Making Fun of Mendel

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 895, 28 September 1956, Page 22

Making Fun of Mendel

by

SUNDOWNER

SEPTEMEER 3

THOUGHT today when I was looking at our only black sheep that if fools did nothing worse than take up the running when the angels’ feet get cold, the world could do with more of them. It needs reckless risk-takers-people who are blind and deaf when caution is shouting warnings. The heights of Abra-

ham were climbed by fools, the Battle of Trafalgar lost by

caution. But it is not ordinary folly to say that two and two are five, or three, or any number greater or smaller than four. That is the folly of the frog blowing itself ‘up till it bursts. It is the kind of folly men of science say laymen commit when we question their findings and pronouncements. But I don’t argue that the earth is flats I don’t say that water flows uphill. I don’t suggest that Jonah swallowed the whale. I don’t think, or suspect, or hint that a ferret is not a fitch or a fitch a ferret. I obey all the-laws that I know to be laws except those I break through weakness. But I don’t find that my sheep obey Mendel. Dinah had a white lamb when she was eleven months old. When she was two she’ had a black lamb to the same Southdown father. At three she had a white lamb to that father, and at four a black lamb to an undetermined father (but still Southdown). This year at five she has had a half-in-half lamb to a Shropshire father, and has turned more than half-white herself. But that is not the law. Although she has produced two and a half white and two and a half black lambs in five years, in a nicely balanced sequence, her own blackness, though it was pronounced when she was born, has been fading steadily, and was a genetic accident to begin with. The rams mated with her, if they carried black genes, have not been able to prove it in any other

mating, and the blackness produced by Dinah is therefore biologically excessive. She has been as reckless scientifically as those wild sheep of Guthrie-Smith’s that turned themselves black by keeping out of reach of the shepherds for a few years and avoiding evil communications with the flock sheep. & ae

SEPTEMBER 5

. me gs | READER, who wonders in her covering note if she is "a crank and a nuisance," has sent me the sad story of Moturau Moana. Moturau Moana is a large furnished home on a bush-clad headland at Half Moon Bay. It was given to New Zealand by a Miss Noeline Baker so that people interested in

Stewart Island and its natural history -botanists, geolo-

gists, artists and zoologists-could stay in it and use it as a base for their work. But most people had never heard of it. Of these who know about it not enough wish to use it to encourage the Government to go on looking after it. Now there is a’danger-a strong probability, my correspondent thinks-that the place will be abandoned, and she asks all those who would regard that as a calamity to do what they can to stave it off. This is not the place for a stavingoff compaign, or for public activities of any kind. But I wish I knew what to think about such situations. It is clear enough that Governments can be embarrassed by gifts if not enough people are interested in the purpose for which they are made. The worthier the person is who makes them the more difficult it is to refuse them, and the more troublesome to accept them, since noble people are always in advance of their time and make a very small minority, in any community. On the other hand,

there is a point beyond which prudence should not go in public expenditure, and a risk that all Governments should be prepared to take for the things of the spirit. In this case the risk can hardly be very great. We all accept without question the burden of schools, colleges, and universities; without much questioning the provision of music and art; and when we do make a noise about any of these costs we still meet them. A free home for scientific workers in an especially rich field would be accepted as readily if there were evidence that it would be used. But’ there are two preliminary questions to which I myself do not know the answers. The first is, has the existence and the purpose of Moturau Moana ever been widely advertised? If it has, I am one of the sympathetic public the advertisers have not reached. The second is, do the artists and the scientific workers to whom Moturau Moana is known make regular use of it? When I was young I spent a lot of time dragging horses to water which they had no desire to drink. Now I save my energy and my halters. Governments must take a longer view than individuals, and I hope it will be long enough in this case to keep Moturau Moana in being till the voice of its possible users has been heard. In the meantime, as ham experts say, the question is over to them. ant ~_ -_

SEPTEMBER 7

belt a \V HEN I first heard the phrase "the expulsive power of a new affection," it affected me like my first sight of Mount Cook, I was just entering my twenties, and struggling desperately-as we so often do then, and so seldom do 20 years later-to adjust my desires to my terrifying sense of duty. But the

words have not lost their magic 50 years later. I still have

no better way of reconciling-myself to an emotional loss than giving myself another emotion of the same kind. Fortunately, and I always think most strangely, it is easy. The problem on a farm is to avoid too many emotions; too many (and too abject) servitudes. A pup will enslave you; a lamb; a calf; a clutch of chickens. So will a fat old wether or an ageing cow. I had a letter this morning from the wife of a dairy farmer, the daughter of a dairy farmer, the owner and exhibitor of pedigree Ayrshires, who has been enslaved by a goat. She was foolish enough or brave enough-I can’t decide whichto buy it as a kid, and now it has every member of the family on a short lead. This busy, intelligent, experienced woman, with a home to run and a family to provide for-how many hours of freedom does that leave in 24?--who tells me that she has always "had chooks, and cats, and pigs, and anything up to 25 calves every spring," now devotes "quite a lot of the vegetable garden to rows of tit-bits" for this tyrant, and blesses the day when the chains were fastened to her ankles. Well, we all give hostages to fortune at some time and in some fashion, but those who give their hearts to animals to keep for them take great risks. They are marked for misery as certainly as a raddled ewe is marked for "the works," and only another gamble of the same kind will save them. The drunkard who demands a hair of the dog that bit him is not so brave or so foolish or so clever as the owner of a pet lamb who buries it one day and the next day brings home another. (To be continued)