For years, his many friends and admirers on the dinosaur circuit had urged Mash to set down his lifetime’s experience in book form, as only he could. The first edition of How to Keep Dinosaurs was the result, and it predictably sold out quicker than the whipcrack of an Apatosaurus tail. Through the out-of-print wilderness years, well-thumbed bootleg copies became ever more prized possessions, jealously guarded in game bag or Range Rover glove pocket. The need for a second edition became pressing and I am delighted to have been instrumental, however indirectly, in helping to bring it about (‘Whoso findeth a publisher findeth a good thing’ – Proverbs 18: 22). The second edition has, of course, benefited from Mash’s tireless correspondence with dinosaur-owners the world over.
The book can be appreciated on many levels. It is by no means only an owner’s manual, though it is indispensably that. For all its sound practical advice, it could only have been written by a professional zoologist, drawing deeply on theory and scholarship. Many of the facts herein are accurate. The world of dinosaurs has always been richly provided with wonder and amazement, and Mash’s manual only adds to the mixture. As a theological aside, creationists (now excitingly rebranded as Intelligent Design Theorists) will find it an invaluable resource in their battle against the preposterous canard that humans and dinosaurs are separated by sixty-five million years of geological time.
As Robert Mash himself might warn, a dinosaur is for life (very long life in the case of some sauropods), not just for Christmas. The same could be said of his book. Nevertheless, it will make a delightful present for anyone, of any age, and for many Christmases to come.
* * *
* Robert Mash is a friend from graduate student days at Oxford. We were fellow members of the Maestro’s Mob, the Tinbergen research group. Years later he wrote a lovely book on How to Keep Dinosaurs. When it was republished (2003) in a second edition at my instigation, I wrote this foreword.
Athorism: let’s hope it’s a lasting vogue*
ATHORISM IS ENJOYING a certain vogue right now. Can there be a productive conversation between Valhallans and athorists? Naive literalists apart, sophisticated thoreologians long ago ceased believing in the material substance of Thor’s mighty hammer. But the spiritual essence of hammeriness remains a thunderingly enlightened revelation, and hammerological faith retains its special place in the eschatology of neo-Valhallism, while enjoying a productive conversation with the scientific theory of thunder in its non-overlapping magisterium. Militant athorists are their own worst enemy. Ignorant of the finer points of thoreology, they really should desist from their strident and intolerant strawmandering, and treat Thor-faith with the uniquely protected respect it has always received in the past. In any case, they are doomed to failure. People need Thor, and nothing will ever remove him from the culture. What are you going to put in his place?
AFTERWORD
This joke could run and run. Feminist thoreologians prefer to downplay the patriarchally hard phallic aspects of Thor’s hammer, liberation thoreologians find common cause with workers marching under the banner of the hammer and sickle, while for postmodern thoreologists, the hammer is a puissant significator of deconstruction. Continue to taste.
* * *
* The Washington Post used to have a regular feature called ‘On Faith’, moderated by Sally Quinn, to which I was a frequent contributor. This is the opening paragraph of a piece that appeared on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2007, in response to a question on the current vogue for atheism.
Dawkins’ Laws*
Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty
Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.
Dawkins’ Law of Divine Invulnerability
God cannot lose.
Lemma 1: When comprehension expands, gods contract – but then redefine themselves to restore the status quo.
Lemma 2: When things go right, God will be thanked. When things go wrong, he will be thanked that they are not worse.
Lemma 3: Belief in the afterlife can only be proved right, never wrong.
Lemma 4: The fury with which untenable beliefs are defended is inversely proportional to their defensibility.
Dawkins’ Law of Hell and Damnation
H ∝ 1/P
where H is the threatened temperature of hell fire and P is the perceived likelihood that it exists.
Or, in words: ‘The magnitude of a threatened punishment is inversely proportional to its plausibility.’
The following law, though probably older, is often attributed to me in various versions, and I am happy to formulate it here as:
The Law of Adversarial Debate
When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie halfway between them. One side can be simply wrong.
* * *
* This was my response to the question ‘What is your Law?’, posed by John Brockman in 2004 as his annual challenge sent around to the members of his online salon The Edge: https://www.edge.org/annual-question/whats-your-law.
VIII
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
FROM NEWTON’S ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ and before, science has always been a collaborative venture. While it would be very unDawkinsian panglossianism to deny that some of its practitioners have insufficiently acknowledged what their work owes to the contributions of others, many, many more epitomize that collegiality, cooperativeness of spirit and mutual respect which the first piece in this collection identified as among the chief ‘values of science’. These values, of course, enriched by personal attachment and moral sensibility, are those not of scientists alone but of civilized humanity. They are celebrated in this final brief section, which presents a small selection of personal reflections in memory and honour of others.
‘Memories of a maestro’ was originally delivered as the opening address to a conference gathered in memory of the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Niko Tinbergen. It speaks not only of professional regard but of the sense of belonging generated by participation in the shared endeavour of learning and exploration, the privilege attached to membership not simply of an elite institution but of a group of individuals as gifted in teaching as in their pursuit of science. It speaks, too, of the deeply felt obligation to continue this cascading of knowledge through future generations: ‘We…wanted people to pick up the torches that Niko had passed them, and run on with them towards the future.’
