Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  By just dropping the name of the Christmas Lectures, I managed to borrow an electron microscope (big, heavy, and transported at the lender’s expense), a complete virtual reality system (whose owners went to the enormous labour of programming a simulation of the RI lecture theatre), an owl, an eagle, a hugely magnified circuit diagram of a computer chip, a baby, and a jactitating Japanese robot capable of climbing walls like a much enlarged, ponderously hissing gecko.

  I chose, as the overall title of my series of five lectures, Growing Up in the Universe. I meant ‘growing up’ in three senses: first, the evolutionary sense of life’s growing up on our planet; second, the historical sense of humanity’s growing out of superstition and towards a naturalistic, scientific apprehension of reality; and third, the growing up of each individual’s understanding, from childhood to adulthood. The three themes ran through all five one-hour lectures, which were entitled:

  ‘Waking up in the universe’

  ‘Designed and designoid objects’

  ‘Climbing Mount Improbable’

  ‘The ultraviolet garden’

  ‘The genesis of purpose’

  The first lecture was typical of RI Christmas Lectures in the number and variety of demonstrations. To illustrate the power of exponential growth of a population under hypothetical conditions of unlimited food and no constraints, I used the example of folding paper. Every time you fold paper you double its thickness. If you fold it a second time, your paper is four times as thick as the original. Successive foldings increase the thickness until you reach the sixth fold, sixty-four pages thick. Regardless of the size of the paper you start with, six foldings is as far as you can normally go: the wad is too thick to fold again, and by now very small in area. But if you were somehow able to continue folding, even as few as fifty times, the thickness of your paper would reach out to the orbit of Mars. This being the Christmas Lectures, it was not enough to state the calculation. It was necessary to roll out a huge piece of paper and call up a pair of children to help fold it – only as far as 64-fold thickness, after which they struggled amid laughter. I suppose it’s a good way to drive home the power of exponential growth, but throughout my Christmas Lectures I occasionally worried that a simile can obscure, rather than illuminate, the simuland (look it up if you must, and as I confess I did, but you’ll find that you already know the meaning, imbibed in the way we learned our words as children).

  The first lecture also demonstrated what could be called faith in the scientific method. Bryson hung a cannonball on a wire from the high ceiling of the steeply raked RI lecture theatre. I stood to attention against the wall, held the cannonball to my nose, then let go. You have to be careful not to give it a shove, but if you just let it go by gravity, the laws of physics assure you that when it swings back it will stop just a tiny bit short of breaking your nose. It requires a modicum of willpower not to flinch as the black iron ball looms up towards you.

  I’m told (by no less an authority than a former President of the Royal Society who happens to be Australian) that, when this demonstration is performed by Australian scientists, only wusses hold the cannonball to their face. Top blokes hold it to their lolly bags (budgie smugglers or jocks). And I heard of a Canadian physicist who was so exhilarated by the audience’s burst of premature applause as the cannonball hurtled towards him that he started forwards to acknowledge it . . .

  I also, in Lecture 1, borrowed a baby (Richard Melman’s niece) in order to hold her in my arms while I told of Michael Faraday’s famous retort to the question ‘What is the use of electricity?’ He said (although the story is attributed to others as well): ‘Of what use is a new-born baby?’ I found myself sentimentally affected to be holding the beautiful little Hannah while I spoke – with hushed voice in order not to frighten her – of the preciousness of life, the life that stretched before her. I was delighted when, some twenty years later, Hannah announced herself on a correspondence forum on my website, RichardDawkins.net.

