Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  PBM

  Of all the Nobel Prize-winners I was in awe especially of Peter Medawar, who had long been a hero of mine, as much for his writing style as for his science. Badly disabled by a stroke at a disquietingly young age, he was assiduously cared for by his wife, Jean (the knot of his tie seemed softer and looser than a man would produce). The slight slur in his speech scarcely hindered his wit and erudition. Only once did I glimpse a chink in the armour of valiant bonhomie. I was hurrying along a corridor, nearly late for one of the lectures, and I passed the Medawars, also rushing as fast as Peter could, which was not very. Jean, in an urgent hiss, called me back (‘Richard, Richard’) and appealed for help in getting him through the door into the conference room. As I did so, I was moved by her solicitude for him and by his evident anxiety not to be late, a guard-dropping moment that belied the outward patrician nonchalance.

  On another occasion he mentioned that he and my father had been exact contemporaries as schoolboy biologists at Marlborough College. ‘Your father and I were united in our detestation of one A. G. Lowndes.’ Lowndes had been their much loved and legendarily successful biology teacher, and I reminded Sir Peter that he had written an affectionate obituary of his erstwhile mentor. ‘Oh well, I felt that when the old bugger croaked I ought to do my bit for him.’

  At some point around that time I was invited by Redmond O’Hanlon, who was on the editorial staff of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), to review one of Peter’s books. I submitted a rave notice, one of the most enthusiastic book reviews I have ever written (alongside some stinkers whose style, now that I think about it, owes inspiration to Medawar himself).1 My only slightly negative sentence was a judgement that I set down in order to repudiate it: ‘Some have described Medawar as a “loose cannon on deck” but I would vigorously contest this charge . . .’ I was never sent a proof to correct, and when the issue came out I was horrified to find that they had cut all my most glowing praise and printed the review under the headline ‘Shots from a loose cannon’. I stormed round to Redmond’s office above his wife Belinda’s famous Annabelinda dress shop in Oxford. Surrounded by what seemed to be an overflow collection of stuffed reptiles, shrivelled monkey hands, fetish objects and other bizarre memorabilia from his travels, he listened to my prolonged tirade in silence, then left the room without a word. He returned carrying an object which he solemnly, and still without a word, presented to me. It was a double-barrelled shotgun. I shall never know whether it was loaded (Redmond’s eccentric adventurism is such that it is possible) but in any case the gesture paradoxically disarmed me. I don’t think Redmond was actually responsible for the mischievous sub-editing, and Peter was magnanimous when I wrote to tell him of the episode.

  A decade or so later, near the end of Peter’s life, Jean invited me to one of her dinner parties in their house in Hampstead, north London. Peter’s physical condition had deteriorated since our meeting in Germany, but his mind was as sharp as ever, and she would invite two or three guests every week to keep him entertained. Those, like me, who scarcely knew him personally, felt especially honoured to be invited, and the evening was not to be forgotten. My fellow guest was the distinguished journalist Katharine Whitehorn, and I suspect that she entertained him a lot better than I did, awed as I was. The only concession to his malady was when he apologetically excused himself to retire early to bed: ‘I’m afraid I’m a very sick man.’

  I felt honoured again when, in June 2012, Charles Medawar presented me with a priceless book from his father’s library: the Festschrift volume presented to the great Scottish naturalist D’Arcy Thompson on his retirement, edited by Peter and signed by all the authors including V. B. Wigglesworth, J. Z. Young, J. H. Woodger, E. C. R. Reeve, Julian Huxley, O. W. Richards, A. J. Kavanagh, N. J. Berrill, E. N. Willmer, J. F. Danielli, W. T. Astbury, A. J. Lotka, G. H. Bushnell, and of course the two editors, W. E. Le Gros Clark and P. B. Medawar himself. D’Arcy Thompson’s own signature was there as well, glued in for good measure. Most of those authors were household names to me and my undergraduate contemporaries in zoology, and D’Arcy Thompson was a particular hero, described by Peter Medawar as

