京都大学
英文和訳問題集

"Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey," said the linguist and polyglot Jakobson. In other words: [it's possible to say anything in any language, but each language's grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously.]

All languages may be communicatively and cognitively equal, but much harder to bridge are the social and historical disparities among their speakers, which have become almost unfathomably large. At present, around half of all languages are spoken by communities of ten thousand or fewer, and hundreds have just ten speakers or fewer. On every continent, the median number of speakers for a language is below one thousand, and in Australia this figure goes as low as eighty-seven. [Today these numbers reflect serious endangerment, and even languages with hundreds of thousands or a few million speakers can be considered vulnerable.] In the past, however, small language communities could be quite stable, especially hunter-gatherer groups which typically comprised fewer than a thousand people.

For the sake of justice ― because the powerful, by conquest or commerce or culture or creed, are always actively suppressing, stamping out, and stigmatizing the languages of the powerless. Languages today are not "dying natural deaths" or evolving into new forms the way Latin evolved into Romance. Now more than ever, languages are being hounded out of existence. [Like biodiversity, with which it is clearly linked, linguistic diversity remains strongest today in remote and rugged regions traditionally beyond the reach of empires and nation-states: mountain ranges like the Himalaya and the Caucasus; archipelagoes like Indonesia, Vanuatu, and the Solomons; and zones of refuge like the Amazon, southern Mexico, Papua New Guinea, and parts of West and Central Africa.] But these too are under tremendous pressure.

It's this sense that's being used when we ask questions like "What came before the Big Bang?" (answer, in brief: "Don't know"), "What caused the Big Bang?" (don't know), "Did the Big Bang happen in a particular place?" (no, all of space was in the same place as the Big Bang, before the Universe started to expand), or "When was the Big Bang?" (13.8 billion years ago). [One day we may have a complete theory which explains this first moment and which will tell us whether there have been, or ever will be, other bangs, big or otherwise. It might also go some way to explaining why our particular Universe is the way it is, but at present all we have are some admittedly creative and well-motivated theoretical sketches, suggesting possible routes to it.] Such a theory, fully developed, would be the crowning glory of physics, a wonderous tribute to the ingenuity of the scientific mind, but it would also, inevitably, be extremely hard to test.

The moment of creation itself is inaccessible to us. [What we can do is make observations that tell us about the very early stages of the Universe's evolution, the first pages of its story.] It turns out we can say something sensible about conditions then, and so when observers like me talk about the Big Bang theory, we tend to mean not so much the single moment of beginning but the general and testable idea that, whatever started the thing rolling in the first place, the Universe began its life in a hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since.

In fact, "creativity" has only been a regular part of our vocabulary since the middle of the twentieth century. [Its first known written occurrence was in 1875, making it an infant as far as words go. "Creativeness" goes back a bit further, and was more common than creativity until about 1940, but both were used rarely and in an inconsistent kind of way.] Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of "creativity."

The term "creativity," in other words, allows us to think and say things previous terms don't. It is not a new word for old ideas but a way of expressing thoughts that were previously inexpressible. When people in the postwar era increasingly chose the word "creativity," then, they were subtly distinguishing their meaning from those other, almost universally older concepts. The term may not be precise, but it is vague in precise and meaningful ways. [Just as light can be both particle and wave, creativity somehow manages to exist as simultaneously mental and material, playful and practical, artsy and technological, exceptional and pedestrian.] This contradictory constellation of meanings and connotations, more than any one definition or theory, is what explains its appeal in postwar America, in which the balance between those very things seemed gravely at stake. The slipperiness was a feature, not a bug.

That is, after all, the core function of marketing: influencing behavioral adoption. Once the population has been divided into these segments, marketers then select the segments to which they will offer their products. This is the act of targeting. [We target a segment (or a number of segments) to pursue that we believe will most likely adopt a desired behavior ― buy, vote, watch, subscribe, attend, etc. Although our product may potentially be useful to everyone, we focus our efforts on the people with the highest propensity to move.] Considering the influence that culture has on our behavior, due to the social pressures of our tribes and our pursuit of identity congruence, tribes present themselves as the most compelling segment to target.

This perspective calls for a strong consideration if for no other reason than the fact that tribes are real. They're made up of real people, and people use them to communicate who they are and demarcate how they fit in the world. Segments, on the other hand, are not real. [They are a construct that marketers create where people are placed into homogeneous-like groups based on a rough substitute that helps us identify who they are and predict what they are likely to do.] Segments are clean and neat. But real people are complex and messy.