The next two pieces, ‘O my beloved father’ and ‘More than my uncle’, shine with pride in, and love for, family past and present. Where a less scrupulously honest son and nephew of left-liberal inclinations might have been tempted to downplay, gloss over or repudiate a cast-iron imperial heritage, Richard will have no truck with such weaselling, in either direction: ‘There was, of course, quite a bit that was bad about the British in Africa. But the good was very very good, and Bill was one of the best.’ These affectionate remembrances are typically lit by humour, as in his accounts of his Uncle Bill’s determined reading of the Riot Act (‘I imagine the text as sewn into the lining of his pith helmet’) and his father’s ‘Heath Robinson’ inventiveness on the family farm. And they resonate with pride as much in unashamed paternal and avuncular love as in any of his forebears’ (considerable) worldly achievements: ‘Air of command and military bearing be blowed. There are greater qualities to admire.’
Readers of this collection will, I hope, have come to appreciate the huge scope of Richard Dawkins’ preoccupations, passions and talents – as a scientist, a teacher, a polemicist, a humorist, above all as a writer. For the final piece in this volume, ‘Honouring Hitch’, I have chosen one that focuses this dazzling versatility to a single brilliant point. This address, given by Richard in presenting the award made in his name by the Atheist Alliance of America to the then mortally ill Christopher Hitchens, resounds with, as he says, ‘admiration, respect, and love’. It’s a curious but fitting irony that many of the tributes he pay
s to Hitchens could equally justly be paid to himself: ‘the leading intellect and scholar of our atheist/secular movement’; a ‘gently encouraging friend to the young, to the diffident’; capable equally of ‘the penetratingly logical’, ‘the cuttingly witty’ and ‘the courageously unconventional’. No wonder they were soul brothers.
Richard Dawkins will always have his critics – some sympathetic to his aims, some deeply hostile. But an honest reader of any stamp will, I think, find it hard to deny that ‘there was quite a bit that was bad about British writing in our times. But the good was very very good, and Richard Dawkins was one of the best.’
G.S.
Memories of a maestro*
WELCOME TO OXFORD. For many of you it is welcome back to Oxford. Perhaps even, for some of you, it would be nice to think that it might feel like welcome home to Oxford. And it is a great pleasure to welcome so many friends from the Netherlands.
Last week, when everything had been settled except final, last-minute arrangements, we heard that Lies Tinbergen had died. Obviously we would not have chosen such a time to have this meeting. I’m sure we’d all like to extend our deep sympathy to the family, many of whom, I’m happy to say, are present. We discussed what we should do and decided that, in the circumstances, there was nothing for it but to carry on. The members of the Tinbergen family that we were able to consult were fully in agreement. I think we all knew that Lies was an enormous support to Niko, but I think that very few of us really knew how much of a support she was to him, particularly during the dark times of depression.
I should say something about this memorial conference and what led up to it. People have their own ways of grieving. Lies’s way was to take literally Niko’s characteristically modest instruction that he wanted no funeral or memorial rites of any kind. There were those of us who were fully sympathetic to the desire for no religious observance, but who nevertheless felt the need for some kind of rite of passage for a man whom we had loved and respected for so many years. We suggested various kinds of secular observance. For instance, the fact that there was such musical talent in the Tinbergen family led some of us to suggest a memorial chamber concert with readings or eulogies in the intervals. Lies made it very clear, however, that she wanted nothing of the kind and that Niko would have felt the same.
So we did nothing for a while. Then, after some time had elapsed, we realized that a memorial conference would be sufficiently different from a funeral as not to count. Lies accepted this, and there came a time, during our planning of the conference, when she said that she hoped to attend the conference, although she later changed her mind about that, thinking, again with characteristic modesty and completely erroneously, that she would have been in the way.
It is an enormous pleasure to welcome so many old friends. It is a tribute to Niko, and the affection that his old pupils felt for him, that so many of you are here today, converging on Oxford from, in some cases, very far away. The list of people coming is a galaxy of old friends, some of whom may not have set eyes on one another for thirty years. Just reading the guest list was a moving experience for me.
We shall all of us have memories of Niko and of the group of his associates with whom we happen to be contemporary. My own begin when I was an undergraduate and he lectured to us, not at first on animal behaviour but on molluscs – for it was Alister Hardy’s quaint idea that all the lecturers should participate in the ‘Animal Kingdom’ course which is one of the sacred cows of Oxford zoology. I didn’t know, then, what a distinguished man Niko was. I think that if I had, I’d have been rather aghast at his being made to lecture on molluscs. It was bad enough that he gave up being a professor in Leiden to become, by Oxford’s snobbish custom, just plain ‘Mr Tinbergen’. I don’t remember much from those early mollusc lectures, but I do remember responding to his wonderful smile: friendly, kindly, avuncular as I thought then, although he must have been scarcely older than I am now.
