The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be . . .
And at the ‘infinite improbability drive’. And at the Electric Monk, the labour-saving device that you buy to do your believing for you (the advanced version of which was capable of ‘believing things they wouldn’t believe in Salt Lake City’). And at the appetizingly suicidal, and morally sophisticated, ‘Dish of the Day’ in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (introduced above in the chapter on my Christmas Lectures).
I’ve already explained how I met my wife at Douglas’s fortieth birthday party. But 42 is a more significant number in the Adams canon, and he celebrated his forty-second birthday in characteristic style: a massive dinner for hundreds of guests. Although it was a sit-down dinner, it almost failed to consummate that promise – because of its remarkable seating plan. Shoving a card on each place mat bearing the guest’s name was far too simple for Douglas. Douglas’s place cards had two names, referring not to the person sitting there but to the neighbours on either side. ‘The person on your left is Richard Dawkins. Ask him to say grace. The person on your right is Ed Victor. Turn to him and say, in an incredulous tone, “FIFTEEN?”’ (Douglas’s agent Ed Victor was then the only literary agent in London who took a commission as high as 15 per cent.) Sorting out this placement was a feat of such gratuitous complexity that it occupied Douglas (abetted, I suspect, by more than one of his fleet of Mac computers) most of the evening and we didn’t finally sit down to dinner until nearly midnight. How I miss him, with his world-class sense of humour and – as has been said – world-class imagination.
Break the Science Barrier ended with a quintessentially Oxford scene: Lalla reclining in a punt while I poled her romantically up the Cherwell (plus the cameraman playing gooseberry, of course, but the audience is supposed not to work that out) with my voiceover extolling the beauty of scientific reality, as we both appreciated it.
Seven wonders
In the mid-nineties the BBC producer Christopher Sykes conceived the idea of a television series in which scientists were asked to name their own personal list of seven wonders of the world and talk impromptu about each one. Christopher illustrated their choices, presumably with footage from the BBC’s vast library. My seven wonders were the spider’s web, the bat’s ear, the embryo, digital codes, the parabolic reflector, the pianist’s fingers and Sir David Attenborough (which prompted a delightfully funny, handwritten letter from the great man). This half-hour of concentrated television was one of the few things I have done which apparently earned me no enemies (and lots of friends). Does that make it a good programme? It doesn’t make it a bad one, notwithstanding Winston Churchill’s ‘You made enemies? Good, it means you were doing something right.’ I have never gone out of my way to seek enemies, but they sometimes seem to loom up out of the darkness on the straight road ahead.
The seven wonders format threw up some wonderful candidates. Steven Pinker, for example, chose the bicycle, combinatorial systems, the language instinct, the camera, the eye, stereo vision and the mystery of consciousness. I don’t think anyone chose ‘the taxi driver’s hippocampus’ but perhaps they should have: London’s black-cab drivers have to pass an exam testing their knowledge (it’s even called ‘The Knowledge’) of every last little street and alleyway in one of the world’s great cities, and it’s been shown that in the driver’s brain the part called the hippocampus is enlarged. There’s a certain sadness in the thought that ‘The Knowledge’ may soon be made redundant by GPS navigation. Yet GPS systems have a way to go before they can rival The Knowledge of backstreet shortcuts and how the best ones change with traffic conditions.
Other scientists in the series included my personal hero John Maynard Smith, Stephen Jay Gould, Danny Hillis (inventor of the parallel processing supercomputer), James Lovelock (the Gaia guru), and Miriam Rothschild. This remarkable old lady’s seven wonders were ear mites, the monarch butterfly, the jump of the flea, dawn on the Jungfrau, the bizarrely complex life cycle of a parasitic worm, carotenoid pigments (such as the ones by which we see), and Jerusalem. Her delight in them was infectious – the enthusiasm of a child bubbling over in an 87-year-old – and her show was a type-specimen exemplar of Christopher Sykes’s concept.