Meet my friend Deborah. Deborah drives a minivan. Does Deborah have kids? Do her kids play a sport? What sport do they play? And where does Deborah live? As you read those questions, you likely draw your answers fairly quickly. You probably thought, Deborah drives a minivan, so she must have kids, who play soccer, and they all live in a cul-de-sac. [Sounds about right, right?] Well, here's the thing. I gave you one data point about Deborah (she drives a minivan), and you mapped out her entire life. This is what we do ― with great cognitive fluidity, I might add. We put people in boxes based on the shortcut characteristics that we assign to people's identity.

Of course, one of the features of modern life, mostly thanks to the internet, is that we all have to constantly make choices about what to pay attention to ― what to spend our time on, even if it is for just a few minutes. Many of us today have instant access to far more information than we can ever hope to process, which has meant that our average attention span is getting shorter. [The more 'stuff' we have to think about and focus on, the less time we are able to devote to each particular thing. People are quick to blame the internet for this reduced attention span, but while social media certainly plays its part, it is not entirely to blame.] This trend can be traced back to when our world first started to become connected early in the last century as technology gave us access to an ever-increasing amount of information.

Today we are exposed to twenty-four-hour breaking news and an exponential rise in the amount of produced and consumed information. As the number of different issues that form our collective public discourse continues to increase, the amount of time and attention we are able to devote to each one inevitably gets compressed. [It isn't that our total engagement with all this information is any less, but rather that as the information competing for our attention becomes denser our attention gets spread more thinly, with the result that public debate becomes increasingly fragmented and superficial.] The more quickly we switch between topics, the more quickly we lose interest in the previous one.

So, this is the takeaway for us all in daily life. Do you need a PhD in climate science to know that recycling your rubbish is better for the planet than throwing it all in the ocean? Of course not. [But taking some time to dig a little deeper into a subject and weighing up the evidence, the pros and cons about an issue, before making up your mind can help you make better decisions in the long run.] Most things in life are difficult to begin with. But, if you're prepared to try, you can cope with far more than you imagine.

What are we trying to understand when we try to understand consciousness? Not only do philosophers have no agreed-upon definition of consciousness, some think that it can't be defined at all, that you can understand conscious experiences only by having them. [Such philosophers see consciousness as Louis Armstrong purportedly saw jazz: if you need to ask what it is, you're never going to know. Indeed, the task of explaining consciousness to someone who professes not to know ― and there are philosophers who do profess this ― is much more challenging than that of explaining jazz to the uninitiated.] If you don't know what jazz is, you can at least listen to music that is classified as jazz and compare it to its precursor ragtime, its cousin the blues, and its alter ego classical music.

[Some of the very same philosophers who think that nothing can be said to enlighten those who claim to not know what consciousness is have found quite a bit to say about what it is to those who claim to already know.] And much of their discussion centres on the idea that for you to be conscious there has to be something it is like to be you: while rocks have no inner experiences ― or so most presume ― and thus there is nothing it is like to be a rock, you know that there is something it is like to be you, something it is like to savour your morning coffee, to feel the soft fur of a kitten, to feel the sting when that adorable kitten scratches you.

[The claim that to be conscious is for there to be 'something it is like to be you' can be described in terms of having a 'point of view', or a 'perspective'. To have a point of view in this sense is simply to be the centre of conscious experience.] Of course, to explain consciousness in terms of having a point of view and then to explain what it is to have a point of view in terms of being conscious is circular. Yet, on the assumption that we cannot explain consciousness in terms of something else (you're not going to understand it, unless you have it), such a circle is to be expected ― whether it is a virtuous or a vicious one, however, can be debated.

An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication ― these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. [Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.] Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.

And so we face a no-analog predicament. [If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it's going to be more control. Only now what's got to be managed is not a nature that exists ― or is imagined to exist ― apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself ― not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature.]

Until the advent of digital information, libraries and archives had well-developed strategies for preserving their collections: paper. ... Digital information is inherently less stable and requires a much more proactive approach, not just to the technology itself (such as file formats, operating systems and software). [This instability has been amplified by the widespread adoption of online services provided by major technology companies, especially those in the world of social media, for whom preservation of knowledge is a purely commercial consideration.]