  an aristocrat of learning whose intellectual endowments are not likely ever again to be combined within one man. He was a classicist of sufficient distinction to have become President of the Classical Associations of England and Wales and of Scotland; a mathematician good enough to have had an entirely mathematical paper accepted for publication by the Royal Society; and a naturalist who held important chairs for sixty-four years . . . He was a famous conversationalist and lecturer (the two are often thought to go together, but seldom do), and the author of a work which, considered as literature, is the equal of anything of Pater’s or Logan Pearsall Smith’s in its complete mastery of the bel canto style. Add to this that he was over six feet tall, with the build and carriage of a Viking and with the pride of bearing that comes from good looks known to be possessed.1

  If I am asked to name a single scientist whose writing style inspired me more than any other, I would say that other aristocrat of learning Peter Medawar, and maybe this short extract tells you why.

  Double Dutch

  In 1977 I was invited to present a lecture at the International Ethological Conference held at Bielefeld in West Germany. At that stage of my career, it was quite an honour to be invited (as opposed to volunteering) to give a lecture at this flagship conference of my then field of animal behaviour, and I took great trouble over my speech, which I called ‘Replicator selection and the extended phenotype’. Subsequently published in the journal Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, it was the first time I introduced the idea, and the phrase, ‘extended phenotype’, which was to become the title of my second book.

  The International Ethological Conference is held every two years in a different country and I attended eight of them: in The Hague, Zurich, Rennes, Edinburgh, Parma, Oxford, Washington and Bielefeld. In An Appetite for Wonder I mentioned the 1965 conference in Zurich, where I presented my doctoral research for the first time and was rescued from a technical debacle by the Austrian ethologist Wolfgang Schleidt. The conferences were inaugurated long before my time, as rather cosily small gatherings dominated by the flamboyantly handsome Konrad Lorenz and his more quietly thoughtful and also handsome colleague Niko Tinbergen. Speeches were prolonged by the fact that these two grand old men of the subject – not really old then but already grand – took turns to translate for the benefit of the audience, both ways between German and English. By the time I started attending, the conferences had become much larger, German speeches were diminishing in frequency, and there was no longer enough time for the translations.

  Language problems hadn’t gone away, however. At another one of these biennial conferences, in Rennes, an elderly delegate from the Netherlands advertised his lecture in the programme as being in German. I am sorry to say that consequently, as he rose to speak, the majority of the Anglo-American contingent in the audience shuffled shamefacedly to the exit. I remained in my seat out of embarrassed politeness. This priceless Dutchman waited at the lectern, smiling patiently, until the last ignominious monoglot had slid out. Then his smile broadened into a contented beam as he announced (the Dutch are perhaps the most linguistically gifted of Europeans) that he had changed his mind and would now deliver his lecture in English. His audience then became yet more depleted.

  The leading French delegate to that conference took a straw poll, the evening before her big speech, on how many would understand her if she obeyed orders from her French masters and spoke in French. Embarrassingly few put up their hands and consequently she decided to speak in English. Her change of mind was well advertised in advance and she drew a good audience for an excellent lecture.

  At that same Rennes conference, a colleague from Cambridge jabbered his lecture much too fast. At the end, a questioner stood up and furiously berated him in equally rapid-fire Dutch. Unschooled in the language as I was, I was one of many who got the point. We native En
glish speakers must not abuse the privilege we enjoy: through various accidents of history, our lingua anglica has emerged as the new lingua franca. I suspect that this clever Dutchman had actually understood my Cambridge friend perfectly well, and was complaining not on his own behalf but for the benefit of others – probably not Dutch – who would have struggled to understand high-speed Cambridge English. I have done the same kind of thing, with respect not to language but to difficult scientific matters which, I had reason to fear, might not have been understood by some students in the audience. In other words, like (I suspect) my dear mentor Mike Cullen,1 I have sometimes pretended not to understand a point of science in order to force a speaker to be clearer. In any case, I was humbled by this Dutchman’s public-spiritedness, to the extent that when I returned to Oxford I resumed my interrupted (since school) study of German, under the tutelage of the wonderful Uta Delius – only to be told, by a disgracefully insular colleague, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that. It’ll only encourage them.’ (Those colleagues and friends who can – with affection and not much difficulty I suspect – guess his identity will hear the words in his distinctive intonation.)

