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The Times (London)
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/>
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You may mock gay duck science, 
but it's not quackery 

The Times 
Friday October 03, 2003 

by Terence Kealey 


This year's Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded 
at Harvard University last night, and 
the ceremony was properly humorous. 
Edward Murphy accepted the Engineering 
Prize on behalf of his late father, 
the author of Murphy's Law: "If anything 
can go wrong, it will." Kees Moeliker, 
the curator of birds at the Natural 
History Museum of Rotterdam, accepted 
the Biology Prize for his paper on 
homosexual necrophilia among mallard 
ducks. The other eight prizes were 
equally entertaining. 

The Ig Nobel Prizes were inaugurated in 
1991 to celebrate humour - mostly 
inadvertent - in science. The awards 
end with the traditional: "If you won 
a prize tonight, better luck next year." 
But in his 1905 book, Jokes and the 
Relation to the Unconscious, Freud showed 
how humour speaks to real, if repressed, 
concerns. 

Consider Murphy's Law. If the directors 
of Railtrack had taken cognisance of it, 
some people who are now dead would still 
be alive. Or take the mallard, who was 
actually already engaged in rape when his 
victim died by flying into a building, 
whereupon the rapist sodomised the 
still-warm corpse for a further 75 minutes. 

The reason that story is important is that 
homosexuality is common, not only among 
ducks (up to 20 per cent of duck pairings 
are homosexual) but also, as Bruce Bagemihl 
reported in his 1999 book Biological 
Exuberance, among the whole animal kingdom. 
More than 450 species engage in homosexuality, 
and if the Pope and the opponents of Jeffrey 
John's enthronement as Bishop of Reading 
knew more biology, they might have expressed 
themselves more kindly over recent months. 

Or consider another of this year's prizes, 
the Peace Prize awarded to the very lively 
Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for 
creating the Association of Dead People. 
It is serious, because Bihari has been 
declared legally dead and he needs help 
for his campaign against unfeeling 
bureaucrats and greedy relatives. 

Similarly, Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford 
University, won the Psychology Prize 
for his paper, Politicians' Uniquely 
Simple Personalities, but his work builds 
on fascinating research explaining how 
our leaders are flawed. Previous years' 
awards have been equally useful. The 1996 
prize for the study Transmission of 
Gonorrhoea Through an Inflatable Doll 
speaks for itself, as does the 1993 
prize for Acute Management of the 
Zipper-Entrapped Penis, and the 1992 
prize for Chemical Compounds Responsible 
for Foot Odour. 

One of the most distinguished recipients 
was Mara Sidoli, of Washington, who, in 
1998, was the president of the National 
Association for the Advancement of 
Psychoanalysis when she won the Ig Noble 
Prize for her paper Farting as a Defence 
Against Unspeakable Dread. 

Occasional dullards fail to get the point. 
Robert May, the British Government's Chief 
Scientist, complained in 1995 that the Ig 
Nobels demeaned scientists. He was upset 
by that year's award for A Study of the 
Effects of Water Content on the Compaction 
Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes which 
was, in fact, a commercially useful investigation 
into the sogginess of cereal. Few others were 
upset, and the Ig Nobel organisers dismissed 
the miserable May as "pompous, whining, thin 
skinned and humourless". Inevitably, therefore, 
he has since been elected as president of the 
Royal Society. 

Pioneering science is often dismissed as absurd. 
Karl Popper noted that most research does 
little but confirm existing theories, so truly 
innovative science that upsets those theories 
also upsets the Establishment, which may defend 
itself by belittling the innovators. Robert 
Goddard, the pioneer of space flight, had to 
sue The New York Times over its mockery of his 
early failures, but the paper was only echoing 
conventional scepticism when, after one crash, 
it ran its 1929 headline: "Moon Rocket Misses 
Target by 238,799 1/2 Miles". Later, Patrick 
Steptoe and Roberts Edwards had to sue The Times 
for writing off their IVF work. 

The Ig Nobels may appear to mock but, under that camouflage, they are encouraging courageous pioneers. What else would celebrate a study on Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs? 



Terence Kealey is the author of the 
forthcoming book Sex, Science and Profits