Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

Now that’s the letter of a great publisher and bookman. The other thing that pulled me up from despair was the realization that the generous advance John Brockman had negotiated for the book would enable me to pay a full time post-doctoral research assistant to work on the book. That, after all, is the kind of thing advances are designed for. And the ideal candidate was spirit-raisingly obvious – and, even better, right on my doorstep. Yan Wong, one of my very best pupils since the glory days of Mark Ridley and Alan Grafen, was just finishing his doctoral thesis under Alan’s supervision (I suppose that made him my grand-student as well as my student). Yan was keen to take the assignment, for something like the same reason I had been reluctant to start the book in the first place: it would require a huge amount of work and the reading up of lots of facts. What I had seen as a deterrent, Yan, thirty years younger, saw as a challenge.

  Yan began work with me in early 1999. My professorship was nominally based in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and Yan was given a small office in that splendid edifice (its architecture calls to mind the gothic style of the dinosaur skeletons inside it), where he worked surrounded by bones, fossils, dust and crystal cabinets. We met frequently to discuss every detail of the book, and to plan its structure. Anthony had originally thought of the history of life as proceeding in a conventional direction, forwards in time. But he happily came round to seeing the virtue of doing this history, as Yan and I preferred, backwards. Our reasons were cogent. Too many evolutionary histories culminate in man. The first chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale is entitled ‘The conceit of hindsight’, explained as follows:

  What of the second temptation, the conceit of hindsight, the idea that the past works to deliver our particular present? The late Stephen Jay Gould rightly pointed out that a dominant icon of evolution in popular mythology, a caricature almost as ubiquitous as lemmings jumping over cliffs (and that myth is false too), is a shambling file of simian ancestors, rising progressively in the wake of the erect, striding, majestic figure of Homo sapiens sapiens: man as evolution’s last word (and in this context it nearly always is man rather than woman): man as what the whole enterprise is pointing towards; man as a magnet, drawing evolution from the past towards him.

  We wanted to avoid the human conceit; but at the same time we had to recognize that our readers, being only human, would surely be most interested in human evolution. How could we satisfy that pardonably anthropocentric interest while not pandering to the myth that evolution marches ever upwards towards the pinnacle of humanity? By doing our history backwards. If you start at the origin of life and work forwards, your history can end up, with equal legitimacy, at any of the millions of surviving species. Homo sapiens should not be privileged, nor should Ranunculus repens, nor should Panthera leo, nor should Drosophila subobscura. But if you do your history backwards you can respectably privilege any modern species and trace its ancestry back to the same unique origin, an origin shared by all. This frees us to choose as our recent starting point the species we are most interested in – our own.

  Yan and I dramatized the backwards journey in Chaucerian terms as a pilgrimage, a human pilgrimage back to the origin of all life. We had human pilgrims being joined successively at discrete ‘rendezvous points’ by close cousins, then more distant cousins, then very distant cousins. This had the added benefit of emphasizing that modern species are not ancestors of other modern species but their cousins. Surprisingly, there turned out to be only thirty-nine of these rendezvous points. The reason this number is so small is that at many of the rendezvous, very large numbers of cousins join. At Rendezvous 26, for example, most of the invertebrates join the pilgrim throng, including the insects – and, as Robert May (distinguished physicist-turned-biologist who became the British government’s chief scientific adviser and President of the Royal Society) once quipped, to a first approximation all species are insects.

  We needed a word for the dead ancestors that our modern pilgrims shared at their successive rendezvous points. Dredging up my school Greek I suggested ‘phylarch’ but it wasn’t catchy enough. Eventually Yan’s wife Nicky came up with the perfect word: ‘concestor’, a natural contraction of ‘common ancestor’. Concestor 15, for example, is the common ancestor of all modern mammals.

