Compendium 2011

Compendium

COMPENDIUM The NLCS Academic Journal 2010 – 2011 2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦

Welcome to the first edition of

Compendium The New Academic Journal for North London Collegiate School.

Each year the school sees the publication of numerous newspapers, magazines and journals giving voice to the work of students, their enthusiasm and scholarship across a wide range of subjects. So why Compendium? The aim has been to establish a journal which brings together students and staff in a celebration of the academic community that is North London. If it can stand for the spirit of academic enquiry that lies at the heart of the school community, if it can give an opportunity for students and colleagues to write and share their ideas and research, if it gives some insight into the richness and diversity of independent academic work in the school then I, for one, will be happy indeed.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wrote in an essay entitled ‘Of Innovations’ that ‚As births of living creatures, at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations‛, but I am sure that you will concur with me that this innovation proves the great man was not always right.

I am grateful to both the students and the members of staff who have bravely come forward with material for this first edition, but most especially to Emily Newton who has singlehandedly commissioned material, edited it, designed every aspect of Compendium and in so doing laid an impressive foundation, not to say challenge for subsequent editors to build on.

Peter Langdale, Academic Tutor

This first edition of Compendium contains a really exciting range of articles, from a crash course in Esperanto and Simplish, to debating the purpose of evolutionary history. There is definitely something for everyone in here, whether you love science, poetry or even just use Facebook. Now, at the risk of sounding like a BAFTA speech, I’d just like to dole out a few thank yous: When we sat down to decide what we wanted to achieve with this journal, one of the things that most stood out was to include articles both from students in any year and also from teachers. So I’d particularly like to thank Ms Burdett and Ms Anslow for making the first contributions to what I hope will be a long lasting tradition. The enthusiastic response was so exciting and assuring, so thank you to all the contributors for writing such great articles that I genuinely enjoyed reading. And finally, I’d like to wish next year’s editors (yes, I have multiplied!) the very best of luck.

Emily Newton, Editor 2010-2011

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Contents CLASSICS Heroism in the Iliad - Josephine Rabinowitz

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ECONOMICS Elephants, Missiles and Franchising: Is Jeju in danger?

- Caroline Taylor

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ENGLISH With How Sad Steps... Larkin vs. Sidney - Laura Braigel

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Why we should all be reading Emily Dickinson - TA Anslow

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GEOGRAPHY Global Trade Disparities and Free Trade - Isabel Wheeler

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HISTORY Civil Rights: is peaceful protest successful?

- Ronit Wineman

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LANGUAGES Constructed Languages, Esperanto and Simplish - Alison Fung

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MATHEMATICS Derangements and Secret Santa - JL Burdett

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PHILOSOPHY The Decline of Heroism?

- Shobana Sivalingham

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Does Facebook know you better than you know yourself?

- Meera Somji

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SCIENCES Is evolutionary history just stamp collecting?

- Shabnam Singhal

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Josephine Rabinowitz

Classics

I The Iliad: In Chapter 16, who demonstrates the greater heroism, Patroclus or Hektor?

All Homeric heroes must strike a fine balance, whereby they show courage by seeking glory in battle, yet do not provoke their own deaths though recklessness. Although in Book 16 of the Iliad Patroclus tips the balance and is subsequently killed, his error is the archetypal heroic error, ‚the sort of error a good man would make‛1, as he seeks glory in order to honour, Achilleus. Even Homeric heroes, being human, must at times make mistakes – thus, one whose mistake is so well intentioned must be a great hero.

The key tension between courage and carefulness, bringing either ‘glory’ or ‘shame’ is explored extensively in the Iliad. Patroclus shows immense courage in battle, yet not to seek glory for himself but for Achilleus, who allows him to fight ‘so that you can win great honour and glory for me’2. This seems the ultimate sacrifice for a hero whose primary function and desire is to gain glory. The fact that Achilleus trusts Patroclus to do this for him is hugely complimentary and heightens his heroic status. Patroclus’ ‘single desire’ is ‘to fight at the head of the Myrmidons’, which highlights his courage and wish for glory, and this is contrasted effectively with Hektor, who flees the battlefield, leaving his men ‘snarled and blocked by the ditch the Achaians had dug’. Even if here Hektor demonstrates a certain respect for his life, his abandoning of the Trojans in the face of danger also shows a selfish cowardice that is in no way heroic and is later accused of ‘shirking battle’. Patroclus behaves in a way that is directly antithetical to this when he ‘held his course for where he saw the greatest seethe of troops’ – showing not only tremendous courage, but also rashness unsuitable for a hero.

Armour in the Iliad is often associated with honour; Patroclus’ wishes that they could ‘strip the armour from *Sarpedon’s+ shoulders’, and explains the subsequent struggle over Sarpedon’s body. The killing, ‚Patroclus’s greatest achievement‛3 is a critical moment; earlier, Sarpedon had remarked to Glaukos, ‘I shall be a shame and disgrace to you all your days without end, if the Achaians strip me of my armour’. When Patroclus fi-

nally manages to do this, the armour is described as ‘gleaming’, a word associated with glory. The procurement of the armour is important to Patroclus as proof at the Achaean camp that he has killed Sarpedon, and so would bring him glory, raising his heroic status. However, the disarming of Patroclus by Apollo should not be seen as the stripping of his honour; as a god, it is an unfair contest, and, as Edwards points out, Patroclus must be disarmed so as to avoid ‚awkwardness‛ 4 – Patroclus must be killed, but Achilleus’ armour cannot be pierced, as it has been made by Hephaestus. When Hektor first flees, Homer makes a distinction between the man himself and his armour – ‘Hektor’s swiftfooted horses carried him and his armour away’ – indicating that his honour has been marred by this cowardly behaviour. By contrast, although Hektor’s death is foreshadowed when Zeus gives him Achilleus’ helmet during the disarming of Patroclus, the word ‘gave’ suggests a divine favour, indicating that in the lead up to Hektor’s death, Zeus wishes to honour him.

Glory through victory is another way for a Homeric hero to gain honour: as Patroclus is dying, Hektor boasts over him. Redfield maintains that the hero ‚makes himself by asserting himself‛5, and so Hektor must boast over a dying Patroclus in order to demonstrate that he is as great as he claims to be. However, Hektor’s boasts are undermined to a great extent for a number of reasons. First, referring to himself in the third person in order mythologize himself, he says that to defend the Trojans, ‘Hektor’s swift horses sped into battle’. Since Hektor was in fact reluctant to rejoin battle until persuaded by Apollo, the discrepancy between Hektor’s words and actions is made clear. Secondly, Hektor tries to taunt Patroclus, with his assumption that Patroclus has failed Achilleus, whom Hektor believes instructed Patroclus to kill him. However, Hektor is completely mistaken here, as Achilleus’ instructions were simply that ‘when you have driven *the Trojans+ from the ships, come back’. This not only creates a sense of dramatic irony but also reduces Hektor’s glory – his inaccurate taunt creates a sense of vulnerability, as his greatest moment is undercut by misjudgement. To some extent, this increases Hektor’s heroism by human weakness, yet it also serves to subvert his rhetoric.

Hektor also seems almost vindictive – he will not pass up the opportunity to subtly taunt Achilleus, as his use of the word ‘remaining’ sets passive Achilleus in opposition with himself in his moment of victory.

Whilst this undercuts Hektor, Patroclus’ dignified response simply heightens his heroism, as he does not

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By Zoe Ilivitzky

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defend himself (and Achilleus) by contradicting Hektor, as would appear weak, but rather prophesies that Achilleus will kill Hektor - arguably more effective rebuttal.

Hektor’s self-confidence is apparent as he addresses Patroclus for the final time. However, it could be argued that self-confidence is gallant and perhaps even essential in a Homeric hero, here, it undermines Hektor as he addresses Patroclus’ dead body with the uncertain and somewhat desperate words; ‚Who knows if Achilleus, son of lovely-haired Thetis, might be struck by my spear first, and lose his life before me?‛, expressing some hope that he may, in the future, kill Achilleus. This aggressive statement is undercut by the very fact that Hektor feels the need to retaliate to the dead body, and highlights Hektor’s apparent ignorance of his own ability. Later when Hektor sees Achilleus approaching, he also fails to stand and fight, but flees. Hektor is finally degraded by his failure to hit Automedon, rendering him impotent in his final action of the book.

A Homeric hero, whilst definitely human, and thus prone to human suffering and weakness is also capable of superhuman achievement. Patroclus not only kills Sarpedon, simply lists the names of nine men that he has killed. Homer comments that ‘every one of the others had his thoughts on flight’. His killing spree continues, culminating in the slaying of twenty-seven men, and is likened to a god. Patroclus kills Kebriones, and Hektor kills ‘godlike Epigeus’ with just a stone, which also serves to emphasise both heroes’ superhuman military ability. However, of greater significance is Homer’s implication that Patroclus almost exceeds his fate, and that Patroclus would have taken Troy, had he not been prevented by fate. This is the greatest compliment that Homer can pay a hero – that Patroclus was fighting so fiercely that were it not for the necessary divine interference he would have captured Troy. Here, ‘aisa’, and its synonym ‘moira’, are both ‚a personification of ‘what, in retrospect, was bound to happen’, cooperated with divine and human agents‛. It is impossible for a Homeric character to actually exceed their fate, as this would mean an unworkable alteration to the oral tradition.

Thus, Homer is here exalting Patroclus, whose achievement is so exceptional that he would have captured Troy were it not simply impossible.

However, this is not to say that Patroclus is completely governed by fate, and never had any free will, for his death was at least in part due to a fault of his own.

We are told that ‘if *Patroclus+ had kept to the instruction of the son of Peleus, he would have escaped the vile

doom of black death’, which indicates a choice: between obeying Achilleus and living, and seeking further glory, and death. Patroclus chooses glory, a mistake, and it is this mistake that caused his death; hence Homer’s judgment, ‘and this was a fatal error, poor fool’ when Patroclus continues to fight after killing Sarpedon. Patroclus is called ‘poor fool’ at two other points in Book 16: first when Homer gives a prolepsis of his death, commenting ‘so he spoke in entreaty, the poor fool – what he was begging would be a wretched death for himself and his own destruction’. The other is when Hektor boasts over dying Patroclus, accusing him of considering himself capable of sacking Troy.

