Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  The Festschrift contains 25 chapters divided into seven sections: ‘Biology’, ‘The Selfish Gene’, ‘Logic’, ‘Antiphonal voices’, ‘Humans’, ‘Controversy’ and ‘Writing’. Reading the book again, I am struck by how well and entertainingly most of the chapters are written. I coyly confess to a warm glow of (possibly wishful) thinking that my friends and colleagues really pulled out the stops for me. The warm glow extends to the content, which is consistently interesting; in some cases critical of my work (for example the warm chapter by the then Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries), in all cases original and thought-provoking (for example, the beautiful chapter on my literary style by Philip Pullman). I would like to write a detailed response to every one of these marvellous chapters but it would require another book to do it justice.

  TELEVISION

  On the Horizon

  Apart from lots of interviews here and there, my first intensive exposure to television cameras was in 1986 when I was approached by Jeremy Taylor, one of the resident producer/directors of the BBC’s ‘flagship’ (as it was then justly called) Horizon series of science documentaries. Americans at the time frequently knew Horizon programmes as Nova because WGBH in Boston put out a parallel series of similarly good documentaries, many of which were rebranded, sometimes re-presented, Horizons, occasionally even with an American voiceover.

  I never verified the rumour that the reason for the latter change was a fear that Americans can’t understand – or at least don’t enjoy listening to – British English. It seems unlikely in view of the popularity of dramas such as Upstairs Downstairs, or the anachronism-prone Downton Abbey. On the other hand, I was astounded to be told by a scandalized American friend, Todd Stiefel, that the BBC’s Life, perhaps the most ambitious wildlife documentary series ever screened, and narrated by none other than David Attenborough himself, was doctored for an American audience, with Attenborough’s narration replaced by the voice of Oprah Winfrey! I’m happy to say that the verdict of American Amazon reviewers who compared the two versions has been overwhelmingly in favour of the genuine article. I can’t help wondering why Oprah Winfrey agreed to do it. Was she not afraid of the inevitable comparisons with the peerless Sir David?

  I was certainly afraid when Jeremy Taylor approached me – because of the formidable reputation of Horizon/Nova, and because I doubted whether I would be good enough to do television. I had been approached ten years earlier by another Horizon producer, Peter Jones, to present a documentary on The Selfish Gene. I declined through sheer nerves, and recommended John Maynard Smith instead. He did an excellent job.

  I should say that, although my memory is that I turned down the Selfish Gene documentary through nerves, Jeremy Taylor, who kindly read this chapter for me in draft, has a different recollection based on his friendship with Peter Jones.

  The story I recollect is that Horizon (not necessarily Peter) thought you too youthful in appearance to credibly present your own ideas! Rather like the choirboy delivering the sermon! Indeed, when I raised the idea [a decade later] of approaching you to present Nice Guys, the then Horizon editor, Robin Brightwell, was dead against the idea – again citing the fact that you looked ‘too young’, and would viewers have confidence in you? I insisted and Brightwell told me ‘Well I won’t forbid it – but on your own head be it!’ So, if you felt a bit jittery presenting it, imagine the feelings I was concealing (I hope) from you! Of course, Nice Guys [the documentary that Jeremy and I went on to make] went down a storm with Horizon, BBC2 and the controllers and attitudes to the idea of The Blind Watchmaker [Jeremy’s next proposal for a documentary with me] changed dramatically!

  When Jeremy approached me to do Nice Guys Finish First I was (and presumably looked) ten years older and a bit more confident, but I was still jittery about it. What swung me over was his enthusiasm for the topic he proposed. He had read a book called The Evolution of Cooperation, by the American social scientist Robert Axelrod, and thought the game-theoretic approach to cooperation would form the basis of a great Horizon.