"Look it up" used to mean searching in the index of a printed book, or going to the right alphabetical entry in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Now it just means typing a word, term or question into a search box, and letting the computer do the rest. ... "[We are drowning in information, but are starved of knowledge,]" John Naisbitt pointed out as early as 1982 in his book Megatrends.

The digital world is full of contradictions. On the one hand the creation of knowledge has never been easier, nor has it been easier to copy texts, images and other forms of information. Storage of digital information on a vast scale is now not only possible but surprisingly inexpensive. Yet storage is not the same thing as preservation. The knowledge stored online is at risk of being lost, as digital information is surprisingly vulnerable to neglect as well as deliberate destruction. [There is also the problem that the knowledge we create through our daily online interactions is invisible to most of us, but it can be manipulated and used against society for commercial and political gain. Having it destroyed may be a desirable short-term outcome for many people worried about invasions of privacy but this might ultimately be to the detriment of society.]

His brightest pupil Aristotle thought differently. One major point of Aristotle's theory is said to be: [while history expresses the particular, concentrating on specific details as they happened, poetry can illuminate the universal, not allowing the accidental to intervene.] Hence the justification.

As the debate continues to the present time, researchers in psychology have shown us a new way of dealing with this old problem. From various experiments, it emerges that fiction has the power to modify us. Reportedly, ["when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape."] This might sound rather simplistic, but importantly, researchers are attempting to tell us that reading fiction cultivates empathy.

A recent article on the topic points out: "Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. [They can grasp another person's feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated. Conversely, we have all known bookish, introverted people who are not good at puzzling out other people, or, if they are, lack the ability to act on what they have grasped about the other person.]" (Here bookish people are, we are meant to understand, keen readers of fiction.)

[If we trace the history of opinion from the dawn of science in Greece through all succeeding epochs, we shall observe many constantly-reappearing indications of what may be called an intuitive feeling rather than a distinct vision of the truth that all the varied manifestations of life are but the flowers from a common root ― that all the complex forms have been evolved from pre-existing simpler forms.] This idea about evolution survived opposition, ridicule, refutation; and the reason of this persistence is that the idea harmonizes with one general conception of the world which has been called the monistic because it reduces all phenomena to community, and all knowledge to unity.

[And this explains, what would otherwise be inexplicable, the surprising ease and passion with which men wholly incompetent to appreciate the evidence for or against natural selection have adopted or "refuted" it.] Elementary ignorance of biology has not prevented them from pronouncing very confidently on this question; and biologists with scorn have asked whether men would attack an astronomical hypothesis with no better equipment. Why not? They feel themselves competent to decide the question from higher grounds.

[In any case, the much smaller brain of the bee does not appear to be a fundamental limitation for comparable cognitive processes, or at least their performance. The similarities between mammals and bees are astonishing, but they cannot be traced to homologous neurological developments. As long as the animal's neural architecture remains unknown, we cannot determine the cause of their similarity.]

From the brain's point of view, reality is the expectation of what the next moment will be like, but that expectation must constantly be adjusted. Vision works by pursuing and noticing changes instead of constancies and therefore a neural expectation exists of what is about to be seen. [Your nervous system acts a little like a scientific community; it is greedily curious, constantly testing out ideas about what's out in the world.] A virtual reality system succeeds when it temporarily convinces the "community" to support another hypothesis.

The first commercially available digital camera was launched in 1990. [In the decade that followed, it created a lot of anxiety in photographers and photography scholars. Some went as far as declaring photography dead as a result of this shift.] Initially this was considered too steep a change to be classified as a reconfiguration, rather it was seen as a break. A death of something old. A birth of something new.

In early 2001, the BBC reported on the first cell phone with a camera invented in Japan. Readers from around the world offered their ideas on what such a peculiar invention might be good for. Some said it could have many uses for teenagers (streamlining shopping for outfits, proving you have met a pop idol, setting up your friends on dates) but would be pretty pointless for adults. Others thought it would be a practical aid for spying, taking sneak pictures of your competitors' produce or quickly reporting traffic accidents and injuries. [Yet others thought it might be nice for travelers to keep in touch with their families or hobbyists to show art or collections to others.] My personal favourites include commenters who wrote they couldn't wait for the device to be available at a reasonable price in their home country, so they can take pictures of the friendly dogs they meet at the park.

