill is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. His books include Hellish Nell: Last of Britain’s Witches (2001), Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005), and Witchcraft: a Very Short Introduction (2010).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credits: Photo provided by Malcolm Gaskill. Not to be used without express permission; the execution of Ann Hibbins on Boston Common in 1656 [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

The post Witchcraft: yesterday and today appeared first on OUPblog.

By Chloe Foster

We’re very pleased to annouce the winner of the Very Short Film competition 2013. The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. Students were asked to make a creative and inspiring one minute film about a subject they feel passionately about. After hundreds of entries, we chose 12 longlisted films to go to the public vote. The vote then produced four finalists. After a live final on Wednesday, the winner was chosen and will receive £9000 towards their university education. And the winner is…Sally Le Page with her film on Evolution. Congratulations Sally!

Winner of the Very Short Film competition, Evolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There were four brilliant finalists and all the judges agreed it was a very close contest. The other films were Superconductivity by Christian Foss, Gay Marriage by Hannah Witton, and Geology by Maia Krall Fry.

• The audience take a quick break whilst the judges deliberate

   

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• Sally being presented with the winning cheque

   

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• OUP publisher, Luciana, announcing the winner

   

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• Finalists Maia and Hannah awaiting the result

   

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• Finalist Christian being interviewed by a student journalist

   

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• Our judges! Judy Freidberg, Maggie O'Kane, Paul Boyd, John Mitchinson, and Luciana O'Flaherty

   

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• Winner Sally talking to VSI author Nigel Warburton and VSI editor Andrea Keegan

   

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• Sally being interviewed by judge, John Mitchinson

   

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Image credit: All images supplied by Monia Antonioli. Do not use without express permission.

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Klaus Dodds will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Thursday 21 March 2013 at 1:15 p.m. to provide a very short introduction to the Antarctic. The event is free to attend.

By Klaus Dodds

When I wrote The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction, I wanted the book to be something of a provocation.  The aim, in short, was to highlight things that often get neglected in the midst of stories and images of past and present explorers, melting ice caps, tourists and the penguin. The reality is rather more disturbing.

The first inconvenient truth is that the Antarctic is a deeply disputed space. It is not a place where everyone co-operates straight forwardly just because there is no indigenous human population. We might be worried about the future stability of the polar ice sheet, but in the meantime a host of countries are busy cementing their sovereign claims. Britain has renamed a vast area of British Antarctic Territory Queen Elizabeth Land. The Chilean president visited the Antarctic in January 2013 to inaugurate a new research station to be manned by the Chilean air force. And Argentina believes that any resources lying off the Antarctic Peninsula belong to it and no one else. Alongside those three states, four other countries, Australia, France, New Zealand and Norway also believe that they enjoy sovereignty over large sways of the polar continent and surrounding ocean. The United States and Russia reserve a right to make a claim in the future while other members of the international community believe that the Antarctic is a global common.

The second inconvenient truth is that the parties to what is called the Antarctic Treaty System are struggling to manage resource exploitation. Fishing in the Southern Ocean is worth millions of pounds a year. Fish such as the Patagonian Toothfish are highly lucrative and the Commission for the Conservation on Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) struggles to get agreement on how best to manage such a fishery. And even then that does not even begin to address the problem of illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing in the Southern Ocean. Whaling, although addressed by the International Whaling Commission, is also a fractious affair. Australia and Japan are at loggerheads over whaling in the Southern Ocean, and there is currently a case pending in the International Court of Justice.

The third inconvenient truth is that some countries are perfectly prepared to investigate the Antarctic for its mineral potential. The Antarctic Treaty parties proudly announced to the world that the Protocol on Environmental Protection would ban mining in the Antarctic. The Protocol entered into force in 1998, and this was considered to be instrumental in reducing diplomatic and political pressure on the ATS from environmental organizations and members of the Global South who feared that an elite group of nations might exploit the continent for their own self-interest. In 2012, the Russian delegation submitted a paper to the 35^th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, which blithely mentioned that their scientists were interested in the ‘Determination of structure, geological evolution and potential mineral resources of the Antarctic lithosphere’.

The fourth inconvenient truth is that the Antarctic is heavily commercialized. As with the Arctic, the Antarctic supports a tourist industry involving multiple ships and planes transporting at its peak some 40,000 per year. The tourist industry is an important source of revenue for so-called gateway ports such as Christchurch, Punta Arenas and Stanley in the Falkland Islands. There have been accidents and emergencies in the Antarctic region caused in part because of poor sea conditions but another contributory factor might be the pressure on tour operators to go to ever more remoter parts in order to generate an ‘authentic’ expeditionary experience. A number of countries such as Chile are trying to cash in on this trend and establish hostels and other forms of accommodation to cater for wilderness holidays. It also helps to cement sovereign claims.

The fifth and final inconvenient truth is that there is a growing anxiety about the role of China in Antarctica. While everyone associated with the Antarctic Treaty System is eager to emphasize the consensual nature of decision making and scientific co-operation in the field, there is a worry that a new phalanx of countries led by China, and including Brazil, India and Korea, is going to challenge the political and scientific hegemony previously enjoyed by an alliance involving the United States, Europe and countries such as Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, the media has been full of stories about China’s growing polar footprint – bases, networks and place names. The Antarctic map is being changed as Chinese, Indian and Korean place names lie adjacent to Euro-American naming traditions.

So by all means enjoy the nature programs and continue to revel in the exploits of past explorers and their contemporary avatars but be aware that the geopolitics of the Antarctic is lively. This icy wilderness is being claimed, coveted, exploited by a growing numbers of nations.

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of a number of books including Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (2007) and The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction (2012).

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 will be in full swing tomorrow, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Charles Foster will be giving a free talk at the Oxford Literary Festival. The Very Short Introductions ’soapbox’ talks will be running twice a day during the festival.

By Charles Foster

In many textbook titles and university courses, ‘medical law’ and ‘ethics’ are spoken of in the same breath, as one might speak of Darby and Joan. It’s often assumed that there’s a solid, uncomplicated marriage, in which each partner knows his or her function; or at least an efficiently commercial partnership governed by a clearly drafted document. But, like most real relationships, it’s not so simple.