I think I must have been imprinted on Niko and his intellectual system then, for I asked my college tutor if I could have tutorials with Niko. I don’t know how he managed to swing it, because I don’t think Niko gave undergraduate tutorials as a rule. I suspect that I may have been the last undergraduate to have had tutorials with him. Those tutorials had an enormous influence on me. Niko’s style as a tutor was unique. Instead of giving a reading list with some sort of comprehensive coverage of a topic, he would give a single, highly detailed piece of work, such as a DPhil thesis. My first one, I remember, was a monograph by A. C. Perdeck, who I am happy to say is here today. I was asked simply to write an essay on anything that occurred to me as a result of reading the thesis or monograph. In a sense it was Niko’s way of making the pupil feel like an equal – a colleague whose views on research were worth hearing, not just a student mugging up a topic. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I revelled in it. I wrote huge essays that took so long to read out that, what with Niko’s frequent interruptions, they were seldom finished by the end of the hour. He strode up and down the room while I read my essay, only occasionally coming to rest on whatever old packing case was serving him as a chair at the time, chain-rolling cigarettes and obviously giving me his whole attention in a way that, I’m sorry to say, I cannot claim to do for most of my pupils today.
As a result of these marvellous tutorials, I decided that I very much wanted to do a DPhil with Niko. And so I joined the ‘Maestro’s Mob’, and it was an experience never to be forgotten. I remember with particular affection the Friday evening seminars. Apart from Niko himself, the dominant figure at that time was Mike Cullen. Niko obstinately refused to let sloppy language pass, and proceedings could be stalled for an indefinite period if the speaker was not able to define his terms with sufficient rigour. These were arguments in which everybody became engaged, eager to make a contribution. If, as a result, a seminar wasn’t finished at the end of the two hours, it simply resumed the following week, no matter what might have been previously planned.
I suppose it may have been just the naivety of youth, but I used to look forward to those seminars with a sort of warm glow for the whole week. We felt ourselves members of a privileged elite, an Athens of ethology. Others, who belonged to different cohorts, different vintages, have talked in such similar terms that I believe that this feeling was a general aspect of what Niko did for his young associates.
In a way, what Niko stood for on those Friday evenings was a kind of ultra-rigorous, logical commonsense. Put like that, it may not sound like much; it may seem even obvious. But I have since learned that rigorous commonsense is by no means obvious to much of the world. Indeed, commonsense sometimes requires ceaseless vigilance in its defence.
In the world of ethology at large, Niko stood for breadth of vision. He not only formulated the ‘four questions’ view of biology, he also assiduously championed any one of the four that he felt was being neglected. Since he is now associated in people’s minds with field studies of the functional significance of behaviour, it is worth recalling how much of his career was given over to, for instance, the study of motivation. And, for what it is worth, my own dominant recollection of his undergraduate lectures on animal behaviour was of his ruthlessly mechanistic attitude to animal behaviour and the machinery that underlay it. I was particularly taken with two phrases of his – ‘behaviour machinery’ and ‘equipment for survival’. When I came to write my own first book, I combined them into the brief phrase ‘survival machine’.
In planning this conference, we obviously decided to concentrate on fields that Niko had been pre-eminent in, but we didn’t want the talks to be only retrospective. Of course we wanted to spend some time looking back at Niko’s achievements, but we also wanted people to pick up the torches that Niko had passed them, and run on with them towards the future.
Torch-running behaviour, in new and exciting directions, bulks so large in the ethograms of Niko’s students and associates that planning the programme was a major headache. ‘How on earth’, we
asked ourselves, ‘can we possibly leave out so-and-so? On the other hand, we have space for only six talks.’ We could have limited ourselves to Niko’s own pupils – his scientific children, but this would have been to devalue his enormous influence via grandpupils and others. We could have concentrated on people and major areas not covered in the Festschrift volume edited by Gerard Baerends, Colin Beer and Aubrey Manning, but that too would have been a pity. In the end, it seemed almost not to matter which half a dozen of Niko’s intellectual descendants stood up to represent the rest of us. And perhaps that is the true measure of his greatness.
* * *
* Niko Tinbergen, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, had been lured to Oxford from his native Holland in 1949. He accepted the invitation partly (but only partly, according to Hans Kruuk’s highly perceptive and honest biography) because he saw Oxford as a springboard from which to take Dutch and German ethology to the English-speaking world. The move involved considerable personal sacrifice. He voluntarily took a substantial cut in salary and a demotion from full professor at Leiden to ‘demonstrator’, the lowest rank in Oxford’s academic hierarchy; his children had to take a crash course in English to cope with (expensive) new schools; and he never found the Oxford college system congenial. British academic biology was lucky to get him. I arrived in his research group in 1962, perhaps a little too late to benefit fully from his heyday, but I got plenty of it at second hand from the large and flourishing group that he founded and influenced, above all Mike Cullen, to whom I paid tribute in An Appetite for Wonder. A year after Niko died, Marian Stamp Dawkins, Tim Halliday and I organized a memorial conference in Oxford. What follows is my opening speech, which served as the introduction to the proceedings of the conference which we edited as a book, The Tinbergen Legacy.
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