Desert salmon

This book caught my eye at the airport bookstore when I left Sweden a couple of weeks ago. Finished it in a couple of three evenings as bedtime reading last week. Simple, but very entertaining. It's about a Dr Jones (a male fisheries scientist) married to an economist whose income is well beyond her husbands. To be fair, the author is not very nice to many of the characters in the book, but the career woman is described as being boring and self-centered and she accepts a job in Switzerland without discussing with husband first (who wouldn't accept a job in Switzerland?). She seems very insensitive to her husband's work-related troubles when they occur. And they do occur because he's asked to introduce Salmo salar to rivers in the Yemen. Rivers that only carry water in the rainy season.

I appreciate that this is fiction and I think the author has done a pretty good job in studying the biology of salmon in order to describe what Dr Jones has to do in order to transport salmon from UK, store them in Yemen until rain season starts and the on-site construction work needed. I can also giggle at the stupid name for the institute he works at, "National Centre for Fisheries Excellence". But what clearly reveals that the author is a non-scientist is the following quote from Dr Jones diary:

We had a departmental meeting today to consider the final draft of my paper "Effects of increased water acidity on the caddis fly larvae". Everyone is being very complimentary, especially David Sudgen. (...) In fact, David went so far as to say that, following the publication of my article, there was probably nothing further worth saying about the caddis fly. Praise indeed. (...) I have moved forward the boundaries of human knowledge about a little brown insect that, insignificant as it may be in itself, is a vital indicator of the health of our rivers

What's wrong with this?

The boss, David Sudgen, is not a scientist, so he cannot be blamed for, and may even be expected to, making such a remark. But the fact that Dr Jones will let this comment pass without a protest, not even in his diary, is a true sign the author does not entirely get the essence of science. Because the final word is never said. Science is not about the final truth. Religion deals with final truths. There are always new questions to ask and old hypotheses to be ditched. Alternatively, the author just want to convey that Dr Jones is a bad scientist, but then it's a very subtle way of doing it since the rest of the book seems to indicate the opposite.

Read it, it's fun, even though the words "believe" and "belief" are used a bit too much for my atheist taste.