Dame Miriam
I didn’t know Miriam well, but so remarkable a character demands a digression. She used to invite Lalla and me to her annual Dragonfly Party (so called because guests were encouraged to view the dragonfly conservation measures around her lake) at her country house at Ashton, near Oundle where I had earlier been at boarding school. Her garden was something to behold. There is a coffee-table book, The New Englishwoman’s Garden, in which each double-page spread is devoted to the garden of some high-born or well-connected lady. The pages glow with immaculate lawns shaded by immemorial cedars, tastefully understated flower beds, herbaceous borders, shady arbours and ancient, brooding yew alleys. All is as expected, until you turn the page to the garden of the Honourable Miriam Rothschild (they could have left off the Honourable and replaced it with FRS, but that would have been out of the book’s character).1 Her garden was stylishly her own. The plants were all such as the other ladies would have called weeds. They consisted entirely of wild English meadow flowers and unmown grasses. Waves of flower-decked long grass buffeted the walls of the house and crashed through the windows into the interior window boxes, which therefore looked like an indoor continuation of the garden. The large house itself was so smothered in creepers you almost needed a machete to find it, like a fairy-tale castle in an enchanted forest. Under faded family photographs (including one of the bowler-hatted and full-bearded second Lord Rothschild driving through London in his coach pulled by four zebras) were the cases containing the celebrated Rothschild insect collections.
The luncheons themselves were sumptuous buffets. At one of these annual ‘dragonfly bashes’, she beckoned me over to her table: ‘Come and sit by me, dear boy. But first, go and carve me a slice of venison: a very small slice, mind you, I’m a strict vegetarian.’ To be fair, the deer had not been killed for food, but had died of an accident, so you could say that her vegetarian principles were being upheld in the spirit – if not the flesh . . . Miriam owned a herd of rare Père David’s deer, brought back from China by her father with a view to conserving the species (they are extinct in the wild). One of these deer had unfortunately got itself entangled in a fence and died. Hence the venison on the ethical buffet table.
Miriam was once invited to give the prestigious annual Herbert Spencer Lecture in Oxford. The Vice-Chancellor and dignitaries were all seated in the front row of Christopher Wren’s magnificent Sheldonian Theatre. They had probably processed in, begowned, mortar-boarded up and heralded by the Bedell with his mace, although I don’t strictly remember that detail and may have embellished it. Miriam’s lecture itself, I remember well. It turned out to be a heartfelt plea for animal rights and a passionate denunciation of meat-eating. I was seated immediately behind the Vice-Chancellor and noticed him begin to shift visibly in his seat with anxiety as the lecture progressed. Then I saw a note being passed discreetly along the row, and an aide hustled out, doubtless running hot-foot to the college kitchen where they were busy preparing the post-lecture dinner that the Vice-Chancellor was to host in Miriam’s honour. You’d think she might have given his office a warning in advance, but I suspect her sense of mischief took over.
On another occasion, Lalla had been trying to raise money for Denville Hall, the wonderfully hospitable and sympathetic care home for retired actors of which she chairs the trustees. At that time her favoured art form was painting silk with beautiful animal designs. As well as ties (such as the warthog tie which failed to gain the seal of royal approval), she painted truly beautiful silk scarves, all with animal designs – butterflies, pigeons, chickens, whales, fish, shel
ls, ducks, armadillos (Matt Ridley bought that one for his Texan wife, the armadillo being that state’s mascot) – and offered them for sale in aid of her favourite charity. Knowing that Miriam habitually wore a headscarf, I encouraged Lalla to paint one for this wealthy and philanthropic old lady in the hope of securing a large donation. The obvious if unconventional subject, given Miriam’s unmatched expertise in those acrobatic little suckers, was fleas: hugely magnified images of fleas, nine different species. Lalla painted the scarf beautifully, and I sent it off on her behalf, explaining the good cause. Finally, Miriam’s reply came: ‘Please thank your wife and tell her I shall keep the handkerchief [this ‘handkerchief’ was at least a metre square] but inform her that she has sadly underestimated the flea penis, which, as you doubtless know, is proportionately among the largest in the animal kingdom.’ Miriam’s letter was accompanied by a generous cheque for Denville Hall, and by the gift of her book on flea micro-anatomy, inscribed for Lalla with a note: ‘See p. 112 for vagina of mole flea.’
