Brief Candle in the Dark

by Richard Dawkins

  Well, I could not but deliver on my earlier promise. We went to India – and then, when we got there, it turned out that, exactly as I had guessed from the outset, the Dalai Lama was much too busy to see us. The full story then emerged. His office had said, ‘Well, if you were to turn up on such and such a day, he might possibly be able to see you, but we can’t guarantee it.’ I believe that Molly, with her Pollyannitus ear and conviction that there’s no obstacle she can’t get round, literally hears ‘Well, maybe’ as ‘Yes, definitely.’ I forgave her: you couldn’t fail to forgive somebody so winsomely charming, and we did end up filming some amazing scenes in India while we were there.

  Molly and I share an embarrassing secret (embarrassing for me, not her), and I hereby confess it. Again it was Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life, and we were filming on the top of Beachy Head on the south coast of England. Its dizzying 500-foot chalk cliffs have made it a notorious suicide spot, and there are little low crosses, only knee high, lining the cliff path to commemorate the poor agonized souls who had launched despairingly into the void. I was to take a poignant walk along the path, while the camera focused in close-up on my feet as they passed the little crosses, each in their sad turn. I couldn’t understand why my feet felt so uncomfortable, but I soldiered on while we shot several takes. When we finally had enough footage, I was able to sit down on the grass and take my shoes off – blessed relief. Molly came and sat with me to plan the next scene. It was then that we noticed why my feet had been so uncomfortable. I had somehow managed to put my left and right shoes on the wrong feet. Molly giggled delightedly and we agreed not to tell Russell and the rest of the crew. But my faux pas is preserved for posterity in close-up. I suppose I should be thankful my pas wasn’t even more faux, given our proximity to the cliff edge.

  I’m proud of all the films I made with Russell and his crew. Between Root of All Evil? (the first one) and Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (the most recent) we did Enemies of Reason (about astrology, homoeopathy, dowsing, angels and other superstitious nonsense excluding religion), The Genius of Charles Darwin and Faith Schools Menace. The last of these included a memorable trip to Belfast to examine the educational roots of the tribal wars there and we took in an Orange parade among other disquieting sights including the huge, starkly realistic murals depicting masked men with guns.

  Enemies of Reason contained a telling sequence on dowsing, coordinated by the London University psychologist Dr Chris French. Professional and amateur water diviners converged from far and wide to show their prowess, confident in their ability, proved to their own satisfaction over years. Alas, they had never before been subjected to a double-blind trial. Inside a big tent, Chris French laid out a rectangular array of buckets. Some of the buckets contained water, some contained sand. In a preliminary trial, the lids were removed from the buckets and the dowsers all had no difficulty: their divining rods, hazel twigs or pieces of bent wire all obediently twitched when they could see water, and didn’t when they couldn’t. But then came the real test, with lids on the buckets. Because it was a double-blind trial, neither the dowser nor Dr French (who was keeping score) knew which buckets contained water. The accomplice who set them up did so with the tent sealed, and he then disappeared so that he couldn’t give the game away by any subtle cues. Under these double-blind conditions, not a single one of the dowsers scored above chance level. They were flabbergasted, desperately – in one case tearfully – disappointed, and obviously sincere. Such failure had never happened to them before. But they had never done a double-blind trial before.

  I don’t know who invented the double-blind trial, but it is a brilliantly effective yet simple technique. There’s a telling story in John Diamond’s courageous book Snake Oil, written when he was dying of cancer and beset by well-meaning quacks. The sceptical investigator Ray Hyman once did a double-blind trial of an ‘alternative’ diagnostic technique called applied kinesiology. As it happens, I have experienced kinesiology myself. I’d ricked my neck and was in pain. It was the weekend and I couldn’t go to my normal doctor, so I decided to be open-minded and try an ‘alternative’ practitioner. Before beginning her manipulation she did a diagnostic test which consisted of pushing against my arm to test my strength while I was lying on my back – kinesiology. She demonstrated to her own satisfaction that my arm was stronger when I had a small vial of Vitamin C resting on my chest. The vial was sealed, there was no way for the vitamin to enter my body, so it was obvious that she was really – though probably subconsciously – pressing harder against my arm when the vial was not there than when it was. When I expressed my scepticism she gushed her enthusiasm: ‘Yes, C is a marvellous vitamin, isn’t it?’

