The class will accept that the term genetic is used loosely to refer to any
trait for which we can link a length of DNA with the expression of a specific
characteristic. At a basic level, this definition should cover girls and playing
with dolls. If we accept that, in some cultures at least, girls are more likely
to play with dolls than are boys, then we can say that playing with dolls is to
an extent coupled with the possession of two X chromosomes and is therefore
genetic. But no, the students will not accept this. While it may be possible to
link the characteristic playing with dolls to a piece of genetic material, its
expression is entirely dependent on cultural influence.

Next I ask them to take me step by step from a gene to expression of any
characteristic. This request is usually met by blank looks. For virtually all of
us, for virtually every trait, there is a black box of ignorance about how genes
are decoded into flesh and blood or behavioural attributes. The class has no
difficulty with the idea that, to a greater or lesser extent, the chain of
events producing every bit of us usually includes genetically regulated
enzyme-catalysed reactions but is also dependent on environmental factors.
Without wanting to get bogged down in the complexities of a nature/nurture
debate, everyone seems happy to accept that our attributes are an interaction of
genes and the environment—a phenotype.

The students are prepared to accept that there can be a phenotype of girls
playing with dolls, and that phenotypes are the result of interaction between
genes and environment. So, are they happy with the idea that girls have genes
for playing with dolls? No, there’s still disquiet. So what is the problem?

People react in a similar way to tabloid headlines about genes for poor
motherhood. People are content with the idea that their physical bodies are the
product of both genes and environment, but suggest this applies also to
behavioural characteristics and they have problems. I think this is related to a
poor understanding of what we mean by interaction. The perception is that
phenotype is an unequal balance of genes and environment—unequal because
people invariably want to prefer one or the other.

My students are happy with the idea that girls play with dolls because of
cultural influences. After all, cultural influence is mainly just shorthand for
the opinions of earlier generations. But now it is the students’ turn to
influence the cultural trend. Suggest that there may be a genetic component and
they feel impotent. Find a gene for something and we become powerless, destined
to grow up to be bad mothers, or play with dolls.

The concept of an interaction is one of the most basic concepts in scientific
thinking and yet it is poorly understood. An electrical circuit with two
switches and a bulb requires both switches to be in the “on” position for the
light to shine. Once illuminated, things may be more complicated as one or both
of the switches may be dimmer switches and both can affect the intensity of the
light. In reality the expression of most human characteristics is like this: a
spectrum with both environmental and genetic effects varying the intensity of
expression from slight to almost absolute. However, both are equally vital for
the trait to be expressed at all.

“Set-aside, ugh,” says the trained botanist, conservationist or agricultural scientist, who tends to dismiss the community of plants associated with rotational set-aside as uninteresting arable weeds. But such was the display of colour this summer that it would have been pure snobbery for anyone to label it as of “no aesthetic worth”.

The nonrotational option of set-aside allows the least productive pieces of farmland to be taken out of production for several years. These more marginal areas tend to have lower levels of nutrients in the soil or poor drainage and thus may be of potential interest to the ecologist. Over this time scale, “interesting” perennial plants can reinvade and establish themselves from hedgerows, field edges, drainage ditches and local sites of interest. Invertebrate populations build up, providing food for farmland birds, nesting undisturbed in the developing sward.

Most farmers, however, opt for rotational set-aside. Here, a small percentage of fields (prime productive and unproductive land alike) are taken out of production for a year at a time. Many of these fields are simply expanses of bare soil with scattered crop plants, thistles and couch grass. Yet under these conditions, even the despised arable weeds can grow to an unprecedented size and produce armfuls of flowers. Unfettered by a competing crop and the barrage of agronomic practices that usually accompany it, a new habitat has been created.

Ageing, nonrotational set-aside fields, dominated by the gold of creeping buttercups, interspersed with the reds and whites of sorrels and clovers, misty blue patches of speedwell, nodding daisy-like heads of mayweeds and wisps of annual grass, are a riot of colour to the casual passer-by. Even the most hardened of botanical snobs must find it difficult not to admire the delicate elegance of the pastel yellow field pansy.

