An Appetite for Wonder

by Richard Dawkins

  I didn’t finally lose my virginity until much later, at the rather advanced age of twenty-two, to a sweet cellist in London, who removed her skirt in order to play to me in her bedsitter (you can’t play the cello in a tight skirt) – and then removed everything else. It is fashionable to decry one’s first such experience but I shall not. It was wonderful, and what I chiefly remember is the feeling of atavistic fulfilment: ‘Yes, of course, this is what it was always going to feel like. This is the way it was going to be from the beginning of time.’ It isn’t difficult for a biologist to explain why nervous systems evolved in such a way as to make sexual congress one of the consistently greatest experiences life has to offer. But explaining it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful – just as Newton’s spectral unweaving never diminishes the glory of the rainbow. And it doesn’t matter how many rainbows you see throughout your life. The glory is reinvented afresh, and the heart leaps up every time. But I’ll say no more on the subject, and will betray no confidences. It isn’t that kind of autobiography.

  Wordsworth, as it happened, was never a favourite of mine, but I would like to quote here a few fragments of some of the poems that did move me as a young man. These verses were an important part of making me what I am, and they were all (in some cases still are) word-perfect in my memory.

  Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

  Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

  You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

  Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,

  When we are old, are old . . .’ ‘And when we die

  All’s over that is ours; and life burns on

  Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I,

  ‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’

  ‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.

  Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;

  ‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread

  Rose-crowned into the darkness!’ . . . Proud we were,

  And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

  –And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

  Rupert Brooke

  Tell me not here, it needs not saying,

  What tune the enchantress plays

  In aftermaths of soft September

  Or under blanching mays,

  For she and I were long acquainted

  And I knew all her ways.

  A. E. Housman

  I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,

  For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;

  And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood

  With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:

  I cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay

  Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,

  Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair

  Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.

  W. B. Yeats

  Heart handfast in heart as they stood, ‘Look thither,’

  Did he whisper? ‘look forth from the flowers to the sea;

  For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,

  And men that love lightly may die–but we?’

  And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,

  And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,

  In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,

  Love was dead.

  A. C. Swinburne

  My father kept a loose-leaf folder in which he bound a large number of his favourite poems, all copied out in his own hand. My own taste in poetry was strongly influenced by this private anthology, which my mother still possesses. I was touched to learn that it originated in letters to her in their early twenties, sent from Cambridge where he was doing postgraduate studies, each poem enclosed with a letter and preserved by her.

  But, to my own undergraduate days and my thoughts of what should come next: I don’t think I ever seriously contemplated joining my father in farming. Increasingly, I wanted to stay on at Oxford to do a research degree. I didn’t have any very clear idea of what might follow after that, or of what kind of research I wanted to do. Peter Brunet offered me a biochemical project, and I gratefully signed up to it and studied the relevant research literature, though without much enthusiasm. But then I went for tutorials with Niko Tinbergen on animal behaviour – and my life changed. Here was a subject I could really think about: a subject with philosophical implications. Niko was apparently impressed by me: his end-of-term report to my college said I was the best undergraduate he had ever tutored – although that verdict must be tempered by the fact that he didn’t do much undergraduate tutoring. Anyway, it raised my courage to the point of asking him whether he would like to take me on as his research student, and to my enduring delight he said yes. My future was assured, for the next three years at least. And for the rest of my life, now that I think about it.

  LEARNING THE TRADE

  PERHAPS all scientists recall their graduate student years as an idyll. But surely some research environments are more idyllic than others, and I think there was something special about the Tinbergen group at Oxford in the early 1960s. Hans Kruuk has captured the atmosphere in his affectionate but not hagiographic biography, Niko’s Nature.42 He and I arrived too late for the heroic ‘hard core’ period described by Desmond Morris, Aubrey Manning and others, but I think our time resembled it – though we saw less of Niko himself, because his room was in the main Zoology Department while all the rest of us were housed in the annexe at 13 Bevington Road, a tall, narrow house in north Oxford, about half a mile from the main Zoology building tacked onto the University Museum in Parks Road.

  The senior figure in 13 Bevington Road was Mike Cullen, probably the most important mentor in my life – and I believe most of my contemporaries in the Animal Behaviour Research Group (ABRG) would agree. To try to explain the debt that all of us owe to this remarkable man, I can do no better than quote the closing words of the eulogy that I spoke at his memorial service in Wadham College, Oxford, in 2001.

  He did not publish many papers himself, yet he worked prodigiously hard, both in teaching and research. He was probably the most sought-after tutor in the entire Zoology Department. The rest of his time – he was always in a hurry and worked a hugely long day – was devoted to research. But seldom his own research. Everybody who knew him has the same story to tell. All the obituaries told it, in revealingly similar terms.

