‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ is one of the sentences uttered by Hamlet in his cloud comparisons, and I had used it in The Blind Watchmaker (the book, that is) to illustrate the difference between cumulative selection and one-off selection. An infinite number of monkeys, bashing away randomly at typewriters for an infinite amount of time, will write the complete works of Shakespeare, together with an infinite quantity of other poetry and prose in an infinite number of languages. But this is no more than an illustration of the ungraspability of the very idea of infinity. Even the short sentence ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ would take a regiment of monkeys more billions of years than anyone can contemplate. If you programmed a computer to simulate a monkey, typing character strings of the right length at random, and even if it took only one second to type each string of twenty-eight characters, you would have to wait about a billion billion billion times as long as the world has so far existed to achieve any likelihood of hitting ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’.
I jokingly wrote in The Blind Watchmaker that I didn’t know any monkeys but fortunately my eleven-month-old daughter Juliet was ‘an excellent randomizing device and she proved only too eager to step into the role of monkey typist’. Eager was an understatement. She would visit me in my rooftop eyrie overlooking the Oxford Canal and pound away at the keyboard with her little fists, loyally trying to help me meet the deadline for finishing my book. After listing some of the random strings she typed, I went on: ‘She has other important calls on her time, so I was obliged to program the computer to simulate a randomly typing baby or monkey.’
Anybody familiar with the medium of television will not be surprised to learn that Jeremy wanted to recreate the scene. Juliet’s mother, Eve, brought Juliet to my room in New College where we were filming. Perhaps it was the intimidating presence of cameras and cameramen, lights and huge silvered umbrellas, and a director shouting ‘Turn over’ and ‘Cut’, but poor Juliet, even when sitting on her mother’s knee, was overcome with stage fright and refused to show her virtuosity at the keyboard. So in the end the film went straight to the computer, which simultaneously compared the simulated monkey to a ‘Darwin’ algorithm which used cumulative selection. Partially successful ‘mutant’ strings were selectively allowed to ‘reproduce’ through successive generations, and the whole process of ‘breeding’ the sentence ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ took only a minute or so.
The weasel program was, of course, a simulation of Darwinian evolution only in a very limited sense. It was designed only to illustrate the power of cumulative selection, as opposed to single generation randomization and selection. Moreover, it homed in on a distant target (the preordained phrase, ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’), which is very different from how evolution works in real life. In real life, that which survives survives. There is no distant target, tempting as it may be to imagine one with hindsight. This was why I went on to write the much more interesting and lifelike series of ‘biomorph’ programs, which I will discuss in another chapter, and which also played a prominent role in the film.
A later scene in the documentary took us to Berlin. The purpose was to film a German engineer, Ingo Rechenberg, who was pioneering Darwinian selection as a method of perfecting the design of windmills and diesel engines, but we took the opportunity to visit the Berlin Wall and watch the East German guards waiting to shoot anybody attempting to escape the Orwellian oppression of the Stasi. At this bleak and depressing spectacle Jeremy’s habitual cheerfulness deserted him, and I have never forgotten his heart-cry of despair, not aimed at anyone in particular but roared up anonymously into the rain-grey sky.
I’m glad I did those two BBC Horizon films but, looking at them again in order to write this chapter, I am struck – even a tiny bit embarrassed – by a nervous hesitancy in my delivery of pieces to camera. Possibly one reason was an awareness that every mistake I made was costly. In those days our filming was done on 16-mm film which was expensive and couldn’t be reused. Today’s digital recording media have zero cost. Mistakes cost only the extra time needed for another take. Although Jeremy was very nice about it and never mentioned the cost of film and his limited budget from the BBC, every time I made a fluff in those Horizon films, I felt the need to apologize.
Jeremy actually denies the halting lack of confidence to which I have just confessed, and suspects that I am being oversensitive to my own shortcomings. In any case, perhaps because of the drop in the monetary cost of mistakes due to the shift to digital media, or perhaps because I was ten years older, I don’t seem to notice the same hesitancy when I look today at Break the Science Barrier, a documentary for Channel Four that I presented in 1996.
Break the Science Barrier
Channel Four doesn’t have its own internal production staff or facilities. Instead (and the BBC increasingly follows this model) they commission work from any of a large number of independent production companies that have sprung up in London and all around the country. So the initial approach for Break the Science Barrier came to me not from Channel Four but from John Gau Productions Ltd. It didn’t take me long to discover that John Gau was one of the most respected figures in British television, a BBC veteran who had left to found his own independent company, widely revered for his experience in the world of television and his success in winning commissions and awards. I had little hesitation in agreeing to my name going forward in his bid to Channel Four. The bid was successful and John hired a freelance director, Simon Raikes, to direct the film, which John himself would produce. I got on well with both Simon and John, and I ended up very pleased with the film – an impression confirmed when I watched it again recently.
Break the Science Barrier combined, in roughly equal measure, a paean to the scientific method and the wonders it reveals, and a lament for the neglect of science in our world. To illustrate the latter, we featured the story of Kevin Callan, a British lorry driver who was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and subsequently released for reasons that we went on to tell. The jury were convinced, by expert testimony from doctors ignorant of the science of head injury, that Kevin had shaken his four-year-old stepchild Mandy to death.
