Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  a whirlwind tour of an early flight simulator made of plaster and bits of wood, a 3D drawing machine with metal arms and joints, and a spinning bowl of mercury which he was hoping to use as some kind of reflecting telescope (imagine that being allowed today).

  ‘Isn’t this fun?’ Gregory would gasp as he went from one quirky and interesting question to another . . .

  There will never be anyone quite as wacky, inventive, eclectic, brilliant, or engaging as Gregory, but I hope there will be many more scientists who have his playful curiosity, his delight in science – and whose enthusiasm can survive our current culture of targets, measurement, and obsession with usefulness.

  The title of his Simonyi Lecture, ‘Shaking hands with the universe’, was, of course, a reference to his ‘hands-on’ approach, and his lecture was a feast of vivid demonstrations.

  I first met Jared Diamond in 1987 in Los Angeles. I was spending two weeks there, working intensively as a guest in Alan Kay’s research offshoot of the Apple Computer company, writing the colour version of my Blind Watchmaker ‘biomorphs’ program (see pages 386–7). The working atmosphere was ideal. I shared an open-plan office with clever young programmers and could turn to them at any time for advice on the recondite inner workings of the Mac Toolbox. Even better was my living environment as a house guest of the delightful Gwen Roberts – mathematics teacher and puzzler extraordinaire – as one of her motley but intriguing population of migrant visitors. A quirkily entertaining companion, if she were an author she would have a most exotic pulverbatch.1 Every morning I commuted by bus from Gwen’s house to the office, and usually had lunch with the geeks – sandwiches, for which they sent out to a neighbouring deli. On one of these days, however, I was invited out to lunch by a UCLA professor, whose name was prominent in my field of biology, but whom I had not so far met: Jared Diamond.

  We agreed that he would pick me up in his car, outside the Apple office. His books were best-sellers, and so as I stood on the corner I was looking out for something exuding quiet luxury: prosperous if not flash. I didn’t give a second glance at the ancient Volkswagen Beetle that chugged and lurched slowly and erratically towards me from far along the dead straight road – until it creaked to a halt, and there was the smiling Dr Diamond. I got in, dodging the curtain of upholstery that had come unglued and was hanging loose from the car’s ceiling. I hadn’t known quite what kind of restaurant he would take me to. Perhaps the charming Volkswagen should have given me a clue. We parked the Beetle on the UCLA campus and walked to a cool, grassy bank by a stream, gently shaded by trees. Here we sat on the grass, and Jared produced lunch, wrapped in a large cloth: a hunk of cheese and some crusty bread, which he cut with a Swiss army knife. Perfect! So much more conducive to interesting conversation than a noisy restaurant with waiters coyly informing us ‘I’m Jason and I’ll be your server for today’ and reeling off lists of specials, then later interrupting the conversation to ask ‘How’s everything tasting?’ And Jared’s bread and cheese, in those bucolic surroundings, really did taste good.

  In English pubs, by the way, bread and cheese is called ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’. Not an ancient name, it was presumably coined by some whizz-kid in Marketing. It was the subject of an amusing anachronism on The Archers1 when an old farmhand complained nostalgically that the Ploughman’s Lunch he had been given in the village inn was not a patch on the Plewman’s Lunches of his youth in the good old days.

  My next encounter with Jared was in 1990 when Jim Watson, Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, invited Jared and me to organize a conference there to celebrate the centenary of that prestigious institution. The conference was titled ‘Evolution: molecules to culture’, but what I remember most vividly was the presence of a rather outspoken school of linguists from Russia. Jared had taken the initiative in inviting them, and I must have fondly imagined that linguists and evolutionary biologists would have much in common. Language changes gradually over historical time, in a way that bears a strong, if superficial, resemblance to the way living species change over geological time. Linguists have perfected techniques for reconstructing ancient dead languages, such as proto-Indo-European, by careful comparative analysis of their descendants – techniques that look winningly familiar to evolutionary biologists, especially molecular taxonomists who deal in what can – in these post-Watson–Crick days – be called molecular texts. Moreover, the first stirrings of linguistic capability in our hominin ancestors is a topic of great curiosity to biologists, even though some linguists have treated it as a forbidden (because intractable) one. Notoriously, in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned discussion of the question, on the grounds that it was forever unanswerable.

