Zoology Department Quotes

The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pendantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage was all twisted out of shape and the gray wolf Berserker was missing. Dracula had temporarily inherited its body. Dracula had a totally difference experience at the zoo from that of other people.

I'm on the New York State Council for the Arts now, and every so often some other member talks about sending notices to college English departments about some literary opportunity, and I say, "Send them to the chemistry departments, send them to the zoology departments, send them to the anthropology departments and the astronomy departments and physics departments, and all the medical and law schools. That's where the writers are most likely to be.

Indeed, it’s a virtue for a scientist to change their mind. The biologist Richard Dawkins recounts his experience of ‘a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford’ who for years had: passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi Apparatus was real. At the end of the lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the hand and said – with passion – “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” We clapped our hands red … In practice, not all scientists would [say that]. But all scientists pay lip service to it as an ideal – unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a lump to my throat.25 This is what people mean when they talk about science being ‘self-correcting’. Eventually, even if it takes many years or decades, older, incorrect ideas are overturned by data (or sometimes, as was rather morbidly noted by the physicist Max Planck, by all their stubborn proponents dying and leaving science to the next generation). Again, that’s the theory. In practice, though, the publication system described earlier in this chapter sits awkwardly with the Mertonian Norms, in many ways obstructing the process of self-correction. The specifics of this contradiction – between the competition for grants and clamour for prestigious publications on the one hand, and the open, dispassionate, sceptical appraisal of science on the other – will become increasingly clear as we progress through the book. 25. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006): pp. 320–21.

In 1985, Wouter van Hoven was in his office in the zoology department at Pretoria University when he got an unusual call from a wildlife warden. In the last month, more than a thousand kudu, a particularly majestic species of antelope with elegant stripes and long, curling horns, had dropped dead on multiple game ranches in the nearby Transvaal region. The same thing had happened the winter before. In total some three thousand kudu had died. Nothing seemed wrong with them, no open wounds, no disease, though some looked a little thin. Could he come out as soon as possible? The ranch owners were beside themselves. Van Hoven was a wildlife nutrition zoologist who specialized in African ungulates. He should be able to figure this out, he thought. He’d be over right away. When Van Hoven got to the first game ranch, dead kudu were lying about as if a war had just been fought. But the first thing he noticed after the stench was that there were too many of them for a ranch that size. As a rule, there should not be more than three kudu per 100 hectares, and this ranch had about fifteen per 100. The same was true at the next few ranches he visited. Game-ranch hunting had exploded in popularity, and to cash in, ranchers were pushing the limits of their land. He opened up several kudu and saw stomachs full of crushed acacia leaves, undigested. He looked out at the giraffes, who were spread out along a swath of savanna, nibbling acacia trees and evidently not dying. After a few weeks a picture began to come together: when acacias begin to be eaten, they increase the bitter tannin in their leaves. Van Hoven already knew this. It’s a gentle defensive mechanism. At first, the tannin rises just a little. It’s not dangerous, but it tastes bad. Typically, that’s enough to deter a kudu. But both of the last two winters were extremely dry. All the grass was dead. Too many kudu, penned in by game fences, had nothing else to eat and nowhere else to go. He figured they had continued eating the acacia leaves, despite the bitter taste, because they had to. He pulled out a few clumps of chewed acacia leaves from a kudu gut and brought them to a lab. Kudu, Van Hoven knew, could handle about 4 percent tannin content in a leaf. Above that is trouble. The acacia, he figured, kept raising the level of tannin in the leaves, tit for tat. The kudu kept eating. And then, clearly, the acacias delivered a lethal dose. The undigested leaves Van Hoven tested from the kudu’s stomachs were 12 percent tannin.