As it happened, I had a personal interest in the naming of fish: I had felt highly honoured when, in 2012, a team of Sri Lankan ichthyologists conferred the scientific name Dawkinsia on another genus of freshwater fish, this one from Sri Lanka and South India. There are now nine recognized species in the genus. The beautiful one shown in the picture section here (it too might seem to deserve the name ‘rainbow fish’) is Dawkinsia rohani.1
Galápagos
If Ogasawara is the ‘Galápagos of the Orient’, for me part of its attraction lay in my love affair with the Galápagos archipelago itself. It’s a place of pilgrimage for Darwinians such as me, so it was perhaps not surprising that Victoria Getty, when she happened to meet Lalla at a grand dinner in Windsor Castle, was shocked to learn that I had never been there – so shocked, in fact, that she immediately promised to put this right by arranging a trip to the islands and inviting us along as her guests.
This serendipitous conversation had come about at a gala occasion, hosted by Prince Michael of Kent, which featured the performance by a visiting Russian orchestra of a symphonic work composed by Gordon Getty, younger brother of Victoria’s late husband Sir Paul Getty. Prince Michael is a prominent Russophile – I was impressed by his speech of welcome to the orchestra in Russian. He and Princess Michael are friends of Charles Simonyi, my benefactor at Oxford, through whom we had been invited. The dinner stands out in my memory not only because of Lalla’s conversation with Victoria Getty but because I sat next to Susan Hutchison, former television news anchor in Seattle and executive director of Charles’s charitable foundation. I found her charming, and delightful company until I discovered that she was a shamelessly enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush, whereupon my gentlemanly manners were sorely tested. We didn’t quite come to blows, and by the end of the meal we had kissed and made up. Meanwhile, Victoria had asked Lalla what Galápagos was like, and Lalla said she hadn’t been there, and I hadn’t either. There and then, Victoria promised Lalla she would arrange a trip and invite us along as her guests. The very next day she telephoned Lalla to say she was looking at chartering a boat called the Beagle (a facultative sailing boat but otherwise not like the original one) and to fix the date of the voyage. We were overjoyed.
Then something embarrassing happened: well, an embarras de richesses you’d have to call it. Completely independently I was approached by an American shipping magnate, Richard Fane. One of his ships, the Celebrity Xpedition, plied the Galápagos Islands, and he had chartered it to celebrate an anniversary with his wife Colette in the company of ninety friends and relations. Would I like to come on board as guest lecturer to regale his guests with talk of evolution in the very place where Darwin had his first stirrings of inspiration, the place about which Darwin wrote those haunting words: ‘One might almost fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’ Lalla was invited too; and so also, when I told Mr Fane that I couldn’t go because I’d miss Juliet’s birthday, was Juliet. It was too tempting and generous an offer to pass up.
But what to say to Victoria? She had arranged the trip on the Beagle as a consequence of discovering that I had never been to Galápagos. But now, if we accepted Richard Fane’s invitation our participation in the Beagle voyage would be founded on false premises: it would be my second visit, not my first. We decided we had to come clean. Lalla telephoned Victoria to confess all. She responded extremely generously, simply saying: ‘So much the better, you’ll be able to explain things to us.’ Her generosity continued the next time we met, which was at one of the cricket matches that she organized to honour the tradition of her late husband. That Anglophile American – he became, indeed, a naturalized British citizen – was so passionate about cricket that he carved out from a hillside in his Buckinghamshire estate a first-class pitch, where county teams would come to play against, among other teams, the Getty Eleven. After his death in 2003 Victoria continued the custom, and we were invited each summer to one of the Getty matches, in glorious sunshine with Getty Red Kites circling overhead. I call them that because Paul Getty was largely responsible for reintroducing these magnificent birds to our part of England, they having been driven extinct over most of the British Isles by gamekeepers. The cricket matches always included a sumptuous luncheon in a marquee for the guests, and we were honoured to be placed at Victoria’s table where she introduced us to Rupert and Candida Lycett-Green, who were to be our fellow passengers on the Beagle. I found an immediate bond with Candida as a lifelong admirer – that’s putting it mildly – of her father, the quintessentially English poet John Betjeman.