  Such a prohibition seems absurdly negative to me. However hard it might be to reconstruct, language clearly must have had an origin – or origins. There must have been a transitional period when language evolved from our ancestors’ pre-linguistic state. The transition was a real phenomenon, it really happened whether the Paris Society liked it or not, and there is surely no harm in at least speculating about it. Did our ancestors pass through a stage resembling chimpanzee sign language – large vocabulary but no hierarchically nested syntax of the kind that is now unique to humans? Did the capacity for hierarchically embedded grammatical structures arise suddenly in one genius individual? If so, who did she talk to? Could it have arisen as a software tool for internal, unvoiced thoughts, becoming externalized in the form of audible language only later? Do fossils tell us anything about the range of sounds that our various ancestors were capable of uttering? These are all questions to which there has to be a definite answer, even if the answer is beyond our reach in practice, and I’ll return to them in the next chapter (see pages 381–4).

  Jared and I had an enjoyable back-and-forth correspondence, putting together the invitations to the conference, and it has to be said that most of the expertise came from him. The conference itself, when it finally happened, was the occasion for a certain bafflement on my part. I was impressed by the confidence with which the linguists claimed to reconstruct relatively recent ancestral languages such as proto-Indo-European (c.3500 BC). I could stomach similar reconstructions of other ur-languages such as proto-Uralic and proto-Altaic. By more strained analogy, I supposed that in principle you could feed those proto-languages back into the same reconstructive mill and come up with the ur-language to end (or rather begin) all ur-languages – ‘proto-Nostratic’ – although I gathered that even many of the linguists themselves found that a bit of a stretch.

  So far, so intriguing. But I came unstuck when I ventured what seemed like a pretty obvious suggestion, what is vulgarly called a no-brainer. Seeking to make a contribution as an evolutionary biologist, I proposed what I thought was a salient difference between linguistic and genetic evolution. Once a biological species has split in two – perhaps separated by an accident of geography – once the divergence has gone far enough to preclude interbreeding, it is for ever. The two gene pools, previously mixed by sexual reproduction, never merge again even if they meet.1 Indeed, that’s how we define the separation of species. Languages, by contrast, having diverged far apart, often come together again and form gloriously rich hybrids. This would mean that, although biologists can safely trace all the surviving mammals, say, back to one single matriarchal individual who lived and died about 180 million years ago, it would not be true that all Indo-European languages trace back to a single, unique ancestral language spoken by a particular tribe somewhere in eastern Europe about three-and-a-half millennia ago.

  The Russian linguists were almost apoplectic in their indignation. Languages never merge. But, but, but, I stammered, what about English? Nonsense, they shot back: English is a purely Germanic language. ‘What percentage of English words is of Romance origin?’ I asked. ‘Oh, about 80 per cent,’ was their unabashed, almost contemptuously paradoxical reply. I sank back into my biologist’s shell, crushed but unsatisfied.

  I think the conferen
ce was a success, and Jared and I both were pleased with it. When he came to Oxford to give his Simonyi Lecture, he was a most gracious guest. Belying – or no, maybe in accordance with – his bread-and-cheese lunch, he showed an appreciation for the finer things in life when he presented Lalla and me with a good vintage Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, and carefully wrote on the bottle that it should be drunk between 2005 and 2017. We shall open it to celebrate publication of this book in 2015. In addition to being a distinguished physiologist, ornithologist and ecologist, he is a widely cultivated man, a polyglot, deeply knowledgeable about anthropology and world history, and we benefited from this in his Simonyi Lecture, which was centred on his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is a tour de force, and one cannot help wondering why no historian ever got around to writing it before him. Why did it take a scientist to develop its fascinating historical thesis? One could make the same point, perhaps even more forcefully, about The Better Angels of our Nature, by the next of my Simonyi Lecturers, Steven Pinker.