When he acts in a way that will lead directly to his death, and finally as he is dying, it is illustrated how inextricably interconnected free will and fate are in the Iliad. Fate forms the framework for what must happen, and the characters must attempt to work within this framework. So although we must condemn Patroclus for bringing about his own death by trying to go beyond the limits of his fate, we can also applaud him for his courage and humanity in doing so.

However, Hektor also exhibits human weakness.

His misjudgement is apparent primarily when he wrongly guesses Achilleus’ instruction to Patroclus, but also when Apollo must persuade him to rejoin battle. The emphatic positioning of ‘uncertain’ underlines Hektor’s doubt. Although at times these weaknesses can undermine the Homeric hero – as they arguably do with Hektor – they also humanise him. For example, it is easy to sympathise with Patroclus when he cries to Achilleus ‘like a little girl’ at the beginning of the book, since we see him as ‚a loyal Greek, feeling deeply for his fellow-soldiers’ plight‛7. These insights into the two heroes’ characters are explored further in the similie of Hektor’s physical superiority, shown by his depiction as a lion, an animal far more glamorous than Patroclus’ boar. However, the superior quality that Patroclus possesses is encapsulated in the word ‘akamanta’, meaning ‘panting hard’. Patroclus’ refusal to give up is what marks him out as such a superb Homeric hero, this would have resonated with a Greek audience, who would have been extremely impressed with Patroclus’ resilience. Hektor’s portrayal as a lion is exactly how he would wish to be seen: as gallant, courageous and majestic. Yet often in Book 16 this seems to be just a façade – Hektor appears as the hollow exterior of a Homeric hero, who shows courage only when it is easy, and filches glory from Euphorbus and Apollo by dealing Patroclus the final blow. Patro-

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clus’ determination is far more appealing than the less valiant Hektor.

Redfield asserts that a critical part of heroic balance is that the ‚hero becomes great by insisting on his own greatness, while presenting proper modesty before the far greater gods‛8. The hero must respect the gods and hope for divine favour, understanding that however great a mortal they may be, the gods are still superior.

This can be seen early in book 16, when Achilleus, arguably the greatest Homeric hero, prays to Zeus and pours a libation into a goblet from ‘which no other man would ever drink’. Zeus’ answer to this prayer indicates that he believes Patroclus to be greater than Hektor. For Achilleus begs him to ‘strengthen the heart within [Patroclus], so that Hektor can see whether my lieutenant proves his skill to fight on his own’. Zeus ‘granted’ this part of his prayer, thus suggesting Patroclus’ dominance over, or at least equality with, Hektor. Patroclus also demonstrates his knowledge of the gods’ supremacy when he feels Achilleus’ passivity could be forgiven ‘if there is some prophecy known in your heart which prevents you *from fighting+, or some word from Zeus’.

Hektor too shows respect for the gods when his reason for rejoining battle is that ‘he could tell the swing of Zeus’ sacred scales’.

It is when Patroclus temporarily forgets this balance, and has the audacity to fight ‘like a god’, failing to see the real god Apollo in ‘the battle’s fury’, that he must die. Redfield maintains that ‚so long as the god is on his side, this combination [of stressing his greatness without showing hubris+ is easy‛9 – the gods evidently favour Hektor, as Apollo both coaxes him back into battle, and helps him to kill Patroclus. He implies two things. First, this speech exudes confidence in his own greatness, asserting that it is only due to fate that he is dying, and that he could have killed twenty men like Hektor. Secondly, Patroclus suggests that divine interference demeans Hektor, as he alone would not have been able to kill Patroclus, but was ‚given‛ victory by the gods, although it could be argued that divine interference heightens Hektor’s importance as the gods deem him worthy of their efforts. However, Hektor is relegated to third in the list of Patroclus’ killers, following Apollo and Euphorbus. The fact that another mortal was able to injure Patroclus before Hektor further discredits him. William Allan argues that ‚Eurphorbus’ intervention < has a meaningful impact on the audience’s perception of Hektor’s character‛ 10, as it sullies his victory. The Homeric hero must also be a social fig-

ure, one who cares for his men. Patroclus demonstrates this primarily by his relations Achilleus: by his wish to gain glory for Achilleus, and his dying prophetic threat that Achilleus will kill Hektor. Patroclus accuses Achilleus of being selfish – ‘what good will you do for any other man< if you do not save the Argives from shameful destruction?’, and from this we can infer that Patroclus’ motives for battle are relatively selfless. Similarly, the first time Hektor is mentioned in book 16, even though ‘he knew well now the battle was turning to victory against him’, he still ‘held his ground and tried to save his loyal companions’. Hektor later boasts that he is ‘renowned’ for ‘keeping the day of compulsion’ from the Trojans – that is, for preventing the destruction of Troy. However, Hektor is also portrayed as unwilling to fight: Glaukos berates him for having ‘wholly forgotten your allies’, as does Asios for ‘shirking battle’. Thus, Patroclus is the greater social figure, as he does not ever err in this role.

I would argue that Patroclus demonstrates greater heroism primarily because his death is due to being too heroic. Patroclus’ temporary dismissal of his human limitations and his desire to gain glory means that he almost exceeds his fate. By contrast, Hektor, who must be persuaded to fight, is only then the third to kill Patroclus. Indeed, Homer’s implication that Patroclus would have captured Troy – were it not for the restraints placed on him by the oral tradition and his inability to change the plot – raises Patroclus’ heroic status immeasurably. This is the way in which Homer can honour and exalt Patroclus to the greatest extent.

Notes 1. James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the ‘Iliad’ , (1994), p128.

2. Homer, ‘The Iliad’, Penguin Classics (1987), p255. All other English quotations from the Iliad refer to this edition.

3. Mark W. Edwards, Homer: Poet of ‘The Iliad’, JHUP (1990), p261.

4. Mark W. Edwards, op.cit., p264.

5. James M. Redfield, op.cit., p129.

6. Seth L. Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s ‘Iliad’, UCP (1984), p63.

7. Peter Jones, ‘The Iliad’ as Tragedy, Omnibus., p33.

8. James M. Redfield, op. cit., p130.

9. Ibid., p130.

10. William Allan, Arms and the Man: Euphorbus, Hector, and the Death of Patroclus, Classical.

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Economics

Caroline Taylor

II Elephants, Missiles and Franchising Is Jeju in Danger?

It has become apparent with all the recent hubbub about Jeju that I still suffer from a shocking lack of knowledge of our South Korean counterpart, primarily believing that there must be lots of elephants in Jeju, based on the evidence that it was a lyric in our recent Canons Follies. As it takes away so many of our teachers with its calls of adventures in a sunnier climate I am left wondering what is its draw? Elephants? Why would you start up a school in Jeju? But more than this I am also worried for our South Korean counterpart.

With the recent attacks upon Yeonpyeong Island, a small South Korean fishing island, I cannot help myself asking is Jeju safe from the belligerence of the North Korean State? How can the North Korean regime be controlled?

First I think a broader understanding of the island itself is needed to understand Jeju’s draw: Jeju is an ovular, almost egg-shaped, volcanic island; 40 miles across, 16 miles down and lying 60 miles off the coast of South Korea. At its centre rests the dormant volcano Mount Halla which peaks at 1,950 metres, holding a lake within its crater. The surrounding area is now a national park as similar crater-formed hills, seaside waterfalls and lava tunnels create a breath-taking paradise.

Moreover, this island, with its oceanic climate, supports a variety of sub-tropical plants upon its slopes; disappointingly, I am pretty sure that there are in fact no elephants in Jeju (at least none have been seen within the school compound). Having painted this image of such a paradise, I know what you are thinking: Edgware was never like this. Where is our dormant, semi-tropical volcano? Canons Park, our closest contact to nature, is overrun by armies of dogs and their walkers, wearing their uniform of sturdy Wellingtons and Barbour coats, whilst wielding in their hands either a long stick to throw, or, for the more technologically possessed, a plastic ‘dog ball thrower’ and a ball.

But, perhaps a brief history of the island is also due at this point: according to legend, life on this island began as three demi-gods emerged from Samsunghyeol (and no, not the phone company) on the northern slopes of Mount Halla. It then continued as an inde-

pendent kingdom which went by the name of ‘Tamraguk’ in honour of one of its rulers. In 1121 AD it was renamed Jeju. The Yuan dynasty in China established a military governor on the island in 1273; this lasted for over a hundred years, and was then replaced by governorship from the Korean mainland. During this period: 1392 to 1910 it was predominantly used as a place of political exile and for grazing horses. However, from 1910 to 1953 Jeju, with Korea, was annexed by Japan and in September 1948 Jeju had its very own uprising and the island came to be listed as an ‘enemy zone’ by the government of the Republic of Korea. Only recently, on 1 July 2006 has Jeju become the first and only special autonomous province in South Korea.

But what is Jeju’s significance now? Its lack of accommodating harbours on its coast has allowed it to develop in relative peace from the upheaval of large container ports on its coast. And its principal exports remain agricultural, with its main crop being sweet potato. Yet this island is also crucial to South Korea as it supplies the national demand for beer with its annual barley crop. Moreover, its tropical climate has also accommodated the production of oranges on the southern coast, whilst on its northern slopes a peculiar species of mushroom grows; both remain important exports. Marine products are also of great importance with seaweed and shellfish being collected by skilled women divers and a particular clam’s shell furnishing valuable mother -of-pearl used for inlaid lacquer. One can imagine the feast that school food will represent to the future boarders at our Jeju franchise: rather than our soggy fish fingers and oily chips, they will be proffered an option of shellfish accompanied with a portion of roast sweet potatoes or perhaps some fresh fish fried in beer-batter with a salad of oranges and crispy seaweed.

Yet all this does not explain why we are extending the North London Collegiate School Empire to this far corner of the world; so why did she set her cap at Jeju? As one of the Asian Tiger Economies, South Korea has enjoyed astonishingly high rates of growth over the last 40 years or so with its GDP increasing nearly a hundredfold. Its living standards are now even better than many countries in the European Union. With this economic growth a significant group of well-off middle class families have appeared; inevitably desiring to give their children a prestigious, and therefore Western, education. However the prohibition placed upon teaching in English by the South Korean government has prevented the development of schools offering such an ex-

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perience on the mainland, while Jeju’s recently gained semi-autonomous status has allowed it to escape such restrictions. Thus perhaps this is an ingenious move to fill a gap in the market. Not aimed as a boarding school for international students, but for domestic students, it seeks to exploit the hopes of middle-class South Koreans for a Western education, without the financial and emotional costs of sending them abroad. Thus perhaps our franchise in Jeju is not so odd an idea, but rather a cunning plan to fill a gap in the education market.

