The Boys Who Didn't Kill Each Other (and other true stories)

A turkey leftovers edition of EiA.

Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about the science of curiosity, attention, wonder and why million-to-one chances seem to crop up nine times out of ten.

As we gallop into the final straight of Season 6, I’m finding there’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into the newsletters I’ll be publishing over the next week or so.

This edition is therefore like one of those meals you have just after Christmas, using the odds & ends stubbornly left over from a dozen meals: turkey, parsnips and custard, say, or brussels sprouts & macaroni cheese sandwiches. My point is: of course they don’t fit together. This is an act of desperation. Thanks.

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To get us started today - hey, did you read Lord Of The Flies when you were at school?

William Golding’s debut novel is rightly regarded as a classic work of psychological fiction. If you’ve never had the pleasure/horror, it concerns a group of young boys stranded on a deserted island who quickly revert to cruelty, savagery and murder.

I first read it at school. It’s one of those books beloved by British English literature examiners, for its rich, deep themes of the moral corruption of power, the tension between groupthink and individuality, and the infinite capacity for human beings to be shitty to each other.

At least, that’s what many of the modern interpretations are - because Golding himself is usually understood to have been specifically skewering the class-stratified British public school system at the time, and also working out his frustrations about a popular pro-colonialism children’s novel called The Coral Island.

However, in the words of Golding’s daughter, Judy Carver:

“My father greatly distrusted simple judgments. He was careful to give [Lord Of The Flies antagonist] Jack some good qualities, and to make him attractive. It’s possible to imagine that under different circumstances Jack and Ralph would have been friends, would have helped each other’s weaknesses, and admired each other’s strengths. But the author shows that this cannot happen on the island because the boys in their isolation are suffering unchecked “from the terrible disease of being human”. ”

Ah yes, what a lovely view of humanity. (That said, Judy Carver wrote generously of her father in her 2011 memoir.)

Beyond that quote, I’m not making any attempt to dissect the true meaning of Lord Of The Flies here, or to diminish its impact upon British literature. But I have seen it being used to justify authoritarian themes - for example, in business management - because, it’s implied, people (and in particular men and boys) always turn into ultra-selfish rage monkeys when they’re left to their own devices, so you need to treat them with a firm hand.

For example, here’s a quote from disgraced American evolutionary biologist Marc. D Hauser: “[Lord Of The Flies] should be standard reading in biology, economics, psychology, and philosophy." Uh. Well, firstly, it’s a novel - and secondly, in 2010 Harvard found Hauser guilty of fabricating and falsifying data in his research, after which he resigned, so maybe there’s an extra pinch of salt to take with his statement.

I certainly don’t believe humans are a disease, so I never liked what I thought Lord Of The Flies had to say, including when I was a teenager being bullied at school. As an alleged adult, I tend to assume we’re all capable of acts of woefully thoughtless stupidity (for which the antidote is often curiosity, acquired wisdom and applied kindness) - but Pure Evil itself is much rarer.

However, my tiresome optimism isn’t the point here! The point is: Lord Of The Flies certainly isn’t “proof” we’re awful - but it can feel like proof, in the depths of your being that only good stories can reach.

So I am very glad to tell you that a real-life version happened in 1965 where six boys were marooned for 15 months on a deserted island in Tonga - and things went very differently.

In short:

• The boys drew up rosters for garden, kitchen and guard duty.

• They cooperated and mediated disputes with discussions and time-outs.

• They sang songs, accompanied by a guitar made from driftwood, a coconut shell & salvaged wires.

• When one fell off a cliff and broke his leg, the others set it using sticks and leaves and covered his work shifts.

• They kept it together - and on Sunday 11th September 1966 after 15 months of surviving on fish, coconuts and birds, they were all rescued.

There are differences here from Golding’s scenario. These boys were aged between 13 and 16 (Golding’s were 6 to 12.) They were adventure-seekers willingly AWOL from a Catholic school in Nuku‘alofa, the capital of Tonga - rather than crash-landed British evacuees. And so on.