  Self-deception of that kind is precisely what the double-blind technique was invented to eliminate. In testing the efficacy of any medicine, not only must it be compared with a placebo control, it is vitally important that neither the patient, nor the experimenter, nor the nurse administering the dose should know which is experimental, which control. Ray Hyman did a double-blind trial of a slightly less far-fetched claim of kinesiology than used by my quack: that a drop of fructose placed on the tongue would strengthen a patient’s arm, when compared with a drop of glucose. Under double-blind conditions there was no difference in strength. Whereat the chief kinesiologist delivered himself of this immortally indignant remark:

  ‘You see? That is why we never do double-blind testing any more. It never works!’

  In addition to the superseding of costly film stock by digital recording, other things have changed since my early films with Jeremy Taylor. In the 1980s, film crews were heavily unionized. There were statutory times for tea breaks, lunch breaks and the easeful ‘It’s a wrap’ moment at the end of a day’s work. If Jeremy wanted his camera crews to go on a bit late in the evening, because the filming was going so well and the light was so good, he had to ask them as a special favour. By the 2000s things had changed. There somehow seemed to be a greater sense of personal involvement in the film by the entire crew, and everybody was happy to go on as long as necessary. I suspect, too, that there was a certain amount of overmanning in the 1980s. The crews back then consisted of not only a cameraman, sound man and production assistant, but also an assistant cameraman (or ‘focus puller’) and at least one ‘sparks’ (electrician) to deal with the lights. I recall going up to Leeds around then for an ITV television show produced by Duncan Dallas, who, incidentally and irrelevantly, had been my exact contemporary at Balliol College, Oxford, though we hardly knew each other. Duncan and I were alone in the studio (the crew had gone off for tea) and there was a large box obstructing the space where we were trying to work. Thinking I was being helpful, I was just about to pick it up when Duncan shouted in a panic: ‘Don’t touch it!’ I recoiled as if he’d said it was a bomb, and he explained. Moving boxes was strictly the job of the scene-shifters and he couldn’t answer for the consequences if I were seen picking it up. Duncan hesitated for a moment, looked nervously over his shoulder and then whispered: ‘Dammit, let’s risk it.’ And we hastily moved the box before the crew came back from their tea break.1

  Manchester television conference

  In November 2006 I was invited to give a guest lecture in Manchester to a conference of science documentary makers. The title they gave me was ‘Can television rescue science in an age of unreason?’ My lecture was illustrated with clips from recent television documentaries, put together with the help of Simon Berthon, who also advised on the content of the lecture. I began by apologizing for presuming to lecture professionals on how to do their job: my only excuse was that I had been invited to do so. I structured my lecture around a list of ten difficult choices – or ten sliding scales along which a film might be situated: choices that face anyone who makes a science documentary.

  The first of the ten was the question of ‘dumbing down’.

  The television producer rightly lives in dread of the remote control, knowing that, within any one second of his precious broadcast,
literally thousands of viewers may be tempted to flip idly to another channel. There is a powerful temptation to pile on the ‘fun’, to lace it with gimmicks (speeding up laboratory procedures like Charlie Chaplin, for example), to shrink the science to soundbites whose real scientific nourishment is about as empty as a bucket of popcorn.

  I sympathized with the need to chase ratings, but made an unfashionable plea for elitism – elitism as a mark of respect for the audience, rather than the patronizing, indeed insulting assumption that they need science to be dumbed down to render it accessible. The worst example of this patronizing attitude that I ever came across was expressed by a participant in another conference on public understanding of science. He suggested that dumbing down might be necessary to bring ‘minorities and women’ to science. Seriously, that is what he said, and no doubt it brought a warm, cosy glow to his condescending little liberal breast. In my Manchester lecture I said:

  Elitism has become a dirty word, and it is a pity. Elitism is reprehensible only when it is snobbish and exclusive. The best sort of elitism tries to expand the élite by encouraging more and more people to join it . . . Science is inherently interesting, and the interest will shine through without the need for soundbites, gimmicks or dumbing down.