Lord Donaldson reassured us that, though the law might technically allow a capacitous 17 year old girl to be forced to have an abortion against her will, we needn’t worry: ‘medical ethics’ would stop it. Lord Justice Hoffmann (as he then was) said: ‘I would expect medical ethics to be formed by the law rather than the reverse.’ Where does that leave us? If one is arguing about who is the senior partner, law or ethics, one can argue either side’s case equally convincingly and equally unconvincingly on the basis of the judicial dicta we’ve got.

When the Bolam test is employed in its most cringingly unreflective way, the ethical codes of the profession are simply imported into the law. It would then seem as if law has become ethics. But in fact if one looks at the origin of those codes, the ethicists often think that they’ve taken their cue from the law. We’re caught in a mad circularity; a confusing circus of chickens and eggs.

It’s important that we break out of this circularity.  It’s important for reasons of legal (and professional regulatory) certainty. People have a right to know whether they’re being judged by canons of law or ethics, and the origins of the principles that might condemn them. Challenge is impossible unless the sources are clear.

There are some areas of medical practice where some degree of deference to medical opinion is appropriate. Not all the jurisprudence encrusted on Bolam is wrong. These are areas where technical clinical competence is at stake.

However: in practice, debates within such areas about liability are decreasingly likely to centre on Bolam. This is simply because of the increasing importance of evidence-based medicine. We increasingly live in a world where a particular clinical approach is obviously either right or wrong. If the literature emphatically demonstrates that approach X is inferior to approach Y (and X and Y are financially comparable), no responsible doctor can endorse X. But even within the arena of technical clinical competence, Bolam will never become wholly redundant. Medicine will not (and should not) become entirely a science rather than an art.

But Bolam isn’t good for all clinical purposes. It’s not good for purposes that are obviously infused with ethics. It’s easier to recognise these when they occur than to set out the criteria that characterise them. But for legal purposes we’ve got to be clear. We won’t go far wrong by identifying as ‘ethical’ all questions to do with consent to treatment, confidentiality and (although I’m more agnostic about this), the ownership and use of body parts.

In such ‘ethical’ areas, who should take the lead? I think it’s clear: the law. The law has in place, as bioethics does not, structures and procedures for the detailed examination and adjudication of ethical questions. The courts are not as good as Parliament at taking societal temperatures, but they’re a lot better than the General Medical Council. And, having taken the temperature, they’re much better  ethical diagnosticians, therapists and prognosticians than the GMC. They take a wider and deeper view.

The law should set the minimum standard. If the regulators want to demand more of their professional members, then fine. If an individual doctor wants to be particularly morally scrupulous: fine.

Let’s go back to the unwilling 17-year-old whose parents think she should have an abortion. Should she? No. Nor should the law which at first blush might be thought to permit it be revoked. But it’s a counsel of despair and laziness to suggest that ‘ethics’ should be the final bulwark against the sort of nightmarish abuse of the law that might lead to a 17-year-old being tied to a table and subjected to a forcible abortion. Whose ethics should we use? Mine? Yours? Dr. Mengele’s? The GMC’s? Well, the GMC seems to think it’s following the judges, and, anyway, the courts already have the ability to review GMC guidelines, so the courts really can’t wash their hands of the problem for ever. The ignominious game of forensic pass the parcel has to stop, and it has to stop with the parcel in the hands of the judges. They’re paid to open it.

The law can and must do better than Lord Donaldson did. It’s not hard to see how it might. It might say (just by way of example), that Lord Donaldson’s feared conclusion needn’t follow because abortion is a rather special type of ‘treatment’. It can’t simply be lumped together with appendectomies. Surely a little bit of nuance, well within the bounds of creativity that the common law should allow itself, should be able to sort it out.

[Many thanks to Jose Miola for a helpful discussion.]

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, a tutor in medical law and ethics at the University of Oxford, and a barrister (practising in medical law) at Outer Temple Chambers, London. He read law and veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the author, editor or contributor to over thirty five books.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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To celebrate World Book Day this week, we take a look at what John Sutherland thinks about why we read bestsellers and what they say about the age in which they were published, in his Very Short Introduction to Bestsellers.

By John Sutherland

Why read, or contemplate, with any degree of seriousness, less than ‘good’ (and sometimes downright bad) books – the Deepings of the literary world? Do they not belong in that category, contemptuously called in German, Wegwerfl iteratur? – ‘throw-away literature’? Why pick up what literary history so resolutely discards?

Any study of bestsellers confronts the same question as does the decaf, no-fat latte drinker in Starbucks: ‘Why bother?’ One justification, and the easiest demonstrated, is their (that is, bestsellers’) interesting peculiarity. Like other ephemera of past times, bestsellers (even Orwell despised Deeping) offer the charm of antiquarian quaintness. Where else would one encounter a line such as: ‘I say, you are a sport, pater’ [‘Son’ addressing ‘Sorrell’, on having been given a tenner ‘tip’ in Deeping’s Sorrell and Son]. And, so short is their lifespan, that today’s bestsellers become yesterday’s fiction almost as soon as one has read them.

Looking back through the lists is to uncover delightful cultural oddities. Consider, for example, the top-selling (#1) novel of 1923 in the United States, Black Oxen, by Gertrude Atherton. Recall too that the discriminating reader of that year had James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod to choose from.

Atherton’s title is taken from W. B. Yeats (‘The years like great black oxen tread the world’). The allusion signals grand literary pretension; pretension absurdly unmerited. None the less, the novel’s theme was, for the time, both topical and sensational – rejuvenation. For humans, that is, not cattle.

The narrative opens in a New York theatre. A brilliant young newspaperman, Lee Clavering (a member of the city’s elite ‘top 400’ families), is struck by a beautiful woman in the audience. Investigation reveals that she is facially identical with a young ‘belle’ of thirty years before, Mary Ogden. Miss Ogden married a Hungarian diplomat, Count Zattiany, and has never been heard of since. Speculation rages, but eventually the truth comes out: Ogden/Zattiany has been rejuvenated in Vienna by Dr Steinach’s new X-ray technique. By bombarding a woman’s ovaries at the period of menopause, the ageing process is reversible.