Yet I remain concerned for Jeju’s safety. Last November North Korea launched its first major military attack against South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953. The artillery barrage fired 170 missiles on Yeonpyeong Island, killing two marines, two civilians, injuring several and burning houses. For many South Koreans this attack was the first ‘act of war’ on their land that they had witnessed and so the retaliatory missile bombardment of only 80 shells was perceived by many as somewhat disappointing. Some even argued that the USA should station nuclear weapons in the South as a deterrent to the North. However, the North Korean regime is a sensitive one and dislikes direct threats to its power; South Korean politicians therefore fear that retaliating too strongly against the North would provoke further attacks, especially against their capital, Seoul, which lies only 35km from the contentious border. However, as North Korea is an unpredictable power with nuclear capabilities, international intervention is called for to contain the threat.

International pressure has been previously used as the preferred tool to control the North Korean state.

However, the reluctance of China, the Kim regime’s main backer, to take a tough stance has rendered coordinated efforts difficult. It has been particularly argued that only with strong action from China can any success in dealing with North Korea be achieved. China, described as the ‘big brother’ of the North Korean regime, seeks stability in this region. She fears both that the outbreak of war on the peninsular would cause damage to China and that if the regime should collapse millions of impoverished North Koreans would pour into China seeking refuge and jobs. China therefore supports the regime as a bulwark against her fears. Meanwhile the North Korean regime itself appears to be all too willing to use war as a tool of diplomacy: a tool used to bring countries to the negotiating table. This situation must inevitably threaten China’s desire for stability. Therefore to persuade China herself of this threat, with her

position as a global power and her close relationship with Korea, may prove to be the key to controlling this tinderbox state.

But even when coordinated international efforts have brought North Korea to the negotiating table, North Korea has proved a fickle partner. For example in 2006 following the UN Security Council’s condemnation of the North Korean testing of long-range missiles, North Korea sought an apology. At its refusal North Korea declared that she would never return to the sixparty talks between herself, America, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia which had sought to end its nuclear programmes in return for further humanitarian aid. Similarly the regime recently chose to unveil a uranium enriching plant in direct contravention of the sanctions of the International Community. These examples demonstrate both North Korean belligerence and sensitivity, which must be a threat to the future of South Korea as the North’s main target, and therefore to the safety of Jeju and our teachers, called up to teach on the front line of the North London Collegiate School Empire.

So while our Jeju franchise may appear a paradise, surrounded by a World Heritage site, perhaps the threat of nuclear strike will continue to loom over its head. While this article may have been given to parhaps just a little exaggeration, it is true that the belligerent North Korean regime remains a difficult and unpredictable animal to handle and perhaps, only with China’s condemnation, will the International Community be able to successfully restrain it. Of course, my worries for Jeju were somewhat allayed as I saw that our new franchise lies upon an island about as far south as it is possible to go and still be in Korea. I therefore have high hopes that our new franchise in South Korea shall successfully evade North Korean missile attack.

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Laura Braigel

English

III Comparing Larkin’s Sad Steps and Sidney’s With How Sad Steps Sad Steps Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

Four o’ clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under a cavernous, wind-picked sky.

There’s something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow Loosely as canon smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High, preposterous and separate— Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No, One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can’t come again, But is for others undiminished elsewhere.

Philip Larkin

Poets condense and perfect the communication of a finite range of human experience. Consequently, as in all art forms, concepts are revisited, surfacing after time stripped or embellished by new perspective. Whether it be the imposing neoclassical constructions of the Third Reich, or the boom in Gothic fiction seen in the Victorian era, ideas of the past tend to be adopted and re-examined. Often it’s easy to see why; Hitler admired the power of the Roman Empire, and stole other cultural elements such as the Saluto Romano in styling his own authority. Moreover, Victorian life was so structured around religious and social constraints that writing combining romance and horror may have had appeal in its escapism. When looking at how circumstance shapes creativity one centres in on the extremes; the great times and the dreadful. Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586) lived through the intellectual transformation of the Renaissance; a cultural revolution which led pursuits such as painting and architecture into the Modern Era. His sonnet

‘With how sad steps…’

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies !

How silently, and with how wan a face !

What, may it be that even in heavenly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?

Sure, if that long with love-acquainted eyes Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case; I read it in thy looks; thy languish’d grace To me that feel the like, thy state descries.

Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me, Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?

Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

Do they call virtue there, ungratefulness?

Philip Sidney ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.’

Alan Bennett, The History Boys

‘With how sad steps...’ encapsulates the extravagance of expression the movement stimulated. Conversely, Philip Larkin was a young man during the Second World War, the destruction caused by which left disillusion on a global scale. Eric Homberger deemed Larkin ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’ and much of his work reflects the ‘lowered sights and diminished expectations’ of the generation. This is true of his poem ‘Sad Steps’ which shares its conceit with Sidney’s sonnet. Four hundred years later, Larkin conducts a striking revisitation of the idea; an apostrophe of the moon on a lonely night.

So why were both these Philips moved by the remoteness of the cosmos? Sidney was lovesick. In 1581 the teenage Penelope Devereux was introduced to the Elizabethan court, and quickly captured the poet’s attentions. However Devereux later married Lord Robert Rich, in accordance with the expectations of her family.

This was the inspiration for the sequence ‘Astrophel and

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Stella’, which tells of the star lover, Astrophel’s, passion for Stella (‘star’). Sidney uses the distance between earth and the constellations as an extended metaphor for the void that Devereux’s marriage placed between the lovers; like an astronomer he became forced to admire from afar. In ‘With how sad steps<’ the poet reaches out to engage in a pseudo-conversation with the moon, ironically seeking reassurance and understanding from the most distant, unearthly and inanimate object. Sidney saw his own isolation in the emptiness and silence of the night sky, and latches onto the comparison in his sonnet by fashioning sympathy in its aloof subject; (‘O Moon<thou feel’st a lover’s case: I read it in thy looks’). This desire to universalise his suffering betrays a slight narcissism, symptomatic of Sidney’s youth. In ‘With how sad steps<’ the poet imposes his emotion on his surroundings, portraying even ‘heavenly place’ to centre around the spurned love which he is experiencing. Sidney lived to only 32, and was 27 when he became acquainted with Devereux. His class is also important in understanding the sonnet’s indulgent tone. Sidney came from a privileged and powerful background and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford; an upbringing which must have left the poet with a sense of entitlement. The strew of exclamatory ‘O’s and overblown rhetorical questions ensure that ‘With how sad steps<’ feels like the outpouring of a passionate, but spoilt young man.

The tone of Larkin’s ‘Sad Steps’ could not be more different. Aged 49 at the time of its writing, the poet has a world-weary realism and meditates not on the injustice of spurned affection, but on his own mortality. The excess of Sidney’s sonnet is replaced with understated simplicity. The title, even, is reduced to an essence as Larkin takes only the sibilant core. We see an immediate cynicism, almost a refusal to romanticise, in the fact that Larkin has not written a sonnet. For a form which demands precision in the encapsulation of single idea within fourteen lines, ‘Sad Steps’ is too fragmented, it’s also too bleak for the sonnet’s historic association with love and passion. Instead, Larkin’s poem comprises of five regular three line stanzas and rhyme that changes throughout as new phonology is introduced (e.g. CDC EDF). This progression which allows the conceit to develop. Prosaic language and phlegmatic sarcasm, (‘Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!), further Larkin’s rejection of sentimentality, supported by bleak aesthetic description (‘<Under a cavernous wind-picked sky).

Throughout the poet distances himself from the fervor of Sidney’s miserable devotion by portraying the moon

as dispassionate; removed from petty human activity (‘One shivers slightly, looking up there./ The hardness and the brightness and the plain/Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare). The voice here is older, more reasoned and acceptant.

Larkin saw the ‘strength and pain/Of being young’ in Sidney’s sonnet and, looking at the same moon, mourned its passing. Although he does mock the sonnet’s overblown rhetoric, there is wistfulness as ‘Sad Steps’ cannot reach the height of emotion that Sidney’s lovelorn gush does. Larkin portrays himself as a lonely old man, introduced unappealingly in the first line (‘groping back to bed after a piss’), who can no longer be moved in the way the younger poet was.

Although the tone is one of gloomy acceptance, Larkin’s message is ultimately positive; that although his time for heady heartbreak has passed, the intensity of youth is eternal in that ‘others<somewhere’ are experiencing it, Sidney being one of them. ‘With how sad steps<’, if not reflective in the same way, is wonderfully poetic and vivid. However despite their differences, and the time which passed between their writing, the two poems are inextricably linked and bond two men otherwise divided by four centuries.

When read together, Larkin’s reaction reminds one of a tired father putting into perspective his son’s adolescent drama. The achievement of such an intimate and immediate connection is a testimony both to the eternal nature of Sidney’s torment, and to Larkin’s understanding of it.

By Emily Cummin

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 11

TA Anslow

English

IV Looking for Emily Dickinson: Finding Nobody All teenagers should read Emily Dickinson's poetry. At this age feelings can be experienced at their purest; she pares down emotive experience to its essence, with little circumstantial detail to modify the intensity. The subjects sound angst ridden – crushing disappointment, meaninglessness, unrequited love, encroaching death – but they are delivered with a smiting pen. She is trapped in vicious conundrums: in thrall to passion which will hurt but can not be resisted, incarcerated in her own mind. In confronting them however she is unflinching and, in this way, triumphant.

Those poems charting her fear of madness are particularly claustrophobic. She imagines her head as inhabited by gothic scenarios: ‚One need not be a Chamber – to be HauntedOne need not be a House The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place -‛

In this poem the haunted mansion of her mind seems to build itself as she grows in consciousness of it, until she finds her 'Body' crouched terrified behind a locked door, on the verge of realising that the Assassin is her brain. 'I felt a funeral, in my Brain' is also peopled by the splinters of her own fractured self, in this case 'Mourners' who tread and beat through her head until 'a Plank in Reason, broke,/ And I dropped down, and down-'. 'My Brain' itself is a particularly unhinged figure laughing and giggling perpetually as the anxious 'I' begins to sense 'That person that I was-/ And this One – do not feel the same - '. When she gets to imagining her own death it seems, despite the creepiness of the ghostly commentary, a numbing relief: 'And then the windows failed – and then/ I could not see to see -' Throughout all these the halting pace and rationed words produce a tense immediacy.