Less happy television encounters
In addition to the science documentaries of which I have been the presenter, I have on many occasions found myself, one way or another, on the wrong side of a television camera. I won’t list them all in detail here. Apart from the only two occasions (which I’ll come on to) where I was the victim of deliberately deceitful editing, the series I remember with least affection is The Brains Trust. The title and format were inherited from a justly famous wartime radio series in which a panel of three people gave off-the-cuff responses to questions sent in by listeners and read out by a chairman. Panellists varied from week to week, but the renowned regulars were Julian Huxley, Commander A. B. Campbell, and C. E. M. Joad. At the time of the original broadcasts I was a toddler in Africa, but I’ve listened to recordings, redolent of a bygone era when friends called each other by their surnames and radio voices seemed to declaim rather than converse (‘Thenk you, Cempbell. I say, Huxley, what is your cendid opinion?’) The television version was never as successful as the radio original. I can’t, now, imagine why I agreed to take part, but for some reason I did: three episodes, and I hated them all. I was not reassured when the woman in the chair greeted me with an expression of amazement that I was a scientist. She had apparently never met one before: ‘We called them “grey men” at Oxford, and they used to go to 9 a.m. lectures while we were all still in bed.’ She followed through by saying, when I mentioned Watson and Crick in one of my answers to a question, ‘For the benefit of viewers, could you briefly explain who Watson and Crick are?’ Would she have made a similar request if I had spoken of Wordsworth and Coleridge, or Aristotle and Plato? Or even Gilbert and Sullivan?
Famous name-pairings remind me of a nice story told by Francis Crick himself. He introduced Watson to somebody in Cambridge who said, ‘Watson? But I thought your name was Watson-Crick.’ Cue another digression. I feel privileged to have known both these men. The talents of both were essential to their remarkable achievement in stretching limited data to generate a conclusion of near-unlimited significance, and it’s not obvious which of the two names should come first in the ubiquitous binary. The opening phrase of Watson’s The Double Helix (‘I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood’) doesn’t chime with my more limited experience of his senior partner, but it is true that both of them needed huge confidence to pull it off. In my jacket blurb for Crick’s autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, I wrote of a
justified pride, almost arrogance, on behalf of a discipline – molecular biology – that earned the right to be arrogant by cutting the philosophical claptrap, getting its head down, and in short order solving many of the outstanding problems of life. Francis Crick seems to epitomise the ruthlessly successful science that he did so much to found.
He did much more than solve the structure of DNA. His demonstration, with Sydney Brenner and others, that the genetic code had to be a triplet code, must be one of the most ingenious experiments ever conceived.
Jim Watson too, if he is arrogant, earned the right to be. His ex-cathedra pronouncements can be ill-judged and his sense of humour can occasionally be cruel, but one gets the feeling he doesn’t realize it out of a kind of naive innocence. His humour can also be baffling, as when he announced to me that, if he were to be portrayed on film, he wanted the actor to be the tennis player John McEnroe. What could that mean? How are we supposed to respond? But I treasure his answer to something I asked when I interviewed him in the garden of his old Cambridge college, Clare (for a BBC programme about Gregor Mendel, which culminated in the monastery where the great scientist monk did his pioneering work). I put it to Jim that many religious people wonder how atheists answer the question, ‘What are we for?’
Well, I don’t think we’re for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, ‘Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.’ But I’m looking forward to a good lunch.
Now that’s vintage Jim – and the lunch was indeed good, made better by his company. Lalla and I got to know him and his wife Liz quite well when they bought a house in Oxford and spent several summers in our home city.