When news of the wonderful process hits the newspapers, ‘civil war threatens’. And luckless Clavering finds himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother. On the other side, he himself is obsessively loved by a flapper, Janet Oglethorpe, young enough to be his daughter, who drinks illegal hooch and attends ‘petting parties’. The plot thickens, madly, thereafter.

It is nonsense – just as, medically, Steinach’s X-ray miracle was nonsense. In 1922 Atherton herself had received the Viennese doctor’s rejuvenation treatment. It seems, from publicity pictures to have done little for her beauty. But tosh fiction and quack science as it may be, Black Oxen fits, hand-in-glove, with its period. And no other period.

However absurd it seems to the modern reader, Atherton’s novel reflects, and dramatizes, contemporary anxiety about women’s freedoms; as definitively as did Bridget Jones’s Diary in the 1990s. The 1920s was the era of the ‘flapper’ – the perpetually young girl-woman. British women in this decade had, after long struggle, the vote – but only if they were over 30, after which the heyday in the female blood was conceived to have been sufficiently cooled to make
rational political decisions. The cult of Dionysian youth – the ‘be young forever or die now’ aspiration – is more respectably commemorated in another novel of 1923, Scott Fitzgerald’s Beautiful and Damned. It, too, made the bestseller lists, but much less spectacularly than Atherton: Fitzgerald was running a longer literary race.

Black Oxen, the top novel in the US in 1923, is inextricably ‘of ’ its period. It could have been published 15 years later (as was Aldous Huxley’s ‘elixir of life’ novel, After Many a Summer). But out of its immediate time-and-place frame, Black Oxen would have no more ‘worked’ than a fish out of water. Nor would it, in other days, have been what it was, ‘the book of the day’. The day made the book, as much as events of the day made newspaper headlines in 1923.

This hand-in-glove quality is inextricably linked with the ephemerality of bestsellerism. A #1 novel may be seen as a successful literary experiment – as short-lived as a camera flash, and as capable of freezing, vividly, its historical moment. If (to paraphrase Coleridge) one saw Jonathan Livingston Seagull (‘Jesus tripping’) wandering wild in Arabia, one would shout: ‘hippy seventies!’ (with the possible addition ‘dude!’). If Bulldog Drummond blundered, dinner-jacketed, into one’s living room, his ‘man’ Denny in close attendance with pint tankard, furled brolly, and pistol, one would recognize the clubland thug as a time traveller from the early 1920s.

The great literary work may be, as Jonson said of Shakespeare, ‘not for an age but for all time’. The reverse is, typically, the case with the ‘best’ bestsellers. They are snapshots of the age.

John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London and the author of Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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By Charles Foster

By the standards of most books, the Very Short Introduction to Medical law is indeed very short: 35,000 or so words. As every writer of a VSI knows, it is hard to compress your subject into such a tiny box. But I wonder if I could have been much, much shorter. 88 words, in fact.

Here’s my re-write:

1.        Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2.         There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

This would hardly be saleable as a VSI, but is there anything else to say? Certainly it’s arguable that the rest of what we describe as ‘medical law’ (at least in a publicly funded healthcare system) is simply commentary on it.

The words, of course, are those of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s the most elastic of all the Convention articles. It stretches to places of which the original draftsmen (probably thinking of preventing phone tapping and other Big Brother-ish activities by the State’s shadowy men in raincoats) would never have dreamed.

It effortlessly and unsurprisingly encompasses confidentiality. It’s not hard to see how it can generate a right to informed consent, determine what should happen to my body parts, have a fair stab at drafting a definition of death, and, generally, require clinicians to act in all their dealings with me in just the sort of respectful way that makes a good doctor a good doctor. It has been found to extend to the end of life, enabling me (so long as the criteria in 8(2) are satisfied), to end my life at the time and in the circumstances that I choose. It’s a structure built by autonomy and dignity, and is now their natural home, from which they preside over the law.

Article 8 doesn’t just let me do things. It prefers to permit than to deny, but it’s capable, using the language of 8(2), of stopping me do things too. If I want to nail my genitals recreationally to a piece of plywood, or to ask a surgeon to cut off all my limbs because that’s this season’s look, it’s likely to have something stern to say.

But ultimately some commentary is necessary. The tension between 8(1) and 8(2) (which is the real tension in much medical litigation) needs to be measured and described. Fundamental and parthenogenetically fecund though it is, perhaps Article 8 needs to acknowledge its need for insemination by ideas such as personhood and the right to reproduce, and its reliance on other principles (the right to life, for instance, embodied in the law of murder, manslaughter, and the prohibition of assisted suicide). Perhaps, too, duties aren’t just the flip side of rights, and perhaps we need somehow to oblige doctors to get out of bed in order to be respectful. We all know that highly elastic principles and people tend not to be great on the details.

Having looked at it, I’m reassured that the remaining 34,912 words were justified.

Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, a tutor in medical law and ethics at the University of Oxford, and a barrister (practising in medical law) at Outer Temple Chambers, London. He read law and veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the author, editor or contributor to over thirty five books, including Medical Law: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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By Joseph M. Siracusa

Any discussion of North Korea’s nuclear program should begin with an understanding of the limited information available regarding its development. North Korea has been very effective in denying external observers any significant information on its nuclear program. As a result, the outside world has had little direct evidence of the North Korean efforts and has mainly relied on indirect inferences, leaving substantial uncertainties.

Moreover, because its nuclear weapons program wasn’t self-contained, it has been especially difficult to determine how much external assistance arrived and from where, and to assess the program’s overall sophistication.

That said, what is known is that Pyongyang has tested three nuclear devices: in 2006, 2009, and, of course most recently, on 12 February 2013. They have all had varying degrees of success, and North Korea has put considerable effort into developing and testing missiles as possible delivery vehicles.

February’s detonation of a “smaller and light” nuclear device — presumably, part of the plan to build a small atomic weapon to mount on a long-range missile — was the first test carried out by Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. And while it always intriguing to speculate on who is running the show in North Korea, the finger generallyseems to point to the military.

Many foreign observers have come to believe the otherwise desperate, hungry population (and failing regime?) that make up North Korea’s secretive police state is best symbolized by its nuclear and missile programs. Which gives rise to the basic question: what, then, is Pyongyang’s motivation for its nuclear and missile programs? Is it, as Victor Cha once asked, for swords, shields, or badges?