An equally taut but rather less fraught scene is her famous dramatisation of the moment when latent life is at last given meaning: ‚My Life had stood – a loaded Gun In corners – till a Day The Owner passed – identified – And carried Me away -‛ It doesn't matter who or what the 'Owner' is, or that the poem appears to be the monologue of a revolver; the pent up figure and the audacious brevity of the style is compelling.

Important figures in the literary world of midnineteenth century Massachusetts were put off, however, by her elusive syntax and opaque concision. Even the friendliest, the publisher Higginson, called her work 'wayward' and 'exasperating'. Only a handful of her 1775 poems were published in her life time and these were forced out of their idiosyncrasies and into a more linear, conventional form, without her permission. Otherwise her readership consisted of a few carefully monitored correspondents. Although she fiercely desired immortality, she herself did not compromise her expression to achieve it, but seemed to sense that recognition would have to be deferred to a more receptive age.

'Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-' she taunts, fading into uncharacteristic lower case as she dodges visibility.

By Julia Sklar

The layers under which the poems were concealed are a bizarre manifestation of this. The manuscripts themselves were stitched into sixty small book2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 12

lets and shut in a chest in her bedroom, only to be discovered on her death. Once out in the open they still proved hopelessly convoluted for contemporary publishing, the writer Aldrich declaring: '... the incoherence and formlessness of her versicles are fatal.' When they were eventually printed, through the machinations of Emily's brother's ambitious and conniving mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, her capitalisation and punctuation were standardised and some oblique expression reworded, thus obscuring the original voice. Even her face, as a frontispiece, was altered as her family feminised an image of her at sixteen by painting in curls, shawl and a large lacy ruff.

Over subsequent decades a thorough muddle of interpretation was perpetuated by Mabel's daughter and Emily's niece as they battled to prove which of their mothers had been the true intimate of the reclusive poet; in an impressive rally of rival biographies they bashed out spurious tales of possible love affairs which were supposed to reveal the source of the poet's heightened feeling: the figure addressed in the 'Master' poems.

Needless to say this rendered her yet more of an enigma than the original 'myth', as the people of Amherst called their eccentric neighbour. The latest biography, printed earlier this year, makes a convincing case for epilepsy being the stimulation of such alternately ecstatic and nihilistic sensation. The tricksy poet herself would surely find all this scurrilous scratching around risible; the most direct move towards clarity now is publishing the original manuscripts in scanned form as no current typography can render accurately the erratic lengths of her dashes and the spaces between them, wherein, presumably, lies much meaning. Her life and work are a masterclass in evasion.

Perhaps the key to 'the colossal substance/ Of Immortality' is that the riddle be unsolvable. The creative figure at the heart of her poems can be dangerous in its intensity if looked at directly: 'Dare you see a Soul at the white Heat?' The same figure, 'A woman-white', destroys herself in a fatal exchange for a vision of 'Eternity': 'A hallowed thing – to drop a life/ Into the purple well - '.

The white motif identifies the powerful seer she becomes and echoes the white dress the poet herself wore throughout her adult years. (Gilbert and Gubar offer an array of interpretations of this costume in 'The Madwoman in the Attic'.)

sumes an older, classic, female guise: that of the spinner, the spider. This spider works stealthily 'at Night' stitching an 'Arc of White' which will ensure 'Immortality' but will also be sealed as a riddle: the spider suggests various identities for the wearer of this cloth, but of the correct answer he will only 'Himself himself inform'. This will-o'-the-wisp behaviour drove Higginson to warn: 'The public will not accept even fine ideas in such rough and mystical dress, so hard to elucidate'. It is just such mysticism that, to the 1920s Symbolists first and to all subsequent readers, renders the poetry effective.

Take out the author and the conditions of her life and time altogether - and Emily Dickinson seems to deny any other kind of treatment - and you have a set of piercing poems functioning as archetypes of emotion. The modern reader, unperturbed by cryptic expression, can access there the transcendent power of image and metrical form which Yeats, thinking and writing half a century later, believed in so fervently.

His contemporary, the psychoanalyst Jung, also idealised the primal effect of art: it 'makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.' The studied effacement of her motivating dramas means that the poems can be related to all our dramas.

Emily Dickinson successfully obliterates herself, both in her white shroud and entombing room, and also in her verbal presentation: 'I am Nobody!' she signs her first submission of poems to Higginson, though the excitement and capitalisation make this Nobody a potent figure nevertheless. She 'selects her own society' from the other Nobodies and shuns the Somebodies, like the self-aggrandising Mabel Todd: 'How dreary – to be – Somebody'. Her poetry is for all nobodies, the invisibles trapped in the margins. She has the compelling, slippery and other-worldly charisma of her beloved Emily Bronte's Heathcliff. She keeps her personality, and largely her poetry, dormant during her life but uses the image of a brooding volcano to indicate that a time will come when its power will be realised.

However, she herself defies pinning down – 'It's easy to invent a life' – and this creator at other times as2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 13

Isabel Wheeler

Geography

V Does Access to Free Trade Reduce or Increase Global Disparities?

Free trade as a global agenda reached its peak levels during the second half of the twentieth century, when the predecessor of the World Trade Organisation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was formed. It promoted free trade through the four main principles of non-discrimination between countries, reciprocal tariff reductions, transparency in trade measures and fairness in protectionism and antidumping.

The proponents of free trade argue that it encourages the development of all countries through the maximisation of world production and consumption. The main advantage of the free trade model is that of comparative advantage: the idea that different countries are

more efficient at producing different goods, and so by trading their best products with those of other countries, all can benefit and global living standards will rise. However, this generally means that less economically developed countries (LEDCs) become dependent on a small range of primary products, which is problematic, as described later. It is argued that free trade supports the introduction of capital and technology to LEDCs. This is primarily through trans-national corporations (TNCs), which are controversial in their costs and benefits for host countries. While they may enable the set-up of capital-intensive businesses such as mining in LEDCs, the economic benefits are largely channelled back to the more economically developed (MEDC) home country. The competition that global free trade brings drives prices down, while equal opportunity is supposedly given to all countries to export their own most advantageous products and import the cheapest available of other products. However, cases such as subsidised US corn being sold to African countries and damaging African agriculture show that this does not always benefit everyone, and MEDCs who have more economic power to subsidise and protect their own industries have the advantage. However, this subsidising is not a part of the policy of free trade. Many proponents argue that problems exist in the disparities between countries because trade is not free enough.

LEDCs are not able to pressure MEDCs to open their markets to the extent that the LEDCs have been persuaded to; protectionism is expensive and therefore reserved for richer countries. In this way, free trade can bring inequality where it should have brought fairness.

Many of the theoretical assumptions behind the model of free trade are not reciprocated in the real world, such as the facts that factors of production are not mobile and that markets do not operate perfectly. The free trade theory does not take into account the historically constructed disparities that already exist between countries, and so it does not include the advantages in developed economies and the protection that the richer countries have. The idea that through equal opportunity, it can make production more efficient for everyone is therefore faulty because some countries already have significant advantages over others.

By Emily Newton

2010-2011 ÂŚ COMPENDIUM ÂŚ 14

The historic roots of world trade in colonialism can be seen in the current operation of free trade. During the colonial era, the practise of mercantilism meant that more powerful nations imported raw materials from their colonies at low prices and having manufactured goods out of these, sold them at high prices back to the colonies. An example of this system is the Triangular Trade system between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Currently, the principle of comparative advantage has meant that LEDCs export raw materials for manufacture and processing in MEDCs, creating dependence on both sides and disadvantages for the LEDCs. Relying on one main export for the income of a country is a risky situation, but many LEDCs have fallen into the ‘primary product export trap’. This makes them highly sensitive to changes in the markets for this one product. The debt crisis of the 1970s meant that heavily indebted African countries were striving to generate income and so they exported more commodities to pay off their interest. This created an oversupply in these commodities which caused the prices to drop. The attempts to maintain prices in the 70s generally encouraged the increase of production, with detrimental effect, for example causing the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989. There are many possible reasons for oversupply, and so this has of course happened since the 70s in different forms for different products. Commodities are predisposed towards boom-bust cycles, depending on the demand for the product, and so LEDCs exporting raw materials are at the mercy of changing attitudes to consumption in their MEDC buyers.

One factor that can reduce the demand for a commodity is the introduction of a cheaper synthetic substitute. The US sweetener market has a 60% portion made up of maize-based sweeteners, while Europe has increased sugar-beet production, and coupled with other artificial sweeteners, these have damaged economies that are reliant on sugar cane export.

Tin extraction in Bolivia illustrates a similar pattern, as replacements for tin meant that Bolivia’s economy, which had 79% of exports in tin, was heavily damaged.

Primary exports are also disadvantaged by tariffs. The tariffs on raw materials are cheaper than those on manufactured goods, which means that LEDCs can extract little from tariffs on exports, but have to pay higher tariffs on imports from MEDCs.

By Emily Cummin Similarly, when raw materials are exported from LEDCs, the TNCs in between the producers and the final buyers are able to buy the primary product cheaply and sell them with most of the profit obtained for themselves from the final price. For example, of the price of a typical banana, 40% may go to the retailer, with 20% to the importer or wholesaler and only 10% going to the grower.

While in theory, free trade may seem to benefit everyone through efficient production, in practise, there are many complications which mean that this is not wholly possible. The current form of free trade means that disparities are perpetuated, and without intervention it seems only to increase them.

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 15

Ronit Wineman

History

VI Civil Rights: Have peaceful protests only ever achieved limited progress when used on their own?

The struggle against inequality for many groups peaked in the mid to late 20th century. Whilst all these movements had different techniques almost all of them shared a gradual progression from only peaceful protests to splitting into factions; some of which used violence, others maintained the peaceful protesting. When protesting, the aims of all movements are to influence people to change legislation or support their cause so to define which, peaceful or violent, achieves this most efficiently and effectively, it is necessary to look at their theoretical approach to achieving their aims and the effects of these movements in events which they took part in.