  You would have a problem with your research. You knew exactly where to go for help, and there he would be for you. I see the scene as yesterday. The lunchtime conversation in the crowded little kitchen at Bevington Road, the wiry, boyish figure in the red sweater, slightly hunched like a spring wound up with intense intellectual energy, sometimes rocking back and forth with concentration. The deeply intelligent eyes, understanding what you meant even before the words came out. The back of the envelope to aid explanation, the occasionally sceptical, quizzical tilt of the eyebrows, under the untidy hair. Then he would have to rush off – he always rushed everywhere – perhaps for a tutorial, and he would seize his biscuit tin by its wire handles, and disappear. But next morning the answer to your problem would arrive, in Mike’s small, distinctive handwriting, two pages, often some algebra, diagrams, a key reference to the literature, sometimes an apt verse of his own composition, or a fragment of Latin or classical Greek. Always encouragement.

  We were grateful, but not grateful enough. If we had thought about it we would have realized, he must have been working on that mathematical model of my research all evening. And it isn’t only me for whom he does this. Everybody in Bevington Road gets the same treatment. And not just his own students. I was officially Niko’s student, not Mike’s. Mike took me on, without payment and without official recognition, when my research became more mathematical than Niko could handle. When the ti
me came for me to write my thesis, it was Mike Cullen who read it, criticized it, helped me polish every line. And all this, while he was doing the same thing for his own official students.

  When (we all should have wondered) does he get time for ordinary family life? When does he get time for his own research? No wonder he so seldom published anything. No wonder he never wrote his long-awaited book on animal communication. In truth, he should have been joint author of just about every one of the hundreds of papers that came out of 13 Bevington Road during that golden period. In fact, his name appears on virtually none of them – except in the Acknowledgements section . . .

  The worldly success of scientists is judged – for promotion or honours – by their published papers. Mike did not rate highly on this index. But if he had consented to add his name to his students’ publications, as readily as modern supervisors insist on putting their names on papers to which they contribute much less, Mike would have been a conventionally successful scientist, lauded with conventional honours. As it is, he was a brilliantly successful scientist in a far deeper and truer sense. And I think we know which kind of scientist we really admire.

  Oxford sadly lost him to Australia. Years later, in Melbourne, at a party for me as visiting lecturer, I was standing, probably rather stiffly, with a drink in my hand. Suddenly, a familiar figure shot into the room, in a hurry as ever. The rest of us were in suits, but not this familiar figure. The years vanished away. Everything was the same – though he must have been well into his sixties, he seemed still to be in his thirties – the glow of boyish enthusiasm, even the red sweater. Next day he drove me to the coast to see his beloved penguins, stopping on the way to look at giant Australian earthworms, many feet long. We tired the sun with talking – not, I think, about old times and old friends, and certainly not about ambition, grant-getting and papers in Nature, but about new science and new ideas. It was a perfect day, the last day I saw him.

  We may know other scientists as intelligent as Mike Cullen – though not many. We may know other scientists who were as generous in support – though vanishingly few. But I declare, we have known nobody who had so much to give, combined with so much generosity in giving it.

  I almost wept when I spoke that eulogy in Wadham chapel, and I almost wept again just now when rereading it twelve years later.

  I don’t know whether the camaraderie of 13 Bevington Road was exceptional, or whether all groups of graduate students nurture a similar esprit de corps. I suspect that being housed in a separate annexe rather than in a large university building improves the social dynamics. When the ABRG (and other outliers such as David Lack’s Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology and Charles Elton’s Bureau of Animal Populations) eventually moved into the present concrete monster on South Parks Road, something, I believe, was lost. But it may just be that by then I was older and more weighed down by responsibilities. Whatever the reason, I retain a loyal affection for 13 Bevington Road and my comrades of those times who foregathered at the Friday evening seminars, or in the lunch room, or over the bar billiards table in the Rose and Crown: Robert Mash, whose epidemic sense of humour I later recalled in my foreword to his book How to Keep Dinosaurs;43 Dick Brown, chain smoking, hard drinking and implausibly rumoured to be religious; Juan Delius, whose deliriously eccentric brilliance never ceased to amuse; Juan’s supernormally delightful wife Uta who gave me German lessons; the tall, blond Dutchman Hans Kruuk, who later wrote Niko’s biography; the Scotsman Ian Patterson; Bryan Nelson the gannet man, known to me in my first six months only from the enigmatic notice on his door, ‘Nelson is on the Bass Rock’; bearded Cliff Henty; David McFarland, Niko’s eventual successor who, although based in the Psychology Department, was a sort of honorary member of our group because his vivacious wife Jill was Juan’s research assistant, and the couple had lunch in Bevington Road every day; Vivienne Benzie, who introduced the sunny New Zealand girls Lyn McKechie and Ann Jamieson as yet other honorary members of the lunch group; Lou Gurr, another smiling New Zealander; Robin Liley; the jovial naturalist Michael Robinson; Michael Hansell, who later shared a flat with me; Monica Impekoven, with whom I wrote a paper later; Marian Stamp, whom I was to marry; Heather McLannahan, Robert Martin, Ken Wilz; Michael Norton-Griffiths and Harvey Croze, who later formed a consulting partnership in Kenya; John Krebs, who later collaborated with me in writing three papers; the daredevil Iain Douglas-Hamilton, unwilling exile from Africa while he wrote his thesis on elephants; Jamie Smith, with whom I wrote a paper on optimal foraging in tits; Tim Halliday the newt man, Sean Neill with his lovingly restored Lagonda and gift for drawing cartoons, Lary Shaffer, master photographer, and other friends whom I apologize for omitting.