The two Galápagos voyages were both marvellous but rather different. The Celebrity Xpedition holds ninety passengers and we got the full experience of the luxury cruise liner, but without the gruesome casinos and ‘entertainments’ that draw passengers’ attention inwards to their floating hotel rather than out to port or starboard. The Beagle had just nine passengers, all guests of Victoria, and we ate round one big table, together with Valentina, our cheery and knowledgeable Ecuadorian guide.
Both boats followed the standard pattern of visits to Galápagos, anchoring off one island after another and ferrying passengers ashore in inflated Zodiacs, strong mariners handing us on and off the little craft using the ‘Galápagos Grip’. The Celebrity Xpedition had about a dozen Zodiacs, each bearing one of the excellently knowledgeable Ecuadorian naturalists who then supervised our walk over the island, never straying far from the beaten track. Their English, though fluent, was usually strongly accented, with one notable exception: a rakishly bearded Che Guevara lookalike who dumbfounded us with his decorous and perfectly modulated Oxford high-table English. He had apparently been educated by missionaries.1
The overwhelming impression I took away from Galápagos was of the tameness of the animals and the almost ‘Martian’ weirdness of the vegetation. There are regions of the world where, in the case of most members of the fauna, you feel privileged to catch a fleeting glimpse of one in the distance. In Galápagos the tourists have to be told that you are not allowed to touch the animals. It would be absurdly easy to do so. You have to take care not to tread on the sunbathing marine iguanas and the nesting boobies and albatrosses.
The Beagle, being a much smaller boat, was able to anchor off smaller islands, for example the uninhabited Daphne Major, site of Peter and Rosemary Grant’s epic, long-term study of evolution in the medium ground finch. Our landing on Daphne Major was a little perilous, and I wondered how the Grants and their colleagues and students managed to offload their supplies, for everything has to be taken with them on to this deserted islet, even water. The Beagle’s single Zodiac was always supervised by Valentina, a member of the Cruz family, which seemed almost to have populated the archipelago all on its own. At well-nigh every island, or so we remarked jokingly to one another, we were greeted by a different one of her brothers. Another of her brothers was the captain of the Beagle. His English, although not as good as Valentina’s, was probably better than he pretended. On a particularly exciting occasion I got his meaning from the Latin: ‘Mola mola!’, he exulted from the helm, ‘Mola mola!’ One of the most extraordinary fish in the sea, the sunfish, Mola mola, hung floating at the surface like a huge, vertically suspended disc, easily visible from the deck of the boat. Captain Cruz halted the Beagle, and in a frenzy Valentina and the rest of us seized our masks, snorkels and flippers and plunged into the sea. The sunfish didn’t stick around long, but it was wondrous to see it at close quarters before it vanished into its mysterious world, which was not ours.
There were many lovely people on the Celebrity Xpedition, including the Fanes themselves and their extended family of many talents, but because there were so many we didn’t get to know any of them really well. The Beagle trip with Victoria and her friends felt more intimate. Candida was unusual in that, where others would carry a camera, she carried a notebook and sat on a rock amid the scuttling Sally Lightfoot crabs recor
ding her thoughts, observations and impressions. I was charmed by this habit and regret that I didn’t follow it myself.
There is a particular poignancy in these recollections, for as I write this Candida has just died, of cancer. Each summer, she and Rupert have run the ironically named ‘Great International Croquet Match’ in their beautiful and wistfully English garden, hard by Uffington’s thirteenth-century church with its hexagonal tower, overlooked by the White Horse prancing over the chalk downs straight out of the Bronze Age. At the 2014 tournament, just a few weeks ago, Candida, knowing it would be her last, was a model of cheerful good-hostess bravery. Rest in peace, quizzical celebrant of England, an England that Charles Darwin might still recognize thanks in part to your father. Rest in peace, enigmatically sweet shipmate and fellow explorer of the blessed islands of Darwin’s youth.