  Apart from reading Chomsky himself and one or two other books (when I was teaching myself to write a grammar-generating computer program – see An Appetite for Wonder and pages 381–2 below), most of what I know about linguistics comes from Steven Pinker. The same is true for much of what I know about modern cognitive psychology. And the history of human violence.

  Steve Pinker and I are among the handful of scientists in the world (along with Jim Watson and Craig Venter) who have had our genomes sequenced in their entirety. Steve’s genes suggest that he should have high intelligence (no surprise there) but also, amusingly (look at any photo of him on the internet), that he ought to be bald. It’s an important lesson to learn: the known effects of genes in many cases only slightly change the statistical probability of a particular outcome. With conspicuous exceptions like Huntington’s disease, they don’t determine it with high probability, but interact with many other factors including lots of other genes. It’s especially important to remember this when dealing with genes ‘for’ diseases. People are sometimes frightened to look at their genome for fear it will tell them exactly when and how they will die – a kind of death sentence. If that were a realistic fear, identical twins would die simultaneously!

  As psychologists go, Steve has a reputation for veering slightly towards the nativist wing, but that really means only that he is not part of the extreme environmentalism that characterized some schools of academic psychology and social science through much of the twentieth century. This comes through in his book The Blank Slate, which was also the title of his Simonyi Lecture in 2002. He is a leader of the growing, but still somewhat beleaguered school of evolutionary psychologists: a stance that has made him strangely unpopular among some psychologists and philosophers including, even more strangely, the late Bernard Williams who was, in other respects, extremely reasonable.

  As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the Atheist Alliance International honoured me in 2003 by instituting the Richard Dawkins Award, given each year to an individual for raising public consciousness of atheism. Since 2011, after the AAI spun off two daughter societies, the award has been given by the Atheist Alliance of America. The recipient is chosen by a committee in which I play no part, but I usually make an effort to present the prize personally during the annual conference of the Alliance. In those years when I haven’t been able to travel I have videotaped a speech. The full text of my speech for Steve Pinker, the 2013 winner, is in the e-appendix; here I will confine myself to reproducing the opening and closing paragraphs:

  Newspapers and magazines frequently publish ranked lists of Public Intellectuals throughout the world. Steven Pinker is always near the top of such lists and rightly so. I think he’d probably be top of my world list. And I’m truly delighted that he is being given this award in my name.

  Wonderfully readable, he introduces non-specialist readers to his own specialist subject. He’s not the only person to do that, although he does it superlatively well. But what is truly remarkable is that he does it for several different subjects, and, unlike a science journalist, he is a genuine world-class expert in all the subjects he writes about. His scholarship is as deep as his writing style is gripping.

  I went on to give a brief account of his various books, and then concluded:

  After achieving so much, you might have expected him to rest on his very considerable laurels. And, now that I think about it, a laurel wreath would look quite becoming on the famous coiffure. But resting on his laurels was exactly what Steve didn’t do. He produced what can only be described as a magnum opus and he did it by moving into a completely new field, namely history. The Better Angels of our Nature is a magisterial work of history, but it is unmistakably the work of a scientist. And a scientist at the height of his powers.

  The Better Angels of our Nature is not just a scholarly tour de force. It is a document of hope and optimism. Hope and optimism are much needed today, and that very fact should make us suspicious of anyone who steps up to offer them. But our suspicion is battered into submission by the sheer weight of scholarship. And if ‘weight of scholarship’ suggests heavy going that is exactly wrong. The book is light and easy reading. Good company, witty and amusing like its author.

  I am humbled and honoured that the Atheist Alliance has chosen so illustrious a scholar, and my personal hero, for the award in my name.

  Where British science is concerned, Martin Rees pretty much is the great and the good: Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society, Master of the largest, richest and arguably most distinguished (certainly most distinguished in science) of all the colleges of Cambridge or Oxford, knighted, raised to the peerage. And . . . Templeton Prize-winner: ay, there’s the rub, for in that dream of ‘spiritual dimension’ what corruption of true science may come?

