Category Archives: life philosophy

Experiencing success vicariously

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Decorative image of a graduation ceremonyThe final PhD student for whom I will act as lead supervisor is scheduled to finish this month.  I have graduated forty PhD students since I was appointed a lecturer in 1985.  I am still in touch with many of them – they are divided between industry and universities with a bias towards industry (about 60%).  For the first twenty years, I was a sole academic supervisor often with an industrial supervisor providing support.  Then I moved to the US where a PhD committee provides supervisory guidance to the student and supervisor.  By the time I returned to the UK, about fifteen years ago, it had become accepted practice to appoint a second supervisor for each PhD student.  So, although I decided a couple of years ago not to accept any new PhD students as lead supervisor, I am acting as second supervisor for five students.  This is a great role since you have less responsibility, but you are engaged with the exciting research.  The topics vary from understanding the nanoscale mechanics of particles interacting with cells (see, for example, ‘Label-free real-time tracking of individual bacterium‘ on January 25, 2023 through to ‘Structural damage assessment using infrared detectors in fusion environments‘ on March 15, 2023), and just starting this year, innovative methods for communicating confidence in computational models.  Although the research is exciting, at a training session for supervisors during the CDT Winter School that I attended in January (see ‘Experiencing success vicariously‘ on January 7, 2026), we discussed our roles as supervisors and in particular that the research project is not the principal outcome of the PhD.  Instead, the development of the PhD student is the principal outcome.  It’s all about nurturing and mentoring people and the reward is experiencing their success vicariously.

Image: still from a video of a graduation ceremony at the University of Liverpool on December 9, 2025.  As Dean of the School of Engineering, I am at the lectern presenting PhD graduates, but I am hidden behind the Vice-Chancellor who has his back to the camera on the extreme left of the image.  You can watch the video at https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/graduation/the-ceremony/watch-graduation/catch-up/school-of-engineering/9-december-2025-10am/ .

More than human

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Decorative imageIn his recent book, ‘The Place of Tides’, James Rebanks writes ‘the age of humans will pass.  Perhaps the end has already begun though it may take a long time to play out’.  I grew up when nuclear armageddon appeared to be the major threat to the future of life on Earth and it remains a major threat, especially given current tensions between nations.  However, other threats have gained prominence including both a massive asteroid impact, on the scale of the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and climate change, which caused the largest mass extinction, killing 95% of all species, about 252 million years ago.  The current extinction rate is between 100 and 1000 times greater than the natural rate and is being driven by the overexploitation of the Earth’s resources by humans leading to habitat destruction and climate change.  Humans are part of a complex ecosystem, or system of systems, including soil systems with interactions between microorganisms, plants and decaying matter; pollination systems characterised by co-dependence between plants and pollinators; and, aquatic systems connecting rivers, lakes and oceans by the movement of water, nutrients and migratory species.  The overexploitation of these systems to support our 21st century lifestyle is starting to cause systemic failures that are the underlying cause of the increasing rate of species extinction and it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict when it will be our turn.  In his 1936 book, ‘Where Life is Better: An Unsentimental American Journey’, James Rorty observes that the most dangerous fact he has come across is ‘the overwhelming fact of our lazy, irresponsible, adolescent inability to face the truth or tell it’.  Not much has changed in nearly one hundred years, except that the global population has increased fourfold from about 2.2 billion to 8.2 billion with a corresponding increase in the exploitation of the Earth for energy, food and satisfying our materialistic desires.  A recent exhibition at the Design Museum in London, encouraged us to think beyond human-centred design and to consider the impact of our designs on all the species on the planet.  A process sometimes known as life-centred design or interspecies design.  What if designs could help other species to flourish, as well as humans?

References:

Rebanks, James, The place of tides, London: Penguin, 2025.

Rorty, James, Where life is better: an unsentimental journey.  New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936.  (I have not read this book but it was quoted by Joanna Pocock in ‘Greyhound’, Glasgow: Fitzcarraldo Editions, HarperCollins Publishers, 2025, which I have read and enjoyed).

Image: Photograph of Pei yono uhutipo (Spirit of the path) by Sheraonawe Hakihiiwe, a member of the Yanomami Indigenous community who live in the Venezuelan and Brazilian Amazon. One of a series of his paintings in the ‘More than Human‘ exhibition at the Design Museum which form part of an archive of Yanomami knowledge that reflects the abundance of life in the forest.

