Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  Mutual tutorials

  More agreeable than debates have been on-stage conversations where the aim has been mutual enlightenment rather than scoring victories (‘owning’ or ‘pwning’2 as the net generation says). I think the phrase ‘mutual tutorial’ first occurred to me in February 1999 when I shared the stage at Central Hall, Westminster with the psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker. Billed as a ‘debate’ sponsored by the Guardian and chaired by their science editor Tim Radford, the event attracted an audience of 2,300, with many turned away outside. It wasn’t a debate: there was no ‘motion’, nothing to vote on, and we agreed about most things anyway. And, as I said, it paved the way for what I was later to call the ‘mutual tutorial’ – a genre of on-stage conversation that I am increasingly pushing as a superior alternative to both the interview and the debate. Tim Radford, as it happened, did a good and unintrusive job. But it was this encounter that suggested to me the idea of the mutual tutorial without a chairman or ‘host’.

  The ‘chairman interference effect’ was especially noticeable in the encounter I mentioned above in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Dr Williams and I were all set to have a civilized conversation and I had been greatly looking forward to it. But unfortunately it was continually derailed by the chairman, a distinguished philosopher and very nice man, whose strenuous efforts to ‘clarify’ matters by injecting philosophical jargon had – as often seems to happen with philosophers – precisely the opposite effect.

  The large audience attending my London ‘mutual tutorial’ with Steve Pinker (notwithstanding that ‘mutual’, I have to say that I learned more from him than he did from me) attracted the attention of the BBC. Would we like to go on television that evening in their Newsnight programme and reprise our discussion for a wider audience? We would. A little later I was telephoned by the BBC producer, wanting to be briefed on what to expect:

  ‘Could you summarize for me the nature of your disagreement with Dr Pinker?’

  ‘Er, well, actually, I’m not sure that we have much to offer in the way of disagreements. We seem to agree over most things. Is that a problem?’

  There was a long pause from the other end of the line. ‘No disagreement? No disagreement? Oh dear.’

  And she promptly cancelled the invitation! Mutually informative conversation, it seems, is not ‘good television’. There has to be disagreement, sparks must fly. If ‘good television’ means good for ratings, that’s depressing. I’d like to hope that she was mistaken and that disagreement is not in truth good for ratings, but I can’t summon up much conviction. In any case, my own value judgement, as I said in the previous chapter, would place ratings rather low in the scale of what ‘good television’ ought to mean. Especially for the BBC, which doesn’t have to worry about advertising revenue since it is financed by central government through the licence fee.

  The Pinker ‘debate that wasn’t a debate’ encouraged me to promote the format in a new series under the auspices of my charitable foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS). The first one we did was a conversation before a large audience at Stanford University in March 2008, between the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss and me. I began by introducing the format to the audience: ‘Well, I suppose I must bear some responsibility for the fact that we don’t have a chairman sitting between us. I’m trying to pioneer a new method of public conversation . . .’ And I went on to expound the ‘mutual tutorial’ and to explain my objections to chairmen at such events. I acknowledged that it threw a burden on us to keep the conversation going, and I then passed the burden to Lawrence by inviting him to start.

  He began by reminding me of our first meeting, which had been somewhat less amicable. It was at a conference in New York State in 2006, shortly after publication of The God Delusion. I was fielding questions after my talk. I’ve had so much practice at this that I seldom find the questions challenging, but this was different. A questioner, not particularly tall but every inch a confident inch, stood up in the middle of the audience, and his very first sentence rang with an articulate and fluent conviction which is understandably rare on such public occasions. He roundly – almost aggressively – berated me for being too aggressive and insufficiently conciliatory when arguing with the faithful. I can’t remember how I responded, but afterwards we had a drink together and Lawrence, in more friendly vein, suggested that we should continue our discussion in print. So we did, and the exchange appeared in the pages of Scientific American,1 as he told that Stanford audience in his opening remarks. Lawrence and I have had several further public discussions since then, and our original disagreement has abated as we have become friends and drawn closer to each other’s point of view. And, as we have learned from each other, our mutual tutorials have increasingly deserved the name. Several of these conversations have formed the basis of The Unbelievers, a documentary feature film produced by Gus and Luke Holwerda, showing Lawrence and me in various venues around the world, the most notable being the Sydney Opera House.

  Lawrence is quirky, funny and fun. I’ve never quite known what ‘comic timing’ means but I suspect he has it. If he added introspective melancholy to his repertoire you might call him (as I once did) the Woody Allen of physics. And he’s provocative in the best and most constructive sense: ‘Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand . . . forget Jesus: the stars died so you could be here today.’

  The Unbelievers crew were once filming in a hired limousine on a humid, hot day in London. Almost everything you can imagine was wrong with that car, and Lawrence on the telephone to the company is a treasured memory (far from ‘introspective’; and ‘melancholy’ comes nowhere near doing justice to his tirade), climaxing in a threat to wreak physical damage along the whole stretched length of that absurd vehicle. It was a virtuoso performance in exhibition invective, just what we needed to make us laugh in a stifling hot car with both the air-conditioning and the window-opening mechanism broken.

