Darwin's Watch

by Terry Pratchett

  The burgeoning middle class didn't, by and large, aspire to these arcane practices. They wanted technical and scientific information, not to potter about with theories, however important and romantic. They didn't want classical anything, certainly not the classics. The universities proper were still requiring a classical education of all aspiring students, and even in the 1970s they continued to require competence in a foreign language from science entrants (as evidence, presumably, of some culture - they never required science or mathematics from arts or classics entrants). The workmen and the artisans' guilds cooperated to produce the apprenticeship system, and this was in many ways the model for their own educational organisations.

  These, notably the WEA, provided exactly what was wanted, guided and monitored by the artisans' guilds and by the elected council representatives who helped oversee their relations with local industry,

  especially apprenticeship schemes. `City and Guilds' examinations, granting certificates and diplomas, were the educational currency of these self-organised educational systems, and they continued until the 1960s. They were the labels that qualified erstwhile labourers as artisans, worthy of respect by their peers.

  This pulling yourself up by your bootstraps into respectable citizenship contrasts with the attitude to elected local councilmen by the universities that these organisations matured into. Like the ancient universities, new ones like Birmingham and Manchester rewarded local elected dignitaries, mayors, and councillors with honorary degrees. These empty titles, contrasting both with the earned certificates of the artisans and with the honorary degrees given to eminent scholars in recognition and respect, ensured a political allegiance - and devalued academia in general. Unfortunately, the profusion of such young universities in late twentieth-century England has meant that non-technical, even non-scientific subjects have again become fashionable, to the exclusion of that artisan education which was so healthy in late Victorian times. The devaluation of academic degrees of all kinds has continued apace, but at the same time the alternative and more worthy routes to self-advancement have atrophied.

  Does this matter?

  Indeed it does. Perhaps Owen Harry, who had himself risen from a poor Welsh beginning near Cardiffs Tiger Bay to become a very young chief technician in Jack's zoology dept at Birmingham University, and later became a senior lecturer at Belfast University, put this best when he described its main negative consequence as `a lack of sergeants'.

  There is a story about officer training and examination in the British Army in the 1950s. One of the most important questions was 'How do you dig a trench?'. The correct answer was `I say "Sergeant, dig me a trench!"' Sergeants are people who organise the doing. They are not experts in what to do, or when: that's the prerogative of officers, who theoretically constitute the brains of the organisation. Officers decide what has to be done, but don't know how to do it. Sergeants don't actually do things, either, except occasionally when they have to. Their role is to organise squads of ignorant men, often incompetent, but well trained to obey orders, so that they cooperate effectively. Sergeants are the layer that makes cooperation effective: they know how to get things done. Privates know how to do what they're told, and are trained not to do anything else.

  We didn't say efficient; it's a common mistake to see efficiency as something to be striven for. Efficiency is a concept borrowed from engineering and physics, a measure of how much you get out for how much you put in. Sergeants are in some respects the least efficient way of getting things done; they have a tendency towards repetition and sarcasm, confident that a few of their recruits will graduate from basic training with some degree of competence. But sergeants are very effective, and the system they are part of is very robust.

  Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Wells, all came up through a system that was very robust in this way. All of them, different as they were, knew that writing books was a prime way of affecting the society around you. There was no television, no films, and only a fraction of people went to the theatre or the opera ... mostly to music hall and pantomimes around Christmas. Dickens, Kingsley, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy made people - lots of people - think new thoughts and lead new lives. The working men's clubs and their links with the public libraries brought reading skills to a higher level than ever before.

  So this audience was ripe for persuasive texts that could take them out of simple biblical knowledge into new theologies, even into atheism. Huxley, `Darwin's Bulldog', promoted Darwinism as the

  antithesis of a God-made world. From the aspiring middle class of Victoriana grew our modern secular age, with God relegated to the plaything of a few of the less modern clergy. Modern clergy don't believe in a twelve-foot Englishman up there in the sky, with Heaven as an eternal Buckingham Palace garden party. Particularly from those French philosophers who continued sophisticated theological criticism in lineages derived from Voltaire, our clerics learned to do without that strong Victorian style of Christianity. That form of Anglicanism, confident that God really was looking after the English, didn't need to embarrass itself with overt prayers. The rituals would suffice (provided they weren't noisy like the Welsh, or showy like the Catholics).