My fellow panellists on The Brains Trust varied from week to week. There was usually at least one philosopher, sometimes a historian, once a poetic novelist. I think I was the only scientist. Part of the conceit of the programme was that we were pointedly given no advance notice of the questions. The chair even made arch jokes about this, pretending to torment us with the secrecy and putting our limited reserves of spontaneous wit under pressure. The questions were things like ‘What is the good life?’ or ‘What is happiness?’ ‘Happiness is a mountain stream . . .’ was how one of my hapless fellow panellists began his answer. I’m sure mine was no better, if less pretentious, and it is a matter of some happiness to me that I have forgotten it.
I said that I’d mention the two occasions where I was stitched up by outright dishonest editing of television footage. I’m actually pleased that I can point to only two such examples, because the temptation for those with a losing agenda must be great. Creationists have ignominiously lost their argument, deception is their last recourse, and it is not surprising that my two stitch-ups were both at the hands of creationist organizations. In September 1997 I was approached by an Australian company, who said they were sending a team to Europe to make a film about the ‘controversy’ over evolution. Influenced, as I shall explain in the next chapter, by a conversation with Stephen Jay Gould, I had adopted a well-reasoned policy of never having debates with creationists, but this crew’s pitch sounded like a bona fide attempt to document the argument without bias, so I agreed to talk to them.
The ‘crew’, when they arrived at my home, turned out to be amateurishly depauperate. The woman operating the camera also asked the questions. I answered them, despite my increasing doubts as to her competence to make a film at all, and my increasing regret that I had ever allowed her into my house. But then she asked a stock question which, as everyone involved in this so-called ‘controversy’ knows, is a dead-giveaway: only a dyed-in-the-wool creationist would ever say something like, ‘Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation, or an evolutionary process, which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?’ It was now obvious that she had gained entry to my house under false pretences. She was, quite simply and obviously, a fundamentalist creationist, and I had been duped into granting her the attention such people crave and the opportunity to twist my words to her own barmy agenda.
What should I do? Should I summarily throw her out, or answer the question straight as if I hadn’t rumbled her, or something in between? I paused, trying to decide what to do. Finally, after eleven seconds trying to make up my mind, I decided to throw her out because of the dishonesty of her original approach. I told her to stop the camera, and we repaired to my study where, in the presence of my assistant, I explained that I had detected her deception and she must leave forthwith. She pleaded with me, saying tha
t she had travelled all the way from Australia to see me (an obvious lie, but let that pass). Finally, after much begging from her, I relented and agreed to resume filming. My intention was to give her a brief tutorial in some aspects of evolutionary theory of which she was obviously completely ignorant, rather than answer her silly questions – and certainly rather than attempt to explain information theory to someone incapable of understanding it. If you are interested in a full answer to her actual question, it is in A Devil’s Chaplain, the chapter called ‘The information challenge’, which also gives a reference to Barry Williams’s account, in the Australian Skeptic magazine, of the whole farcical episode.
Eventually she left, and I thought no more about the encounter until a year or so later when somebody called my attention to the film which had by then been released. It turned out that my eleven-second pause, while I was deciding whether to throw her out, was represented as me being ‘stumped’ by the question. She had edited the film so that the pause was followed by a cut to me talking about something completely different (from a different part of the interview), which made it look as though, in desperation after being ‘stumped’, I had wantonly changed the subject. As an amusing coda, she actually produced a second version of the film, in which the ‘information’ question was put not by her but by a male accomplice, in a bare, unfurnished room (presumably in Australia) very different from the one in which I was filmed. This was probably because the sound quality of her original question (she being behind the camera) was poor. It makes the deceptive editing even more obvious, but there apparently exists no level of obviousness sufficient to penetrate the intelligence of a certain type of creationist, and they have no doubt been triumphantly dining out ever since on how I was ‘stumped’.
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 20