  Another sentimental memory that I especially treasure is from Lecture 5. I was talking about a revealing difference between two ways in which the retinal image can move. If you shut one eye and gently poke the other eyeball (through the lid) with your finger – and I asked the children to do this to themselves – the whole scene appears to move, as if in an earthquake. But if you move your eyeballs using the dedicated muscles attached to them for that purpose, you don’t see an ‘earthquake’, even though the retinal image has moved just as if you had poked your eyeball. The world seems to stay rock steady, you just look at a different part of it. One explanation, offered by German scientists, is that when the brain gives the order to swivel the eyeball in its socket, it sends a ‘copy’ of the order to the part of the brain that perceives the image. This copy primes the brain to ‘expect’ the image to move through the precise amount ordered. So the perceived world looks steady because there is no discrepancy between observed and expected. When you poke your eyeball, no copy is sent, so the world appears to move as if it really has moved, as in an earthquake, because now there is a discrepancy between observed and expected.

  I pretended I was going to demonstrate the effect with a key experiment. I would paralyse the eyeball-moving muscles with an injection. Then, when the brain sent an order to move the eyeball, the eyeball would stay still but the copy of the instruction would still be issued. So the person would see an apparent earthquake even though the eyeball hadn’t moved – the apparent movement being the discrepancy between expected and actual (zero) eye movement.

  This being the Christmas Lectures, the next thing to do was to call for a volunteer . . . I produced a huge veterinary hypodermic syringe, fit to sedate a rhinoceros, and asked who would like to take part in the experiment. Normally, the children at the Royal Institution Lectures fall over themselves in their eagerness to assist in demonstrations. Surely nobody would volunteer in this case, and I was about to reassure everyone that it was only a joke when one little girl of seven, probably the youngest in the audience, hesitantly raised her hand. It was my darling daughter Juliet, sitting shyly by her mother. I still choke up a little at the memory of her uncomprehending loyalty and courage in the face of the monstrous hypodermic that I was brandishing. Is it irrelevant that she is now a promising young doctor?

  Moving from my smallest volunteer to my largest, in Lecture 4 I was talking about our moral attitudes to animals and the history of our exploitation of them. I quoted the Oxford historian Keith Thomas on medieval beliefs that animals existed purely for our benefit. Lobsters were furnished with claws so that we could benefit from the improving exercise of cracking them. Weeds grew because it was good discipline for us to have to work hard pulling them up. Horseflies were created so ‘that men should exercise their wits and industry to guard themselves against them’.

  The willing ox of himself came

  Home to the slaughter, with the lamb;

  And every beast did thither bring

  Himself to be an offering.

  Douglas Adams extended this conceit to a surreal conclusion in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where ‘a large meaty quadruped of the bovine type’ approached the table, announced itself as the dish of the day and encouraged diners to try ‘Something off the shoulder, perhaps, braised in a white wine sauce?’ ‘Or a casserole of me, perhaps?’ It goes on to explain that people had become so worried about the morality of eating animals that it was ‘eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.’ The majority of the restaurant party ordered rare steaks all round, and the animal happily trotted off to the kitchen to shoot itself – ‘humanely’.

  I needed somebody to read this darkly humorous and philosophically profound piece, and here, yet again, was my cue to call for a volunteer from the ‘juvenile auditory’. Dozens of eager hands shot up as usual, and I pointed to one. An enormous man uncoiled his near-seven-foot height,
and I beckoned him to the front.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Er, Douglas.’

  ‘Douglas what?’

  ‘Er, Adams.’

  ‘Douglas Adams! what an amazing coincidence.’

  The older children, at least, realized it was a plant, but it didn’t matter. Douglas gave a wonderful performance as the Dish of the Day, complete with mimed gestures when he reached, ‘Or the rump is very good. I’ve been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot of good meat there.’