While this is a genuine problem, we should not let the real pitfalls of the savior complex extinguish one of the most humane instincts there is ― the instinct to lend a hand. The trick is to help others without believing yourself to be, or acting like you are, their savior. [All of which is to say that how you help matters just as much as that you do help, which is why it is essential to begin by asking, "How can I help?"] If you start with this question, you are asking, with humility, for direction. You are recognizing that others are experts in their own lives, and you are affording them the opportunity to remain in charge, even if you are providing some help.

The ones that we are very interested in are the so-called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). [Finding them takes either patience or luck. Asteroids are mainly contained to within a few degrees of the plane of the solar system, much like the planets, but comets could come from any direction. They could also be moving really quickly.] This makes it challenging to rendezvous with one and perhaps modify its trajectory enough to somehow make it safe.

The surfaces of both asteroids and comets can be quite dark, so they typically don't reflect much light. This makes them very faint and means that, unless we are using a really big telescope that collects a lot of light, we simply may not spot them all. [However, there are NEO search programs funded by NASA that network underutilized small telescopes. These telescopes generally have large fields of view for maximizing the areas of sky that can be monitored, but they still struggle to detect the really faint objects that have diameters below one hundred meters.] On top of all that, these telescopes are only used for NEO hunting a fraction of the available time when perhaps they should be entirely dedicated to it.

Desertification as a concept is extremely important, however, not least because the fear it generates drives a multimillion-dollar global anti-desertification campaign that impacts the lives of millions of people. Desertification is also important because it was the first major environmental issue to be recognized as occurring on a global scale. [As such, the way that the "crisis of desertification" was conceptualized, framed, and tackled as a policy problem shaped in numerous ways our reactions to subsequent environmental crises such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change.]

Underlying these attempts was a complex, long-standing, and primarily Anglo-European understanding of deserts which equated them with ruined forests much of the time. Examining how these ideas about deserts have changed over the long duration will reveal that many of the worst cases of degradation in the drylands have been the result of policies based on the old ideas that deserts are without value and that desertification is caused primarily by "traditional" uses of the land by local populations. Societies in arid lands have, in fact, lived successfully in these unpredictable environments for thousands of years using ingenious techniques. [The assumption that the world's drylands are worthless and deforested landscapes has led, since the colonial period, to programs and policies that have often systematically damaged dryland environments and marginalized large numbers of indigenous peoples, many of whom had been using the land sustainably.]

Some people drift away from the present by desiring something better than what exists here and now. Others drift away into "What's next?" [Another, more thorough way of avoiding full immersion in the present is by seeing all of life as stages of preparation, ranging from preparing for dinner to preparing for life in the Hereafter, with preparing for final exams falling somewhere in between.] At the other extreme, there are those of us who persistently dwell in the past, with either nostalgia or regret or a mix of the two.

Implicit in each of these explanations is a more obvious physical truth. [The church was built over a hole in the ground that has history both connected to and independent of the structure around it.] To extend the symbolic story: In thinking about religion in American history, we have too often focused only on the church standing above the hole and not on the hole itself, nor on the people lining up to make the soil within a part of their blood, their bones. The United States is a land shaped and informed by internal religious diversity ― some of it obvious, some of it hidden ― and yet the history we have all been taught has mostly failed to convey this.

Still, the storage metaphor is the way we conventionally talk about memory, even though it is terribly misleading. [If our brains literally stored everything away like cans of soup in a cupboard, we should be much better at remembering than we actually are.] Memory is untrustworthy and seems to hang onto only certain things and not others, often with little apparent reason.

[Of course, we know that we can recall some sort of information from our past, using neurochemical activity that makes it possible for our nervous systems to retain a kind of information about our environment and past experience.] However, in spite of all that modern science has at its disposal, human memory remains a stunning enigma.

In the world of music, a limited set of tones is the starting point for melodies, which in turn are arranged into complex structures to create symphonies. Think of an orchestra, where each instrument plays a relatively simple series of tones. [Only when combined do these tones become the complex sound we call classical music.] Essentially, music is just one example of a hierarchical system, where patterns are nested within larger patterns ― similar to the way words form sentences, then chapters and eventually a novel.