In other words, are the programs intended to provide offensive weapons, defensive weapons, or symbols of status? In spite of prolonged diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang officials over the past two decades, the question of motivation remains elusive.

Pyongyang’s interest in obtaining nuclear weaponry, beginning around the mid-1950s, has apparently stemmed in part from what it perceived as the US’s nuclear threats and concerns about the nuclear umbrella that protects South Korea. These threats, in turn, have pervaded North Korean strategic thought and action since the Korean War.

These actions may be gauged as offensive or defensive, but Pyongyang officials were at one point fearful of South Korea’s nuclear ambitions and later uncertain about the US emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons and its nuclear “first use” policy in defense of the South. These nuclear-armed additions included 280mm artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and mines.

Against this backdrop, all of North Korea’s nuclear activities tend to focus on a single goal: preservation of the regime. Possessing nuclear weapons would diminish the US’s threat to the nation’s independence, but it could also reduce Pyongyang’s dependence upon China for its security.

North Korean officials, too, may feel that a small nuclear force offers some insurance against South Korea’s dynamic economic growth and its eventual conventional military superiority.

Pyongyang undoubtedly views its burgeoning nuclear arsenal as a symbol of the regime’s legitimacy and status, which would assist in keeping the Stalinist dynasty in power. Additionally enhanced status would, of course, assist in gaining diplomatic leverage.

Although the North Koreans have boasted about their nuclear deterrent’s ability to hold the US and it allies at bay, it is fairly clear that North Korea has vastly overstated its ability to strike, in part because of the limited amount of fissile material available to Pyongyang and also because of its inability to field a credible delivery option for its nuclear weapons.

The North Koreans have launched long-range ballistic missiles in 1998, 2006, 2009, and 2012, with limited success. By comparison, the US test fires its new missiles scores of times to ensure that they are operationally effective. North Korea would need many more tests of all the systems, independently and together, at a much higher rate than one every few years, to have confidence the missile would even leave the launch pad, let alone approach a target with sufficient accuracy to destroy it.

This was dramatically demonstrated on 13 April 2012, by the failure of the much-hyped effort to employ a three-stage missile, which would send a satellite into space. If the missile was, as Washington and Tokyo believed, a disguised test of an ICBM, the fact that it crashed into the sea shortly after launch illustrated that North Korea’s development and testing of missiles as possible delivery vehicles had miles to go.

Joseph M. Siracusa is Professor in Human Security and International Diplomacy and Associate Dean of International Studies, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Among his numerous books are included: Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction (2008) and A Global History of the Nuclear Arms Race: Weapons, Strategy, and Politics, 2 vols., with Richard Dean Burns (2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: North Korea Theater Missile Threats, By Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS.) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Gerald O’Collins, SJ

“Pope Benedict is 78 years of age. Father O’Collins, do you think he’ll resign at 80?” “Brian,” I said, “give him a chance. He hasn’t even started yet.” It was the afternoon of 19 April 2005, and I was high above St Peter’s Square standing on the BBC World TV platform with Brian Hanrahan. The senior cardinal deacon had just announced from the balcony of St Peter’s to a hundred thousand people gathered in the square: “Habemus Papam.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been elected pope.

Less than an hour earlier, white smoke pouring from a chimney poking up from the Sistine Chapel let the world know that the cardinal electors had chosen a successor to Pope John Paul II. The bells of Rome were supposed to ring out the news at once. But it took a quarter of an hour for them to chime in. When Hanrahan asked me why the bells hadn’t come in on cue, I pointed the finger at local inefficiency: “We’re in Italy, Brian.”

I was wrong. The keys to the telephone that should have let someone contact the bellringers were in the pocket of the dean of the college of cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger. He had gone into a change room to put on his white papal attire, and didn’t hand over the keys until he came out dressed as pope.

One of the oldest cardinals ever to be elected pope, after less than eight years in office Benedict XVI has now bravely decided to retire or, to use the “correct” word, abdicate. His declining health has made him surrender his role as Bishop of Rome, successor of St Peter, and visible head of the Catholic Christendom. He no longer has the stamina to give the Church the leadership it deserves and needs.

Years ago an Irish lady, after watching Benedict’s predecessor in action, said to me: “He popes well.” You didn’t need to be a specialized Vatican watcher to notice how John Paul II and Benedict “poped” very differently.

A charismatic, photogenic, and media-savvy leader, John Paul II proved a global, political figure who did as much as anyone to end European Communism. He more or less died on camera, with thousands of young people holding candles as they prayed and wept for their papal friend dying in his dimly lit apartment above St Peter’s Square.

Now Benedict’s papacy ends very differently. He will not be laid out for several million people to file past his open coffin. His fisherman’s ring will not be ceremoniously broken. There will be no official nine days of mourning or funeral service attended by world leaders and followed on television or radio by several billion people. He will not be lifted high above the crowd like a Viking king, as his coffin is carried for burial into the Basilica of St Peter’s. The first pope to use a pacemaker will quietly walk off the world stage.

In my latest book, an introduction to Catholicism, I naturally included a (smiling) picture of Pope Benedict. But he pales in comparison with the photos of John Paul II anointing and blessing the sick on a 1982 visit to the UK; meeting the Dalai Lama before going to pray for world peace in Assisi; in a prison cell visiting Mehmet Ali Agca, who had tried to assassinate him in May 1981; and hugging Mother Teresa of Calcutta after visiting one of her homes for the destitute and dying.

Yet the bibliography of that introduction contains no book written by John Paul II either before or after he became pope. But it does contain the enduring classic by Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (originally published 1967). Both as pope and earlier, it was through the force of his ideas rather than the force of his personality that Benedict XVI exercised his leadership.

The public relations record of Pope Benedict was far from perfect. He will be remembered for quoting some dismissive remarks about Islam made by a Byzantine emperor. That 2006  speech in Regensburg led to riots and worse in the Muslim world. Many have forgotten his visit later that year to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul when he turned towards Mecca and joined his hosts in silent prayer.

