FOR THE PAST 15 MONTHS or so it’s become a mantra that we should all “follow the science”. Science has been a useful prop for politicians keen to deflect blame for unpopular decisions, though it won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that they follow it slavishly when it suits them but are perfectly happy to set it aside when it doesn’t. Science is often referred to as if it’s holy writ, tablets of wisdom passed down from the mountain which we would be wise to use for guidance.
But another thing I’ve noticed during the coronavirus pandemic is how often scientists themselves have been keen to remind us that the building blocks of science are constantly shifting. “Data, not dates” is all very well, but only so long as that data remains reliable.
An illustration of this comes with the strange case of the coelacanth. This is a prehistoric, deep-living fish that is highly unlikely to trouble any of us divers by swimming in front of our cameras – it probably won’t.
I did see one once, but it had been stuffed and mounted in a tank in the middle of Comoros island’s only dive-centre. I was impressed by its size – they can grow as big as us – and by its uncompromising ugliness.
This was a creature that had originated 400 million years ago, but until six decades before I saw that specimen it was known only from fossils and had been thought long extinct. Then in 1938 one turned up in a fishing net further south in the Indian Ocean.
I was struck by that stuffed coelacanth and later read up on the species.The odd thing was that although it was slow-moving it was apparently
very fast-growing. Scientists had studied its scales, which carry grow thrings like those of a tree, and concluded that it managed to reach its considerable bulk even though it had a life expectancy of only about 20 years. Scientists had spoken, and it was so.

ONLY THIS MONTH have French researchers who questioned this conclusion published a paper that shows that, far from being one of the fastest-growing fish in the sea, it is in fact the polar opposite.
The scientists found 27 dead specimens at various stages of development at the French National Museum of Natural History, and
applied the sort of polarised-light microscopy and scale-interpretation techniques that are routinely used to age commercial fish nowadays.
And they found five previously unsuspected mini annual growth-rings for each of the larger ones noted before. Which meant that coelacanths can live to be 100 and are among the longest-lived of all fish, closer to deep-sea sharks. Not only that, but they don’t even mature until they’re about 55, and their pregnancies last five years!
This is not to attack scientists, of course, only to underline what they want non-scientists like me to understand – that science is only as good as the latest research and tools allow it to be. It’s all about constant questioning of past assumptions.
The UK government has now reached the point where it has more or less dropped any pretence of following the science – the course has been set for our “new normal”. Some scientists agree with the move, many don’t – and the coelacanth indicates why that is.

Download from:

NitroFlare

• Fast & Healthy – June 2021
• Discover Your Ancestors – July 2021