In this translation from silk to music, we replaced the protein's building blocks (sequences of amino acids) with corresponding musical building blocks (tones and melody). As the music was played, we could "listen" to the amino acid sequences we had designed, and deduce how certain qualities of the material, such as its mechanical strength, appear in the musical space. [Listening to the music improved our understanding of the mechanism by which the chains of amino acids interact to form a material during the silk-spinning process.] The chains of amino acids that formed silk fibres of poor quality, for example, translated into music that was aggressive and harsh, while the ones that formed better fibres sounded softer and more fluid, as they were derived from a more interwoven network.

Considering its history, you'd have thought that by now problems with nothing were a thing of the past, sorted out well before the end of the seventeenth century, and that thereafter nothing was nothing to talk about and certainly nothing to worry about. Apparently not. [Far from it, in fact.] Not only does nothing remain a mystery, but (and possibly because of it) ― nothing also keeps on making an appearance in virtually every walk of life, even when we don't notice.

But then how could we notice nothing? That, surely, is the point of nothing: it is . . . nothing. Yet there it is, alive and well, and still, obstinately, as far away as ever from being understood, despite our advances in science, technology, and most spectacularly our ability to gather information and knowledge. In some way, in fact, it is even more of a mystery, precisely because we know so much about everything else. [Since it follows that the more we know, the less we don't know, we are left with one of those strange paradoxes that the more we know about everything, the less we know about nothing.]

My answer is that the history of philosophy is in large measure the history of very smart people making very tempting mistakes, and if you don't know the history, you are doomed to making the same mistakes all over again. [That's why we teach the history of the field to our students, and scientists who cheerfully ignore philosophy do so at their own risk. There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying assumptions.] The smartest or luckiest of the scientists sometimes manage to avoid the pitfalls quite adroitly (perhaps they are "natural born philosophers" ― or are as smart as they think they are), but they are the rare exceptions.

[Not that professional philosophers don't make ― and even defend ― the old mistakes too. If the questions weren't hard, they wouldn't be worth working on.]

We philosophers are mistake specialists. [While other disciplines specialize in getting the right answers to their defining questions, we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up that nobody is even sure what the right questions are, let alone the answers.] Asking the wrong questions risks setting any inquiry off on the wrong foot. Whenever that happens, this is a job for philosophers!

How do mathematicians solve problems? There have been few rigorous scientific studies of this question. Modern educational research, based on cognitive science, largely focuses on education up to high school level. [Some studies address the teaching of undergraduate mathematics, but those are relatively few. There are significant differences between learning and teaching existing mathematics and creating new mathematics.] Many of us can play a musical instrument, but far fewer can compose a concerto or even write a pop song.

One of the first serious attempts to find out how mathematicians think was Jacques Hadamard's The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, first published in 1945. Hadamard interviewed leading mathematicians and scientists of his day and asked them to describe how they thought when working on difficult problems. [What emerged very strongly was the vital role of what for lack of a better term must be described as intuition. Some feature of the subconscious mind guided their thoughts. Their most creative insights did not arise through step by step logic, but by sudden, wild leaps.]

This kind of creativity is like walking a tightrope. [On the one hand, you won't solve a difficult problem unless you make yourself familiar with the area to which it seems to belong ― along with many other areas which may or may not be related, just in case they are.] On the other hand, if all you do is get trapped into standard ways of thinking, which others have already tried, fruitlessly, then you will be stuck in a mental swamp and discover nothing new.

However, there is a third possible answer: rationalism. [It assumes that morality varies around the world and across the centuries, and thus cannot be inborn. It also doubts the idea that whatever morals we have as grown-ups must have been learned during our childhood experience of adults telling us what is right and wrong.] Instead, the rationalist approach asserts that children figure out morality for themselves. This third answer is now a major focus of moral psychology.

This new approach owes much to Jean Piaget, the greatest developmental psychologist of all time. He came up with this insight based on his early career in zoology. [He was fascinated by the stages that insects went through as they transformed themselves.] Later, when his attention turned to children, he brought with him this interest in stages of development.

Children younger than six or seven often said the tall glass now held more water, because the level was higher. They did not understand the total volume of water was preserved when it moved from glass to glass. [He also found it pointless for adults to explain that the volume of water was exactly the same until the youngsters reached an age and cognitive stage when their minds were ready to grasp it.] Once the little ones were ready, they figured it out for themselves just by playing with glasses of water.