  For my plenary talk at the Bielefeld conference I hope I spoke slowly and clearly enough to be understood by all. At any rate, the only negative comment from a polyglot Dutchman was a furious attack on the colour of my tie. Admittedly it was a lurid purple, conspicuously – and to his quivering sensibilities jarringly – out of harmony with the rest of my attire.

  I never nowadays commit such a sartorial solecism, by the way. The only ties I ever wear are hand-painted by my multi-talented wife, Lalla, all to her own animal designs. The subjects include penguins, zebras, impalas, chameleons, scarlet ibis, armadillos, leaf insects, clouded leopards and . . . warthogs. This last tie, I have to admit, has been subjected to severe criticism in high places, signally falling short of royal approval. I wore it on the occasion I was invited to one of the Queen’s weekly lunches in Buckingham Palace among a bewilderingly eclectic mixture of about a dozen guests: those present included (around the table) the Director of the National Gallery, the Australian rugby captain, whose ‘build and carriage’ were exactly as you might imagine, a poised ballerina (ditto), Britain’s most prominent Muslim,1 and (under it) at least six corgis. Her Majesty was charm itself, but my warthog tie did not amuse. ‘Why do you have such ugly animals on your tie?’ Though I say it myself, my reply wasn’t bad for the spur of the moment: ‘Ma’m,2 if the animals are ugly, how much greater is the artistry to produce such a beautiful tie?’ I actually think it is rather admirable that the Queen does not limit her conversation to meaningless politesse, but respects her guests enough to tell them what she really thinks. As for warthogs, my aesthetic agrees with hers: they are ugly. But there’s a sprightly insouciance about the way they run with their tails pointing vertically upwards: not exactly charm, certainly not beauty, but an air of jaunty high spirits that makes me glad they are around. And it is a splendid tie. As I like to think the Queen would have thought on reflection.

  Returning to earlier, purple-tie days and my Dutch critic, the idea of the extended phenotype itself escaped his anger – for which I was thankful, because he possessed a notoriously sharp intellect with a tongue to match. Though a distinguished elder of our shared field and author of an important theory of human origins, he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. One of Evelyn Waugh’s minor characters, ‘Uncle Peregrine’, was a ‘bore of international repute whose dreaded presence could empty the room in any centre of civilization’. I’m sorry to say that my neckwear critic had a similar reputation (the mere mention of his name would clear whole corridors in the world of ethology) coupled with a finely honed persecution complex. There was a (not totally implausible) rumour that he was paid a full professor’s salary by the University of Amsterdam, on the strict condition that he never set foot in Amsterdam. He came to live in Oxford.

  I’m afraid he was the butt of other unkind jokes in the Netherlands. He once submitted to a Dutch journal a paper, in English, which contained a typo: ‘Man is a ridicolous species.’ He meant ‘nidicolous’, defined as a species whose young are heavily dependent on their parents (like thrush nestlings), as opposed to ‘nidifugous’ (like chickens or lambs, whose young leave the nest on their own sturdy legs and are much more appealing to us). The distinguished editors of the journal surely knew full well what the author meant, but they pleaded – in a later mock-apologetic erratum – that he had been unreachable in the African jungle and they had had to make a quick decision, trusting in the laws of probability: ‘ridiculous’ occurs much more frequently in English than ‘nidicolous’ and both involve a one-letter mutation from the misprint. So the published version reads: ‘Man is a ridiculous species.’ Perhaps that persecution complex was not entirely without justification. Nowadays, a spellchecking computer would have done the job for them, and almost certainly reached the same decision.