  We have lost strong simple religion, we have lost academic excellence, we have gained a secular society that maintains the heterogeneity that made it so robust in Victorian times and later. However, we are now pursuing policies, particularly in education, that fail to provide society with all those able people who built the Victorian and Edwardian edifices, both material and theoretical.

  There are routes away from this pessimism. In The Science of Discworld 2 we referred to humans as Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. Our overall message was that humans need to make stories to motivate themselves, to identify goals, and to distinguish good from evil.

  Here we go a step further.

  Technological and Civilised Man, we believe, must become Polypan multinarrans,[1] to extend the metaphor rather further. Human beings must become ever more diverse, valuing and enjoying each other's differences rather than fearing them or suppressing them. And mere explanation is not enough. To gain understanding, a useful working philosophy as appropriate for action as for judgement and

  [1] Sorry, it's one of those horrible Graeco-Latin hybrids. But, like `television', it's comprehensible.

  decision, an explanation is only rarely good enough. People find simple explanations satisfying because they enable thin causal chains of the kind we build for our own personal memories and causalities. But the real world, even the world of other people and their likes, dislikes, and prejudices - sometimes so rigidly held that our own lives and those of our loved ones don't matter to them - doesn't work like that.

  We owe it to ourselves, and to those for whom we are responsible and those who respect us, to develop multi-causal understanding. We can do that, as suggested here, by simultaneously encompassing several explanations of each puzzle, explanations that disagree productively with each other. Multinarrans: many stories. So one person, even a Newton or a Shakespeare or a Darwin, will not really be enough, despite the story we have just told you. Our fictional Darwin is a symbol for an endless stream of Darwins, challenging orthodoxy and being right, a glorious network of innovative thinkers and radicals. People who try to keep ancient cultures alive by blowing up the competition achieve nothing, except widespread contempt for their objectives. They doom their own enterprise by their methods, and they betray a terrible lack of confidence that what matters to them can survive without coercion and violence.

  Back to sergeants, and the way things are really done: `Sergeant, dig a trench.' This is how Polypan multinarrans gets things done. How many people are needed to understand a jet airliner? To build one? Recursion in technology really is like biological evolution, it really does expand the phase space. It expands it so much that most of us have virtually no understanding of how the world we live in works. In fact, it is essential that we don't, because there would be too much for anyone to unders
tand.

  But we do need to understand that this is what the world is like. Otherwise we don't just lose the sergeants: we lose the ability to build aircraft that fly, dishwashers that clean, cars that don't pollute (as much). We stop being able to cure (some of) the sick, to feed (most

  of) the planet, and to house, clothe, and wash a burgeoning humanity.

  Our world is changing, and it's changing very fast, and we ourselves are the inescapable agents of that change. If we stagnate, like our fictional Victoriana, we die. Staying where we are is not an option. Static resources cannot continue to support us.

  We make our world work by introducing new, undreamt-of rules and possibilities, by considering alternatives and making decisions, which feel like `free will', and work that way, even if they are `really' deterministic. We build on the present to create a bigger future. Science standing on technology, and technology standing on science, provide a successful ladder that leads to extelligence.

  Is it, perhaps, the only one?

  The past was another country, but the future is an alien world.

  And yet ...

  The most remarkable thing about the universe, as Einstein once said, is that it is comprehensible. Not in every aspect, but in enough to make us feel at home in it. It makes sense - almost as much as a Discworld story. Which is amazing because facts don't have to make sense: only well-crafted fiction has to obey such rigid rules.

  Part of this comprehensibility can be explained. We evolved in the universe, and we evolved to survive in it. Being able to tell ourselves `what if stories about it - to understand it - has survival value. We have been selected, by nature, to tell such stories.

  What is less easy to explain is why the universe can be represented by human stories at all. But then, if it wasn't, we wouldn't be telling them, would we?

  Which brings us back to Charles Darwin, architect of our own present, which was his future, and would surely seem alien to any Victorian. In Chapter 18 we left him sitting on an `entangled bank', watching birds and insects, and musing on the nature of life. The final paragraph of The Origin, which began with gentle musings about entangled banks, now works its way to its revolutionary conclusion:

  From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

  TWENTY-FIVE,

  THE ENTANGLED BANK

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT IN THE museum's Central Hall when the wizards appeared. There were a few lights on; just enough to see the skeletons.

  `Is this a temple of some kind?' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, patting his pockets for his tobacco pouch and a packet of Wizlas. `One of the weirder ones, perhaps?'

  +++ Indeed +++ boomed the voice of Hex from the middle air.