  I knew Axelrod’s work well because, long before he published his book,

  I received, out of the blue, a typescript from an American political scientist whom I didn’t know, Robert Axelrod. It announced a ‘computer tournament’ to play the game of Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and invited me to compete. To be more precise – and the distinction is an important one for the very reason that computer programs don’t have conscious foresight – it invited me to submit a computer program that would do the competing. I’m afraid I didn’t get around to sending in an entry. But I was hugely intrigued by the idea, and I did make one valuable, if rather passive, contribution to the enterprise at that stage. Axelrod was a professor of political science and, in my partisan way, I felt that he needed to collaborate with an evolutionary biologist. I wrote him an introduction to W. D. Hamilton, probably the most distinguished Darwinian of our generation. Axelrod immediately contacted Hamilton, and they collaborated.1

  Hamilton was actually a professor in the same institution as Axelrod, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, but they didn’t know each other until I introduced them. Their collaboration resulted in a prizewinning paper called ‘The evolution of cooperation’, later incorporated as a chapter of Axelrod’s book of the same title. So I felt a tiny bit possessive about my back-seat part in the book’s genesis. In any case I loved it. I quote again from the foreword that I wrote for its second edition:

  I read it as soon as it appeared, with mounting excitement, and took to recommending it with evangelical zeal to almost everyone I met. Every one of the undergraduates I tutored in the years following its publication was required to write an essay on Axelrod’s book, and it was one of the essays they most enjoyed writing.

  Understandably, then, when I received the overture from Jeremy Taylor and heard how he shared my enthusiasm for Axelrod’s book, I couldn’t resist.

  We met and, picking up on that enthusiasm, I immediately liked him. I found him faintly reminiscent of my New College friend, the intelligible philosopher Jonathan Glover. Jeremy soothed my fears about television, saying that we would start slowly and see how it went. He preferred not to script my pieces to camera, with the reservation that, if it should prove necessary, we’d change to a more scripted format. Fortunately that didn’t happen. Instead, the way it eventually worked was that he and I would rather intensively talk over each piece immediately before I delivered it. Then, after each one was safely in the can, we’d discuss the next piece until I had that one clear in my mind, then record that, and so on.

  The film ended up being called Nice Guys Finish First, and I’ll call it that here although we didn’t hit on the name till it was nearly finished. It’s a play on ‘Nice guys finish last’, an aphorism which, despite the frisson of sexual innuendo, is said to have originated in the world of baseball. The first scene we shot was on Port Meadow, the great flood meadow between Oxford and the Isis river (as this stretch of the Thames is called). Port Meadow has been unploughed common land since Domesday Book, granted as grazing to the Freemen of the City of Oxford and the Commoners of Wolvercote. The Wolvercote house I used to live in with my first wife Marian overlooked its spreading acres, and it was easy to fantasize it into a kind of wetter, English version of the Serengeti Plain with wandering herds, not of wildebeest and zebra but of cattle and horses.

  The relevance of common land to Nice Guys Finish First was ‘The tragedy of the commons’, the topic – and title – of a famous paper by the American ecologist Garret Hardin. Common land is ruined by overgrazing. The system of the commons works as long as everybody exercises restraint. If an individual commoner is greedy and puts too many cattle on the land, all suffer. But the selfish individual suffers no more than anybody else, and he gains disproportionate benefits because he has more cattle. There is therefore an incentive for everybody to behave selfishly: and that is the tragedy of the commons.

  A more familiar example: a group of ten people go to a restaurant
and agree in advance to share the bill, each one paying a tenth. One person orders a much more expensive dish than anybody else. He knows he’ll be paying only 10 per cent of the increased cost on the bill, but he’ll receive 100 per cent of the benefit of the more expensive dish. So there is little incentive for each individual to exercise restraint in ordering, and the bill escalates beyond the likely total if everybody bought their own.1

  Jeremy wanted me to do a piece to camera about the tragedy of the commons and, this being television, there had to be a visual illustration in the background. Port Meadow, ancient medieval common land literally on my own doorstep, was perfect. Here opportunity for gentle humour presented itself and Jeremy, as a good television producer will, seized it. It is the responsibility of the holder of the ancient office of Sheriff of the City of Oxford to attend an annual roundup of all the animals, the exact date of the roundup being kept secret. At least, it’s supposed to be kept secret; Jeremy apparently got wind of it. Or maybe he didn’t, but just struck lucky and took serendipitous advantage.

