Brief Candle in the Dark
Page 46
Oxford. Top, left and right: Alan Grafen and Bill Hamilton in action in the Great Annual Punt Race. Centre: John Krebs (in glasses, right) on the river bank after the race, with friends from the Animal Behaviour Group. Bottom, Mark Ridley, having smuggled a joke into Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, of which he and I were the founding editors.
Intellectual giants and good friends. Top: Lalla and I entertaining Francis Crick (second from left) and Richard Gregory (right) to dinner in our Oxford flat. Centre: Richard Attenborough after presenting me with an honorary doctorate at Sussex University (‘But why have you come as Liquorice Allsorts?’) Bottom, left: ‘poet of the planets’ Carolyn Porco with Lalla in our Oxford garden; bottom right: adventurer extraordinaire Redmond O’Hanlon among just a few of his books.
Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and (next page) the Japanese summer reprise. Top: Giant child volunteer Douglas Adams; centre: eyeballing the cannonball that is just about to not quite break my nose; bottom: demonstrating the defensive chemistry of the Bombardier Beetle.
It was during this trip to Japan that Lalla and I first met Sir John Boyd (centre left), then Ambassador to Japan and still our good friend today. Lalla joined me on stage for the lectures in Japan (top) and once with (centre right) the python we hired for the occasion.
Bottom: Some of the dogs gathered to illustrate the power of artificial selection.
The deep. Clockwise from top: On Ray Dalio’s research vessel Alucia, about to enter the Triton submersible in search of the giant squid; the first photograph of a living specimen of this extraordinary creature; Edith Widder, whose ‘electric jellyfish’ lured it to the camera; inside the Triton with the pilot, Mark Taylor, and (right) Tsunemi Kubodera, the first scientist to see a live giant squid.
Islands in the sun. My second expedition on Alucia took me to Raja Ampat (top), where I tried kayaking. The book tour with Climbing Mount Improbable took Lalla and me to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef (centre right and bottom). Here I was taken snorkelling among the sharks. Maybe one day I'll snorkel the streams of Sri Lanka, where my mother played as a child, and come face to face with the lovely Dawkinsia rohani (centre left).
I was hoping James Dawkins and I were descended from a shared Dawkins ancestor in Jamaica, but DNA disproves this. As you can see from the geneticist Bryan Sykes’s pedigree of human Y-chromosomes (top), we belong to different Y-chromosome ‘clans’, Eshu and Oisin respectively.
‘But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?’ A small selection of the more than twenty religious books provoked by The God Delusion, along with the ‘dog’ itself.
The Simonyi Lectures. Charles Simonyi is the far-sighted benefactor of Oxford University’s Chair of Public Understanding of Science. A man of many interests and enthusiasms, he lives with his contemporary art collection in a fabulous house in Seattle (right), and in 2009 went on a trip into space. He is seen here (left) between his fellow astronauts.
As the first Professor of Public Understanding of Science, I endowed the Simonyi Lectures, and was fortunate to attract a galaxy of stars to present them. Previous page, clockwise from bottom left: Jared Diamond, Daniel Dennett, Richard Gregory and Steven Pinker. This page, from top: Martin Rees, Richard Leakey, Carolyn Porco, Harry Kroto and Paul Nurse.
Television. Top left: Break the Science Barrier was the first TV documentary I presented for Channel 4. More recently, I have worked with Russell Barnes (top, rear centre) and his crew, including Tim Cragg, cameraman (right), and Adam Prescod, sound man (front) on productions including Faith Schools Menace, filmed in Belfast (centre) and The Genius of Charles Darwin (bottom) – in which I had a potential Attenborough moment with a gorilla: if only it hadn’t been in a zoo.
Russell and I also worked together on The Genius of Charles Darwin, filming in a Nairobi slum (top). For Root of All Evil? we visited Lourdes (bottom left) and Jerusalem, where I donned the obligatory hat for visiting the Wailing Wall (bottom right).
Images of evolution. Top right: Debunking the myth ‘As if a hurricane, blowing through an aircraft junkyard, could assemble a Boeing 747’ – nice shot, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. Top left, Lalla holding my cube of all possible biomorph shells.
At the time I met Lalla, I was working flat out on computer biomorphs, monochrome and colour (centre, right), and she was inspired to create some embroidered chair covers (centre left), each stitch representing one pixel. The one on the bottom isn’t a biomorph, though you would be forgiven for thinking so: it’s actually a skeleton of a glass sponge.