WHOSO FINDETH A PUBLISHER FINDETH A GOOD THING
I HAVE been well served by my publishers – through nearly forty years, not one of my twelve books has ever been allowed to go out of print in English – and it is therefore a bit surprising to realize that I seem to have had so many of them: Oxford University Press, W. H. Freeman, Longman, Penguin, Weidenfeld, and Random House in Britain, and an equally long list of different publishers in America. There’s no single reason for this promiscuous infidelity. It began because of the opposite, loyalty: loyalty to a particular editor, Michael Rodgers, who changed employers – as is rather common in the publishing world – with disconcerting frequency.
Early books
In An Appetite for Wonder I told the story of my first meeting with Michael and his cautiously understated eagerness to publish The Selfish Gene: ‘I MUST HAVE THAT BOOK!’ he bellowed at me down the telephone after reading an early draft. He has now given his own account of the same episode in his memoir of a publishing career, Publishing and the Advancement of Science: From Selfish Genes to Galileo’s Finger. Michael’s book also quotes a speech I made at a 2006 dinner in London organized by Helena Cronin in collaboration with Oxford University Press to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of The Selfish Gene (see page 182). I’ll quote it in full because it helps to explain why my loyalty was to him more than to OUP:
Soon after The Selfish Gene came out, I gave a Plenary Lecture at a big international conference in Germany. The conference bookshop had ordered some copies of The Selfish Gene, but they sold out within minutes of my lecture. The bookshop manageress swiftly telephoned OUP in Oxford, to beg them to rush an additional order by airfreight to Germany. In those days OUP was a very different organization, and I am sorry to say this bookseller was given a polite but cold brush-off: she must send in a proper order in writing, and, depending on supplies in the warehouse, the books might be shipped some weeks later. In desperation, the bookseller approached me at the conference, and asked if I knew anyone at OUP who was more dynamic and less stuffy . . . I telephoned Michael in Oxford, and told him the whole story. I can still hear the thump with which Michael’s fist hit the desk, and I remember his exact words. ‘You’ve come to the right man! Leave this to me!’ Sure enough, well before the end of the conference, a large box of books arrived from Oxford.
That was, of course, the English edition of The Selfish Gene. Das egoistische Gen appeared a little later. I soon received a letter from a reader in Germany who said that the translation was so good, it was as though author and translator were ‘twin souls’. I of course looked up the name of the translator – Karin de Sousa Ferreira – and its surprisingly un-Germanic sound made it easy to remember. A little later, at his home university of Zurich, I met the distinguished primatologist Hans Kummer. At dinner I started to tell him the anecdote about my German translator. I had got no further than ‘twin souls’, without ever mentioning the name of the translator, when he spontaneously interrupted me, pointing his finger at me in a pistol-shooting gesture as he asked the question: ‘Karin de Sousa Ferreira?’ After two such splendidly independent testimonials, when the time came for The Blind Watchmaker to be published in German, I put in a strong request for the same translator, and I am delighted that my German twin soul with the Portuguese name graciously came out of retirement to render the book into Der blinde Uhrmacher.
I haven’t always been so lucky with my translations. One Spanish edition (I won’t say of which book) was so bad that three separate Spanish-speakers approached me to say it should be withdrawn. English idioms were translated word for word, in the same way as ‘He gave her a ring [telephone call]’, in an English novel, is said to have been translated into the Danish equivalent of ‘He gave her a ring [for her finger]’. That Danish story may be an urban legend, but it is true that, in my Spanish case, the phrase ‘with a vengeance’ (meaning ‘in a big way’) was translated as ‘con una venganza’ which, I am assured, means what it literally says and makes no sense of the idiom. That’s just one example among many. It’s one reason (again among many) why computer translation is so difficult. The translator needs not merely a lexicon of words but a look-up table of idiomatic phrases like ‘with a vengeance’, even a table of clichés like ‘at the end of the day’ (meaning ‘when all’s said and done’, yet another such cliché). Isn’t language fascinating? I’m glad to say the Spanish publishers took full responsibility and commissioned a whole new translation, which is now published.
The danger of relying on computers to perform human functions reminds me of a lovely story told me by my friend Felicity Bryan, reputed to be Oxford’s only literary agent. One of her clients wrote a novel whose hero was called David. At the last moment, when the book was finally edited and ready to print, the author had second thoughts about her lead character. He was more of a Kevin, she decided, than a David. So she set her computer to do a global search, replacing ‘David’ with ‘Kevin’ throughout. This worked well, until the action of the novel moved to a certain art gallery in Florence . . .