In and among the set-aside vegetation, small mammals reproduce away from the rat race of modern agriculture. Although it’s hard to quantify, this must be good for birds of prey, if only by increasing the numbers of dead rabbits available to them along country lanes. The rule is that set-aside vegetation must be cut late to protect nesting birds and to minimise the risk of their chicks ending up as silage.

Even in the first year of set-aside, invertebrate populations (if not the diversity of species) increase dramatically. Large numbers of sawfly larvae and froghoppers provide potential food for young partridges.

So why do conservationists still scowl at a colourful field of set-aside? Is the answer that you have to be rare to be valued? This cannot be true at the level of the species, at least; many of the plants associated with species-rich grasslands (which are awarded high conservation status) are not in themselves any rarer than the species associated with set-aside. Perhaps it is just snobbery. Many botanists seem unable to value a beautiful flower if it is a weed. It is also nothing to do with the “naturalness” of the system as habitats: species-rich grasslands are as seminatural as set-aside vegetation.

Species-rich grasslands and lowland heaths are assemblages of plant species which result from agricultural practices that are now redundant. This is at least part of the reason why both habitats have shrunk so dramatically since the Second World War. By contrast, the abundant set-aside vegetation is a collection of species created by current agricultural practices.

I am not trying to argue that fields of set-aside should be given the status of our declining and diverse semi-natural habitats. But neither should we write them off. For those prepared to take the time to stop and look, there is beauty to be found. Indeed, much of the richness and interest of the British countryside is in no small part a reflection of historic changes in agricultural practice.

Not that recent intensive agricultural practices have done anything to enhance the appearance of the landscape. But set-aside is not like this, and for the public, unblinkered by years of botanical training, those fields blooming with mayweeds and buttercups offer a pleasant change from the monotony of cereals and “improved” grassland.

And creating a new habitat offers the opportunity to use some of this surplus farmland to make amends for the damage we have inflicted on our natural heritage over the past 50 years. It might well make a lot of sense to convert at least some of the least productive of our arable land back to habitats of higher ecological value, even if they become facsimiles of seminatural, obsolete ecosystems.

We can but wonder if, in some future when the CAP is but a distant memory, old folk will reminisce about those long-gone fields full of flowers. How long before the last obsolete field of set-aside is declared a site of ecological importance and conservationists struggle to design management strategies for its prevention?

The incident prompted me to dust off forty years of conference programmes
of the Ecological Genetics Group and analyse the shift in the fossil record
away from these slow, lumbering dinosaurs to today’s fast, sleek and efficient
grant-driven researchers.

The Ecological Genetics Group, or EGG as it is affectionately known
to its members, has been holding regular meetings around Britain’s universities
at Easter (of course) for almost four decades. It now forms a special interest
group of the British Ecological Society, and although its numbers fluctuate,
the population sample size has been fairly stable over its entire history.
Sure enough the EGG records reveal that an entire dynasty of academic dinosaurs
have apparently roamed around the same conference circuit for an entire
geological period. More than ten of these have been regularly presenting
papers on the same species for the past twenty to thirty years.

As with many fossil records, the archives demonstrate a marked discontinuity.
Within the past ten years no new dinosaur eggs seem to have hatched. It
is impossible to predict how many of this year’s batch of researchers will
be working on the same problem twenty years from now. But apparently no
young scientists presenting papers during the past decade were working on
the same species beyond the three-year life span of the standard grant-funded
project. The trap here is to fall into the thinking (as so many do with
evolution itself) that change implies advancement and progress.

Even the most rapid evolutionary genetic change is likely to be invisible
to the flash-photograph view produced by a three-year project. Undoubtedly
the best known example of observed temporal genetic change is that of the
peppered moth. The now-famous rise of the dark form of this moth during
the industrial revolution and its subsequent demise following the Clean
Air Act, may have never been detected if only three years’ data were available.
The slow and methodical piecing together of evidence which has taken place
during this century, converting the theory of evolution into hard fact,
rests upon many examples like the peppered moth. The dinosaurs or giants
who pieced the jigsaw together may be in the process of being out-evolved,
but consider this: the theory of evolution itself might never have been
postulated if Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been embroiled
in the struggle for the next round of awards.

John Warren is secretary of the Ecological Genetics Group.