All about memes. Top: with Dan Dennett and Susan Blackmore at one of Sue’s ‘Memelab’ gatherings in Devon. At one of these gatherings I propagated the ‘Chinese Junk’ meme (centre). Bottom: Boyhood experience with the clarinet equipped me to play the EWI at the end of the Saatchi & Saatchi memetic extravaganza at Cannes.
The feast. Guests foregathering for my seventieth birthday dinner in New College Hall.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD DAWKINS was first catapulted to fame with his iconic work The Selfish Gene, which he followed with a string of bestselling books. Part one of his autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder, was published in 2013.
Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the Royal Society of Literature Award (1987), the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society (1990), the International Cosmos Prize for Achievement in Human Science (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Shakespeare Prize (2005), the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2006), the Galaxy British Book Awards Author of the Year Award (2007), the Deschner Prize (2007) and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009). He retired from his position as Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in 2008 and remains a Fellow of New College.
In 2012, scientists studying fish in Sri Lanka created Dawkinsia as a new genus name, in recognition of his contribution to the public understanding of evolutionary science. In the same year, Richard Dawkins appeared in the BBC Four television series Beautiful Minds, revealing how he came to write The Selfish Gene and speaking about some of the events covered in this autobiography.
In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of over 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY RICHARD DAWKINS
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype
The Blind Watchmaker
River Out of Eden
Climbing Mount Improbable
Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil’s Chaplain
The Ancestor’s Tale
The God Delusion
The Greatest Show on Earth
The Magic of Reality (with Dave McKean)
An Appetite for Wonder
www.richarddawkins.net/bcd
CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © by Robert Wilson/Contour by Getty Images
COPYRIGHT
BRIEF CANDLE IN THE DARK. Copyright © 2015 by Richard Dawkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST US EDITION
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EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2015 ISBN 9780062288462
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1The strange English term for a private school.
1Today I could not use ‘awesome’: the word has become so debased, it is now no more than a routine term of mild approval. Yes, yes, I know, language evolves: ‘Chill out, Professor.’ I still lament the loss of a valuable word: ‘awe-inspiring’ would spoil the rhythm of the sentence.
1Just about the only skill I learned in the vaunted workshops of Oundle School, as I recounted in An Appetite for Wonder.
1For a selection of these reviews, please see the e-appendix.
1P. B. Medawar, ‘D’Arcy Thompson and growth and form’, in Pluto’s Republic (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982).
1My eulogy at his memorial service is largely reproduced in An Appetite for Wonder.
1An affable gentleman, whom I have admired ever since learning that he offered Salman Rushdie sanctuary in his own home when hysterical mobs of his co-religionists were baying for the blood of that eminent man of letters.
2Pronounced ‘Mam’, by the way, as we were firmly told by the equerry who prepped us, not ‘Mahm’ as is commonly supposed.
1Google it.
1He went on to become a very successful Master of Churchill College, Cambridge, and I’d love to take some credit for calling the college’s attention to his excellent qualities.
1There’s a nice movie of Dawkinsia filamentosa sparring in a tank here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnWprpFYJhQ.
1A whimsically parallel case to an experience of my friends Stephen and Alison Cobb. While in western Uganda, pursuing Steve’s vocation in wildlife conservation, they stopped their Land Rover in a small village whereupon, as is the way in Africa, it was instantly surrounded by a circle of smiling children. ‘How are you?’, the Cobbs politely asked. ‘Moostn’t groomble’ came the chorused reply, presumably learned from a Yorkshire missionary.
1http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html.
1http://edge.org/documents/archive/edge178.html.
1From my foreword to the second edition of Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation (London, Penguin, 2006).
1To say nothing of the bodmin (Google it, together with ‘Douglas Adams’).
1When he was a boy, school expeditions were told to meet not under the clock but ‘under Adams’.
1This little barb will make sense to non-British readers only if I explain that in Britain ‘the Honourable’ is a title given to progeny of lords, and ‘FRS’ (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a genuine honour conferred on scientists.
1I myself am a Minister of the Universal Life Church. My certificate of ordination, which hangs in the downstairs lavatory, was bought for me as a joke birthday present by Yan Wong. Lawrence Krauss is a minister in the same church and he has actually used the qualification to perform a marriage ceremony which he, and the couple concerned, are assured is legal.
1While working on this book I was sad to read in the newspaper that Duncan Dallas had died. In addition to his television work, he was the founder of the network of Cafés Scientifiques, an excellent grassroots organization for bringing science to a wide public which has spread from his home town of Leeds to the whole country and beyond.