Catholics and other Christians around the world hope now for a forward-looking pope who can offer fresh leadership and deal quickly with some crying needs like the ordination of married men and the return to the local churches of the decision-making that some Vatican offices have arrogated to themselves.

When he speaks at midday from his apartment to the people gathered in St Peter’s Square on 24 February, the last Sunday before his resignation kicks in, Pope Benedict will be making his final public appearance before the people of Rome. A vast crowd will have streamed in from the city and suburbs to thank him with their thunderous applause. They cherished the clear, straightforward language of his sermons and homilies, and admire him for what will prove the defining moment of his papacy—his courageous decision to resign and pass the baton to a much younger person.

Gerald O’Collins received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at Pembroke College. From 1973-2006, he taught at the Gregorian University (Rome) where he was also dean of the theology faculty (1985-91). Alone or with others, he has published fifty books, including Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction and The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions. As well as receiving over the years numerous honorary doctorates and other awards, in 2006 he was created a Companion of the General Division of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest civil honour granted through the Australian government. Currently he is a research professor of theology at St Mary’s University College,Twickenham (UK).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credits: Pope Benedict XVI during general audition By Tadeusz Górny, public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Church of the Carmine, Martina Franca, Apulia, Italy. Statues of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II By Tango7174, creative commons licence via Wikimedia Commons

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By Ennis B. Edmonds

Recently, I was discussing my academic interest with an acquaintance from my elementary school days. On revealing that I have researched and written about the Rastafarian movement, I was greeted with a look of incredulity. He followed this look with a question: “How has Rastafari assisted anyone to progress in life?” My friend assured me he was aware that prominent and accomplished Rastas exist in Jamaica, however he was convinced that Rastafari did not contribute to the social and economic mobility of most of its adherents. Sensing that my friend was espousing a notion of progress based on rising social status and increasing economic resources — reflecting his own journey from a peasant farming family to an elementary school teacher to a highly regarded principal of a number of schools to an education officer at present — I pointed out that Rastafari rejects this conventional notion of progress, especially when it is for a few at the exclusion of the many. Pointing out that I had no understanding of Rastafari until I started researching it, I left suggested some literature that he should read and hoping that next time he engages in a conversation on Rastafari, he will do so with greater understanding and appreciation.

Unfortunately, my acquaintance’s attitude towards Rastafari is widely shared by those who judge progress and personal worth by social mobility and increasing material resources within a Western cultural framework. Conversely, Rastafari has articulated a trenchant critique of Western values and institutions, asserting that they are based on exploitation and oppression of both humans and the environment. Western values and institutions have sown seeds of discord, distrust, and conflict that translate into social disharmony and all the social ills that plague contemporary societies. The rapacious exploitation of natural resources in pursuit of profit have violated sound ecological principles and will ultimately trigger an ecological backlash (are we already experiencing this in changing weather patterns?). In this respect, Rastafari is an implicit call for us to examine the foundation on which our political, economic, and cultural institutions and values are constructed. Are they designed to cater to the interest of the whole human family or the interest of those who monopolize and manipulate power? Are they informed by a desire to live in harmony with other humans and nature or by a desire to dominate both?

But Rastafari is much more than a critique of Western society; it is a fashioning of an identity grounded in a sense of the human relationship to the Divine and to the African heritage of most of its adherents. Thus for Rastas, the Divine is not just some transcendent, ethereal being, but an essential essence in all humans and a cosmic presence that pervades the universe. To be Rasta is to be awakened to one’s innate divine essence and to strive to live one’s life in harmony with the divine principles that govern the world, instead being driven to excess in their pursuit of ego-satisfaction. On a more cultural level, Rastafari seeks to cultivate for its adherents an identity and a lifestyle based on a re-appropriation on an African past. Rejecting the slave and post-slavery identity foisted upon them by colonial powers, early Rastas and their successors turned to their African heritage to reconstitute their cultural selves. Despite the derogation of Africa and the denigration of Africans in colonial discourse, Rastas proudly affirm themselves as Africans and posit that an African sense of spirituality that embraces communality and living in harmony with the forces of nature is not only in line with divine principles, but also makes for a more harmonious relationship among humans and a more sustainable future for the earth.

Many of us approach Rastafari from a sense of curiosity inspired by the dramatic imagery that dreadlocks present, rumours we have heard about the copious use of ganja (marijuana) by its adherents, or the realization that the enchanting rhythms and conscious lyrics of reggae are Rasta-inspired. However, a closer look will make us realize that Rastafari presents us with a perspective that can help us ask questions about the mainstream values and institutions of Western society and beyond. Do these values and institutions promote freedom, justice, harmony, opportunity, and sustainability? Long before the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, Rastafari has been criticizing the “downpression,” inequities, and unsustainability of the political and economic structures of the world. How about how we regard our human selves? Are we just cogs in the wheel of an economic machine? Or do we have intrinsic value that is enhanced by living in harmony with other humans and our natural environment? You need not embrace Rastafari to appreciate Marley’s lyrics from “Survival”:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ennis B. Edmonds is Associate Professor of African-American Religions and American Religions at Kenyon College, Ohio. His areas of expertise are African Diaspora Religions, Religion in America, and Sociology of Religion. His research has focused primarily on Rastafari, leading to Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers and Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.

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Image credit: Judah Lion, By Weweje [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. The longlisted entries are now available for the public vote which will produce four finalists. After a live final in March, the winner will receive £9000 towards their university education.

By Chloe Foster

After more than three months of students carefully planning and creating their entries, the Very Short Film competition has closed and the longlisted submissions have been announced.

The competition asked entrants to create a short film which would inform and inspire us. Students were free to base their entry on any subject they were passionate about. There was just one rule: films could be no longer than 60 seconds in length.

We certainly had many who managed to do this. The standard of films was impressive. How were we to whittle down the entries and choose just 12 for the longlist?

We received a real range of films from a variety of ages, characters and subjects — everything from scuba diving to the economic state of the housing market. It was great to see a mixture of academic subjects and topics of personal interest.

It must be said that the quality of the filmmaking itself was very high in some entries. However not all of these could be put through to the longlist; although artistic and clever, they didn’t inform us in the way our criteria specified.