  Our other Chaucerian touch was to let a few of the pilgrims, as they joined the human journey to the past, tell a ‘tale’. These tales were frank digressions, excuses to tell interesting biological stories, relevant to the whole book and not limited to the particular creature telling the story. The Grasshopper’s Tale, for instance, is about race, especially the vexed topic of human races, and the grasshopper tells it because of a particular piece of research on grasshopper races. The Velvet Worm’s Tale is about the Cambrian Explosion. The Beaver’s Tale is about the extended phenotype. The tales were told in my voice: it would have been too twee to have the animals talking in the first person.

  It is certainly fair to say that the book could not possibly have been finished without Yan Wong. He is credited with joint authorship of several of the chapters, and I am delighted to say that I have just negotiated with the publishers, through Brockman Inc., that there shall be a new edition, brought up to date with new material by Yan, and with his name now firmly on the cover as joint author.

  In 2002, during one of my crises of confidence, I sought to appease the publishers and stave off deadline pressure by offering them another book – the one that would eventually be called A Devil’s Chaplain. Anthony was keen to publish a collection of my already published essays and journalism, and so was Eamon Dolan of the American publishers, Houghton Mifflin. I knew exactly the right person to help me edit them. Latha Menon, originally from India but a long-time resident in Oxford and an Oxford graduate, had been the resourceful and astonishingly knowledgeable editor of Encarta, the encyclopedia produced under the auspices of Microsoft. I was on Encarta’s editorial board for several years and attended the annual meetings in Somerville College, under the chairmanship of the distinguished historian Asa Briggs, with Latha leading most of the detailed discussion. I was extremely impressed by her, and, when the work on Encarta came to an end, I successfully recommended her for a job editing science books for Oxford University Press. Could she do some moonlighting, editing my anthology? She could. She was already familiar with almost everything I had ever written and she set to work to help me choose a suitable list of writings and arrange them into seven sections. I named the sections mostly with poetic allusions such as ‘Light will be thrown’ (on Darwinism), ‘They told me Heraclitus’ (obituaries and memorials), ‘Even the ranks of Tuscany’ (various papers connected with Stephen Jay Gould), and ‘There is all Africa and her prodigies in us’ (on African matters). The last section, ‘A prayer for my daughter’, had a single chapter, the open letter that I had written to my daughter Juliet when she was ten. This formed a climax to the book and, as she was now just eighteen, the book itself was dedicated to Juliet on the occasion of her coming of age.

  A prayer for my daughter

  It might seem odd that I should have written a long letter to my ten-year-old daughter on the subject of ‘Good and bad reasons for believing’. Why not just talk to her? The reason is the sad but not uncommon one that we didn’t see very much of each other. Juliet lived with her mother, my second wife Eve. Eve was attractive and amusing and very good company, but we didn’t have much in common apart from our love of Juliet herself. Separation became increasingly inevitable and we parted when Juliet was four – at an age when, we hoped, it might be less upsetting for her than if we left it till later. Juliet and I then saw each other regularly but more briefly than I would have wished (such visits are settled by lawyers, with their ‘our-side their-side’ mentality – need I say more?), and our time together was too precious for heavy discussions about the meaning of life. In her early years my limited times with her went all too quickly, reading her beloved gorilla book, or Mogg the Forgetful Cat, or Babar the Elephant; or playing the piano with her, or walking
down to the river with Pepe the dear little whippet.

  But I did want to communicate something deeper, and the fact that we saw so little of each other erected barriers. I was even a little shy of her: in awe of her sweet nature and her beauty from the day she was born. I was strangely tongue-tied in her presence. Religious parents send their children to Sunday school, or talk to them about their faith. I suppose I wanted to do something vaguely equivalent. She was intelligent and did well at school, and I thought she might appreciate a long, thoughtful letter. I hasten to add that the very last thing I wanted to do was indoctrinate her with my own beliefs. The entire thrust of my letter was towards encouraging her to think for herself and come to her own conclusions.

  She read the letter and said she liked it, but we didn’t discuss it. As it happened, John Brockman was at the time editing a book of essays for children, which he wanted to present to his son Max as a bar mitzvah present. I was one of those whom he asked to contribute, and the obvious essay for me to submit was my letter to Juliet. So it became an open letter. The published version was well received by parents around the world, who gave it to their children or read it to them. And, as explained above, I later reprinted it as the last chapter of A Devil’s Chaplain, and dedicated the whole book to Juliet on her eighteenth birthday.