  Although most of the props for my lectures were conjured up by Bryson and his staff, I also pressed my artistic mother into service. In Lecture 1 I was trying to convey an intuitive idea of the immensity of geological time. Many analogies have been proposed, and I’ve used several myself on different occasions. As others have before, here I chose to represent time by distance, one pace per thousand years. My first few steps across the stage took us back through William the Conqueror, Jesus, King David and various pharaohs, but by the time we had got back to the creatures we now find as fossils the theatre was too small and so I translated the paces into miles, making the numbers vivid by naming towns that were the appropriate distance away: Manchester . . . Carlisle . . . Glasgow . . . Moscow. For each fossil I named, my mother had painted a reconstruction of it on a large sheet of cardboard. Bryson had planted these portraits on particular children at strategic places in the auditorium and they stood up as I called on them. My parents also made a lovely model of Mount Improbable, the eponymous mountain of Lecture 3 (and my later book of that name). One side of the mountain is a sheer precipice. The impossible feat of leaping from the bottom to the top is equivalent to evolving a complex organ like an eye in one fell swoop. But round the back of the mountain is a gradual slope from bottom to top. Climbing, step by step, up the slope is how evolution works: through cumulative selection.

  The lecture ended with a classic RI demonstration – for which I donned a Second World War helmet: the great Bombardier Beetle Damp Squib display. The bombardier beetle is the creationist’s favourite insect. It defends itself against predators by squirting hot vapour produced by a chemical reaction. No wonder the reagents are kept in separate glands and not exposed to each other until they are squirted out of the beetle’s rear end. Creationists love it because they think the intermediate, ancestral stages would all explode, rendering the evolution impossible. My demonstration, carefully prepared by Bryson, showed that actually there is a gentle slope up this particular peak of Mount Improbable.

  The reaction, which depends upon the reactivity of hydrogen peroxide, requires a catalyst, and there is a smooth dose–response curve. Without the catalyst, there is no perceptible reaction at all, and I made much of the anti-climax to mock the creationist alarmism. Then I had a series of beakers of ingredients on the bench, and I added increasing doses of catalyst to each. With a small amount of catalyst the peroxide gets gently warm. Increasing doses of catalyst smoothly increase the strength of reaction until, with a large dose, the audience was able to applaud a satisfying whoosh of steam towards the ceiling and the effect would surely alarm and probably burn any predator brave enough to attack a bombardier beetle. Of course, these being the Christmas Lectures, I hammed it up, putting on the safety helmet and inviting nervous members of the audience to leave the room (none did).

  In all my years as a university lecturer, I never came close to matching the rehearsing and drilling – almost choreography – that the Christmas Lectures put me through. William and Richard seemed to mastermind my every move. As the months of preparation drew towards their December climax and enormous BBC outside-broadcast trucks drew up outside the RI in Albemarle Street, William and Richard were joined by Stuart McDonald, the BBC’s own stage manager, whose job was to direct the actual televising, deployment of cameras etc. Stuart, William and Richard pulled my puppet strings – and Bryson’s too, for he was up and down throughout the lectures bringing on and taking off props ranging from fossils to totem poles to giant model eyes, and in many cases helping me to handle them. The choreography inevitably broke down when we had live animals, and there was a moment of comedy when Bryson and I were trying to catch stick insects walking all over my ridiculously flowery shirt. Things got out of hand again when, to illustrate the power of artificial selection, we had representatives of contrasting breeds of dogs brought on by their rather forthright owner (who corrected me with justified brusqueness when I referred to her prized German Shepherd as an ‘Alsatian’).

  The five lectures were spaced at intervals of about two days, and each one was rehearsed, in full, three times before being finally delivered: two rehearsals the day before, then full dress rehearsal the morning before the evening performance. I suppose actors get used to this, but I’m surprised I didn’t get bored by the repetition. It meant that I gave each of the five lectures four times in quick succession, making twenty hours of lecturing in all. I confess that I was getting a bit weary by the end of the third rehearsal in each case, but the sight of a live audience – what Lalla tells me is called ‘Doctor Theatre’ – soon dispelled that.

  I spent so long in the Royal Institution during ‘my’ year that I still have a sense of cosy familiarity, almost like coming home, whenever I visit the place. I suspect other Christmas Lecturers feel the same. I was told – and this again must be true of all RI Christmas Lecturers – that during ‘my’ week my face had more hours of exposure on British television than any other. Those hours were well away from peak time, however, so didn’t result, I’m glad to say, in my being recognized in the street.

