Table Of ContentDEDICATION
For Lalla
‘Out, out, brief candle: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and
frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more . . .’
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, scene v ‘Science as a candle in the dark’
Carl Sagan, subtitle to The Demon-haunted World (1995) ‘Better to light a
candle than curse the darkness’
Anon.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Flashback at a feast
Oh, the things that are done by a don
Lore of the jungle
Go to the wasp, thou sluggard: evolutionary economics
The delegate’s tale
Christmas Lectures
Islands of the blest
Whoso findeth a publisher findeth a good thing
Television
Debates and encounters
Simonyi Professor
Unweaving the threads from a scientist’s loom
The Taxicab Theory of Evolution
Extending the phenotype
Action at a distance
Rediscovering the organism: passengers and stowaways
Aftermaths to The Extended Phenotype
Constraints on perfection
The Darwinian engineer in the classroom
‘The Genetic Book of the Dead’ and the species as ‘averaging
computer’
Evolution in pixels
The evolution of evolvability
Kaleidoscopic embryos
Arthromorphs
The cooperative gene
Universal Darwinism
Memes
Chinese junk and Chinese Whispers
Models of the world
The argument from personal incredulity
The God delusion
Full circle
Acknowledgements
Picture acknowledgements
Index
Photo section
About the author
Also by Richard Dawkins
Credits
Copyright
About the publisher
FLASHBACK AT A FEAST
W
HAT am I doing here in New College Hall, about to read my poem to a
hundred dinner guests? How did I get here – a subjective 25-year-old,
objectively bewildered to find himself celebrating his seventieth circuit of the
sun? Looking around the long candlelit table with its polished silver and
sparkling wineglasses, reflecting flashes of wit and sparkling sentences, I
indulge my mind in a series of quick-firing flashbacks.
Back to childhood in colonial Africa amid big, lazy butterflies; the peppery
taste of nasturtium leaves stolen from the lost Lilongwe garden; the taste of
mango, more than sweet, spiced by a whiff of turpentine and sulphur; boarding
school in the pine-scented Vumba mountains of Zimbabwe, and then, back
‘home’ in England, beneath the heavenward spires of Salisbury and Oundle;
undergraduate days damsel-dreaming among Oxford’s punts and spires, and the
dawning of an interest in science and the deep philosophical questions which
only science can answer; early forays into research and teaching at Oxford and
Berkeley; the return to Oxford as an eager young lecturer; more research (mostly
collaborating with my first wife Marian, whom I can see at the table here in New
College), and then my first book, The Selfish Gene. Those swift memories take
me to the age of thirty-five, halfway to today’s landmark birthday. They
milestone the years covered by my first book of memoirs, An Appetite for
Wonder.
My thirty-fifth birthday recalled to me an article by the humorist Alan Coren
about his own. Coren was mock-depressed by the thought that he had reached
half-time and it was now downhill all the way. I didn’t feel the same, perhaps
because I was just putting the finishing touches to my first, rather youthful book
and was looking forward to publication and its aftermath.
One aspect of that aftermath was being pitchforked by the unexpectedly high
sales of the book into the company of those who are regularly asked, by
journalists scratching around for column inches, to list their ideal gathering of
dinner-party guests. In the days when I used to respond to that kind of request I
would invite some great scientists as a matter of course, but also writers and
creative spirits of all kinds. Indeed, any of those lists would probably have
included at least fifteen of those actually attending my birthday dinner today,
among them novelists, playwrights, television personalities, musicians,
comedians, historians, publishers, actors and multinational business tycoons.