When choosing the longlisted entries, judges looked for students who were clearly on top of their subject. We were most impressed by films that conveyed a topic’s key information in a concise way, were delivered with passion and verve, and left us wanting to find out more. By the end of our selection process, we felt that each of the films had taught us something new or made us think about a subject in a way we hadn’t before.

The sheer amount of information filmmakers managed to convey was astounding. As the Very Short Introductions editor Andrea Keegan says: “I thought condensing a large topic into 35,000 words, as we do in the Very Short Introductions books was difficult enough, but I think that this challenge was even harder. I was very impressed with the quality and variety of videos which were submitted.

“Ranging from artistic to zany, I learned a lot, and had lots of fun watching them. The longlist represents both a wide range of subjects — from the history of film to quantum locking — and a huge range in the approaches taken to get the subjects across in just one minute.”

We hope the entrants enjoyed thinking about and creating their films as much as we enjoyed watching them. We asked a few of the longlisted students what they made of the experience. Mahshad Torkan, studying at the London School of Film, tackled the political power of film: “I am very thankful for this amazing opportunity that has allowed me to reflect my values and beliefs and share my dreams with other people.  I believe that the future is not something we enter, the future is something we create.”

Maia Krall Fry is reading geology at St Andrews: “It seemed highly important to discuss a topic that has really captured my curiosity and sense of adventure. I strongly believe that knowledge of the history of the earth should be accessible to everyone.”

Matt Burnett, who is studying for an MSc in biological and bioprocess engineering at Sheffield, used his film to explore the challenges of creating cost-effective therapeutic drugs: “I felt that in a minute it would be very hard to explain my research in enough detail just using speech, and it would be difficult to demonstrate or act out. I simplify difficult concepts for myself by drawing diagrams, often spending a lot of time on them. For me it is the most enjoyable part of learning, and so I thought it would be fun to draw an animated video. If I get the chance to do it again I think I’d use lots of colours.”

So, what are you waiting for? Take a look at the 12 films and pick your favourite of these amazingly creative and intelligent entries.

Chloe Foster is from the Very Short Introductions team at Oxford University Press. This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk.

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The Duke of Wellington always has a traffic cone on his head. At least, he does when he is in Glasgow. Let me explain: outside the city’s Gallery of Modern Art on Queen Street, there is an equestrian statue of the celebrated general of the Napoleonic Wars. It was sculpted in 1840-4 by the Franco-Italian artist, Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867), who in his day was a dominant figure in the world of commemorative sculpture. Amongst his works is the statue of Richard the Lionheart, who has sat on his mount and held aloft his sword outside the Houses of Parliament since 1860.

Yet Glasgow’s lofty monument has been a magnet for pranksters –  ever since the 1980s, according to the BBC – who regularly scale the pedestal, Copenhagen’s (the horse’s) flanks and then, clinging onto the Iron Duke himself, crown him with an orange traffic cone. This has caused some controversy: the police warn that the acts of intrepid, late-night climbers (who, to be frank, may also have enjoyed the hospitality of the local hostelries) is an act of vandalism and is downright dangerous. The government-funded agency that oversees the care of the country’s historic buildings, Historic Scotland, acknowledges that embellishing Wellington with a modern piece of traffic paraphernalia is now a ‘longstanding tradition’, but emphasises that the statue is A-listed and so needs to be protected from damage – and there has indeed been damage: on different occasions, the general has lost a spur and his sword. Others argue that the ‘coning’ of Wellington is a worthy expression of the people’s sense of humour and that it is as much a part of the cityscape as its historic buildings and monuments. And indeed the statue has become iconic – not because it is a likeness of the Duke of Wellington, but because the general has a cone on his head: postcards proudly depicting this symbol of Glaswegian humour are easy to find.

This controversy sprang to mind when I was first putting together a proposal for writing a Very Short Introduction on the Napoleonic Wars. One of the reviewers very helpfully suggested that the book might consider a chapter on the conflict in historical memory and commemoration. When I came to write this, the final chapter, I considered opening it with an account of the ‘coning’ of the Duke of Wellington, but in the end I felt that such irreverence and jocularity sat rather uneasily with the content of the rest of the book, which tells a tale of aggression, international collapse, and human suffering. Yet the fact that the Duke still sits, as ever, with a garish point on his head – gravity making it lean at a jaunty angle – did make me wonder about how far the Napoleonic Wars (including, by extension, the French Revolutionary Wars from which they emerged – collectively the wars lasted from 1792 to 1815) have left a legacy that is embedded, visibly or otherwise, in our European cityscapes.

This might well be more obvious on the continent than in the British Isles, since there was a direct impact as armies rampaged across Europe – and there were therefore more sites clearly associated with Napoleonic conquest, European resistance to it, and later commemoration of the conflict. In Paris, the very same Marochetti was responsible for one of the reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the one depicting the Battle of Jemappes (one of the French Revolution’s early victories over the Austrians in 1792). The Arc was completed under the July Monarchy (1830-48), which worked hard to appropriate the Napoleonic legacy for its own political purposes. The same regime nearly awarded Marochetti the commission to create Napoleon’s tomb in the Church of the Invalides when his body was repatriated from Saint Helena. The sculptor, in fact, was producing models for this work as he was busy on Glasgow’s Wellington statue (giving the latter a pedigree that surely reinforces Historic Scotland’s mild-mannered point). Yet British towns and cities are also embedded with places that are connected with the French Wars – as barracks, as headquarters, as places of exile and refuge, as naval dockyards, as depots for PoWs, as sites of popular mobilization. Sometimes the associations are long-forgotten, sometimes they are commemorated.  The conflict is remembered in the monuments that ask us not to forget the carnage and in the individuals who are commemorated in stone and bronze. These may, like Glasgow’s Iron Duke, have become so much part of our urban environment that they are almost unnoticed unless they have a cone on their head, but the traces and memory of the French Wars in Britain’s towns and cities… now there’s a project!

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credit: Statue of Wellington, mounted. Outside the Gallery of Modern Art, Queen Street, Glasgow, Scotland [Author: Green Lane, Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons]

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As a teacher I have sometimes offered a million pounds to any student who can form any one of the following beliefs: that they can fly; that they were born on the moon; or that sheep are carnivorous. Needless to say, I have never had to pay up.  The Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass might have been able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, but that is a feat few of us can match. In fact, it is doubtful whether the formation of belief is under voluntary control at all. Adopting a belief seems to be more like digesting or metabolizing and rather unlike looking or speaking—it seems to be something that happens to one rather than something that one does.