The non-violent protest movement in America aimed to campaign through changing legislation; using the court system to gain justice and publicity for their case and gaining influence by highlighting their oppressors as morally wrong. The good image they created through completely peaceful protests was vital as the media spotlight was on their every move and, as a result, America and the rest of the world were watching.

Civil Rights March in Birmingham, Alabama One of the very important ‚landmark‛1 achievements in the Civil Rights Movement’s progression to an equal society was brought through the Supreme Court.

The ruling brought in 1954 by the Supreme Court, stating that segregation ‚generates a feeling of inferiority‛

was the first of its kind and paved the way for many other legislative changes which gave the Civil Rights Movement a serious image. This was pivotal for so many reasons for the Civil Rights Movement as not only did it finally allow Black children to (in theory) gain a good quality education alongside and equal to that of their white counterparts which would in turn allow them to start getting out of the cycle of poverty but it set a precedent for the desegregation of the rest of American life (other than just education which the judgement referred to). This progression was undoubtedly due to the Civil Rights Movement’s embracement of the proper channels of change which brought them into good repute from the respectable American society.

Once the law had been changed, the problems and racism did not simply cease. As a consequence of the Brown vs. Topeka ruling many towns closed their schools to avoid desegregation and this determination to continue being racist followed other legislative leaps for the Civil Rights Movement. To progress further the laws must be enforced, which was what was attempted in 1963 in the Freedom Rides. Although bus stations had been officially desegregated in 1960 (the Boynton vs. Virginia judgement), they were not always in practice, so the Civil Rights Movement launched what was known as the Freedom Rides. Through Alabama, state protection had been organised consisting of thirty state trooper cars and police helicopters but unfortunately, after they crossed into Birmingham City, Alabama, the state protection dissipated and they were left to the non -existent mercy of the police chief, Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor. Many people were severely injured and buses even set on fire. The cruelty carried out by the white racists, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, may have harmed the individuals and their buses but the effects for the Civil Rights Movement were very good. Thanks to the media, the world was shown the horrific racism and the injustice the Black people suffered in the South which increased the Civil Rights Movement’s popularity and helped to change prejudices against the Black people. There was also an additional bonus as governments worldwide put pressure on the American government to quash the racism which could have been one factor which sped up legislation changes. This particular protest, brought through complete non-violence, highlighted the oppressors as morally wrong and brought a lot of sympathy to the Civil Rights Movement.

Whilst peaceful protests brought certain advantages, the pros to violence would supposedly be; the

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 16

fear brought to the public and the government, and the protests were less ignorable. In practice, however, violence may not have brought those successes at all. In the riots of the summers of 1964-8 much disruption and damage was caused but ‚the fatalities mostly resulted from police shooting rioters‛2 which would mean that most of the fear would be on the Black rioters’ side rather than the white people’s. Not only did the riots result in a lot of mayhem but they also brought the Civil Rights Movement into disrepute and gave ammunition to racists. The riots also lost some sympathetic supporters. Altogether, this display of violent protest does not seem to have helped or advanced the Civil Rights Movement rather hindered it.

Another facet that must be looked at when regarding violent protests are the protest movements behind them as the riots may not give a fair representation of the typical violent protests. The first Civil Rights Movement to reject the non-violent philosophy that had been at the foundation of all their acts before was the Black Power movement whose contribution should not be underestimated. Although from the socio-historic context of the society today where the racism encountered is very diminished from the levels experienced then, it is easy to reject violent movements as having done nothing for the Civil Rights Movement but, even Martin Luther King, whose heart was deeply rooted in nonviolent philosophy, acknowledged that it had contributed to raising Black people’s self-esteem and willingness to take action. That is praise not to be overlooked when judging the importance of violent protests in comparison to non-violent protests.

Although part of the tension between movements was caused by the differing views on violence, another conflict was the degree of involvement of white people in the movement and, in general, Black people’s lives.

The more violent movements tended to favour the separationalist views but they seemed to be overlooking the fact that almost all American politicians were white so it would be necessary to deal with white people some of the time if progress was to be made. Some of their views were so rampantly against white people that a member of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, described Black Power as Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan in reverse. This, like Martin Luther King’s praise, cannot be ignored and knocks the violent Black Power movement from the, albeit low, pedestal created by King. Even though the seperationalist philosophies and the violent philosophies are not inextricably linked, they do tend to go hand in hand which validates criticism of violent movements for poli-

Martin Luther King Jr. cies which do not directly relate to violence.

To conclude, peaceful protests have, undoubtedly, achieved great advances in Civil Rights on their own and it may even be arguable that the question should be have violent protests achieved significant progress on their own (in America). All the early changes were achieved through non-violence and they all acted as a springboard for the other changes that were to follow.

Although it may seem that with the radicalisation of the movement more is achieved, in practice it is simply the natural progression of the protest movement chronologically coinciding with the growing receptiveness and sympathy of the society which creates the illusion of violence being more effective. Whilst the pride the violent organisations instilled in the Black disenchanted communities was beneficial, the separationalist views cannot be excused as they were an unrealistic aim when the government where mainly white hence hindering progress. Whilst in America peaceful protests led the way, this was only due to the democratic society in which they took place. Peaceful protests do not always achieve significant advances on their own but the American society was generally more receptive to the moral battle the Civil Rights Movement fought due to its more liberal and forward-thinking nature. In other societies the same progress cannot be achieved by nonviolence as was in the U.S.A. Notes 1. Civil Rights in the USA, 1863-1980, Paterson, Willoughby and Willoughby, p 112 2. Civil Rights in the USA 1945-68, Sanders, p 120

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 17

Alison Fung

Languages

VII

Essential phrases in Esperanto:

Constructed Languages , Esperanto and Simplish: An introduction

'I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.'

L.L. Zamenhof, founder of Esperanto

We've probably all come across a constructed language (or conlang) at some point, whether it was in the playground, like Pig Latin or Avagav, or the programming language you find in computers. Star Trek fans will have heard of Klingon, and you'll probably have heard of Na'vi from the recent film, Avatar and JRR Tolkien, a famed philologist, created the Elvish languages in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. But perhaps the most well-known constructed language is the auxiliary language of Esperanto, founded by L.L. Zamenhof.

Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, born on December 15, 1859, grew up in Bialystok, Poland, which was, at the time, under the Russian Empire. The town was home to four main ethnic groups: Poles, Belorusians, Germans and Yiddish-speaking Jews. The racial conflicts between these groups inspired Zamenhof to create a language that he hoped would transcend barriers. He believed that these quarrels were as a result of mutual misunderstanding, and a lack of a common language between all groups. As a gifted linguist (besides his parents' native languages of Russian and Yiddish and his adopted language Polish, he also had a good understanding of French, German, Latin and Hebrew, and a basic knowledge of English, Greek and Italian), Zamenhof drew on Indo-European languages in order to create a new language that was easy to learn, with a simple grammar, and that could be used as a second language across the globe.

Saluton!

Kiel vi nomiĝas?

Mi nomiĝas< Kiel vi fartas?

Mi fartas bone Bone, dankon Bonvolu Dankon Nedankinde Jes Ne Helpon!

Kie estas la necesejo?

- Hello!

- What is your name ?

- My name is< - How are you?

- I am good - Good, thanks - Please - Thank you - You’re welcome - Yes - No - Help !

- Where is the toilet?

Mia kusenveturilo estas - My hovercraft is full of plena da/je angiloj

eels.

So what has happened to Esperanto? Why isn't it being used all around the world by everyone? Well, it is the most widely used and most successful constructed language to have been invented (in comparison to other conlangs, for example, Bolak, which is now almost forgotten) and it is used all over the world. The exact number of Esperanto speakers is as yet unknown, although it has been estimated to be between 1 to 2 million, most of which are independent learners. The main problem for Esperanto is that English is regarded as the ‘global language’. Another possible issue is that Esperanto really only incorporates Indo-European elements, and so it may prove difficult for non-Indo-European speakers, even though Esperanto is far easier to learn than English.

However, conlangs are not just made for the sole purpose of creating a universal language. Constructed languages are divided into three categories: (international) auxiliary languages (also known as IALs), which are created as a means of global communication, such as Esperanto, engineered languages and artistic languages.

Within the group of engineered languages, there are three subcategories: logical, philosophical and experimental languages. An example of a logical language is that of Loglan, a language which was designed to challenge the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis1 . Created in the 1950s, Loglan attempts to narrow linguistic restraints,

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 18

and by doing so, should free our minds from these limitations and allow for further development and a more open way of thinking. Philosophical languages, on the other hand, are constructed with less of the pragmatic goal that logical languages have, and instead aim to achieve a kind of transcendence and perfection and exploring the potential or nature of language. Finally, experimental languages, which are those constructed in order to investigate the relationship between thought and language.

1. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, simply put, is a linguistic theory that language affects culture and so the way people behave and think will differ depending on the language they speak. According to the hypothesis, the nature of the human language limits the way of our thinking, and so could even put constraints on human development.

Artistic languages are possibly the most amusing of them all. The most common type of artistic language you will have encountered is the group of fictional languages. ‘Parseltongue’ in ‘Harry Potter’ is a famous example of a fictional language, as well as the ones mentioned earlier. My personal favourite is ‘Simplish’, created by Ulli Perwin to criticise auxiliary languages, in particular, Esperanto. At a glance, it looks like a completely different language, but on closer inspection, you’ll find that it is just phonetic, German-looking English. Read it out loud.

Art by Emily Cummin

SIMPLISH: vottâbâot? âi riid de niuspepâ 2dei : ovâ 20 lenguich in de EU 2 menni intâpretâ ... vi niid niu lenguich : SIMPLISH ! mi longtâim intânet end sii lottâ bed lenguich der ... menni piipel ken tok inglish - so dis vill bi de besik pârt ov it. bâtt inglish nott so gud vidde vokâls - itelish mâtch bettâ ( gess vâi dem sing de operâs so kliirli : kos dem spiik it es dem râit it ! ! ) dis miks ov piggin + rep + edvertâis + nott no hâo 2 spell mâst bi iisi 2 lørn 4 iu. end iu ken bi shuur ol âddâ neshens vill olso ândâstend de tekst ! râit bâi ulli.

The linguist Noam Chomsky once said: ‚Language is a process of free creation‛, of which constructed languages is a brilliant example; not just the creation of languages itself, but expression through them, whether it is simply for enjoyment or to bridge the gaps between people.