  Another of my ten difficult choices concerned the perceived need to provide ‘balance’, something that especially afflicts the BBC because of its charter. I quoted a favourite maxim, which I think I first heard from Alan Grafen: ‘When two opposing points of view are advocated with equal vigour, the truth doesn’t necessarily lie halfway between. It’s possible for one side to be simply wrong.’

  The error shows itself in extreme form in the tendency for broadcasters to champion mavericks, who have nothing going for them except that they buck the orthodox trend. The most egregious example I know was a televised hagiography of a medical researcher who claimed that the triple MMR vaccine caused autism. His evidence was thin and is widely discounted within the medical profession. Yet his story unfortunately had what journalists call legs, giving full vent to the facile trope of the virile young rebel, played by a handsome and personable actor, fighting the stuffy old guard.

  ‘Terry the pterodactyl’ was another of my headings. The wonderful computer graphics techniques first given prominence by Jurassic Park were soon exploited by documentary makers. But instead of letting the wonders of the reconstructions speak for themselves, the documentaries succumbed to the same temptation as spoiled Jurassic Park itself: the perceived need to provide human interest. Not content with a computer-animated discussion of pterodactyls and their probable lifestyle, we are treated to a sob story about a particular, individually named pterodactyl (I don’t think he was actually called Terry, but the point stands) getting lost and trying to find his family, or some such sentimental guff. Personified drama is not only superfluous: it perniciously blurs the distinction between speculation and real evidence:

  Speculation about the habits and social life of pterosaurs or sabretooths or australopithecines is absolutely fine. But it needs to be presented as speculation. Sabretooths might have had a social and sex life similar to lions. Or similar to tigers. The trouble with telling stories about individual sabretooths called Half Tooth and The Brothers, is that it forces you to plump for one theory, say the lion theory, rather than another.

  I quoted another film to illustrate the same tendency to let dramatic ‘human interest’ override scientific truth. The BBC conceived the interesting idea of tracing the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA of three particular West Indian individuals back to their roots in Africa or Europe. The point about mitochondria and Y-chromosomes is that, unlike all other chromosomes, they are not subject to the comprehensive scrambling of genetic history that is caused by chromosomal crossing-over in the rest of the genome. You could travel to any particular moment in history, say 14 January 30,000 BC, and could theoretically locate the one individual female from whom your mitochondrial DNA comes. Your mitochondria come from only her and literally nobody else at that time except one and only one of her daughters (granddaughters etc.), plus her mother, her maternal grandmother etc. If you are male, your Y-chromosome comes from only one male alive in 30,000 BC (plus his father, paternal grandfather etc., and only one of his sons, grandsons etc.). All your other DNA comes from thousands of individuals, probably scattered all over the world.

  So, great idea to take three people and trace the origins of the only two unmixed portions of their genomes, their mitochondria and Y-chromosomes. But the producers were not content with the scientific fascination of this quest. No, they had to ham it up. And in doing so they sadly misled those people into baseless sentimentality when they transported them back to their ‘homeland’.

  When Mark, later given the tribal name Kaigama, visited the Kanuri tribe in Niger, he believed he was ‘returning’ to the land of ‘his people’. Beaula was welcomed as a long-lost daughter by eight women of the Bubi tribe on an island off the coast of Guinea, whose mitochondria matched hers. Beaula said, ‘It was like blood touching blood . . . It was like family . . . I was just crying, my eyes were just filled with tears, my heart was pounding . . .’

  She should never have been deceived into thinking this. All that she, or Mark, were really visiting – at least as far as they were given any reason to suppose – was individuals who shared their mitochondria. As a matter of fact, Mark had already been told that his Y-chromosome came from Europe (which upset him and he was later palpably relieved to discover respectable African roots for his mitochondria!).

  All the rest of their genes came from a wide variety of places, probably throughout the world.