  Juliet was seven when I met Lalla and eight when I married her. From the start, they seemed to get on very well. We settled down to a regime where Juliet spent alternate weekends with Lalla and me in our house, and we had some lovely holidays in the far west of Ireland, with Juliet and her friend Alexandra, in the house which my parents had restored among the dunes looking towards the Twelve Bens of Connemara. Those were happy times, commemorated by a lovely embroidery that Lalla made and presented to my parents.

  But when Juliet was twelve, Eve started to develop ominous symptoms which were diagnosed as adrenal cancer. She had a large operation, which saved her life for a while, but then metastases set in and she entered the treadmill of chemotherapy, with all its gruelling side-effects. She bore it with immense fortitude and courage, buoyed up by her own characteristic black humour, which was one of the things that had attracted me to her in the first place. For example, on one occasion Lalla was taking Pepe to the vet, my nephew Peter Kettlewell, and Eve said: ‘While you’re about it, just ask Peter for something to put me down: I should think the dose for a medium-sized Alsatian would be about right.’ And so she laughed courageously in the face of death.

  Lalla and Eve, during this time, forged a remarkable friendship, and I think this solidified Lalla’s bond with Juliet. Lalla accompanied Eve on all her visits to the oncologist, took her out to lunch in a pub every week and, I think, raised her spirits while her health was declining. Lalla and I employed professional carers, friendly and competent young women from New Zealand and Australia, to help look after Eve and Juliet. And, all of us knowing that the prognosis was dire, we sent Eve on a holiday with Juliet, a fine Mediterranean cruise, which I think she enjoyed.

  I suspect that the seeds of Juliet’s ambition to become a doctor were sown during those terrible two years of her mother’s decline. Rightly or wrongly (actually rightly, I am sure), we decided to keep no secrets from her. She knew exactly what was going on with each hospital visit. I find myself almost in tears as I write this, remembering how that lovely little girl matured far beyond her years, caring for her mother through the ordeals of successive chemotherapy cycles, hiding her own forebodings and grief in a way that no child should be expected to do, keeping calm and sensible when the rest of us were not doing so well at that. And when the end came, in the old Radcliffe Infirmary, Juliet was – what can I say except – a fourteen-year-old hero.

  For the funeral, I asked Edward Higginbottom, the distinguished organist and choirmaster of New College, to find me a singer to do Schubert’s Ave Maria. He found a sweet soprano whose pure voice really did reduce me to tears at such an affecting moment, and Juliet turned to me and hugged me. I supported Eve’s mother down the aisle at the end and we all returned to our house for the wake afterwards.

  Juliet had been brave for so long, it is hardly surprising that her grief struck hard after the tragic loss of her mother. Lalla held us together through those difficult years with her matchless gift for intuitively sympathetic psychology and – well, for holding things together. But Juliet’s school work had suffered and she was set back in the face of the notoriously relentless pressure of Oxford High School. We took her out and sent her to D’Overbroeck’s tutorial college, which suited her better and gave her a taste, I think, of what true education can be. She temporarily lost heart in her medical ambition and went to the University of Sussex, on the south coast of England, to read human sciences. This is a mixture of biological science and social science, with which I was familiar because I had been peripherally involved in the inauguration of a similar degree at Oxford, and had been in charge of the human scientists at New College.

  Juliet loved the science at Sussex. John Maynard Smith had retired by then, but he was still around, and as her biology tutor Juliet had a marvellous young Australian woman, Lindell Bromham, who taught evolution in the spirit of JMS’s still fresh legacy. On the other hand, Juliet didn’t enjoy the social science and found it difficult to reconcile with her own intelligently scientific approach. For her, the last straw was when one of her lecturers said: ‘The beauty of anthropology is that, when two anthropologists look at the same data, they come to opposite conclusions.’ Perhaps the remark was tongue in cheek but, together with the anti-Darwinian spirit of some of the social science lecturers, it still dampened the spirits of a keen young scientist!