  ISLANDS OF THE BLEST

  Japan

  A tradition has grown up of exporting the RI Christmas Lectures to Japan the following summer, and I gladly went along with the custom. They were still called the Christmas Lectures, even in June, and the series was abridged from five to three. Each of my three was given twice, however, once in Tokyo and once in Sendai – a large provincial capital city two and a half hours north of Tokyo by bullet train. It was agreed that Lalla could come with me, and she helped me work on abridging the five lectures. Bryson flew on ahead of us, with a large crate of props from the London performances. In Tokyo he met up with his opposite number there, employed by the British Council as our local scientific fixer, and they set to work sourcing materials and animals for the demonstrations.

  The Japan lectures were not filmed – at least not for broadcasting – so the choreography didn’t have to be so perfect (and there was no William Woollard or Richard Melman to do it anyway). This was perhaps just as well, as we did not in all cases have the same props and walk-on parts – or, in one case, slither-on, because we hired a python from an animal supply house. This raised unexpected difficulties. In the first place, the snake arrived in a box labelled, in Japanese, ‘Live Turtles’. This was because the supply house feared that the parcel delivery workers would refuse to handle a box if it was labelled ‘Live Snake’. We were warned that it was highly unlikely any Japanese child would volunteer to handle it, so Lalla was drafted in to make a rather spectacular entrance wearing the snake coiled menacingly around her body. The python had arrived packed in frozen Brussels sprouts to keep it inactive. By the time of the lecture, and no doubt benefiting from Lalla’s body heat, it had become quite frisky; it escaped and started sliding swiftly about, with Lalla, Bryson and me in energetic pursuit and the children startled into either nervous silence or cries of alarm.

  Undaunted, we stuck with the RI tradition of few slides and lots of demonstrations. There was a tank full of live praying mantises, projected by video camera up on a huge screen above my head. Once I had finished talking about them I moved on to something else, having forgotten that they were still up on the screen. Somewhat later, I became uneasily conscious that I was losing my audience. Even allowing for the fact that they were listening to a simultaneous translation with a delay, they didn’t seem to be responding to my words as I might have hoped. Then I noticed that their eyes were bul
ging in fascination towards something above my head. I looked up at the screen to see a giant female mantis happily munching (it really is a suitable word for those splendid jaws) the severed head of her sexual partner. What was left of him was still gamely copulating with her, possibly the more gamely for having lost his head. (There is some evidence that sexual behaviour in male insects is inhibited by nerve impulses from the brain. My friend and flatmate Michael Hansell was once giving a talk about his caddis fly larvae and expressed regret that he couldn’t persuade the adults to breed in captivity. At this the Professor of Entomology, the endearingly cantankerous George Varley, growled, almost contemptuously, from the front row: ‘Haven’t you tried cutting their heads off?’) The video feed from the mantis tank was too much of a distraction. Killjoy that I was, I asked the technicians to switch it off.

  Compared with London children, who were falling over themselves with eagerness to volunteer for the demonstrations, the Japanese children were far more shy. Perhaps, too, they were intimidated by the vast size of the auditoriums, which in both Tokyo and Sendai were frighteningly much bigger than the RI theatre in London. And I suppose it would have been difficult to handle the language problem. Anyway, for whatever reason, hardly any Japanese children volunteered, in either Tokyo or Sendai. I don’t remember how we managed this in Sendai, but in Tokyo the volunteers on almost every occasion were the same: the three delightful daughters of the British Ambassador, Sir John Boyd.

  Sir John and Lady Boyd invited Lalla and me and Bryson to dinner in the Residence. Afterwards, Julia Boyd and the three girls took us for a night-time swim in the Embassy pool. Sir John was visibly uncomfortable at this because it was against the rules and, as a newly appointed Ambassador, he feared he was not setting a good example to his staff by letting his family break them. On the other hand, his guests were obviously having a nice time and he is a wonderfully generous host.