  Owners of animals grazed illegally on Port Meadow used to be fined, the object being to reduce the tragedy of the commons, but more recently the annual roundup has become a toothless ritual in which the animals are temporarily corralled but no attempt is made to establish ownership or responsibility. This would theoretically allow the tragedy to run its course. We filmed scenes of the roundup interposed with my pieces to camera explaining the principle of the tragedy.

  As I watched Jeremy directing his camera crew, I couldn’t help noticing that part of his intention seemed to be comedic: he was sending up the Sheriff’s men and their pet tradition. I was a little concerned, and I asked him about it. He grinned and said they wouldn’t notice, and even if they did they wouldn’t mind: people love being on television for any reason. I learned a lesson about the subtle wit that characterizes the best documentary directors, a trait I was to see several more times during my years of occasional television presenting. To be truly witty it mustn’t be laboured, and this was another lesson I learned from Jeremy.

  Jeremy was even capable of laughing at the conventions and clichés of his own medium of television while using them himself. He had me explaining the restaurant example while driving a car and talking to a non-existent passenger by my side. Simon Raikes, who directed a later documentary that I did for Channel Four, Break the Science Barrier (more on that below), made explicit the joke against this particular cliché by cutting from me addressing my ‘passenger’ to a shot of the car from outside, which clearly showed that there was no passenger to address (not even the cameraman, of course). When I protested about this, Simon laughed and said nobody would notice: it had become part of the grammar of television, an accepted convention.

  A similarly accepted convention of television documentaries is the ‘walking towards the camera shot’, in which the presenter is filmed talking to a non-existent person who must unrealistically be presumed to be walking backwards in retreat. The cameraman really is walking backwards (at some hazard to himself and passers-by, were it not for solicitous steering by the sound man hanging on to his shoulder). I have always drawn the line at this televisual cliché. My refusal to do it has been accepted, sometimes reluctantly, by every director I have worked with. Yet another convention of television, ‘the speeded-up clouds shot’, often deployed to indicate passage of time, can actually be rather beautiful, so I have no objection to it. Playing tricks with time, both speeding things up and slowing them down, is something David Attenborough’s marvellous documentaries frequently exploit: to great effect, although I wish he would tell us explicitly that he is doing it, at least on those occasions when it isn’t obvious. His wonderfully entertaining autobiography, Life on Air, has a fascinating discussion of the earliest days of television documentaries, where he and his colleagues had to invent the conventions, the ‘grammar’ of documentary television, from scratch: when to do a fade, when an abrupt cut; when to use a voiceover, when to show the speaker’s face, and so on.

  After Nice Guys Finish First was broadcast, I enjoyed a brief honeymoon period when my name was associated with niceness instead of selfishness – as is commonly the case because so many people read my first book by title only. Three prominent corporations approached me. The chairman of Marks & Spencer, Lord Sieff, made contact through his daughter Daniela, who happened to be a pupil of mine at New College, inviting me to lunch in the company boardroom in London. Daniela and I were the only guests and her father explained to us, plausibly enough, that Marks & Spencer was a very nice company which treated its employees well. I saw no reason to doubt him, but I’m not sure he really got the point of the Nice Guys Finish First documentary. Maybe Daniela explained it to him afterwards.

  Then, rather less plausibly, a young woman from the publicity department of the Mars Corporation took me to lunch in order to explain to me that her company sold chocolate bars not to make money but in order to sweeten people’s lives. She herself was sweet and I enjoyed having lunch with her, but I found her corporate message as cloying as her chocolate.