  In its early years the Templeton Prize, pegged by its naively benevolent founder to exceed the Nobel in monetary (though of course no other) value, was awarded to frankly religious figures such as Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. A little later, the black spot moved on to scientists of no great distinction but who happened to be openly devout. As an exact reversal, yet more recent prizewinners have included scientists of genuine and enormous distinction, not really religious at all but willing to utter the occasional ‘spiritual’ deepity and therefore sprinkle on religion some of the gold dust of true science. Freeman Dyson and Martin Rees are the prime examples. What is the next Faustian progression: notorious atheists prepared to stage a Damascene conversion? Dan Dennett, begetter of the excellent ‘deepity’ coinage itself, might seem to be a prime candidate; or, as he himself said to me, ‘Richard, if ever you fall on hard times . . .’

  The greater you are as a scientist, the greater the danger that Templeton can exploit you. Martin Rees is a truly great scientist, as well as a good and exceptionally nice man, and I want to apologize if any of my negativity towards Templeton, either here or in the past, has seemed to be aimed at him personally. I have the very highest regard for him, and I can see exactly why Templeton would seek to recruit such a bright star to burnish its shabby image.

  Martin Rees is not just a great scientist, he’s also a great communicator of his science – no easy task where cosmology is concerned. Cosmologists really do have to grapple with some of the deepest questions any scientist faces, and Martin manages to make it clear without dumbing down, fascinating without selling out to demotic populism. His Simonyi Lecture was a model of how to deal with the deep problems of existence simply but not simplistically. His title, ‘The mystery of our complex cosmos’, led him to elucidate what he meant by complexity, illustrating it with a lovely image: stars are vast, but ‘a star is much simpler than a butterfly’. He was rightly firm about the entitlement of science, as opposed to metaphysics, to ask speculative questions about, for instance, the likelihood of finding bio-friendly planets in the universe, and even bio-friendly universes in a multiverse of billions of universes (an idea he had beautifully explored in Just Six Numbers). To quote his lec
ture, ‘This is not metaphysics but science, albeit speculative science.’

  I first met Richard Leakey when he wrote me a somewhat unusual letter. He had a charitable interest in a London college of which he was a trustee, and he was trying to persuade a rich man from America to come through with a big donation. The would-be benefactor had read my books and expressed a wish to meet me. Richard wrote to ask whether I would have lunch with the two of them, in an Oxford restaurant. I said I would, mostly because I wanted to meet Richard Leakey. Both men were, in their different ways, larger-than-life figures. Our host turned out to be a polymathic and prolific talker, of strong and decisive will, who went some way towards living up to his preferred nickname of ‘Philosopher King’. When we had ordered our meals, he handed the wine list to Richard and unsuspectingly invited him to choose the wine. Did a wicked smile cross Richard’s lips as he scanned the list, exchanged a quiet word with the sommelier and handed it back? If it did, I didn’t notice. The meal was convivial and the wine was excellent. As indeed it had every right to be – and thereby hangs this tale. But I knew nothing of it until the waiter gave the Philosopher King the bill. His face went white and his jaw dropped, but he paid without a word. At the time I didn’t know what the problem was, but Richard told me afterwards, in high merriment. His whispered instruction to the wine waiter had been to fetch a bottle costing more than £200. Not, you might think, the best way to endear yourself to a man from whom you are hoping to raise a large charitable benefaction. I believe the mot juste is chutzpah, and that’s Richard all over, as I later came to appreciate. For all I know, he may even have got away with it.

  The next time I met him was at another lunch: this time a celebratory launch of the Science Masters series initiated by John Brockman and Anthony Cheetham (see page 152), in which he and I both had slim volumes: River Out of Eden in my case, the excellent The Origin of Humankind in his. Lalla happened to sit next to him at the lunch, and they got on so well that he invited her (and incidentally me) to spend Christmas with his family in Kenya, at their house on the Indian Ocean coast. We went, and the encounter reminded us again of his darkly humorous indomitability. Here is what I wrote of him after that Christmas visit in The Sunday Times (reprinted in A Devil’s Chaplain, in the section called ‘All Africa and her prodigies’):