As The Selfish Gene turns 40, the author reflects on what he has learned about writing and science
Because we count in tens, centennial years get publishers all excited and decennials are the next best thing. You would hardly expect mine to overlook 2016 as the 40th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, 30th of The Blind Watchmaker, 20th of Climbing Mount Improbable and 10th of my biggest seller, The God Delusion.
Of course, counting began with the “digital” aid of fingers, and we still count in tens. The origin of the pentadactyl limb is a mystery lost in the Devonian swamps, where our lobe-finned ancestors crawled out of water. Whatever the reason, we land vertebrates are stuck with five digits per limb (even horses and cattle start with five). Thus physicists use powers of 10 (“orders of magnitude”) to express large numbers with too many noughts for your comfort. If we’d had four digits per limb it might have been a real blessing because octal arithmetic is more binary-friendly than decimal, and computer technology might now be centuries ahead (or at least an octal century of 64 years).
0 comments:
Post a Comment