  Cold water, hot blood

  I next pick out a 1978 conference in Washington DC, because an incident there has become part of the folklore of the so-called ‘sociobiology controversy’ and, unlike most regalers of the tale, I was an eye-witness. The conference was convened by my old Berkeley friend the ethologist George Barlow, and the anthropologist James Silverberg, to discuss the sociobiology revolution and how to carry it forward. Edward O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology itself, was the star speaker, and I was also invited because The Selfish Gene was acquiring a following at the same time. There was much overlap between Wilson’s magisterial opus and my slighter volume, although neither book influenced the other. One important difference is that John Maynard Smith’s powerful theory of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) plays a prominent role in The Selfish Gene but is mysteriously absent from Sociobiology. I regard this as the most serious shortcoming of Wilson’s great book, although it was overlooked by critics at the time – and, as noted in the previous chapter, my contribution to the Washington conference was accordingly devoted to the topic. Maybe those critics were distracted by the fusillade of silly political attacks on Wilson’s final chapter about humans – attacks from which The Selfish Gene suffered some (not very damaging) collateral damage. The whole sorry history is well and fairly treated by the sociologist Ullica Segerstråle in her Defenders of the Truth.

  At the Washington conference I was in the audience for a panel discussion when a motley rabble of students and leftist fellow travellers rushed the platform, and one of them threw a glassful of water at Edward Wilson, who was using crutches at the time, having injured himself training for the Boston Marathon. Some journalists have described a ‘pitcher’ of ‘iced water’ being ‘poured’ on his head. This may have happened too, but what I saw in the confusion was water being thrown sideways from a glass in Wilson’s general direction, fended off by David Barash, flaring his Bernard Shaw (or W. G. Grace) style beard towards the attacker in a classic primate agonistic display. Barash was the author of a readable student textbook of sociobiology who has grown, through his later books, into a sage and humanely prophetic voice in our field. The assailants were chanting slogans obviously inspired by the Harvard Marxist cabal led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould, so it was good that Gould himself was on the platform with Wilson and Barash, and in a position to quote Lenin’s condemnation of ‘an infantile disorder’. In the same vein the chairman of the session, plainly upset, stood up and made an angrily passionate speech, concluding: ‘I am a Marxist and I wish personally to apologize to Professor Wilson.’ Ed Wilson himself took it with his customary good humour. I expect he knew, as we all did, that among all the hubbub he had inadvertently scored a quiet victory that day.

  Northern nightingale

  In 1989 Michael Ruse, founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, convened a conference on ‘The border zone between evolutionary science and philosophy’. This conference was remarkable not so much for its theme as for its location: Melbu, a village on one of the islands off the coast of northern Norway. More tha
n the beauty of the place and the night sun, what was memorable was the – what shall I call it? – the sociology of the conference venue. Once a prosperous centre of the fishing industry, Melbu had fallen on hard times. In response to this change in its fortunes, a consortium of citizens led by the dentist got together to found a community centre, which would bring money into the village by building and operating a conference venue. The most unusual feature of this enterprise was that it was run entirely by volunteers, freely giving their time, money and resources out of what appeared to be pure, altruistic public-spiritedness. I may be exaggerating a little but the conversations among us delegates from abroad, at meals and on midnight walks, dwelt more on our wonderment at the idealism of the townspeople than on the official topic of the conference itself.

  Two pleasant vignettes mark Melbu in memory. In a gigantic cylindrical fishmeal store – no longer needed for its original purpose because of the decline in the industry but still faintly smelling of it – we had a grand gala dinner. Come the appropriate hour, we gathered outside and stood in a long line – not just the conferees but, as it seemed, most of the inhabitants of the village who were, indeed, nearly all volunteers for the enterprise. We stood, and we stood. And we stood. Finally, a Norwegian biologist colleague left the line to investigate the delay. He returned in high humour with the perfect explanation: ‘The cook is drunk!’ This was so very Melbu, and so exactly like the plot of ‘Gourmet Night’ at Fawlty Towers, our mounting impatience dissolved in good-natured laughter. Our spirits were still high when we finally entered the giant drum to be greeted by a spectacular vision of thousands of candles all around the perimeter. The meal itself was fine.