Thirty-five years ago, I think to myself as I spot familiar faces around the
table, such a mix of literary and artistic guests at a scientist’s birthday dinner
would have seemed unlikely. Has the Zeitgeist changed since C. P. Snow
lamented the chasm between scientific and literary culture? What has happened
in the years covered by my dinnertime musing? My reverie jumps me into the
middle of the period and I conjure the giant, unforgettable figure of Douglas
Adams, sadly absent from the feast. In 1996, when I was fifty-five and he ten
years younger, I had a televised conversation with him for a Channel Four
documentary called Break the Science Barrier. The programme’s purpose was
precisely to show that science needed to burst into the wider culture, and my
interview with Douglas was the high spot. Here is part of what he said:
I think the role of the novel has changed a little bit. In the nineteenth
century, the novel was where you went to get your serious reflections and
questionings about life. You’d go to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Nowadays, of course, you know the scientists actually tell much more
about such issues than you would ever get from novelists. So I think that
for the real solid red meat of what I read I go to science books, and read
some novels for light relief.
Could this be a part of what has changed? Have novelists, journalists and others
of the kind C. P. Snow would have planted firmly in his first culture increasingly
come to embrace the second? Might Douglas, if he were still living, now go back
to the novel and uncover some of what he had moved to science to find, twenty-
five years after he read English at Cambridge: Ian McEwan, say, or A. S. Byatt?
Or other novelists who love science, such as Philip Pullman or Martin Amis,
William Boyd or Barbara Kingsolver? Then there are highly successful science-
inspired plays, in the tradition of Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn. Could this
starry dinner party, put together for me by my wife Lalla Ward, an artist and
actress herself well read in science, be some kind of symbol of a change in the
culture – as well as a personal landmark in my life? Are we witnessing a
constructive merger between scientific and literary cultures, perhaps the ‘third’
culture towards which my literary agent John Brockman has been working
behind the scenes as he nurses his online salon and grows his glittering list of
science authors? Or the merging of cultures that I aspired to in my own
Unweaving the Rainbow where, under the influence of Lalla, I tried to reach out
to the world of literature and bridge the gap from science? Où sont les C. P.
Snows d’antan?
Two anecdotes tell (and if you don’t like digressive anecdotes you might find
you’re reading the wrong book). One of my guests at this New College dinner,
the explorer and adventurer Redmond O’Hanlon, author of grotesquely funny
travel books such as Into the Heart of Borneo and In Trouble Again, would
throw literary parties and dinners with his wife Belinda to which, it seemed, the
whole of literary London was invited. Novelists and critics, journalists and
editors, poets and publishers, literary agents and literary lions descended on their
remote corner of the Oxfordshire countryside, the house crammed full of stuffed
snakes, shrunken heads, leathery corpses and leather-bound books, exotic curios
of anthropology and – one suspects – anthropophagy. These evenings were
always notable for the company and, when it included Salman Rushdie, for the
bodyguards keeping their own company upstairs.
On one of these occasions, Lalla and I happened to have staying with us
Nathan Myhrvold, Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and one of the most
inventive geeks of Silicon Valley. Nathan is a mathematical physicist by training.
After his PhD at Princeton he worked in Cambridge with Stephen Hawking
during the period when Stephen was still just capable of talking, though not
intelligibly to any but his close associates, who acted as interpreters for the
benefit of the rest of the world. Nathan became one of these highly qualified
physicist amanuenses. True to his promise, he is now one of high tech’s most
innovative thinkers. When Redmond and Belinda invited us we told them we
had a house guest and they, hospitable as ever, told us to bring him along.
Nathan is too polite to monopolize a conversation. His neighbours at the long
table presumably asked him what he did, and the conversation grew into a
discussion of string theory and other arcana of modern physics. And the literary
illuminati were held spellbound. They began as usual, no doubt, exchanging
aphoristic wit with their neighbours. But inexorably a wave of curious interest in
science swept from Nathan’s end down the long table, and the evening became a
kind of informal seminar on the weirdness of modern physics. When a seminar
includes intelligences of the calibre of this bunch of dinner companions,
interesting things happen. Lalla and I basked in reflected glory as sponsors of the
unexpected guest at this archetypal ‘third culture’ evening. And afterwards
Redmond telephoned and told Lalla that never, in all his years of throwing such
parties, had he seen his eminent literary guests reduced to such stunned silence.
The second anecdote is almost a mirror image. The playwright and novelist
