![]() ![]() Rose senior volunteered as soon as the war started, joined up as a private and left as a major. Steven was born in 1938, by which time his father was working as a schoolteacher, because the chemicals he had worked with in industry made him ill. Steven's parents married in 1935: his mother came from the slightly richer family, as her father, a cabinet maker, had been left a small factory making carpenter's planes by his childless employer. ![]() ![]() Despite this, his father managed to get himself trained in night school and even found a job as an industrial chemist in the middle of the depression, though he had to change his name from Rosenberg to Rose to do so. His paternal grandmother died young of TB, and when his grandfather remarried, his father and brother was sent away to a Jewish boys' orphanage in north London. All four grandparents were immigrants: his father was "born above a tailor's shop" in Mare Street, Hackney, east London. The politics predate the science in his life: his family was shaped by poverty, pride and anti-semitism. And he does have the most extraordinary energy." He can be astonishingly articulate in circumstances where I would simply seize up. Steven is not always right but he has been very brave in some of the things he has said. "He may be the last of the Marxist radical scientists," says his friend and collaborator Patrick Bateson, now provost of King's College, Cambridge, "but he won't be the last radical. The book against evolutionary psychology they recently edited, Alas,Poor Darwin (Jonathan Cape), was a great deal more aggressive than some of the contributors had hoped. In print he can be ferocious, especially when collaborating with his wife Hilary, the sociologist. When what I regard as bad or mistaken ideas are non-trivial, they need combating." He walks with the stoop of an academic but sits with his head cocked, alert like a boxer: "Combat is forced upon me," he says. One result is his curiously split reputation: Professor Jekyll and Comrade Hyde. ![]()
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