One more brief translation story. I was at a conference on evolution in Japan, listening on headphones to simultaneous translation. The lecturer was talking about early hominin evolution, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, archaic Homo sapiens, all that kind of thing. But what was this coming through the headphones? ‘Early evolution of Japanese.’ ‘Fossil history of Japanese.’ ‘Evolutionary history of Japa . . . HUMANS.’
Michael Rodgers moved to W. H. Freeman in 1979, and a couple of years later, when my second book, The Extended Phenotype, was ready for publication, I took it to him there. As I have already remarked, the publishing world is a fluid one, and when Michael moved yet again, this time to Longman, again I followed him with The Blind Watchmaker in 1986. A couple of stories about The Blind Watchmaker. Near the beginning of the book I recounted a dinner-table conversation with ‘a distinguished modern philosopher, a well-known atheist’. I said that I couldn’t imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859 and the publication of Origin of Species. The philosopher demurred. Citing Hume, he couldn’t see why living complexity needed any special explanation. I was dumbfounded and devoted substantial portions of the book to rebutting him, though never mentioning him by name. I’m not sure why I chose not to reveal his identity. It was, in fact, Sir Alfred ‘Freddie’ Ayer, Wykeham Professor of Logic and Fellow of New College, a formidably clever man of whom I was in awe. Many years after The Blind Watchmaker was published, he approached me to say he had just read it. He apologized (totally unnecessarily) for not having read it before, and said he was delighted to have inspired it – so he at least had identified himself. I asked him whether I had rendered our conversation correctly and he said, ‘Perfectly correctly.’
My second story about The Blind Watchmaker I tell for no better reason than that it’s quite funny. First, a little background. Many evolution-sceptics have been puzzled by an aspect of the perfection of animal camouflage. They reluctantly accept that bird eyes are sharp enough to put the finishing touches to a resemblance of intricate perfection, such as that of a stick insect to a stick, complete with buds and leaf scars. Or, another example, there are cat
erpillars that resemble a bird-dropping. But then, the sceptic says, how can you accept selection for the final detailed perfection of mimicry of a stick or a bird-dropping on the one hand, while also believing that the same kind of selection shaped the ancestors of those insects on their first tentative fumbling steps towards a resemblance? I quoted Stephen Jay Gould on the bird-dropping mimic: ‘Can there be any edge in looking 5 per cent like a turd?’ I answered the question in a way slightly different from Gould’s. The very same eyes are presented with prey under a great variety of seeing conditions: dim versus bright light, corner of the eye versus full frontal, far away versus close up. A minuscule resemblance to a bird-dropping might be enough to save a caterpillar’s life when seen from a distance or in twilight. But a strong resemblance would be necessary to save its life when seen close up and in strong daylight. And there is a continuous gradient from poor seeing conditions to good, which provides a smooth selection pressure for every degree of improvement in mimicry from crude to perfect. The same ‘gradient’ argument works for all complex adaptations – eyes, wings, all the chestnuts of creationist literature, and is of immense importance for the whole theory of evolution.
That’s the background to the story. Now, Stephen Gould’s name appears several times in The Blind Watchmaker and therefore also in the index. The index to a book, with its military-style backwards formatting, is a fine place to conceal a joke. It will not be noticed by many, but those who see it will share with the compiler a smile of secret complicity. The official history of New College, Oxford, 1379–1979, edited by my late colleagues John Buxton and Penry Williams, has an index compiled by a third colleague, the medieval historian Eric Christiansen (whose own memoirs of New College life will not be, and by all accounts should not be, published until after he and all his victims have died). Eric smuggled into the index of the college history some delightfully characteristic little jokes. Under ‘Fellows’, for example, we find ‘comforts of’, ‘drunkenness of’, ‘execution of’, ‘expulsions of’, ‘factions among’, ‘obscurity of’, ‘provenance of’ and, my favourite, ‘philistinism of’. Turn to the pages indicated under ‘philistinism of’ and you find no mention of the word itself, just accounts of three building projects which obviously offended Eric’s taste: two in the nineteenth century and an especially egregious one in the twentieth.
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 13