But unlike digestion or metabolizing, the upshot of belief-formation has a direct impact on how we behave. Although we don’t always act in accordance with our beliefs, it goes without saying that what we believe plays a huge role in governing what we do. More importantly, a rational person ought to act on the basis of their beliefs; indeed, failing to act in light of one’s beliefs is a form of irrationality.

In and of themselves the two claims that we have just examined—that belief-formation is involuntary and that a person’s beliefs justify their actions—are unobjectionable. Trouble looms, however, when we put them together. From Francisco Pizarro to Tomás de Torquemada, and from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Anders Breivik, history is littered with the carnage wrought by the actions of sincere but misguided individuals—people who have regarded the superiority of their religion, race or ideology as legitimizing actions that we regard as horrific.

How should we regard such individuals? If the formation of belief is involuntary, then, one might think, we cannot justifiably condemn them for holding the beliefs that motivated their actions. Can we condemn them for acting on those beliefs? Arguably not, for how else is a person to act if not on the basis of their beliefs? But if we cannot condemn them either for forming their beliefs or for acting in light of their beliefs, what grounds do we have for condemning them at all?

Some might be tempted to respond that we don’t have any grounds for condemning such individuals, and that those who act on the basis of their sincerely held beliefs shouldn’t be denounced for what they do, no matter how awful their deeds. We could, of course, continue to regard such agents as legally responsible for their crimes, but—according to this line of thought—we have no grounds for holding them morally guilty for the actions that they carry out in light of their convictions.

Although some might be happy to settle for this solution, I suspect that for many of us it is a response of last resort—a position to be adopted only when all other avenues are exhausted. Are there any other avenues available to us?

Perhaps we were too quick to embrace the idea that belief-formation is always involuntary. Although it is clear that we cannot simply decide to adopt any old proposition that is put to us, it doesn’t follow—and it may not be true—that we have no intentional control over what we believe. For example, it is surely plausible to suppose that we have some control over whether or not to subject our beliefs to critical scrutiny. One can deliberate about whether or not to believe those propositions that are open questions for one. And if deliberation lies within one’s voluntary control, then perhaps one can be justifiably blamed for failing to deliberate appropriately.

Perhaps so, but does this solve our puzzle? I suspect not. For one thing, I very much doubt whether the beliefs that motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Anders Breivik were ‘open questions’ from their point of view.  Instead, I suspect that they regarded them as self-evident truths, claims no more deserving of critical scrutiny than the belief that 2+2=4 or the belief that there is water at the bottom of the ocean. Moreover, even if they were guilty of failing to subject their beliefs to the kind of scrutiny that they should have, that failing would surely be relatively minor rather than an instance of gross moral turpitude of the kind for which we are inclined to hold them guilty.

So, how should we resolve this puzzle? I don’t have a full solution to offer, but here is one line of thought that I find tempting. Although belief-formation is responsive to evidence, it is also influenced by desire and motivation: how we take the world to be is heavily influenced by how we would like the world to be. And one of the central sources of belief in the superiority of one’s religion, race or ideology is surely the desire to dominate one’s fellow human beings.

And here, perhaps, we can see the hint of a solution to our puzzle. What the Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds and Anders Breiviks of this world are guilty of is not the fact that they have voluntarily adopted unjustified beliefs, for we have seen that it is doubtful whether their beliefs were voluntarily acquired. Rather, their guilt lies in the character traits that their beliefs manifest. Our condemnation of them is justified insofar as the beliefs that motivated their actions were grounded in intolerance, arrogance and self-aggrandizement.

Tim Bayne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He has taught at the University of Canterbury, Macquarie University, and the University of Oxford. His main interests are in the philosophy of psychology, with a particular focus on consciousness. A native of New Zealand, he divides his time between Manchester and Geneva. His is the author of Thought: A Very Short Introduction .

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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 Image Credit: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, upon capture. Taken by U.S. forces when KSM was captured  [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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We spoke to Uta Frith, author of Autism: A Very Short Introduction and asked her about diagnosis, the perceived links between autism and genius, and how autism is portrayed in culture.

Autism was not identified before the 1940s. Weren’t there any autistic people before this?

Autism was not a new phenomenon starting in the middle of the 20^th century, but it needed people like Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger to point out the striking constellation of poor social communication and stereotypic behaviours for others to see it too. Clinicians used the terms ‘infantile’ or ‘early childhood autism’ and located it among the neglected population of children who were born ‘mentally deficient’. Gradually clinicians became aware that most of this neglected population showed similar problems in varying degrees, and that specialist services were needed to educate children who could not communicate appropriately. They embraced the idea of the autism spectrum. So, just as there has been an increase in the autism spectrum diagnosis, there has been a corresponding decrease in the diagnosis of mental retardation.

But the spectrum idea had even wider implications. The constellation of social impairments and stereotypic behaviours can also be found in people whose intellectual abilities are average or superior. Previously these people would have been regarded as loners or possibly schizophrenic. It turned out that many families had an eccentric uncle, cousin, or grandfather! From the 1990s the diagnosis of Asperger syndrome became hugely popular and preferred to the diagnosis of autism. This popularity also reflected the gradual recognition of outstanding talents in autism, which is particularly visible in people who are also articulate. The loosening of criteria from early childhood autism, which remains rare, to the whole autism spectrum, which is not at all rare, has helped to make autism one of the most frequently used diagnostic categories today. In the US, 1 in 88 people currently have the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

I have read that some people with Asperger syndrome claim that they do not have a disorder, but that they are just different from ‘neurotypicals’.