  Finally, a British senior executive of IBM Europe, who really did understand the message of our documentary, flew me to the company’s Brussels headquarters to supervise a training game for middle-management executives. The purpose was to help them bond, and thereby improve the atmosphere of the workplace. These dynamic young suits were divided into three teams, the Reds, the Blues and the Greens, in order to play a modified version of ‘iterated prisoner’s dilemma’ (I won’t spell out the details of this game-theory classic here: the details are all in Axelrod’s book and in the second edition of The Selfish Gene). Each team was shut up in a separate room, and they communicated their moves by runner. Good cooperative rapport between all three teams was built up and maintained during the long afternoon, exactly as Axelrod would have predicted. But alas, the theory also predicts that if a game of iterated prisoner’s dilemma is known to be going to end at a fixed time, the temptation to defect rises. This is because the final round, if it is known to be the final round, is equivalent to a one-off prisoner’s dilemma – where the rational strategy is to defect. And if you know that your rational opponent is likely to defect on the last round, a pre-emptive strike in the last-but-one becomes rational: and so on back. Axelrod coined the phrase ‘the shadow of the future’, meaning the expected time to the end of the game. The shorter the shadow, the higher the temptation to defect.

  And unfortunately, in the case of the IBM game, it was known that it was going to end at 4 p.m. We should have anticipated the resulting catastrophe and, instead of announcing the termination time in advance, blown a whistle at a random, unpredictable moment. As things were, it was not at all surprising with hindsight that, just before the witching hour of teatime, the Reds massively defected against the Blues, betraying a long-standing trust that had been painstakingly built up throughout the afternoon. Far from helping these executives to bond, our game, even though it was played for tokens rather than real money, caused so much ill-feeling between the Blues and the Reds that they had to have counselling before they could work together again on the serious business of running IBM. It seems quite funny now, but I didn’t feel good about it on the journey home.

  Nice Guys Finish First was followed, not long after, by another Horizon documentary, again directed by Jeremy Taylor. This time the title came first: The Blind Watchmaker. Like the book after which it was named – which had just been published – the documentary was a response to creationism, and that was a sufficient reason to do much of the filming in Texas. Jeremy and I flew to Dallas, hired a car and drove to the small and sleepy town of Glen Rose. The nearby Paluxy river flows shallowly over sensuously smooth, flat limestone in which are elegantly preserved dinosaur footprints. Well, some of them are elegantly preserved, showing the characteristic three toes of dinosaurs. Others, however, are sufficiently ill-formed to be seen, by the eye of faith – and I do mean faith – as human footprints. In the 1930s, the Paluxy b
ecame a mecca for creationists eager to believe that the world was young and humans walked with dinosaurs (the ‘behemoth’ mentioned in the Book of Job). A market in fake dinosaur footprints together with giant human ones made of cement was set up in Glen Rose, and the ‘evidence’ became part of the stock-in-trade of creationist lore and literature.

  Jeremy hired a local Texan film crew and we tramped through the wilderness from Glen Rose to the Paluxy river, where we spent a lovely day wading and paddling in the warm, shallow water with its sympathetically smooth limestone bottom. We were accompanied by Ronnie Hastings, a local science teacher, and Glen Kuban, the two men who had done the most to uncover the real truth about the Paluxy river ‘man tracks’ (they are really dinosaur spoors, but from heels so the three toes don’t show). Looking at the film again today to remind myself while writing this, I am a little embarrassed by the brevity of my shorts, and they have indeed been the subject of some ribaldry on the internet. Short shorts are not fashionable today, but I must say I still can’t help finding Bermudas rather ridiculously long, even ungainly. Besides, they would have got wet as I waded in the Paluxy.

  My friend Jeremy Cherfas, himself experienced in television, told me a shorts story about another documentary presenter, the distinguished South African anthropologist Glyn Isaac. He was being filmed as he crouched down to pick up a fossil, which he then turned over to show to the camera. His shorts were very short and he didn’t realize that his penis was visible. The director scrupulously called ‘Cut’ but, in Cherfas’s words, ‘the cameraman, being a great cameraman, just kept on rolling’. No such embarrassment happened to me, but I have to admit that very short shorts wouldn’t be Wardrobe’s natural choice (to quote Lalla) for reciting Shakespeare as I had to do – the passage where Hamlet notes the ease with which the human eye is fooled by superficial resemblances (in his case of clouds to animals, in my case of dinosaur heelprints to human footprints).