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 19

Mathematics

J L Burdett

VII Derangements and Secret Santa With thanks to Mrs Jacques and family Introduction Towards the end of the Autumn term, one of the tasks of many form tutors is to arrange a ‚Secret Santa‛ for their form. This means that each form member must be allocated, preferably at random, another form member for whom they should anonymously provide a small gift. One way to do this is to give out to the form at random slips of paper each bearing the name of someone in the form, so that each girl knows whose ‚Secret Santa‛ she is, but is not told who will be providing her own gift. Unfortunately this method is not infallible, as it is possible that a girl will receive her own name, which takes the fun out of it somehow. A variant of the method requires that as the slips are given out, a girl who receives her own name owns up to this, is therefore given another slip, and returns the original to the teacher so that it may subsequently be given to someone else. This works well unless the first occurrence of a girl receiving her own name is when most of the form has already received their ‚Secret Santa‛ name. In this case, some form tutors deem it too easy for the girl involved to deduce who her ‚Secret Santa‛ is, and will abandon the whole process to start again. Indeed some tutors will start again if at any point a girl receives her own name, in order to maintain the difficulty of an individual finding out who her ‚Secret Santa‛ is.

A colleague in the Maths department once spent far too much of tutor time following the last method, having to start the process six times before obtaining a satisfactory allocation of names. The question then posed was ‚What is the probability of getting a satisfactory allocation of names first time, if the names are handed out at random?‛ Putting the question into mathematical language We may identify each possible allocation of names in a class of n girls as one of the n!1 permutations of n nonidentical objects. For example, in a (very small) form of three girls, say Lena, Meena and Nina, there are six ways to allocate the names.

Allocation of names Girl

1

2

3

4

5

6

Lena

L

L

M

M

N

N

Meena

M

N

L

N

L

M

Nina

N

M

N

L

M

L

A convenient way to show these permutations is to use cycle notation, as in the following examples: (LMN) represents allocation 4, where L gets M, M gets N and N gets L. (LM) represents allocation 3, where L gets M, M gets L and N gets N. The ‚fixed point‛ N is not shown in the cycle notation. e represents allocation 1, where all three of L, M and N are fixed points. 2 Of these allocations, only numbers 4 and 5 are satisfactory for our purposes, as in all the others, at least one girl receives her own name.

1. n! is the standard notation for ‚n factorial‛, defined for any positive integer n as the product of all the positive integers up to and including n. So, for example, 3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6. Conventionally, 0! = 1.

2. e is traditionally used in group theory to represent an identity element, i.e. part of a mathematical structure that leaves the other elements unchanged. Cycle notation is mostly used in the study of permutation groups and so alongside the cycles, a unique symbol is needed for the identity permutation. Leaving a blank space to show that all the elements are unchanged would definitely cause confusion!

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 20

We can now see that it is possible to reformulate the original question as ‚What proportion of the permutations of n unlike objects have no fixed points?‛ 3 The direct approach Using the cycle notation above it is straightforward to list the results for forms of size of 1, 2, 3, or 4. It is relatively straightforward but increasingly tedious to do this for a form of size 5, and it would take great determination and perseverance to compile the listing of 720 permutations for a form of 6.

As suggested by the results for the form of size 5, the results for the smaller forms can be used to calculate the value of dn for those with more members. For example, in a form of 6, there are 6! permutations in total. This set of 6! permutations may be partitioned into subsets according to how many fixed points they each have.

We can define Fr to be the set of those permutations with r moving points, so, for example, F 6 consists of all the permutations in which all six points move, and F0 consists of e alone. Thus |F6| must be d6, and |F0|must be one. As all permutations must belong to exactly one of these subsets, we must also have : 6! =| F0 |+| F1|+| F2| +| F3|+| F4 |+| F5 |+| F6|

3. We will pretend that in a form of 2, a student who did not receive their own name would be baffled as to who their ‚Secret Santa‛ was.

4.

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Moreover, Fr must consist of all those permutations of a form of size r that have no fixed points, applied to each of the possible groups of size r that may be chosen from the 6 form members.

Using the general result to answer the original question Assuming a form of 26 students and using Excel to do the calculations, we find d26 = 148,362,637,348,470,000,000,000,000 and the probability of getting a suitable allocation of names first time is 0.3678794412 (10 dp).

Further investigations Since it is so painless to compile the values of dn in Excel using the relations given above, it seems worth seeking a more user-friendly, explicit formula for dn in terms of n, by analysing any number patterns in the results obtained.

As n increases, the ratios of successive values of dn approach n, so it is worth calculating the values of n x dn-1. The table shows how these match, to within ±1, the values of dn.

The conjecture here must be dn = n x dn-1 + (-1)n.

This formula clearly agrees with the values above which were found using the previous generalised statement, and indeed the results agree for as many values of dn as we care to compute. Unfortunately there does not seem any obvious way to prove this (much simpler) formula. However, there is no rule against using a convincing but unproven result in further investigations, especially if this may in turn lead to a differently formulated, and more easily provable result.

In this instance, starting from d1 = 0, the conjecture may be used to build up expressions for d2, d3, and so on. d2 = 2.0 + (-1)2 = 2.0 + 1 d3 = 3(2.0 + 1) + (-1)3 = 3.2.0 +3.1 – 1 d4 = 4(3.2.0 + 3.1 – 1) + (-1)4 = 4.3.2.0 + 4.3.1 – 4.1 + 1 This looks much more promising once you note that the zero value for d1 is obtained via 1.1 – 1, and hence d1 = 1.1 - 1 d2 = 2( 1.1 – 1)+ (-1)2 = 2.1.1 - 2 + 1 = 2. 1 – 2 + 1 d3 = 3(2. 1 – 2 + 1) + (-1)3 = 3.2.1 – 3.2 +3 – 1 d4 = 4(3.2.1 – 3.2 +3.1 – 1) + (-1)4 = 4.3.2.1 – 4.3.2 + 4.3 – 4 + 1

5. Arguably if there are no objects then there is only one way to permute them, which is to do nothing (to the non-existent objects). Hence any such permutation must leave any (non-existent) objects fixed, yielding d0 = 0.

6. I stopped at approximately n = 200, but the reader may care to test further values for herself.

7. Please note that I am not suggesting we should rely on unproven results, merely that chances may be taken on the way to achieving a proven result.

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 22

The generalisation may be written:

or, taking out the common factor of n!,

i.e.

Now this is rather interesting, because when the exponential function e x is expanded as an infinite power series, the series is:

and if we take x = -1, then it can be seen that the value of dn is found by multiplying the first n+1 terms of the series by n! e.g. we know d4= 9, and:

This is such a pleasing result that it almost makes you forget that we have yet to prove that these formulae will provide correct values for dn. Indeed, it also explains why as n→ ∞, the probability of obtaining a suitable allocation of names for ‚Secret Santa‛ first time approaches a limit of 0.3678794412 (10 dp).

For as n → ∞,

which has a decimal value of 0.3678794412, correct to 10 dp. My own efforts at proving these results produced nothing but a very large pile of discarded sheets of working, and so I decided it was time to do some research.

A proof of the formula for dn

8. Adapted from ‚Let's get deranged!‛ John C. Baez, December 14, 2003 from http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/qg-winter2004/ derangement.pdf accessed 20 July 2010.

9. This principle, applied to two events in probability, is familiar to sixth form students in the form P(A ∪ B) = P(A) + P(B) – P(A ∩ B).

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 23

Thus we have a proof of the result from the previous section:

Historical and general notes The proof above is attributed to Nicolaus Bernoulli (1687-1759), one of an extensive family of formidable mathematicians, who, across three generations from about 1680 worked on a wide variety of problems from applications of the then new method of calculus, to fluid mechanics and the beginnings of the formalised study of probability. However, the first record of the problem of finding the number of permutations of n unlike objects where no objects are fixed is due to Pierre Rémond, Marquis de Montmort (1678 – 1719). A French nobleman, de Montmort abandoned his study of the law in order to pursue Mathematics, and in his Essai d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard ( Paris, 1708), he considered a number of problems arising from popular gambling games. This included not only some discussion of the ‚Arithmetic triangle‛ (now more usually referred to as Pascal’s triangle), but also the ‚hatcheck‛ problem: n people leave their hats at the cloakroom; when they go to collect them, each of them takes one hat at random.

What is the probability that none of them has their own hat when they leave?

Bernoulli met de Montmort in Paris in 1709 and they subsequently worked together on a range of problems, with Bernoulli even staying at the de Montmort chateau for three months. There was a long and productive correspondence between the two, which was published in the second edition of the Essai (1713). Authors differ as to whether the proof of the hat-check problem published in 1713 should be ascribed to de Montmort or to Nicolaus Bernoulli.

10.

11.

12.

13.

John C Baez, ibid; ‚Games, Gods & Gambling‛ by F N David, edited excerpts at http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Montmort_essai.html accessed 21 July 2010. ‚Men of Mathematics‛ (Penguin 1953) by E T Bell, chapter 8.

The title page of the second edition may be seen at http://www.montmort.com/index_fichiers/essay_d_analyse.htm accessed 21 July 2010.

14. F N David, ibid.

15. F N David, ibid.

16. John C. Baez, ibid.

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 24

The permutations which solve the hat-check problem are now known as derangements and the values of dn are also known as Rencontre numbers, or the sub-factorial values for n, sometimes written !n. They are taught in university combinatorics courses, and may be used to solve any problem identical in structure to the original ‚Secret Santa‛ problem.

A typical example runs: At the banquet of a large conference, n mathematicians hang their coats on the coat rack as they enter. At the end of the night they leave in a drunken stupor, each one randomly putting on a coat without checking that it's their own. Show that in the limit as n → ∞, the probability that none of the mathematicians staggers home in their own coat approaches 1/e.

Moral: if you see a mathematician wearing an ill-fitting coat, there's a good chance he's deranged.

Whilst the derangement (or at least the sense of humour) of mathematicians seems destined always to remain a talking point, perhaps form tutors approaching the end of a busy term may be reassured to know that arranging a suitable ‚Secret Santa‛ is one task where being deranged may be seen as a positive advantage!

By Tess Hanneman

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦

25

Shobana Sivalingham

Philosophy

IX The Decline of Heroism?

