Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  Anyway, as I said, I put a little joke, for Steve Gould’s benefit, in the index of The Blind Watchmaker. It duly appeared in the original British edition. However, when the American publishers saw it they were aghast. They thought it in terrible taste, and they may just possibly (although I was too discreet to ask) have been conscious that Stephen Gould was one of their most bankable authors. Publication of the US edition was held up while the joke was expunged. Then, unintentionally, as a result of a simple oversight, the microfilm version containing the censored index was the one used in subsequent printings of Longman’s British edition and Penguin’s paperback. Michael Rodgers had intended that the joke should remain in the British edition. The fact that it didn’t may, for all I know, confer on the first British printing a collector’s value, along the lines of the ‘unperforated’ stamps prized by some philatelists. Here are the two versions of the index entry under dispute. Spot the difference (differences, rather, for there were some smaller jokes that gave supplementary offence to the American publisher).

  Gould, S. J.,

  five percent eye, 81, (quoted in 41)

  five percent resemblance to turd, 82, (quoted in 41)

  mentioned, 275, 291

  punctuated equilibrium, 229–52, (36)

  revealing faux pas, 244, (36)

  revealing flaws, 91, (34)

  writes off synthetic theory, 251, (35)

  Gould, S. J.,

  five percent eye, 81, (quoted in 41)

  on dung-mimicking insects, 82, (quoted in 41)

  mentioned, 275, 291

  punctuated equilibrium, 229–52, (36)

  on Darwin’s gardualism, 244, (36)

  The Panda’s Thumb, 91, (34)

  writes off synthetic theory, 251, (35)

  Meanwhile, Oxford University Press had bought from W. H. Freeman the paperback rights to The Extended Phenotype, and they have remained its publishers ever since. So, although I had moved to other publishers, I still retained good relations with OUP. When, in 1989, they approached me for a new edition of The Selfish Gene, it seemed natural that it should include, as a new chapter, a summary of the thesis of The Extended Phenotype.

  The editor OUP put in charge of the new Selfish Gene was Hilary McGlynn. I enjoyed working with her, but my most decisive influence while planning and working on this project was my friend Helena Cronin. She helped me with it while I helped her with her own beautiful book, The Ant and the Peacock. Everyone concerned agreed from the start that the original text of The Selfish Gene should remain unchanged, warts and all. The publishers felt that the original edition had acquired a kind of iconic status which should be preserved. Arthur Cain, quoting a critic of A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, had called The Selfish Gene ‘a young man’s book’ and the publishers wanted to keep that feeling. Amendments, second thoughts and embellishments would be confined to a large section of endnotes. And I proposed two new chapters: one called ‘Nice guys finish first’, on the theme of my BBC Horizon documentary of that name (see page 188); and one called ‘The long reach of the gene’, which would be the condensed version of The Extended Phenotype. These additions combined to make the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene about half as large again, compared to the original 1976 edition.

  Literary agents

  I have said that I followed Michael Rodgers to Longman for The Blind Watchmaker. By then I had acquired a literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, at Peters Fraser & Dunlop in London, who struck a hard bargain with my new publisher (as rather dramatically described by Michael in his memoir). Caroline had contacted me after The Selfish Gene and persuaded me, over lunch in the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, that an agent was a good thing to have, and that she was a good representative of the genus. And so she turned out to be. However, after The Blind Watchmaker I received increasingly pressing overtures from the New York literary agent John Brockman.

  John was, and is, legendary in the publishing world as a ruthlessly tough bargainer – albeit an honest one who never pretended to be anything else (a journalist once said you could see Brockman’s fin circling from a long way off). But what attracted me to him was his single-minded devotion to science and its place in our intellectual culture. This mission has grown, until now all his clients are scientists (or philosophers and scholars writing on scientific subjects), members of the fraternity that he himself has labelled ‘the third culture’, consciously going beyond C. P. Snow. It has reached the point where rather few authors in this category are not clients of Brockman Inc. His ‘Edge’ website has been rightly described as an ‘on-line salon’ for scientists and associated intellectuals. Like some blogs, it has many authors. The important difference is that Brockman’s contributors are there by invitation only and they are a carefully creamed-off élite. I have written that he has the finest address book in America, and he uses it relentlessly to push science and reason, for example in his annual ‘Edge Question’.

  Around Christmas time each year, John ransacks his address book and cajoles its contents (both those who are and those who are not his clients) to give personal answers to the year’s question. For example, a typical question was: ‘What was the most important invention of the past two thousand years?’ I especially remember my friend Nicholas Humphrey’s answer: spectacles, for without them anyone beyond middle age would be unable to read and thus, in our verbal culture, disempowered. My own answer was the spectroscope: not that I thought it really was the most important, but I was rather late sending in my entry and by the time I got around to it all the more obvious inventions had been snapped up. Nevertheless, the spectroscope turns out to be a pretty good candidate. It goes far beyond what Newton could imagine, being the instrument by which we know the chemical nature of the stars, and by which we know – via the red shift of light from receding galaxies – that the universe is expanding, that it began in a big bang, and when.