  The model for the ‘mutual tutorial’ pioneered with Pinker and Krauss has proved successful in other public conversations, using the same chairman-free format. My partners in these dialogues have included Professor Aubrey Manning and Bishop Richard Holloway (possibly the two nicest men in Scotland). Aubrey and I share a common heritage as students of Niko Tinbergen (Aubrey a decade ahead of me), so our conversation included some reminiscing, with many laughs, about the Athens of ethology that was the Tinbergen group, but we also talked science itself. Bishop Holloway describes himself as a ‘recovering Christian’. He’s probably about as close to being an atheist as a bishop can get away with. We’ve had more than one encounter, including an on-stage conversation in Edinburgh, which moved the Glasgow journalist Muriel Gray to write as follows:

  Holloway, as we all know, is the church leader who questioned his faith and found it wanting, and Dawkins of course is not simply world famous for his pioneering and award-winning scientific work, but also for his aggressive views concerning organised religion. A couple of audience members before the session began admitted they were worried that the two men might come to blows, or that a fundamentalist audience member might use the event to launch an offensive verbal attack on Dawkins. Instead the hour that seemed like five minutes was one filled with two startlingly intelligent men, each brimming with humanity, drawing personal pictures of just how awesome, mysterious and wonderful existence is. The sheer joy of hearing Holloway still trying to draw poetry and meaning from a religion he is not quite ready to dismiss completely out of hand, as Dawkins listened eagerly, trying to assist him without dismissing his desires as ignorant, was breathtakingly inspiring. And all this was book-ended with Dawkins’s views on birthing universes, black holes, and the future of the human species when we start to form ourselves from silicon and alloys instead of vulnerable flesh. Now that’s what I call entertainment . . . However, the m
ost dreadful, in fact utterly unbearable, part of the evening was that it stopped after an hour.1

  I think you could safely call that a mutual tutorial. Incidentally, I’ve since had two intellectually rewarding on-stage conversations, also in Edinburgh, with Muriel Gray herself.

  Another wonderful encounter was with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York. Our conversation2 took place in 2010 at a conference organized by the RDFRS on the campus of Howard University in Washington, described as a ‘historically black’ university. In front of a lively student audience (though a smaller one than both Neil and I are used to because, as we later learned, religious leaders had ‘discouraged’ attendance), Neil and I talked of ‘The poetry of science’. The phrase immediately makes one think of Carl Sagan, and Neil Tyson has magnificently, but with becoming humility, accepted the challenge of stepping into Sagan’s unfillable shoes to present a new version of Cosmos. What a superb spokesman for science he is, this warm, friendly, witty, clever man, whose great knowledge is properly served by his ability to expound it. The only other person I can think of who might have understudied Carl Sagan so well is Carolyn Porco (of whom much more in the next chapter). Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that, of all scientific subjects, astronomy should be so well endowed with stellar ambassadors.

  That was not the first time I had met Neil Tyson. Our first encounter, in San Diego in 2006, was almost a carbon copy of my introduction to Lawrence Krauss. I had just given a talk in which I was critical of the religiously inclined ecologist Joan Roughgarden. At question time Neil delivered a polite but serious – and impeccably phrased – attack on my style:

  I was in the back row as you spoke . . . and so I could see sort of the whole room as the words came out of your mouth as beautifully as they always do and as articulately as they always do. Let me just say your commentary had a sharpness of teeth that I had not even projected for you . . . You’re Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, not professor of delivering truth to the public, and these are two different exercises. One of them is, you put the truth out there and, like you said, they either buy your book or they don’t. Well, that’s not being an educator. That’s just putting it out there. Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there’s got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn’t always ‘Here’s the facts, you are either an idiot or you’re not.’ It’s ‘Here’s the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.’ And it’s the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, creates impact. And I worry that your methods, and how articulately barbed you can be, ends up simply being ineffective, when you have much more power of influence than what is currently reflected in your output.

  I was conscious that the chairman, Roger Bingham, was anxious to wrap up the session, so I replied briefly:

  I gratefully accept the rebuke. Just one anecdote to show that I am not the worst in this thing. A former and highly successful editor of New Scientist magazine – he actually built up New Scientist to great new heights – was asked: ‘What is your philosophy at New Scientist?’ He said, ‘Our philosophy in New Scientist is this: science is interesting, and if you don’t agree you can fuck off.’

  To the jovial sound of Neil Tyson’s bellow of laughter, Roger Bingham closed the session.1 Neil’s critique was a good one – it was pretty much the same as Lawrence Krauss’s, although more gently expressed – and it is one that I take to heart. I’ll return to the question later, when I come to discuss The God Delusion.