The point we were making was that ignorance of science, on the part of not just the judge and the prosecution but also Kevin’s own defence team, had led to an unjust conviction. When he had ventured to ask his own lawyer what experts they were going to call in his defence, the lawyer told him to shut up – and called no witnesses. The reason was that the doctors the defence had thought to call agreed with the prosecution experts. Kevin was on his own, the sole witness in his own defence, and he was sent down for life.
He was on his own but indomitable. Prison rules allowed him to order books, and he systematically set about teaching himself the recondite subject of neuropathology. Long after his release, in his small house on the Welsh coast he showed our television camera the massive files of notes on the subject that he had accumulated while in prison. These notes seemed to me as full and as detailed as those of any first-class university student swotting for a final examination – with the difference that Kevin was faced with a rather more serious interpretation of ‘final’. Can you imagine how soul-destroying it would be to contemplate a lifetime in prison stretching ahead of you, knowing you were innocent?
Eventually he found a book by a New Zealand neuropathologist, Professor Philip Wrightson, which described symptoms identical to poor Mandy’s. Kevin wrote to Wrightson and sent him all the details from the court records. Wrightson studied them exhaustively and became convinced that Mandy’s injuries could not possibly have been caused by shaking. They were caused by a fall, which was what Kevin had said all along.
The case was reopened on the strength of Wrightson’s new testimony, and Kevin was released without a stain on his character. But, as my spoken commentary said, ‘An innocent man had spent four years in jail.’ If this disturbing history had taken place in an execution-happy jurisdiction such as Texas, Kevin would presumably be de
ad. And even in Britain, but for his astonishing tenacity and the integrity of a good doctor from New Zealand, he would still be languishing in jail and probably hideously ill-treated by the other inmates.
Our documentary included a damning indictment, by one of Britain’s most eminent barristers, Michael Mansfield QC, of the scientific ignorance of the judge and all the lawyers involved. I was moved by Kevin’s story, and I came away with a fierce respect for this relatively uneducated truck driver who had, by sheer force of will and intelligence, educated himself in the relevant science, and also in the scientific method of thinking. His lawyers were far better educated than this heroic young man; but they were educated in the wrong subjects, and they let him down.
We also, in the film, deplored the widespread public descent into superstition and gullibility – a theme to which I would return in Unweaving the Rainbow and in a later documentary for Channel Four, Enemies of Reason. For Breaking the Science Barrier we filmed Ian Rowland, a professional conjuror who performed tricks of the kind alleged by spoon-bending mountebanks to be ‘paranormal’ or ‘supernatural’ – but who was himself at pains to emphasize that he was doing nothing but tricks: ‘If somebody else does it super-naturally he’s doing it the hard way.’ In America the same role of honest, fraud-busting magician has long been filled by that veteran sceptic James ‘the Amazing’ Randi. Other spectacular illusionists who go out of their way to promote scientific reason and debunk the charlatans are Penn and Teller, and Jamy Ian Swiss, all of whom I am proud to call my friends.
I have never performed a conjuring trick in my life, but (perhaps ‘and’ is the better conjunction) I am fascinated by what the best stage magicians can do. It might almost be said to have philosophical implications. When I watch a world-class conjuror like Jamy Ian Swiss in America, or Derren Brown in Britain, my sense of the miraculous is so strong that it takes a strenuous effort of will to persuade myself that there really is a rational explanation. Contrary to all apparent evidence, what I have seen isn’t a miracle. Turning water into wine, or walking on water, would seem child’s play compared to what these remarkable performers can do. I have to keep telling myself it really is only a trick, even though all my instincts are screaming ‘miracle’, ‘supernatural’, ‘paranormal’. Honest spell-breakers like James Randi, or Ian Rowland, or Jamy Ian Swiss, or Derren Brown, or Penn and Teller don’t need to come clean about exactly how they do it: they cannot, it would be breaking their professional code to do so. It is enough that they reassure us that it really is a trick.
A shameful confession. I was no longer a child when I saw, on television, the following ‘paranormal’ performance by an alleged strongman. He had a fishing hook inserted in the skin of his back and he appeared to be towing, with a fishing line, a large, heavy railway truck. The skin of his naked back was pulled dramatically outwards, and he did lots of straining and groaning acting. Slowly but surely, the truck moved. My confession – and I overcome my shame to tell it as an illustration of how we are all vulnerable – is that I did not immediately dismiss it as a trick because the laws of physics simply cannot be violated in that way. Rather, my reaction was: ‘Well, what a remarkable man. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .’ There. Got that confession out of the way and feel a complete and utter fool. But I know the gullible me of that time is lamentably far from alone.
The honesty of conjurors like Penn and Teller, James Randi and others is not in their commercial interests, by the way. Quite the contrary. The fakes and fraudsters who perform the same tricks (or more usually inferior tricks) but claim on television that they are supernatural, and then write bestselling books about their ‘powers’, must laugh all the way to the bank (or all the way to the oil or mining companies whose foolish executives pay them handsomely to ‘divine’ by ‘psychic powers’ where to drill for oil or precious minerals).