Staying connected to reality via literature

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Decorative image of a painting by Sarah EvansFor most of this year, I have not been a frequent visitor to bookshops so I am not suffering from tsundoku [see ‘Tsundoku’ on May 24th, 2017].  Instead, I have been unable to resist borrowing books from people when visiting them for weekends [see ‘Fictional planetary emergencies’ on June 4th, 2025].  This has allowed me to enjoy Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, Fen by Daisy Johnson, and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street by Hilary Mantel.  The last one describes the experiences of the narrator living in a Middle Eastern country while her husband works as civil engineer on a lucrative employment contract.  It is a thriller but the cultural differences between life in a Middle Eastern kingdom and the West for a professional woman are shocking and perhaps should be a ‘must-read’ for anyone tempted by lucrative job offers in the Middle East.  A month or so later, I borrowed from the same bookshelf Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami and The Optician of Lampedusa by Emma Jane Kirby.  ‘Hope’ describes a boat journey across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain by migrants and the back stories of the migrants that induced them to take the extraordinary risks of paying a people trafficker for the crossing in an overcrowded small boat.  The ‘Optician’ is a first person account of someone who, when cruising in their boat with a group of friends, rescued dozens of migrants from the Mediterranean Sea after their boat sank.  However, the rescue was too late for hundreds of men, women and children.  The book deals with the grief of the rescuers and their shock at the response of the Italian authorities.  In a world in which many people are becoming increasingly tribal and insular, within their own bubble [see ‘You’re all weird!’ on February 8th, 2017], it is crucial that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) people stay connected with the realities created by our addiction to fossil fuels and the deep inequalities of wealth – literature can help us connect, especially literature based on real-life experience.

References:

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water, Penguin Books, 2022.

Daisy Johnson, Fen, Penguin Books, 2017.

Emma Jane Kirby,  The Optician of Lampedusa, 2017.

Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, Harper Collins Publishers, 2004.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Penguin Books, 2025.

Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Algonquin Books, New York.

Image: Painting by Sarah Evans owned by the author.

Are we individuals?

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It has been estimated that there are 150 species of bacteria in our gut with a megagenome correspondingly larger than the human genome; and that 90% of the cells in our bodies are bacterial [1].  This challenges a simple understanding of individual identity because on one level we are a collection of organisms, mainly bacteria, rather than a single entity.  The complexity is almost incomprehensible with 30 trillion cells in the human body each with about a billion protein molecules [2].  Each cell is apparently autonomous, making decisions about its role in the system based on information acquired through communicating and signalling with its neighbours, the rest of the system and the environment.  Its autonomy would appear to imbue it with a sense of individual identity which is shaped by its relationships within the network of cells [3].  This also holds for human beings within society although you could argue the network is simpler because the global population is only about 8 billion; however the quantity of information being communicated is probably greater than between cells, so perhaps that makes the network more complex.  Networks are horizontal hierarchies with no one or thing in overall control and they can adapt to cope with changes in the environment.  By contrast, vertical hierarchies depend on top-down obedience and tend to eliminate dissent, yet without dissent there is little or no innovation or adaptation.  Hence, vertical hierarchies can appear to be robust but are actually brittle [4].  In a network we can build connections and share knowledge leading to the development of a collective intelligence that enables us to solve otherwise intractable problems.  Our ability to acquire knowledge not just from own our experiences but also from the experience of others, and hence to progressively grow collective intelligence, is one of the secrets of our success as a species [5].  It also underpins the competitive advantage of many successful organisations; however, it needs a horizontal, stable structure with high levels of trust and mutual dependence, in which our sense of individual identity is shaped by our relationships.

References:

  1. Gilbert SF, Sapp J, Tauber AI, A symbiotic view of life: we have never been individuals, Quarterly Review of Biology, 87(4):325-341, 2012.
  2. Ball P, How Life Works, Picador, 2023.
  3. Wheatley M, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, 2nd Edition, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, San Francisco, 1999.
  4. McWilliams D, Money – A Story of Humanity, Simon & Schuster, London, 2024.
  5. Henrich J, The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.