1Every European has mitochondria belonging to one of only seven types. Each one of us is descended from only one of seven mitochondrial matriarchs (themselves descended, much further back, from the African ‘mitochondrial Eve’). Sykes dramatizes the story by giving names to each of the seven European matriarchs, telling us where they lived and inventing a fictional short story about each of them. Nice book. Recommended. Sykes has done the same kind of thing for Y-chromosomes, tracing all our Y-chromosomes back to only 17 Y-chromosomal patriarchs, all in turn descended from ‘Y-chromosome Adam’.
1They can be seen at a website called Web of Stories: http://www.webofstories.com/play/john.maynard.smith/1.
1I quoted this passage in my Guardian article. For Craig’s own ‘justification’, see http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-slaughter-of-the-canaanites-re-visited.
1You can read the full article at bit.ly/1fXPAGS.
1R. Stannard, Doing Away with God (London, Pickering, 1993).
1Until you recall the notoriously powerful lobbying influence of CICCU, the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union.
1For the full account, see bit.ly/1rY74rY.
2See http://www.electricscotland.com/history/glasgow/anec305.htm.
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1QHO_AVZA.
2http://bit.ly/1AUT0GJ.
1bit.ly/1iGJRVQ.
2This spelling seems to have arisen as a serendipitous misprint, a mutant meme subsequently favoured. Gillian Somerscales suggests to me that it is only ever seen in written form and nobody ever has to pronounce it. ‘Do you think’, she asks, ‘that a “non-spoken” form of language may be emerging?’ If so, ‘LOL’ might be another candidate for the text-only dictionary.
1http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-science-speak-to-faith-extended/; see also e-appendix.
1Glasgow Sunday Herald, 5 Sept. 2004.
2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUMI3_QLmoM.
1A video of the encounter is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik. It has had more than two million hits.
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7IHU28aR2E.
1While this book was in press, I happened to meet Professor A. C. Grayling, my fellow debater, at a luncheon. The subject of false memories came up and I recounted this story to him. To the amazement of both of us, he confessed that he had exactly the same false memory. He was incredulous when I told him the true story. But the film evidence is unequivocal. Both of us had concocted the same false memory. I wonder how often that happens? To me it seems to undermine eye-witness testimony even more gravely than I had thought. Imagine that the incident apparently witnessed was a serious crime instead of an intervention in a debate. Would any jury throw out the identically corroborated, independent evidence of two witnesses, both university professors, if a barrister tried to argue that both witnesses suffered from false memory syndrome?
1http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/3136.
2Those before 2011 were given by the Atheist Alliance International.
3For my speech in full, see the e-appendix. You can hear both our speeches, followed by questions, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmdzqLE6wM.
1Yes, I know it’s a mixed metaphor but I can’t help liking it.
1http://edge.org/conversation/thank-goodness
1Google it together with ‘Douglas Adams’.
1For non-British readers: a popular soap opera on BBC Radio, chronicling the lives and feuds of farming folk in a fictitious rural village.
1There may be extremely rare exceptions – too rare to detain us here.
1I had occasion to mention this in a poem that I wrote for Charles’s pyjama party, which I have unfortunately lost and of which I can recall only this couplet:
There’s the finest champagne, and the best from the deli
(The walls are of glass, when they’re not Vasarely).
1S. J. Gould, ‘Caring gro
ups and selfish genes’, ch. 8 in The Panda’s Thumb (New York, Norton, 1980).
1My thanks to Natalie Batalha for her permission to reproduce this message.
1It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Genes that are common in the population are perforce shared by most of us anyway (and indeed by most individuals of some other species). The particular sense of ‘probability of sharing’ that is relevant to the theory of kin selection is something more like ‘probability over and above the baseline set by the population as a whole’. The best way to visualize this subtle idea is with a geometric model developed by Alan Grafen: see his chapter in R. Dawkins and M. Ridley, eds, Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology, vol. 2 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 28–9.
1Story no. 40, ‘W. D. Hamilton: inclusive fitness’. See http://www.webofstories.com/play/john.maynard.smith/40.
1Alternative versions of the gene, sitting at the same locus on the chromosomes of the population.
1D. P. Hughes, J. Brodeur and F. Thomas, eds, Host Manipulation by Parasites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
1http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090119081333.htm.
2In the context, this was a dig at the vague hand waving of ‘niche construction theory’.
3Nesse’s co-author, the great George C. Williams, is unfortunately no longer with us.
1Nick Davies is the leading contemporary authority on these remarkable birds. See, for example, his 2015 book, Cuckoo: cheating by nature (London, Bloomsbury).
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1a1Ek-HD0.