  Over the years, the annual Brockman questions have included: ‘What is your dangerous idea?’, ‘What have you changed your mind about, and why?’, ‘What questions have disappeared, and why?’, ‘How is the internet changing the way you think?’, ‘What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?’, ‘What should we be worried about?’ and ‘What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?’ (My answer to that last one was my belief that life, wherever it may be found anywhere in the universe, will turn out to be Darwinian life; see page 398.) Every year, John edits the answers into a book – superficially not all that different from many another annual anthology until you look at the cast list, and count the Nobel Prize-winners, Fellows of the National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society, and general household names (at least in households where books abound and intellectuals foregather).

  Much of that still lay in the future when John first approached me, but he was already well embarked on his zealous crusade for science and I was impressed. Though reluctant to leave my happy association with Caroline (and naively unaware that when authors part from agents the trauma can feel like a divorce), I agreed to meet John to hear his pitch. I was already planning a lecturing tour of the United States, so I added to the itinerary a visit to the farm in Connecticut where the Brockmans spend their weekends away from New York. But as it happened, the ‘I’ turned into a ‘we’. Here’s how.

  This was 1992, when Douglas Adams reached his fortieth birthday, and his party was memorable for a particular reason. It was there that he introduced me to the actress Lalla Ward, whom he had known from the days when Doctor Who was at its wittiest because he was the script editor and she and Tom Baker gave added value to the wit by their inventively ironic playing of the two leading roles. At the birthday party, Lalla was talking to Stephen Fry when Douglas led me over and introduced us. Both Douglas and Stephen being absurdly taller than Lalla and me, it was natural that she and I should find ourselves facing each other under a Gothic arch formed by Douglas and Stephen as they exchanged lofty witticisms high above us. Through the archway I shyly offered to refill Lalla’s
glass, and when I returned we rapidly reached agreement that the party was too noisy for conversation. ‘I suppose, by any faint chance, it wouldn’t just possibly be a good idea to go out for a quick meal and – of course – return later?’ We discreetly slipped away and found an Afghan restaurant off the Marylebone Road.

  That Lalla had read The Selfish Gene and watched my Christmas Lectures was gratifying. That she had read The Extended Phenotype (and Darwin) as well was too good to be borne. I subsequently discovered that, in addition to Doctor Who’s companion, she had played a beautiful Ophelia to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet in the BBC TV production, and was also a talented and versatile artist, published author and book illustrator. As I said, too good to be borne. We didn’t return to the party.

  I mentioned to Lalla that I was about to embark on my American journey, having added to the itinerary a visit to John Brockman. She said she was about to set off for a holiday in Barbados, with a girlfriend from the theatrical world. Impulsively she asked if I would take her to America with me, although it would mean letting down her friend in Barbados. Equally impulsively I agreed.

  Slight embarrassments then opened up. I was due to stay with Dan and Susan Dennett on first arriving in Boston, and later with the Brockmans in Connecticut. In both cases one house guest was expected, not two. How could I broach the subject? Lalla and I fretted that our hosts would ask – it is, after all, a perfectly normal question to ask of a couple – ‘How long have you known each other?’ and we would have had to answer, ‘A week.’ As it turned out, they didn’t ask, and it was only years later that Lalla confessed to Dan the truth. ‘Really?’ said Dan, with possibly mock innocence. ‘I thought you’d known each other for years.’

  After leaving the Dennetts we flew to South Carolina, where Duke University boasts the largest population of lemurs outside Madagascar. Lalla (having done careful drawings of most of the lemur species long ago) already knew their Latin names, which greatly impressed not only me but also the lemur experts who showed us round (and I rather think I caught a couple of lemurs giving each other knowing winks as they witnessed me clocking yet more hidden depths). Highlight of our visit was the Aye-Aye (Daubentonia), an anomalous and literally extraordinary lemur with an extravagantly elongated, bony middle finger adapted to probing for insect prey. First there was just a cardboard box, betraying no contents. Then a single, long twig-like finger protruded. It was followed by a satanically comic face, peeping over the rim. Then, with splendid deliberation, the finger to end all fingers was deployed, not to winkle out an insect from a hole in a tree but straight up the nostril. Like most graduates of Oxford or any other university, I have forgotten most of what I learned in lectures. But Harold Pusey on lemurs has stuck in my memory solely because of one multiply repeated phrase. After every generalization about lemurs, out would come the inevitable refrain in Harold’s deep voice: ‘Except Daubentonia.’ That’s why I just said literally extraordinary.

  From South Carolina we flew to La Guardia, where John Brockman had ‘sent a car’ to greet us. We saw an enormous stretch limo. ‘That’ll be for us,’ Lalla joked to me. But no joke, it was. It was so big, the poor driver couldn’t get out of the car park without a lot of back-and-forthing, and he actually bumped into a pillar on one of these manoeuvres. That was my first experience of an American-style stretch limo, and the drive through the darkness to Connecticut was a surreal experience of double-bed-sized leather seat, polished wood cocktail cabinet and crystal decanters, all bathed in glowing blue interior lights.

