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Living with Insects

“Living with Insects” is a 5,000-word story about an invented contemporary evolutionary biologist whose teenage daughter is struggling with A-level genetics. The biologist leaves his wife; furious, she devastates the daughter by telling her she is probably ‘not even’ his child. The story intercuts between the real historical evolutionary biologist W.D.Hamilton’s life and the invented present and shows that altruistic behaviour between father and daughter is not based on the facts of conception. Research questions included: 1 How not just to explain Hamilton’s evolutionary principle of inclusive fitness in a story, but to embody it through metaphor; 2 How to deal ethically with the task of inventing the thoughts of a named historical individual. The story was commissioned by Comma Press for a short story anthology, Litmus (2011), based on ‘the Eureka moment of scientific discovery’. The stories were intended to bridge the gap between the way scientists and artists record significant moments, interweaving science and biography. Research involved meeting and collaborating with a contemporary scientist, in my case Manchester’s Professor Matthew Cobb. Hamilton’s collected “Prefaces” and writing about the “Principle” in social insects are long-standing research interests, examining altruistic behaviour outside simple parent-child relations and linking it to the social group’s genetic inter-relatedness. I also worked closely from Hamilton’s autobiographical ‘Prefaces’ – where he links his own father’s wider altruism to something almost mystical, so the ‘personal’ story qualified the scientific one. Litmus was the Independent’s Book of the Week, featured on Radio 4’s ‘Pick of the Week’ and ‘Front Row’ and Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. Subsequently, public appearances with the advising scientist occurred at a number of literary festivals.