The philosophical interest goes further. Scientists of a rationalist bent are often challenged to say what might in principle cause them to change their minds and come to regard naturalism as falsified. What would it take to convince you of something supernatural? I used to pay lip service to the promise that I would become a supernaturalist overnight, the moment somebody showed me some convincing evidence. I presumed it obvious that such evidence would be easy for a god, say, to furnish. But now, stimulated by a thoughtful discussion by Steve Zara, one of the regular contributors to my website RichardDawkins.net, I am less sure. What would convincing evidence for supernaturalism look like? What could it possibly look like? A ‘close magic’ card trick by Jamy Ian Swiss appears to be as supernatural as almost any miracle I can imagine, and in this case I am assured by the honest conjuror that it really is only a trick, an illusion. If Jesus appeared to me in clouds of glory, or I saw the stars move into a new constellation spelling out the names of Zeus and the entire Olympian pantheon, why would I reject the hypothesis that I was dreaming, or hallucinating, or the victim of a cunning illusion, perhaps manufactured by extraterrestrial physicists or an alien David Copperfield-style conjuror, rather than succumb to the cop-out theory that the laws of nature had been overthrown by a ‘supernatural’ event? Superhuman, yes, why not? I’d be surprised if the vast universe was not home to superhuman intelligences. But ‘supernatural’? What could supernatural even mean, other than falling outside our present, temporarily imperfect understanding of science?
Arthur C. Clarke, the famously prophetic science-fiction writer, made a related point in his ‘third law’: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If we could somehow fly back to the middle ages in a Boeing 747 and invite people aboard to show them a laptop computer, a colour television or a mobile telephone, even their greatest intellects would conclude that all four devices were supernatural and we were gods. Again, what could ‘supernatural’ ever mean, other than ‘beyond our present understanding’? Clever tricks by expert conjurors are beyond my present understanding and probably yours too. We are tempted to call them supernatural, but we resist the temptation because we know – the conjurors themselves assure us – they are not. As David Hume advised us, we should exercise the same scepticism over all alleged miracles because the alternative to the miracle hypothesis, even though implausible, is nevertheless more plausible than the miracle.
The other half of Break the Science Barrier’s message, promoting the wonder of science, we covered by, among other things, filming Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the discoverer of pulsars, in the evocative location of the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester. What a moving spectacle that is: the giant, Cyclopean parabola, staring out through deep space into deep time. We also interviewed David Attenborough and – another coup – Douglas Adams. The speech about novels and science books I quoted in the introductory chapter came from this interview with Douglas, which ended with my asking him this: ‘What is it about science that really gets your blood running?’ And here is what he said, impromptu, and with his infectious enthusiasm somehow enhanced rather than lessened by the twinkle in the eye that endears us to his perennial readiness to laugh at himself.
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend seventy or eighty years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.
Alas, he – and we – only got forty-nine.
This is as good a moment as any to mention my friendship with Douglas, and how I came to know him. The first of his books that I read was not The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It is certainly the only book I’ve ever read from cover to cover and then immediately turned back to page one and read again from cover to cover. I did that because, t
he first time through, it took me a while to twig all the Coleridge references and I wanted to read it again, this time on the alert for them.
It is also the only book that has prompted me to write a fan letter to its author. It was an early email, sent at a time when emails were rare. The Apple Computer company had its own internal email network called Applelink. You could only send emails to other members of the Applelink circle, and in the late 1980s there were only a few hundred of us in the whole world. Douglas and I were among them, through the good offices of Alan Kay. Alan had earlier been at Xerox Parc, where he was one of the founding geniuses of the WIMP interface (Windows, Icons, Menus [or Mouse], Pointer), which Apple and later Microsoft were to adopt. In the great diaspora from the computational Athens that was Xerox Parc, Alan moved to Apple with the honorific title of Apple Fellow, founding his own unit for developing educational software and adopting a very fortunate Los Angeles junior school as his test bed. Alan was a fan of both Douglas’s and my books, and both of us were elected as honorary advisers to his educational unit. One of the perks was early membership in Applelink; and, given that there were so few of us on the network, it was easy for me to look Douglas’s name up and email my fan letter to him.
He replied promptly, saying that he was a fan of my books too, and inviting me to visit him the next time I was in London. I arrived at his tall Islington house and rang the bell. Douglas opened the door, already laughing. I immediately had the sense that he was laughing not at me but at himself, or perhaps more precisely at my anticipated reaction – he must have seen it many times before – to his spectacular height.1 Or perhaps he was just laughing ironically at some absurdity of life which he presumed I would find equally amusing. I went in with him and he showed me round his house, bristling with guitars, Midi music equipment, futuristically giant loudspeakers and – as it seemed – dozens of retired Macintosh computers fallen afoul of Moore’s Law and languishing in the shade of their state-of-the-art successors. It became obvious that we did indeed laugh at exactly the same things, and revelled in companionable recognition of the same comic absurdities. He would have guessed, for instance, that I must laugh delightedly at this:
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 19