Gone are the days of Alexander the Great and Hercules. Now is the era of the ordinary, everyday man. Is the magical idea of heroism dead?

A hero was originally defined as a demigod, part God and part man. Therefore the conventional idea of heroism held that a being could be human yet more than human at the same time. The classical hero was extraordinary in every light. He performed feats of superhuman courage, never selfishly but purely for the greater good of humanity. Unfortunately, so much cannot be said for today’s hero. In our day, it is no longer the ideal that inspires us but the average. A modern hero is no more than an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. We idolize these people to the exclusion of others, whose resumés may fit the title of hero better.

Joseph Campbell, an American mythologist, said that heroes reflect the values we revere, the accomplishments we respect and the hope that gives our life meaning. A hero is essentially an ideal to live up to, an example to emulate. Often he is a representative of the new, whether it is a new city, a new age or even a new way of life. However, the most fundamental aspect of a hero is that he is chosen as worthy to receive society’s adulation.

Hence follows the famous quote from the American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‚A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world‛. Therefore, it is because society’s ‘tastes’ are constantly changing that the idea of a hero must change as well. Perhaps this can be condensed into the economic problem of scarcity. Because there has been a gradual fall in the demand for a certain type of hero, the supply has fallen correspondingly. The issue now is whether there actually is a lack of what we will call conventional heroes in our society or whether these heroes are simply not recognised.

It might be argued that we no longer have the circumstances that give rise to heroic acts. Difficult times usually spurt out heroes as a matter of course but we are lucky enough to say that for the last couple of decades, we have not faced such disasters. This last statement might be questioned due to events such as the 7/7 bombings and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both cases, we have seen undeniably heroic acts, such as

soldiers sacrificing themselves for their fellow men and western women risking their lives to govern Iraqi provinces. Moreover, it is still possible to identify instances of heroic instances before the 19th century. The problem was that the circumstances did not allow their acts to be recognised.

A more likely answer is that these heroes are no longer recognised because there are, in fact, too many heroes and when there are too many heroes there are ultimately none, as the essence of heroism is singularity. The romantic vision of the lone, misunderstood hero wandering down his own path would be impossible were a hundred other heroes ambling alongside him. In the past, there have been numerous occasions for people to stand out. Galileo faced persecution by his whole community for his belief that the earth moved around the sun, and not the other way around. It is now much more possible to challenge accepted lines of thought, to fight against the tide, as is seen with Britain’s notoriously opinionated press. Where individualist ideas are suppressed, heroism is much more evident.

This was witnessed recently in China, where The Great Firewall, which censors internet content, stifles its citizen’s freedom of thought. However when Liu Xiaobo, a political prisoner, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pursuit of democracy in the face of adversity, his heroic acts have been made apparent to the whole world. By contrast, in a democracy like the UK, emphasis is placed on the mass of people and the concept of consensus decisions. This leads to the unfortunate rise of unsung heroes. For example, although the astronaut remains a heroic figure, we no longer remember them by name as there are just too many of them.

Today there are three types of hero that we worship. The first is the ordinary, average man. It was in 1900 when the artist and hero in his own right, GF Watts established the Memorial to Self-Sacrifice to ensure a permanent record of those who had died trying to save others but whose deeds would typically be obscured by ‘humbler life’. This movement took off so well due to the fact that it coincided with the advance of a press eager for such stories. Civilian heroism in the Titanic also gave rise to numerous commercial reactions, from postcards to exhibitions and sheet music to the blockbuster phenomenon. Therefore it was only inevitable that this popular hero would seep into literature, under the apt name of anti-hero. It has now become a trend for the incapable and mediocre to front both novels and the screen alike, succeeding against the

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 26

odds. The lovable but frankly terrible role model, Homer Simpson is the perfect example. The second kind of a hero is the victim, the most obvious example of which is the soldier. At a first glance, they might seem to fit the conventional idea of heroism in that they are exceptionally courageous and fight on behalf of their countries.

However, by the public they are seen as unfortunate puppets of politicians and so charities such as ‘Help for Heroes’ have been set up. We applaud those who suffer, not those who achieve. Finally, there is the celebrity culture that has washed over Britain. A study taken in America in 2006 revealed that more people knew who Harry Potter was than Tony Blair. It found that while six out of ten people knew that Homer Simpson’s son was named Bart, only one out of five could name either the Odyssey or the Illiad. Even more worrying was that 60% knew that Superman came from Krypton when only 37% knew that the closest planet to the sun was Mercury.

So what are the implications of the modern idea of heroism? If a hero does reflect the ideals of society, then the state of society must be questioned. The fact that we have replaced conventional heroes with celebrities, victims and ordinary men suggests that people no longer aspire to be the best. The fact that we no longer look for heroic qualities in others means that we will never try and develop these qualities in ourselves. Whilst becoming a hero necessitates a rite of passage or some hardship, becoming a celebrity does not seem as difficult. So we settle for the easier route. This highlights the feeling of inability and helplessness that has invaded society’s mentality. At the same time, we yearn for the lives of glamour, fame and riches that celebrities seem to lead.

Unlike the conventional hero, it is no longer about striving to help others but for your own end. This reflects a shift in the public mindset that might be attributed to the Thatcher days, when capitalist values meant that people had to look out for themselves. Perhaps, as the Iron Lady herself once said, ‘there is no society’. The number of people interacting in their local communities, attending churches and joining political parties has fallen. People are showing a general lack of faith, and a growing apathy not just towards politics but towards life in general.

Despite a rise in living standards, we are more depressed than we were before and all of this points to a rise in celebrity culture. Perhaps worshipping heroes is merely a means of escapism that enables us momentarily to evade our everyday lives.

Perhaps the reality is that the myth-making, which was integral to building up the idea of heroism, is no longer possible. We no longer have either the faith or the generosity to maintain these ideas. Alexander the Great became a hero by his own declaration that he was descended from Zeus. History also revealed that that the death toll at Florence Nightingale’s hospital was higher than at any other hospital in the East and recently unearthed letters have suggested that she was not the tender, romantic figure that she had been made out to be. Often the point of a hero is to act as a symbol. They are the beacon of hope that make the seemingly impossible possible. Perhaps a parallel can be drawn with the current US president, Barack Obama.

With his election campaign brimming over with idealistic concepts such as ‘hope’, a catchy signature slogan that went ‘Yes, we can’ and the chance to be the first black President of the US, he fast became an icon for change. Yet the high expectations that had been placed on him could never have been met. Unlike in the past, today’s leaders have to deal with an antagonistic press that scrutinize their every move, ranging from matters as serious as problems with their policies to those as trivial as their new haircut. The press is often blamed for riling the public against politicians due to their propensity to look on their every move with a critical eye.

However, is this really a bad thing? By highlighting the flaws in our heroes, we knock them off their pedestal and bring them down to our own level.

In this way, we humanize them and make them more easily emulated. Nevertheless, whilst the concept of heroism is constantly changing, the one thing we can always be certain of is that heroes will always exist.

Everyone needs a role model: be it Churchill, Achilles, a family member, God or even Homer Simpson himself. There can be no absolute hero. Even Tony Blair, while he has become relatively notorious in the UK, is hero-worshipped in Kosovo, where many have even named their children after him. We always strive to imitate those who epitomise the qualities that we prize.

Each of us has, and should be allowed to have a different idea of what makes a hero. In the words of the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli: ‚Nurture your mind with great thoughts; to believe in the heroic makes heroes.‛

The third way of looking at this issue is that there never have been heroes in the older sense of the word.

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Meera Somji

Philosophy

X Does Facebook know you better than you know yourself?

Is who you think you are, who you actually are?

Consider your Facebook profile, with the picture you have chosen to display, the choice of friends who are able to write on your wall, and the list of events you are attending. Is that you?

With social media sites, we display ourselves to, and interact within, a world which is neither entirely virtual nor only physical. How we choose to be seen becomes who we are, in this infosphere. But how has this affected our identities? In the philosophy of mind, there is a well-honed distinction between personal identity and self-conception, or more simply between who we are, the ontological self, and who we think we are, the epistemological self. The question of where social media fits into this lies with the social self, the channel through which Facebook has its deepest impact on who we are.

The relationship between the epistemological self and the ontological self is complex. It is not only that our self-conception should be close to who we really are, but our ontological selves are influenced by who we think we are. This is where the social self plays an im-

By Gemma Ginsberg

portant role. One could argue that exploring the manipulation of social media with our philosophical identity might seem frivolous and distracting, wholly unworthy of serious reflection. But one does not need to look far to see our hyperconscious generation, for whom constant communication through the internet is inescapable. We Facebook and twitter our lives away, where nothing is too small to be left unsaid. Thus, in this climate, if anything is contributing to the construction of our individual identities, it is this continuous question in our minds; how can I make the amusing circumstance that I am right now, a witty status update.

Beyond your mobile uploads album and your status update, your social personality is created by the thoughts of other people whom you have chosen to be in your network of relations. It is their information that you read, and which updates your social self, feeds into your social-conception and ends up shaping your personality.

Everything may leave a trace somewhere. On Facebook, old monsters of the day you thought a particular outfit was a good idea, can creep to the surface at any time. The Canons Follies slideshow of old photos of Year 13 found on Facebook was an amusing, albeit discomforting, trip down memory lane, but it made me think about how Facebook remembers who we used to be far better than we do. Maybe Facebook knows me better than I think I know myself.

Facebook poses more than the question of who you are, but who you want others to see you as. This is not too different as when in ‚real‛ life, you choose what outfit to wear to meet which people. But at these times, you are often only meeting one group of people, in front of whom you can play one character. One aspect of your personality. One face. You choose which bit of you to show.

Perhaps more than other modes of communication, online social networking encourages defining oneself in relationship to others. Most Facebook users have "friends" that extend across social and geographic boundaries. The older you get, the more these boundaries begin to extend across time, for example when friends from my primary school mix with friends from my current school. In ‚real‛ time and ‚real‛ life, we interact with these groups differently, playing different roles with different people. But on Facebook all of this changes; these lines of compartmentalisation are blurred. This reveals the dilemma of your Facebook

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 28

identity, in a way that is not necessary in the ‚real‛ world.

