The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

On Saturday I went back to the library again, and this time there was a piece in the Independent Magazine on the Galapagos. It talked about extinction and selection. There were lots of logical fallacies, and also some factual mistakes about dinosaurs, and he seemed to have misunderstood the selfish gene theory. Here was my chance! I wasn’t going to point out the logical errors, which might put his back up, and I decided not to say anything about the part where he mixed up DNA and RNA because I thought that would be too embarrassing, but I thought I could safely point out more abstruse errors of fact, and this would be the type of thing I could sign Steven aged 11. It was hard to know how simply I should put the selfish gene theory: since he hadn’t understood it I didn’t want to make the explanation complicated, but I thought it would sound obnoxious if I stuck to words of one syllable. I wrote the letter ten times trying to sound clever and not obnoxious. I could have printed it out on the word processor, but I thought my atrocious handwriting might be more appealing, so I wrote the final version out by hand. It took two days to write. I could have written it in 15 minutes if I hadn’t had to worry about sounding obnoxious. Still, as Sibylla would say, it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.