  A personal anecdote about Y-chromosomes at this point. In 2013, I was delighted to receive an email from James Dawkins, a young historian doing a PhD at University College, London, whose father’s family came from Jamaica. His doctoral thesis is about the estates of a particular family of landed gentry, in England and Jamaica. The family concerned is the Dawkins family, who were sugar planters in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, I’m sorry to say, slave owners. My regrettable family history means that Dawkins is a common family name in Jamaica, not just because of droit de seigneur but because the family gave its name to various places in ‘our’ region of Jamaica. My six-greats-uncle James Dawkins (1696–1766) actually had the nickname ‘Jamaica Dawkins’, as I learned from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

  I have not observed (said he) that men of very large fortunes enjoy any thing extraordinary that makes happiness. What has the Duke of Bedford? What has the Duke of Devonshire? The only great instance that I have ever known of the enjoyment of wealth was that of Jamaica Dawkins, who, going to visit Palmyra, and hearing that the way was infested by robbers, hired a troop of Turkish horse to guard him.

  Uncle James’s family wealth was squandered long ago on futile lawsuits by the paranoid Colonel William Dawkins (1825–1914), who eventually died in penurious bankruptcy, and the once substantial family estates are now reduced to a small working farm in Oxfordshire. The modern James Dawkins has come several times to stay there as a welcome guest of my sister’s family, while researching old tin boxes filled with dusty documents in my mother’s attic. We were all hopeful that he might turn out to be a long-lost cousin, and the obvious way to find out was to look at our Y-chromosomes. The Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes, author of The Seven Daughters of Eve,1 kindly agreed to do the analysis, and both James and I sent cheek swabs to his company, Oxford Ancestors. When my result arrived, I wrote as a biologist to James as a historian, telling him what to look for in his.

  We each have a Y-chromosome which is nearly identical to our father and brothers. But, as the generations go by, occasional mutations arise. So, although your Y-chromosome is nearly identical to your paternal grandfather’s, there is a slightly greater chance of a difference than in the case of your father. If we are both descended, in the paternal line from a sixteenth century Dawkins in Jamaica, our Y-chromosomes will be nearly, but not
quite, identical . . .

  It’s logically necessary that, if you go back sufficiently far, every human Y-chromosome in the world is descended from one ancestor, who is whimsically named Y-Chromosome Adam. He almost certainly lived in Africa, probably between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. If you look at all the Y-chromosomes in the world, they are all descended from Y-Adam, but because of geographical separation and migrations etc., they can be classified into a dozen or so major ‘clans’. Each of these clans can be traced to a hypothetical ancestor, a particular man who lived in a particular place. Bryan Sykes has given them all fanciful names. For example my Y-chromosome is derived from Oisin who lived in West Eurasia. That would be true of most Englishmen, and doesn’t mean we are close cousins. However, if it should turn out that YOUR Y-chromosome is also descended from Oisin, that would be extremely interesting. Of course it might only mean that it came from a west European. But then the coincidence of surnames kicks in, and it would mean it would be worthwhile looking in more detail to see if our Y-chromosomes are CLOSER than any two west European Y-chromosomes. If, on the other hand, your Y-chromosome came from one of the three African progenitors coloured red on the rather pretty tree diagram, that would mean there’s no point in our pursuing genetic cousinship any further. Which would be a pity!

  When James’s results came in, it turned out that we are not cousins descended from the same Dawkins ancestor. A pity indeed. James’s Y-chromosome is derived not from the male tagged Oisin by Bryan Sykes, but from Eshu, who lived in Africa.

  I’ve reproduced in the picture section Bryan’s pedigree of all the human Y-chromosomes. James’s and my faces are superimposed alongside our respective ancestors, (African) ‘Eshu’ and (west European) ‘Oisin’, the names given them by Bryan Sykes. You can see that our cousinship is actually rather distant. Well, strictly speaking, what you can see is only that our Y-cousinship is not close. We could share a more recent ancestor down a female line. But it does mean that our shared surname has no direct genetic significance of the kind that J. B. S. Haldane was referring to when he said ‘I was born with a historically labelled Y-chromosome’ – meaning an ancient surname. It’s an interesting thought that aristocratic and royal families, who can trace their male lines back over centuries, are now in a position to question the legitimacy of each link in the chain, simply by looking at the Y-chromosomes of their alleged cousins in the male line. Will courts of law soon be asked, by long-forgotten distant cousins, to examine DNA challenges by pretenders to thrones or ducal houses?