Many argue, and if I had a penny for how many times my mother has said to me, that the Facebook generation has lost touch with reality. We live in a virtual bubble, and we are unable to engage with the genuine environment. Instead we are mesmerised by the artificial and the synthetic. The way I am choosing to look at it, social media like Facebook represent an unprecedented opportunity to be in charge of our social selves. We can choose who the other people are whose thoughts create our social personality and hence, indirectly determine our personal identities.

And so, is Facebook helping us find who we are? The internet continues to boast the freedom of anonymity, a dangerous freedom that serves the interest of being able to pretend to be somebody else, illustrated by Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon ‚on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog‛ in The New Yorker in July 1993. However, I also see a different freedom, the freedom associated with self-determination and autonomy. Recall how the construction of the social self feeds back

By Pruthvi Shah into the development of the epistemological self, which then feeds back into the moulding of the ontoBy Julia Sklar logical self, who we think we are moulds who we are. More freedom on the social side means more freeidentity, who can you be that is acceptable to everyone? dom to shape oneself.

One could argue that constructing a public self-portrait in front of multiple parts of your life carries with it an Further Reading: obstruction to the freedom of being who you want to be; all of a sudden you are restricted. However, does the "Facebook and the Question of Authentic Self-Identity" opportunity for self disclosure on Facebook put us more Tamara Wandel. in touch with ourselves, as we struggle between different representations of self that we display in ‚real‛ life? ‚Word of Mouse‛, TPM, 4th quarter 2010 - Luciano Floridi In this way, interaction with others on Facebook serves to promote the discovery of an authentic sense of self2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 29

Science

Shabnam Singhal

XI Is the inference of evolutionary history more than just a sterile exercise in classification or ‘stamp collecting’?

The term ‘stamp collecting’ is often prescribed to an exercise that is essentially the classification of unrelated, meaningless facts. Instead of shedding new light, this act of classification is futile and unproductive, and thus nothing of real value can be gained from its analysis. The question posed is whether or not the inference of evolutionary history is one such act. The study of evolutionary history tracks the effects of evolution on life through time, and how it continues to shape living things. Through the study of fossils and extant living beings, especially DNA, entire family trees can be discerned. Therefore a large part of evolutionary history involves the classification of an organism’s phylogeny.

The knowledge that modern day birds and crocodiles are both descended from an ancient ancestor called the ‚archosaur‛ seems to be one such product of evolutionary history’s classification and at first an entirely random fact. However, it explains why a mutant chicken embryo grew crocodile-like teeth. The close relations between reptiles and birds allowed for the genes for teeth that the chickens possessed to be reactivated, even though they had lain dormant for 80 million years.

The discovery was made by a team based at the Universities of Manchester and Wisconsin, who then went on to successfully induce teeth growth in normal chickens.

This could have important applications in the regeneration of teeth and tissue. This rather extreme example can be applied more generally to explain the importance of an organism’s phylogeny in everyday life.

Therefore, instead of being a collection of random facts in itself, evolutionary history brings meaning and order to ideas that would otherwise be unrelated. It seems almost unfathomable now to think that the similarities present in say the Great Ape family, including our fossilised remnants of its extinct members, are no more than a strange coincidence. Yet through evolutionary history, it is easy to explain the parallels in physiological makeup, intelligence and even behaviour. It is difficult to classify the inference of evolutionary history

as ‘stamp collecting’, if it is potentially the only thing which prevents the study of natural history from descending into sterile classification. This led Theodosius Dobzhansky to make his famous statement: ‚Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts - some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole‛. The definition of stamp collecting as such, a collection of unrelated observations and a sterile exercise in classification, potentially reduces almost all empirical science to stamp collecting. In fact Lord Rutherford, who popularised the use of the term, used it to denote just that, saying himself that ‚all science is either physics or stamp collecting‛.

Before Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic Table in 1869, the study of Chemistry could perhaps have similarly been described as a sterile exercise in the collection of unrelated information. A great deal was known about each individual element by this time, including its properties, compounds and weight. However, these were little more than unrelated facts, which could be dismissed as sterile classification. Yet, they are the foundation upon which the Periodic Table and the entire scientific discipline of Chemistry rest. Thus, making observations is an integral part of the scientific method and necessary for the existence of any empirical science. However, it is true that the classification of these facts is meaningless without a strong scientific principle to endow them with meaning. Just as the Periodic Table assembled unrelated commonplace ideas and unified them in Chemistry, so the Theory of Evolution did in Biology, signalling a new era for the field. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, wrote the following: ‛Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is‛. A scientific principle is needed to unite the unrelated facts of any empirical science into something more than ‘stamp collecting’.

Chardin is making the point here that evolution is this scientific principle and the premise upon which the whole of natural history and biology lies. It gives substance to otherwise unrelated facts, and strongly undermines the idea that the inference of evolutionary history is solely ‘stamp collecting’.

If the inference of evolutionary history is truly ‘sterile classification’, then it must also by definition be unproductive and futile. Yet a true understanding of evolutionary history would mean a deeper understand-

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 30

ing of the evolutionary process itself. This potentially has many lasting benefits. For example, the inference of evolutionary history has already been used to reveal key genes, which may be involved in human genetic disorders. For example, the Mexican Tetra fish also known as the Blind Cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus), which is albino and lost its eyesight during the process of evolution. This was predicted by Darwin: ‛By the time that an animal had reached, after numberless generations, the deepest recesses, disuse will on this view have more or less perfectly obliterated its eyes‛.

Evolutionary history is often used as a basis for scientific practice. For example, directed evolution is used to engineer proteins such as improved antibodies and enzymes not normally found in nature. Enzymes are highly adapted to their specific task through the very process of evolution and modifying them to perform another task is an almost insurmountable problem using rational design. This is due to the immense complexity of change that comes with even a single modification. In directed evolution, the gene required for the protein is mutated through DNA shuffling or by using error prone PCR. The most desirable mutated forms are screened and selected. The DNA is then sequenced so that the mutations can be determined. After many cycles of this process, a much more desirable protein can be reached. Secondly, understanding the phylogeny of a pathogen can greatly help epidemiologists to recognize its spread and origin, and therefore can be of assistance in tracking and controlling infectious diseases. Ribo-

somal RNA is often used as a molecular clock for bacteria due to their morphology. Due to its very real practical applications, evolutionary history cannot simply be dismissed as a sterile exercise in classification.

In fact evolutionary history has taught us that species are fluid and attempting to define each one in a traditional way would be a more apt use of the term ‘stamp collecting’. In the traditional Linnaean system of classification, species conform to a fixed ideal. This is rooted in the idea that a species can be determined by propagation, which dates back to Aristotle. It was first written down by John Ray, who is often called the father of natural history, in 1686 in his work Historia plantarum generalis: ‛no surer criterion for determining species has occurred to me than the distinguishing features that perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the species ... they are accidental variations and not such as to distinguish a species‛. However, even in asserting here that species are constant, John Ray has drawn attention to the variation which exists among each species. James L. Larson writes about Linnaeus’ response to this problem that ‛Linnaeus’ species concept entails the differentiation of essential, fixed, intrinsic marks which define species from immaterial, variable, extrinsic marks, which are somehow unreal‛.

However this supposed ‘problem’ of variation lies at the heart of evolution. Far from reinforcing this rigid and potentially sterile system of classification, evolution undermines its entire premise – that species are essentially

By Pruthvi Shah

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 31

an immutable entity unto themselves. The Theory of Evolution states that natural selection, arising from variation within each generation, leads to speciation.

This raises the difficult task of determining whether at any given point an animal is any longer a member of that species. How different do members of a species need to be until before they are two different species entirely?

nounced in plants, and it is estimated that 14% of living plant species are the product of hybridization.

These facts severely warp the way in which a Tree of Life diagram is usually characterised. This resulted in Doolittle claiming in 1999 that ‚the history of life cannot be properly represented as a tree. The tree of life is not something which that exists in nature; it’s a way that humans classify nature‛.

Traditionally, the distinction has been drawn at whether or not two animals can mate and produce fertile offspring. This was presented by Ernst Mayr in 1942 thus: ‚species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups". Some animals that are widely considered to be separate species can in some occasions produce fertile offspring. For example in captivity, a male lion and female tiger can be mated to produce ‘ligers’. Although the males are sterile, the females are fertile and can be mated with both tigers and lions.

It would also be difficult to classify different species of prokaryotes using this method as they are asexual and high levels of horizontal gene transfer often take place.

However, Darwin suggests that evolution does away with the need to classify animals as different species: "I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other ... It does not essentially differ from the word variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms‛.

In the light of evolutionary history, attempts to define an ever-changing succession of beings become obsolete.

Evolution is the rule to which all species must adhere and not a strict succession of moulds to which they must conform.

In conclusion, although evolutionary history could be called a sterile exercise in classification, I feel that it exists as much more than simply this. Firstly, its inference has transformed the field of Biology from potentially descending into stamp collecting. It can not be dismissed as sterile classification due to its strong underlying scientific principles, which is crucial in making the distinction between an act that is solely a sterile exercise in classification and a science. The inference of evolutionary history has many practical applications, the enormous benefits of which are still to be discovered. Finally the more we infer from evolutionary history the further we get from traditional rigid systems of classification. This case would be just the opposite if it was evolutionary history was solely stamp collecting.

In fact, increasingly, evolutionary history is revealing that a rigid system of classification of descent may be almost impossible to achieve. A universal ‘Tree of Life’ model like the one Darwin first described in the Origin of the Species may never be entirely realised.

This is due to horizontal gene transfer playing a much bigger role than originally expected. This was discovered to be an important cause of drug resistance but its importance in evolution was not realised until later. It was once thought that hybridization mostly produced sterile individuals but it is now realised that 10% of all animals regularly hybridize with other species and that his could be a key part of the evolutionary process. The modern chicken was the result of the hybridization of the Red Junglefowl (Gallus Gallus) and the Grey Junglefowl (Gallus Sonnerati). The process is even more pro2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 32

Compendium 2010—2011 EDITOR: Emily Newton

WRITERS: TA Anslow Laura Braigel JL Burdett Alison Fung Josephine Rabinowitz Shobana Sivalingham Shabnam Singhal Meera Somji Caroline Taylor Isabel Wheeler Ronit Wineman

ARTISTS: Emily Cummin Gemma Ginsberg Tess Hanneman Zoe Ilivitsky Julia Sklar Pruthvi Shah

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Mr Langdale

2010-2011 ¦ COMPENDIUM ¦ 33

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