  The Friday evening seminars were the highlight of the week for the Tinbergen group. They lasted two hours and frequently spilled over into the following Friday, but the time flashed by because, instead of the soporific formula of an hour spent listening to one speaker’s voice followed by questions at the end, our two hours were enlivened by argument throughout. Niko set the tone by interrupting almost before the speaker could complete his first sentence: ‘Ja, ja, but what do you mean by . . .?’ This wasn’t as irritating as it sounds, because Niko’s interventions always aimed at clarification and it was usually necessary. Mike Cullen’s questions were more penetrating, better informed and more feared. Other notable contributors – brilliant in their idiosyncratic ways – were Juan Delius and David McFarland, but the rest of us chipped in without inhibition too, almost from the first day we were there. Niko encouraged that. He insisted on absolute clarity about the question we were asking in our research. I recall how shocked I was, on visiting our sister research group at Madingley in Cambridge, to hear one of the graduate students beginning to describe his research with the words: ‘What I do is . . .’ I had to restrain myself from imitating Niko’s voice: ‘Ja, ja, but what is your question? Years later, I related this story when I gave a research seminar at Madingley. I refused to identify the culprit to a mock-scandalized Robert Hinde, the formidably intelligent and charismatic leader of the Madingley group who later became Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and my lips are sealed to this day.

  The question Niko set for me was a version of the question often la-belled with the ‘nature or nurture?’ cliché derived from The Tempest:

  A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

  Nurture can never stick . . .

  Philosophers down the centuries have pondered the question. How much of what we know is natively built in, and to what extent is the young mind a blank slate, waiting to be written over, as John Locke believed?

  Niko himself, like Konrad Lorenz (with whom he is credited with co-founding the science of ethology), was early associated with the ‘nature’ school of thought. His most famous book, The Study of Instinct,44 which he later pretty much disowned, used ‘instinct’ as a synonym for ‘innate behaviour’, defined as ‘behaviour that has not been changed by learning processes’. Ethology is the biological study of animal behaviour. Various schools of psychology also study animal behaviour, but with different emphasis. Psychologists historically tended to study animals like rats or pigeons or monkeys as substitutes for humans. Ethologists historically were interested in the animals in their own right, not as proxies for anything. Consequently they have always studied a much wider range of species, and they tend to emphasize the role of behaviour in the natural environment of the species. Ethologists also, as I have said, historically emphasized ‘innate’ behaviour, whereas psychologists were more interested in learning.

  In the 1950s, a group of American psychologists started to take an interest in the works of the ethologists. Prominent among them was Daniel S. Lehrman, a big man with a deep knowledge of natural history as well as of psychology. He also spoke adequate German, which made him an effective bridge between the two approaches to animal behaviour.

  In 1953 Lehrman wrote a very influential critique of the traditional ethological approach. He strongly crit
icized the whole notion of innate behaviour, not because he thought everything was learned (although some psychologists whom he quoted did), but because he thought it was in principle impossible to define innate behaviour: impossible to devise an experiment to demonstrate that any particular piece of behaviour is innate. Theoretically, the obvious method was the ‘deprivation experiment’. Imagine if humans were given no verbal instruction in how to copulate and no opportunity to observe other species – not even the smallest inkling. Would they know how to do it when the opportunity finally presented itself? It’s an intriguing question, and there might be telling anecdotes, perhaps about over-sheltered and naive Victorian couples. But in non-human animals we can do experiments. Deprivation experiments.

  If you rear a young animal in deprived conditions without the opportunity for experience, and it still knows how to behave properly, that must mean the behaviour is innate, inborn, instinctive. Mustn’t it? But Lehrman objected that you couldn’t deprive the young animal of everything – light, food, air, etc. – and that it is never obvious how much deprivation is needed in order to satisfy the criterion of innateness.

  The dispute between Lehrman and Lorenz got personal. Lehrman, whose family background was Jewish, caught Lorenz out in some suspiciously Nazi-inflected writings from the war years and did not shrink from mentioning this in his famous critique. Lorenz, on first meeting Lehrman after the critique was published, said (approximately): ‘I thought from your writings that you must be a small, mean, wizened little man. But now that I see you are a BIG man [and Lehrman was indeed a very big man] we can be friends.’ This avowal of friendship didn’t stop Lorenz trying – Desmond Morris tells the story as an eye-witness from inside the car – to intimidate Lehrman by almost mowing him down with an enormous American car that he was driving in Paris.