No Such Thing as a Fish

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 14 · 20 July 2000

From Henry Gee

Richard Fortey (LRB, 6 July) uses his review of my book, Deep Time, to launch cheap shots at my late friend and his former colleague Colin Patterson. Fortey starts his review with an account of the alleged academic authoritarianism of the Swedish palaeontologist Erik Stensiö. He closes his review with a declaration that Stensiö was the palaeontologist most admired by Patterson – a crusader against authoritarianism. Patterson, one of the finest evolutionary theorists of the age, died a couple of years ago and cannot defend himself.

Fortey is entirely right in his suspicion that I have never published a cladogram. He has published lots, however – and the implication in his review is that I therefore have no right to discuss them, and that he, being older and wiser, knows better. This is precisely the kind of authoritarianism that Patterson strove to unmask – indeed, it resembles the actions of Stensiö that Fortey himself condemns.

Henry Gee
Kings Langley, Hertfordshire

Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000

From Richard Fortey

I was appalled to read that Henry Gee (Letters, 20 July) considers part of my review of his book Deep Time to be an attack on the late Colin Patterson. It was not – my quarrel was solely with Gee’s ossified version of Patterson’s views. I was both a friend and admirer of Patterson; indeed, I published a memoir of him last year in the Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society wherein my regard for him is evident. Gee also accuses me of authoritarianism, but while it would be authoritarian to describe an author as a ‘fool’ (which I didn’t), it is merely assertive to describe him as ‘out-of-date’ (which I did). The latter is easily rectified by a little reading; there is very little you can do about the former.

Richard Fortey
Natural History Museum, London SW7