But this is about stories, and their ability to give us hope. Does this real-life tale make you think that maybe we can be better than rock-bottom awful? Good. That’s my take as well. So here’s a last word from the captain that rescued them:

“Life has taught me a great deal...including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

(Also: fiction writer

Simon K Jones

wrote an enjoyably hopeful twist on ‘Flies with his book No Adults Allowed, which I really enjoyed and recommend you go check out.)

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Secondly, my vote for most startling-titled science paper of the month goes to “Evidence suggesting that earth had a ring in the Ordovician.”

This is the period of our planet’s history between 485 and 443 million years ago - and the research looks at a massive increase in meteorites whacking into us at that time. This has been known about for a while, but the scientists looked at the positions of craters from Ordovician meteorite impacts, and found they were all within 30 degrees of Earth’s equator - suggesting the presence of an equatorial ring of rocky debris.

I spotted this on Threads last week and immediately wanted to write about it - but astronomer Phil Plait beat me to it, and probably good job too because he’s the expert here. Go read his overview here.

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And staying with space - just look at this!

It’s a composite image taken by the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars - and it looks to me like it’s sunset because the sky is tinted blue (which I previously wrote about here).

But look near the top of it:

That larger, distinctly potato-like shape is Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. This is something I’ve read about in science fiction books, but I didn’t think I’d see a photo of it from the surface, like someone would if they were walking around in their heated suit (it’s damn cold on Mars), and caught a flash of reflected sunlight out the corner of their eye, looked up and - there it is.

And that tiny white dot next to it?

That’s all of us on Earth, over a hundred million miles away.

Whew.

(Hat-tip to astrophysics student Skylar Grayson for making me aware of it, and credit to NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS for the image.)

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Hooray! The Ig Nobels are here again! (Thanks to Jacob Sutton for the reminder.)

If this pronouncement means nothing to you, please start here:

And I’m glad to say that this year’s winners are a bumper crop of exciting ridiculousness.

I’m particularly delighted that the Japanese team who discovered that mammals - including humans, in theory - can ‘breathe’ through their rectums has been awarded the Ig Nobel for Physiology. (I previously wrote…I guess you could call admiringly about anus-breathing when I looked at the science of breathing liquid.)

Other gems include:

• a University College London demographer who has debunked the data supporting the popular idea of “Blue Zones” where people allegedly live the longest, instead finding it’s often riddled with clerical errors, pension fraud and a lack of verified birth certificates.

• the Botany prize winners finding slightly creepy evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of nearby artificial plastic plants.

• a posthumous award to researchers who published a study in 1939 (!) showing that repeatedly exploding paper bags next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow caused the cow to produce less milk. Hold the front page indeed. (According to the writeup at New Scientist, when the daughter and grandson of one of the researchers turned up to accept the prize, they were met with a demonstration that involved a toy cat, a human in a cow costume and five Nobel laureates exploding paper bags.)

The full list of winners is here - but please, when you’ve glanced through it, do yourself a huge favour and read the archives for an hour or two. Endless joy.

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Next - remember the story of this letter that took almost a century to travel across England?

Delightfully, it’s just been beaten by a postcard:

In August 1903, Ewart on the Eastern Coast of Wales sent a postcard to Lydia on the Southern Coast. While the distance between them would only take about an hour and a half to drive today, Ewart’s message took 121 years to arrive.

A manager at the Swansea Building Society, a Welsh financial institution, was surprised to receive the much-overdue postcard in August 2024. Thanks to the efforts of the building society, as well as local sleuths and specialists, Ewart and Lydia’s descendants were soon reunited over the long-lost note.

Thanks to Beth Kujawksi for tipping me off about it.

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And lastly - I’ve been following astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy on all my social media channels for a while now, so I shouldn’t be surprised by the quality of anything he posts, which is usually jaw-dropping...

But this colour-processed image of the recent lunar occultation of the planet Saturn, which he took from the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, absolutely blew me away:

(Full set of images here, currently available as prints at Andrew’s website.)

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Images: Delphine Fant; NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Andrew McCarthy.