  Her interest in medicine was rekindled and the big break in her young career came when she succeeded in transferring to St Andrews, in Scotland, after only one year at Sussex. Here at last she was able to read medicine. St Andrews is one of Britain’s great universities (and its third oldest after Oxford and Cambridge), and it was marvellous for her. I fondly think she was pretty good for St Andrews too. She was popular, made lifelong friends, edited the medical students’ magazine, went to balls and parties, and still ended up with a top first-class degree. St Andrews doesn’t have a clinical school, so its medical students disperse after their first degree. Most go to Manchester, but Juliet set her heart on Cambridge and she qualified there as a doctor in 2010. Eve would have been deeply proud of her, as I am.

  The God Delusion

  In early 2005, soon after The Ancestor’s Tale was published, John Brockman signalled that his original objections to my attempting to publish The God Delusion in America had evaporated. George W. Bush’s lurch towards theocracy – he literally said that God had told him to invade Iraq – surely had something to do with this comprehensive shift. John asked me to write a proposal in the form of a letter to him, which he could hawk around to publishers. I reproduce the opening paragraphs of the letter here.

  New College, Oxford OX1 3BN

  21st March 2005

  John Brockman

  Brockman Inc. New York

  Dear John

  The God Delusion

  As you know, I am about to embark on writing and presenting a major television documentary, attacking religion as ‘The Root of All Evil’ (the working title, which will change). It has been commissioned by the religious department (!) of Channel Four, who want something hard-hitting, going after religion with all guns blazing, rather than a balanced, moderate, gentle treatment like the history of atheism series recently presented by Jonathan Miller. In my discussions with the producer, it is I who am the voice of restraint!

  Channel Four will broadcast it either as two one-hour shows, or (which I and the producer would prefer) one two-hour blockbuster. Filming will begin in May or June of 2005, and the documentary will be shown presumably late in 2005 or early 2006. No doubt Channel Four will make strenuous efforts to sell it outside Britain as well. Meanwhile, the producer is working hard setting up locations for filming in various parts of the world, includi
ng America, Europe and the Middle East.

  It seems sensible to write a book on the same general theme while it is in the front of my mind, and I propose The God Delusion. I don’t see it as a straight TV tie-in.

  The chapters that I went on to list in the letter bear some slight resemblance to the ones that I eventually wrote – more so than is usual for my proposals, actually. Although I presented the book to John by way of the TV documentary, it was not a television tie-in. Far from it. The documentary and the book both stand on their own, and overlap only slightly.

  In America, John sold the book to Houghton Mifflin, the publishers of The Ancestor’s Tale and A Devil’s Chaplain. In Britain, he broke new ground. The book was bought by Transworld, a division of Random House, where my editor was Sally Gaminara. The relationship turned out a happy one and she has published all my books since then. Sally has recently written to me of her reaction when John first sent her the above letter. ‘I shared it with my colleagues who were equally enthusiastic and we entered, and won, the auction for UK publishing rights.’ She went on to describe her reaction when she received the typescript of the book itself. I’m especially pleased that it made her laugh:

  I also hadn’t bargained for the wonderful humour in it. I expected to smile a little, but not laugh out loud again and again. It was a gloriously thrilling experience.

  Her response makes a sharp contrast with a reputation the book has acquired – perhaps among those who have read only secondhand accounts – for shrill and savage stridency. I’ll return to this in a later chapter. Sally’s letter continued:

  . . . one never knows whether one’s own taste chimes with others and so the nail biting began again in the run-up to publication (September 2006). I solicited pre-publication quotes from a wide group of writers and thinkers, many of whom came up with fabulous ‘puffs’, far more than usual, so I allowed my excitement to spill out again. But it wasn’t until you gave your first interview on publication with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, arranged by Patsy Irwin, that we got the first signs that something ‘big’ was on its way.