  In some of my ‘mutual tutorials’ I have had so much more to learn than my fellow conversationalist that the word ‘mutual’ needs to be dropped. Most daunting for me was the formidable intellect of Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and cultured polymath. I hope I concealed my nervousness adequately, both during our filmed conversation and at the very pleasant dinner party which he hosted for me at his club in Austin, a city I have heard described as an intellectual oasis in Texas. There are some Nobel Prize-winners who – you can’t help feeling – must have got lucky, to pair an American idiom with a little British understatement. You don’t get that feeling when you meet Professor Weinberg – and I hope the British understatement is still coming through loud and clear. Good casting for a world-class genius.

  The chairman-free format might seem unlikely to work when more than two discussants are involved, but we managed to make it work well with four of us in the meeting of the so-called ‘Four Horsemen’, filmed in 2008 by my Foundation,1 in the book-lined Washington apartment of Christopher Hitchens. Dan Dennett and Sam Harris joined Christopher and me, and we got on just fine without a chairman. We had invited Ayaan Hirsi Ali to make a fifth; unfortunately she had to dash off on a sudden emergency visit to the Netherlands, where she had been a Member of Parliament. So we were four after all, and the ‘Horsemen’ title stuck. The hours of discussion around the table passed surprisingly quickly, with no one of us dominating, and I strongly suspect in this case that a chairman would almost certainly have spoiled the atmosphere.

  Christopher

  I need to say something about that hero of the mind, Christopher Hitchens. I didn’t know him well. I was not one of his inner circle of friends from youth, but I got to know him when God is Not Great was published, and its natural bracketing with The God Delusion led to our sharing public platforms of various kinds. I first met him at a debate in London in March 2007 at Central Hall, Westminster, a large venue holding more than 2,000 people – the same venue as for my encounter with Steven Pinker, already mentioned. Christopher and I were teamed with A. C. Grayling, one of my favourite philosophers, to propose the motion: ‘We’d be better off without religion.’ It was the promised participation of these two admired colleagues that tempted me to relax my normal objection to formal debates. On the other side were an anthropologist, Nigel Spivey; Roger Scruton, a philosopher; and Rabbi Julia Neuberger, whom I’ve already mentioned. What I chiefly remember from the debate is a splendid ‘How dare you? How DARE you?’ from Christopher. But it was a false memory on my part, which I should document because false memory syndrome needs to be more widely known and because I once recounted this false memory in a public speech in Melbourne, eulogizing Christopher after his death.

  I was convinced I remembered Christopher’s ‘How DARE you?’ as an intervention during Rabbi Neuberger’s speech. It wasn’t. The videotape clearly shows that it was in response to a questioner from the audience who claimed (because he tried to be a good person) to be religious although he didn’t believe in God. Christopher did intervene during Julia Neuberger’s speech, but it was to say something quite different (not clearly audible on the video because his microphone wasn’t switched on, but definitely not ‘How dare you?’). False memory syndrome is real, interesting, and disturbing. I hope the evidence for it is taught to law students and all those involved in the use of evidence from witnesses, but I fear it is not. Eye-witness evidence is far less reliable than many people think, including jury members. Witnesses in court don’t only lie. They are honestly self-deceived. I was first convinced of this when I had the pleasure of meeting Elizabeth Loftus, a brave and personable American psychologist who frequently testifies on behalf of people wrongly accused, for example, of child molestation. In some of the cases she has dealt with, the problem is exacerbated by unscrupulous practitioners deliberately implanting false memories in witnesses – something Elizabeth persuaded me is disquietingly easy to do, especially in children. Nobody went out of their way to implant my false memory about Christopher’s intervention. My own brain did it, all by itself, subconsciously conflating two real memories.1

  I should apologize for that, but at least I’m in good company. In 1982 the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist François Jacob wrote an excellent book called The Possible and the Actual. I read the English translation around the time it came out and came to a paragraph that seemed oddly familiar. I searched and found the reason. Jacob must have read The Selfish G
ene, perhaps in the French translation; perhaps he had a photographic memory, or perhaps he copied out a paragraph which he later found and falsely remembered composing it himself. I’ve reproduced the two paragraphs overleaf.

  The Selfish Gene

  by Richard Dawkins The Possible and the Actual

  by Francois Jacob

  1st edition OUP 1976, p. 49 1st edition, Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 20

  Another branch. now known as animals, “discovered” how to exploit the chemical labours of the plants, either by eating them or by eating other animals. Both main branches of survival machines evolved more and more ingenious tricks to increase their efficiency in their various ways of life, and new ways of life were continually being opened up. Sub-branches and sub-sub-branches evolved, each one excelling in a particular specialized way of making a living, in the sea, on the ground, in the air, underground, up trees, inside other living bodies. This sub-branching has given rise to the immense diversity of animals and plants which so impresses us today. Another branch called animals became able to use the biochemical capacity of the plants, either directly by eating them or indirectly by eating other animals that eat plants. Both branches found ever new ways of living under ever diversified environmental conditions. Subbranches appeared and sub-subbranches, each one becoming able to live in a particular environment, in the sea, on the land, in the air, in the polar regions, in hot springs, inside other organisms, etc. This progressive ramification over billions of years has generated the tremendous diversity and adaptation that baffle us in the living world of today.