Poohsticks, Mr Trump and being a child-like researcher

In The Holy Bible [1] we read:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I have no idea whether this guidance is to be taken literally but, if so, and if I was a Christian believer, I would need to think twice about the enjoyment of games that adults are meant to have “grown out of”. One of the many pleasures of becoming a parent is that we can legitimately enjoy these games once again as our children grow up.

One that I still play is Poohsticks, described by A. A. Milne in The House at Pooh Corner [2] and demonstrated in a wonderful drawing by E. H. Shepard of Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet playing the game (see above). As is now well known, Poohsticks is for two or more players, each of which selects a stick. On command, each player drops their stick into a river from the upstream side of a bridge and the first stick to appear on the downstream side of the bridge decides the winner.

Last week, I was walking on Boxmoor in Hertfordshire where a bridge crosses the River Bulbourne and, as on other occasions, the child in me could not resist playing Poohsticks. Necessarily, I played against myself and took two twigs and threw them in to the water and I didn’t much care which one came out first as I was the winner anyway. Both twigs eventually became tangled up, together with other vegetation, on a small tree trunk that had fallen across the river. While watching the fate of the twigs, I also notice that a submerged horse chestnut leaf was being carried downstream, but it was moving slowly compared to the twigs. As someone who spent a career looking in streams and rivers, I already knew that there are many methods by which vegetation becomes trapped, and thus retained to provide nutrients after decomposition, and I also knew that water flows more rapidly at the surface than in the water column (illustrated crudely below: higher in the water column the influence of friction from the bed becomes less).

Playing Poohsticks, in addition to allowing me re-entry to the joys of childhood, resulted in observations and questions for which I was able to provide answers based on acquired knowledge. When conducting original research, it is always helpful to ask questions like those inspired by child-like curiosity and I admit that there were several occasions in my career when I had the “look at that!” or “what’s that?” response that one might expect of a five-year old. The result was sometimes questions that could be framed into hypotheses and null models that were testable (using the best Popperian method), although I was always aware that complex biological systems have probability at their core, rather than just the absolute laws of physical science.

The main lesson to come from all this is that I Corinthians 13:11 must not be taken literally and we should all be child-like in the best sense, not like the childishness of Mr Trump that has recently grabbed the headlines [3]. Being child-like keeps us open to serendipitous discoveries and, as we know, many of those “accidents” have led to important steps in understanding the world around us. I always encouraged students to be child-like and to be amazed, and thrilled, by living organisms and their way of life. I can't help it.

[1] I Corinthians 13:11 in the Authorised King James Version of The Holy Bible.

[2] A.A.Milne (1928) The House at Pooh Corner. London, Methuen. (My edition was published in 2004 by Egmont U.K. in London).

[3] Michael Wolff (2018) Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. London, Little, Brown.

Looking back on Academic Life

I was very proud to be made an Emeritus Professor of Biology at UCL after spending the last 23 years of my career there.

Those years were not all spent in one location, as there were several moves to different buildings within the campus, resulting from amalgamations and re-organisations. My last year was spent in a building away from the main campus as no rooms were available in the refurbished building occupied by my latest Department. That was rather good in a way as, although I missed chatting to some of my colleagues, I didn’t feel that I fitted in with the contemporary focus of Universities. My interests had always been in research and teaching, but with each on an equal footing; research fascinated me and enabled me to follow my muse, while teaching gave the chance to pass on my fascination. That approach to academic life is now old-fashioned and, to have been more successful, I should have dedicated myself more to writing grant proposals and networking with those who could help me in my career. Maybe that sounds like the thinking of someone who didn’t have the necessary drive and ability to succeed and there is some truth in that. I was never going to be a high flier in research, even though the citation for the DSc degree I was awarded in 2008 stated that I had “distinguished myself by research and learning”. My interest in research was much more in having fun with ideas and then testing them out.

I loved teaching. Each year there would be a new group of students and we could work together on various subjects. The students mostly seemed to like me letting all my enthusiasms show, and were even accepting of some of my rather eccentric impersonations of animal locomotion and behaviour. Having had no pedagogical training, I was free to use my own approaches in teaching, so the end-product was the result of a certain amount of trial and error. As Biology is to me a wonderful, wide-ranging discipline it was easy to be motivated and to motivate students. Even more highly valued that the DSc are the three Teaching Awards which I received from UCL (a record, I think).

While very few colleagues had any wish to attend Graduation, for me it was one of the highlights of the year. Not the dressing-up, as parading in academic dress was never one of my favourite activities, but the chance to say goodbye to a year group of students and to meet with their families. What a difference between their first few days at University and the polished products that were now in the “outside world”. What a pleasure it was to work with most of them, even those who didn’t much care for the subject in that way that I did.

Few parts of academic life brought more ups-and-downs than the behind-the-scenes job of tutoring. It was always something that I felt was important and I did what I could to support students who were not having the best of times. Sometimes there were failures, and I regret that I may have made some bad decisions or given poor advice, but there were a lot more successes. Not successes for me, as I was just a sounding board, but for the students who were able to fight through their difficulties. Whatever the rewards of research and teaching, it was the pleasure of seeing these students graduate that provided some of the best times of my career as an academic. It sounds mawkish, but it happens to be true.