Too long too easy

In the early 1970s, when I was getting to college, people were beginning to apply evolutionary theory to help understand the human condition. The basic idea was that, through comparative anthropology / primatology we could speculate about the social structures of early humans. It could then be suggested that some of the drivers of social relationships might be genetically hard-wired rather than learned anew each generation. This was controversial because biological determinism, if it was hard-wired, might make it impossible for the dispossessed to get a fair share of the cake. These ideas came to a head when EO Wilson [obit] published Sociobiology in 1975. An earlier exponent of the idea that 1 million years of evolution in anatomically modern humans might impinged on how soccer teams or boardrooms worked was Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (1971) [review]. You could hardly choose more eponysterical author names for a book about biological anthro.

Robin Fox has a daughter Kate Fox who works as an experimental sociologist in Oxford. She is married to author neurosurgeon Henry Marsh [whom prev], not that it makes any difference - she's a person in her own right, not a chattel of the men in her life. I got her chunky book Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour. (2004, 2ndEd 2014), out of the library recently. It's 225,000 words [far too] long and not enough chips. There aren't many copies in the Irish library system and there was a reserve on the title, so I didn't read every word. There's a chapter on the relationship of English people to English television, for example. We last owned a telly 40 years ago (in England), so all that is a closed book to me and I skipped that chapter.

Other sections made my skin crawl with shivers of recognition, so I didn't dwell on them either. What I did read is readable and amusing in a breezy sort of way. It is based on experimental work, so is not a series of anecdotes and opinions. The experiments are science but not as hard scientists might recognise it. I'm not getting snitty/sniffy here: I had my name on a number of papers in biomedical immunology which had small samples, large error bars and quite woolly conclusions. Those conclusions are quite likely irreproducible, if anyone could be bothered to replicate our underpowered experiments.

Our results were based on molecular biological assays where the reagents cost a lorra money and patients and controls were limited. €500,000 doesn't go far in Eppendorfia. Fox's research is cheap: like bumping into people in railway stations and counting the number of times they say sorry; or sitting in the pub eavesdropping on blokes slagging each other off as a surrogate for showing affection . . . and counting the insults. But it doesn't seem to be based on thousands of interactions. Maybe it doesn't need to be. Fox's theme or thesis is that the English are funny. Irony rules! Self-deprecating humour is a key ingredient in social lubrication in England. I do that, it's how I was brought up (in England). The English also tend to be punny which is an acquired taste and I'm glad I don't have to endure the careful arched-eyebrow delivery of clever word-play any more. 

StopPress: Had a visit yest from a friend who lives in Newry and commutes daily to Dublin. In contrast to the English, they talk to each other on the train. Only among Team Carriage C, mind: wouldn't know anything about those Others from Carriage A. But Carriage C has a Christmas party and all the other elements of successful Third Spaces. Brits are missing something walled up behind their newspapers immersed in their devices not making eye-contact