Piaget argued children's understanding of morality was like their understanding of those water glasses. We cannot say that it is inborn, and we cannot say that children learn it directly from adults. It is, rather, self-constructed. [Taking turns in a game is like pouring water back and forth between glasses. No matter how often you do it with three-year-olds, they are just not ready to digest the concept of fairness, any more than they can understand the idea of volume conservation.] After surpassing the age of five or six, the children will play games, have arguments, and work things out together, thereby develop notions of fairness without the help of adults.

Opening a door equipped with a familiar round doorknob is something that most of us learn to do as children. Even though one small hand might not fully encompass the knob, we can use two hands until we grow up and can finally grasp the knob easily with one. [The mechanics of the seemingly simple task of turning a doorknob involve a variety of forces that the hand exerts on the knob and through it to the door.] If the shape of the knob is spherical or cylindrical, the pressure of the fingers on the edge must induce enough friction to cause it to turn.

Sometimes even the greatest pressure we can exert on a doorknob will not enable us to turn it. This will be the case, for example, if we cannot develop enough frictional force between our skin and the polished metal of the hardware due to moisture on the hand or the knob. Wearing gloves might also prevent us from grasping a doorknob firmly enough to operate it. [It is of such common domestic frustrations, if not absolute failures, that everyday inventions are born.] Typically, first attempts to fix a problem begin with improving the existing technology with the aid of devices that serve the purpose at hand.

For example, one way to increase the frictional force between the hand and the doorknob is to place around the knob a tight-fitting rubber band. [An even less aesthetically pleasing solution might be to wrap the doorknob with some tape.] But such solutions cry out for more elegant and architecturally integral means of increasing the frictional force between the knob and the hand.

The problem of not being able to develop enough grip between the hand and the doorknob can also be solved by changing the shape of the knob to oblate or prolate. [This modification shapes the knob more like an egg, which can be turned not so much by the friction but rather by the action of pushing opposite sides of the knob in opposing directions, effectively working it as a pair of levers.] A doorknob of whatever roundish shape is in effect a continuum of levers.

Early attempts to solve some of these riddles only added to the mystery. During the 1970s a research team spent several years trying to track the winter movements of Arctic foxes in northern Alaska. [The animals were fitted with numbered ear tags, released, and their whereabouts were then recorded. Although next to nothing was revealed about how they got to various places, due to limitations of the techniques being employed, deep into the high Arctic, more than 2000 kilometers away, is where some were recovered.] In a valiant effort to learn more, the team decided to try out radio telemetry, the technology that had revolutionized wildlife tracking in the early 1960s.

In a valiant effort to learn more, the team decided to try out radio telemetry, the technology that had revolutionized wildlife tracking in the early 1960s. [The target may be followed to wherever it goes via a radio collar that is fitted to the animal being investigated, which transmits a signal that researchers on foot or in a plane can detect with precision.] "We learned absolutely nothing," says one of the researchers.

The thought of an Arctic fox wandering around for months on end, under such harsh conditions, continues to raise many questions. [Is there some preordained pattern that the animals follow or are the journeys random? If not the latter, how do they navigate in an icescape that offers no permanent landmarks, that drifts and spins at the mercy of the currents, melts and freezes according to the weather, and seemingly has not much to offer in the way of a scent trail to follow for satisfying their appetites?]

Even the advent of satellite-based tracking in the early 1990s did not provide an immediate answer. The first collars, which required large batteries, were far too heavy for Arctic foxes. [But now, at last, the technology has caught up, in the form of light, battery-powered devices tailored for the Arctic fox, including one equipped with an antenna laced with red pepper to discourage animals from gnawing it off.] Last year, a Canadian team published results of a satellite-tracking study of the Bylot Island foxes.

"What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?" she asked when I went to her for advice. I squirmed, "Why must I do what is hardest?" ... [I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field ― internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a surgical knife caused pain in my stomach.] Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

Thirty years later, I am not known for speed, or technical genius. Say I adopt the style and technique that suits the patient and the particular situation and I'll consider that high praise. [I get encouragement from my fellow physicians who come to me when they themselves must suffer the knife. They know Marion Stone will be as involved after the surgery as before and during. They know I have no use for sayings such as "When in doubt, cut it out" or "Why wait when you can operate" other than for how reliably they reveal the shallowest intellects in our field.] My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do."