Asperger syndrome is a label that is going to disappear from the official diagnostic criteria. This is because clinicians believe that autism spectrum conditions can be diagnosed regardless of severity and regardless of differences in ability. But in its mildest form is autism a disorder? Certainly, the border between autistic and neurotypical is hard to establish. Many of us are a bit geeky and a bit egocentric and a bit obsessive. It could all be just a matter of degree. However, this argument has serious drawbacks. Educational support, psychiatric and other care will only be given to people who have a disorder, and on the whole autistic people do need specialist education and care. My hope is that eventually we might be able to identify clear-cut differences, but not in observable behaviour. The distinctions are likely to be in the underlying mental mechanisms that atypical brain development disturbs in particular ways.  But this is still speculation, and arguments about what it means to be autistic will continue.

Are most scientists and artists on the autism spectrum?

A supremely self-assured egocentrism coupled with obsession with a particular idea or technique seems to be the mark of genius. We expect a genius to be oblivious of the trivial aspects of a conventional social life. We should be suspicious of this stereotype, because on the one hand, not all artists and scientists are like this. On the other hand, some people may behave like this to persuade other people that they are artists. However, the idea that autism and genius go together has given new impetus to the stereotype. Now we can label the fact that a famous artist or scientist habitually withdraws from company and shows arrogance and blatant socially inappropriate behaviour: it must be autism! However, the likeness to autism is only superficial.  There are many reasons for people to be socially odd and to be single-minded to the point of obsession. In the case of the brilliant physicist Paul Dirac, the case can be made that he had Asperger syndrome and Graham Farmelo’s marvellous biography (“The Strangest Man”, 2009) provides a lot of support for this possibility.

Autism has been portrayed in books, plays, and in films. Which can you recommend?

Rain Man was made in 1988, is one of the first big movies that portrayed autism, and indeed autism in an adult who had many endearing traits. This was hugely important, to make people aware of the fact that autistic children grow up to be autistic adults and that they could be heroes. In making this film the director and actors consulted autistic people and their parents. This made the portrayal by Dustin Hoffman exceptionally perceptive.

The most frequent aspect that films and books portray is savant talent, for example, an encyclopedic memory. In some cases this is mere caricature of what might be found in real life. The film I like best never mentions autism, and was made in 1979. It is called “Being There”. Here Peter Sellers portrays a man who outshines sophisticated socialites by his innocence. Mark Haddon with his 2003 best selling book “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” succeeded in telling a good story from the point of view of an autistic boy. He made a huge contribution to awareness of autism and a more tolerant attitude to autistic people by reaching a large readership.

Uta Frith is the author of Autism: A Very Short Introduction and Autism and Talent. She is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credits: Book jacket of The Strangest Man from Faber.co.uk used for the purposes of illustration; Book jacket of Autism and Talent, all rights reserved by Oxford University Press; Photo still captured from Youtube clip of Rain Man.

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By Peter Holland

The metaphor of the ‘evolutionary tree’ is powerful. Closely related species, such as octopus and squid, can be pictured as twigs sitting near each other on a small branch, in turn connected to larger and larger branches, each representing more distant evolutionary relationships. Every animal species, past and present, is a twig somewhere on the vast tree of life. But what is the shape of this metaphorical tree? Can we find the correct place for all the twigs, or perhaps even just the largest branches? In short, who is related to whom? To solve this would be to reconstruct the history of animal life on our planet.

Solving the puzzle is not trivial. Even with just a hundred species, there are more possible trees than there are protons in the universe. And of course there are millions of animal species alive today, so the number of possible evolutionary trees is simply unimaginable. Yet remarkable progress has been made.

In 1857, Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Thomas Henry Huxley: “The time will come, I believe, though I shall not live to see it, when we shall have fairly true genealogical trees of each great kingdom of nature.” Darwin did not live to see it. Through most of the twentieth century, biologists argued fervently about the tree of animal life, with every expert having different opinions. For example, many felt that ‘segmented worms’ such as earthworms and leeches must be close relatives of other segmented animals, such as insects and spiders. Perhaps simple-looking animals, such as flatworms and parasitic flukes, were on a branch emerging near the base of the animal tree of life. These were commonly held views, and are still found in many textbooks. They are, however, wrong.

In the 1990s, a new source of data emerged that has changed our view of animal evolution theory. There is a set of genes used by all animal cells and these genes accumulate mutations to their DNA sequences over time. The more closely related two species are, the more similar their DNA sequences. With new technologies it is possible to find the DNA sequence of hundreds of genes, from hundreds of species, and amass vast data sets for comparison between species. In the light of this new information, many of the old arguments have melted away. And the DNA sequences give a remarkably consistent picture. It seems we can now describe the “fairly true genealogical tree” of animal evolution, stretching back over half a billion years. We can deduce that soon after the origin of the first animals, most likely simple balls of cells, several major evolutionary branches separated. One branch lead to sponges, one to comb jellies, one to a little-known group called placozoans, one to jellyfish and sea anemones, and one to the first ‘bilaterians’. You and I are bilaterians, as are worms, snails, insects, and millions more: these are the animals with front and back, top and bottom, and left and right. The bilaterian part of the animal kingdom then split into three huge branches: the Lophotrochozoa (including snails, segmented worms, and many more), the Ecdysozoa (including insects, spiders, nematodes and more) and the Deuterostomia (for example, starfish, sea urchins, and vertebrates). The vertebrates branched and branched again; giving ever smaller groups of closely related species, until eventually we found our own place in the great tree of life. Nestled among the apes, monkeys and other primates, we sit on a mammalian branch along with, perhaps surprisingly, the rats, mice, and rabbits.

Why does knowing the tree of life matter? There are practical applications, because knowing which animals are closely related helps if we wish to extrapolate findings between species, for medical research, for instance.  But there is a wider, more fundamental reason. Having the tree of life provides the essential framework for understanding biology. We can now compare anatomy, physiology, behaviour, ecology, and development between animal species in a more meaningful way than ever before. We can see how characters changed along each branch of the tree of life. In short, we can now start to build a picture of the pattern and process of animal evolution.

Peter Holland is the author of The Animal Kingdom: A Very Short Introduction. He is Linacre Professor of Zoology and Head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. After a degree in Zoology and a PhD in Genetics he has spent the last 20 years undertaking research into the evolution of the animal kingdom, focussing primarily on the genetic and developmental differences between animal groups. He has published over 150 research papers on animal development and evolution.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image credits: Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch, his first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837): public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Vertebrates image by Bob the Wikimedian: creative commons licence via Wikimedia Commons.

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