At 16 and diagnosed with terminal cancer, he has published his first book, "The Anonymous Revolutionary". After reading his article I went to his blog theanonymousrevolutionary.com
and much of what he had posted resonated so strongly with me that I felt a sense of guilt and inadequacy. This morning I read on the blog posted by his parents that he had died and feel quite devastated that I have not had the opportunity to meet this young man. So here is my blog that I would like to dedicate to his memory.
Who am I?
Scientist, rationalist, socialist, atheist, humanist, book lover, animal lover, but not necessarily in that order and the last of these terms I use with some reservation as the term is often used pejoratively in much the same way as "tree hugger", I am probably also one of those.
It is as an animal lover that I am starting this blog as I believe that so many people have got it wrong.
It is also a pertinent time of the year; I put a small pond in the garden last summer and within a month a frog was seen swimming in it and I had great hopes which were fulfilled earlier this month when Joan (my wife) announced that there was frog spawn in the pond; inside a week two more deposits arrived. I was taken back to 1954 and a teacher I had a terrible crush on, Miss Windybanks. Miss Windybanks where are you now? She was my maths teacher and because I had a certain facility with the subject I was well regarded if not a favourite. Her importance to me, however, was as the organiser of the Natural History Club, a lunch time and after school affair where I learnt a lot about animals.
April 1954 was probably the beginning of my real education because Miss W brought in a cluster of frog spawn and put it into a small aquarium with some gravel and pond weed. We were encouraged to watch the changes in the eggs as the little black spots over a number of days gradually elongated and to my great delight eventually broke away from the mass and started swimming freely. My delight was modified over the course of the next few weeks as the hundreds of tadpoles were reduced in number to no more than a few tens even though the remaining ones had increased tadpoles in size and had started to grow little hind legs. I asked what happened to all the others. Miss W explained she had removed some that had died and floated to the top of the aquarium, others had been eaten by their siblings and some had probably sunk to the bottom and had decomposed in the gravel. This, at the time, was a traumatic explanation for me and I expressed my concern to Miss W. She asked me to consider what would happen if all the eggs (say, for the sake of argument, approximately 200) had hatched and grown to maturity. As approximately half the tadpoles would be female and would lay just as many eggs themselves next year how many frogs would we have after just five years. She knew of my interest in maths and that I would try to work it out even though I had not yet met the exponential function. When I next saw her and said that there would be not hundreds, not thousands, not millions, not billions but several trillion, she said that in that case we wouldn't be able to walk on the surface of the earth because of frogs and tried to explain in terms I might understand about evolutionary stable populations and about life and death. It was revelatory experience for me.My next blog will give the next major revelation.
