At this distance the huge wave of popular revulsion toward the memory of the Thatcher government and all its works seems as unreal as the Diana hysteria, but election night in 1997 had an atmosphere of national vindication that I can only otherwise remember from global sporting events. "Were You Still Up for Portillo?" was the title of one book on the election, referring to the question people asked one another the next morning about the symbolic defeat of one of the most loathed and Thatcherite Conservative ministers.

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This is unfair. As the man in charge of the economy for the past 10 years, Brown can argue that all the real successes of the Blair government were his, and all the failures Blair's. But Blair had the success that really mattered: He got elected. And Iraq, his one great failure, will probably sweep Brown away just as it has destroyed Blair, because it has brought out an extraordinary resentment of America here. Whoever is in power will be tied to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will be the victims of this growing antipathy when the election comes.

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That's not all Americans don't seem to understand about the crisis we find ourselves in now. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 I wrote a piece for Salon about the lessons Britain had learned in 50 years of struggle against terrorist movements, from the Stern gang to the Irish Republican Army. Don't torture people, I wrote; don't shoot the young men who throw stones. Remember that wars go on for longer than seems remotely possible when you start them, and that the really dangerous enemies are not the young men trying to kill you today, but their unborn children, should they grow up to hate you, too. These were not startling or new reflections over here. They were, however, alien to the way that most Americans seem to think of terrorism. (A day or two later, I found myself on a radio show in Oregon, where a caller asked whether it was now OK to shoot or at least intern green activists because the people trying to stop logging were like terrorists.)

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These bombs were not, thank god, poisonous. But it is already clear from the reaction of the police and the transport authorities, from the first stories about the cause of the explosions -- a "power surge" was blamed, to prevent panic -- to the little touches like ferrying the wounded to hospitals in commandeered double-decker buses, that they had prepared and rehearsed in detail for an atrocity. We are unlikely to hear of all the measures taken. But it looks as if the police, the emergency services, and the transport authorities were all less shocked than Tony Blair, whose ghastly statement as he left the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, for London completely lacked his usual fluency. Where normally he skips lightly from cliché to cliché, there were terrible pauses between each one, which seemed to extend for hours.

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He gave as good as he got in his long feud with the "Darwinian fundamentalists," as he called his opponents. This term, an inspired piece of polemical mudslinging, showed that what his own invective lacked in quantity, it made up in quality, since one of the defining characteristics of the sociobiologists he was attacking was their rather Victorian atheism, and their conviction that the worst sort of human being in the world was a fundamentalist Christian.

It's hard to think of any scientist who has managed to combine Gould's professional excellence -- for you do not get to be a senior professor at Harvard by being an industrious windbag -- with his gifts as a popularizer. As a paleontologist, Gould dealt with an obscure family of Bahamian land snails, and collaborated most famously with the trilobite expert Niles Eldredge. As a popularizer, he wrote enchantingly about subjects from bacteria to baseball.

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Here are some of the lessons we have learned:

We have learned something about wars: They go on for longer and are more expensive than anyone imagines when they start. No one could have believed, when the first troops went into Northern Ireland in 1969, that they would still be there 30 years later, still ready to fight. But the only short wars against terrorism are those that the terrorists win. So accept now that you will still be fighting in 10 or 20 years' time, because you will.

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Even respectable academic online mailing lists often melt down into reciprocal accusations of Nazism and censorship, as did the mailing list of the Human Biology and Evolution Society, the trade body for evolutionary psychologists, five years ago.

And if the Nazis don't get you, the nutters will. I once watched a list on Darwinism disintegrate into a series of arguments about Karl Popper's philosophy of science, a subject that can make otherwise civilized people argue like fundamentalists who think they have identified the antichrist.

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In a more thoroughly technological world than Plato's, the myth needs a little updating. So imagine us still huddled in the cave, but this time, behind us, are the machines we have made. The light comes from the fire we have made in the middle of the cave. It is flickering and partial, and casts tall shuddering shadows on the wall. It is these shadows, not the machines themselves, that we see and believe are real.

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He was described by the Independent as a "renaissance man," and the Times of London solemnly reported his "intellectual credentials." When Hugh Hefner dies, I doubt he will be remembered as a great philosopher or a renaissance man, even if he could suck his pipe and walk at the same time -- but then Hefner was far less successful than Versace at what is obviously the most important business in the world: selling newspapers by giving them an excuse to print pictures of beautiful women's tits. All of the Versace obituaries are of course lavishly illustrated with pictures of his models, on a sliding scale: The less she is wearing, the bigger the picture. This is an old tradition. A few years ago, the conservative Daily Telegraph, traditionally read by retired colonels, decided to rejuvenate its readership: Pictures of Liz Hurley in That Dress, as it is reverently known, were its chosen weapon in the struggle. They appeared somewhere in the paper almost every day, either to attract younger readers or in the hope that the excitement would kill off a few of the older ones.

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"so I was smacked out on the prime minister's jet, big deal." Thus British author Will Self, whose past has earned him the hyphenate title "author-former heroin addict," summed up his shenanigans on then-Prime Minister John Major's campaign plane last April.

Big deal, indeed. For days, during the rough and tumble election, the question "Did he or didn't he shoot up on the PM's plane?" dominated the British press. Originally, Self denied "acting oddly" and spending "a long time in the lavatory." But later he told journalists, "I had a bad patch with smack and I did take a tiny nub end of gear on the fucking flight."

The controversy surrounding Self's alleged shooting spree nicely dovetailed with the publication of his latest novel, "Great Apes." "Great Apes" could use all the hoopla it can get: Beyond an astonishing resemblance to the "Planet of the Apes" movies, there isn't a hell of a lot to recommend it. Self, author of "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" and "My Idea of Fun," among other works, has a certain literary reputation, but it's hard to separate it from his personal notoriety. As Lesley White noted in the Times of London, "Most of us have never met Will Self, nor read his novella about a woman who sprouts a penis; but we are all aware of his pose, his junkie past, the naughtiness that once declared it was as easy to get crack as a rail ticket at King's Cross station."

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Congratulations! You've just caught a meme.

A meme, according to Richard Dawkins, who coined the word in his bestseller "The Selfish Gene," is anything a human can remember and transmit. Memes are meant to be the brain's equivalent of DNA. A meme could be an idea or a snatch of music or a dance. So long as it gets copied between brains fairly accurately and competes with other copies for survival, it will do as a candidate for evolution. If memes exist, they have modified the world just as genes have: Genes have made the biosphere; memes have made the memeosphere, the place where human beings exist.

The idea is catchy -- the "meme" meme is particularly popular online -- but controversial. Dawkins himself has withdrawn from it a little. He said last year: "There are people who take memes seriously and there are people who don't. I sort of sit on the fence, and don't mind seriously one way or the other. That wasn't my purpose in producing them."

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