  Claire Bloom lived in Connecticut not far from the Brockmans, and Lalla, who had played Ophelia to her Gertrude, was keen to see her again. I had never met her, nor had the Brockmans, and they invited her to lunch. She drove over and proved to be as charming off screen as on. After lunch she and Lalla worked on me to accept John’s hard sell, and I eventually agreed to sign with Brockman Inc. as my new literary agency.

  River, mountain, rainbow: a digressive tour

  At this point, as I have recounted in an earlier chapter, I had just given the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and my first book signed up by John had the same working title, Growing Up in the Universe. The publishers were to be Penguin in Britain and Norton in America. The title was later narrowed to Climbing Mount Improbable, which had been the title of the third lecture in the series of five, while the content was broadened to include lots of things that did not feature in the lectures at all, and other parts of the lectures spilled over into a second book, Unweaving the Rainbow.

  I had made a start on Climbing Mount Improbable when John contacted me with a new idea, a major diversion. He and his friend the distinguished British publisher Anthony Cheetham (who had been my contemporary at Balliol College, although we didn’t know each other) had come up with a scheme – I suppose you might say ‘business model’ – to produce a series of twelve short books to be called the Science Masters. Each slim volume was to have a different author and was to be a personal account of the author’s science. What was different about the business model was that the twelve authors were to be financially united in a cooperative: a collective. That is, from a business point of view we twelve were treated as a single author – client of John Brockman – and would each take an equal share in the royalties of all twelve books. This would mean that those of us whose books sold better than average would end up subsidizing those of us whose books sold less well. I liked the idea – can’t now remember exactly why, maybe it appealed to the socialist part of my brain – and I signed up to write the short book that became River Out of Eden. My fellow tillers of the Collective Book Farm included Richard Leakey, Colin Blakemore, Danny Hillis, Jared Diamond, George Smoot, Dan Dennett, Marvin Minsky . . . and Stephen Jay Gould who, unfortunately for the collective, never actually produced his book.

  A pleasure that resulted from association with the Science Masters was to get to know Anthony Cheetham, whose idea, with John Brockman, it jointly was. Lalla and I met Anthony at the launch party for the series at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, and we are still good friends with him and his more than delightful wife, the literary agent Georgina Capel. We’ve spent several weekends at their idyllic house in the Cotswolds, watching the sun set over the roses and next day admiring the forest that Anthony has planted as a token of confidence in the future. During one of those weekends of golden Jurassic stone, the outspoken Roman Catholic apologist Cristina Odone, a fellow guest, went out of her way at dinner to pick a fight with me: good-humoured on both sides but unresolved – and presumably never to be resolved except in the unlikely event that it is posthumously resolved in her favour.

  As it happened, Lalla and I were staying with the Cheethams the weekend after River Out of Eden was published, in the summer of 1995. Anthony went, as usual, to the nearby market town to buy the Sunday newspapers before breakfast, and we opened the Sunday Times to discover that my book – well, our book, for Lalla drew the pictures and Anthony’s publishing house was a thirteenth member of the cooperative – had entered the bestseller list at number one. I don’t remember whether Anthony opened champagne for breakfast, but it would have been characteristic of his ebullient generosity to do so.

  River Out of Eden came out soon after the death of my uncle Colyear, youngest brother of my father, whom he resembled. I dedicated the book to his memory:

  To the memory of Henry Colyear Dawkins (1921–1992). Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford: A master of the art of making things clear.

  By universal consent he was a brilliant teacher, humorous, lucid, fluently intelligent, who managed to get the principles of statistics across to generations of grateful Oxford biologists – no mean feat. Along with most other college fellows in biology, I used to ask him to give statistics tutorials to my own New College students. On one occasion, I had gone to see him for that purpose in his office in the Forestry Department, then called the Imperial Forestry Institute, which is relevant to this story. I was describing the young man to him (‘Quite clever, a bit laz
y, you’ll need to keep an eye on him . . .’ etc.). Colyear was taking notes as I spoke, but not in English (he was a fine linguist). I said: ‘Oh, that’s very confidential of you, taking notes in Swahili.’

  ‘Good God, no,’ he expostulated. ‘Swahili? No, no, everyone in this department speaks Swahili. This is Achole.’

  Another brief anecdote to sum up his character. At Oxford railway station the car park was guarded by a mechanical arm, which rose to allow each car to leave when the driver inserted a token of payment in a slot. One night Colyear had returned to Oxford on the last train from London. Something had gone wrong with the mechanism of the arm and it was stuck in the down position. The station officials had all gone home, and the owners of the trapped cars were in despair as to how to escape the car park. Colyear, with his bike waiting, had no personal interest; nevertheless, with exemplary altruism he seized the arm, broke it, carried it up to the stationmaster’s office and plonked it down outside the door with a note giving his name, address and explanation as to why he had done it. He should have been given a medal. Instead, he was prosecuted in court and fined. What a terrible incentive to public-spiritedness. How very typical of the rule-obsessed, legalistic, mean-spirited dundridges of today’s Britain.