  +++ In all the universes of the The Ology, it was the Temple of the Ascent of Man. Here, it is not +++

  `Very impressive,' muttered the Dean. `But why don't we just show him the big snowball? He'd be pretty pleased to know it was because of him humans got away.'

  `We've scared the poor chap enough, that's why!' snapped Ridcully. `He'll understand this. Hex says they started building when Darwin was alive. Stuffed animals, bones ... it's the kind of thing he knows. Now stand back and give the chap some air, will you?'

  They stepped away from the chair on which Charles Darwin had been transported, wreathed in the blue light. Ridcully snapped his fingers.

  Darwin opened his eyes, and groaned.

  `It never ends!'

  `No, we're sending you back, sir,' said Ridcully. `That is, you'll soon wake up. But we thought there is something you should see first.'

  `I've seen enough!'

  `Not quite enough. Lights, gentlemen, please,' said Ridcully, straightening up.

  Light is the easiest magic to do. A glow rose in the hall.

  `The Museum of Natural History, Mr Darwin,' said Ridcully, standing back. `It opened after your death at a venerable age. It's your future. I believe there is a statue to you here somewhere. Place of honour, no doubt. Please listen. I would like you to know that because of you, humanity turned out to be fit enough to survive.'

  Darwin stared around at the hall, and then looked askance at the wizards.

  `The phrase "survival of the fittest" was not-' he began.

  `Survival of the luckiest in this case, I fear,' said Ridcully. `You are familiar with the idea of natural catastrophes throughout history, Mr Darwin?'

  `Indeed! One only has to examine-'

  `But you will not have known that they wiped intelligent life from the face of the globe,' said Ridcully, sombrely. `Sit down again, sir ...'

  They told him about the crab-like civilisation, and the octopus-like civilisation and the lizard-like civilisation. They told him about the snowball. [1]

  Darwin, Ponder thought, bore up well. He didn't scream or try to run away. What he did do was, in a way, worse: he asked questions, in a slow, solemn voice, and then asked more questions.

  Strangely, he kept away from ones like `how do you know this?' and `how can you be so sure?'. He looked like a man anxious to avoid certain answers.

  For his part, Mustrum Ridcully very nearly told the whole truth on several occasions.

  At last Darwin said, `I think I see,' in a tone of finality.

  `I'm sorry we had to-' Ridcully began, but Darwin held up a hand.

  [1] See The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld 2

  'I do know the truth of all this,' he said.

  `You do?' said Ridcully. `Really?'

  `Indeed, a few years ago there was a rather popular novel published. A Christmas Carol. Did you read it?'

  Ponder looked down at the hitherto blank piece of paper on his clipboard. Hex had been told to be quiet; Charles Darwin was probably not in the right frame of mind for booming voices from the sky. But Hex was resourceful.

  `By Charles Dickens?' said Ponder, trying not to look as though he was reading the writing that had suddenly filled the page. `The story of the redemption of a misanthrope via ghostly intervention?'

  `Quite so,' said Darwin, still speaking in the careful, wooden voice. `It is clear to me that something similar is happening to me. You are not ghosts, of course, but aspects of my own mind. I was resting on a bank near my home. I had been wrestling at length with some of the perturbing implications of my work. It was a warm day. I fell asleep, and you, and that ... god ... and all this, are a kind of .. . pantomime in the theatre of my brain as my thinking resolves itself.'

  The wizards looked at one another. The Dean shrugged.

  Ridcully grinned. `Hold on to that thought, sir.'

  `And I feel sure that when I awake I will have reached a resolve,' said Darwin, a man firmly nailing his thoughts in order. `And, I fervently trust I will have forgotten the means by which I did so. I certainly would not wish to recall the wheeled elephant. Or the poor crabs. And as for the dirigible whale ...'

  `You want to forget?' said Ridcully.

  `Oh, yes!'

  `Since that is your clear request, I have no doubt it will be the case,' said Ridcully, glancing questioningly at Ponder. Ponder glanced at the clipboard and nodded. It was a direct request, after all. Ridcully was, Ponder noted, quite clever under all that shouting.

  Apparently relieved at this, Darwin looked around the hall again.

  "`I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls", indeed,' he said.

  The words `Reference to a popular song written by Michael W. Balfe, manager of the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1841' floated across Ponder's clipboard.

  `I don't recognise some of these very impressive skeletons,' Darwin went on. `But that is Robert Owen's Diplodocus carnegii, c
learly ...' He turned sharply.

  `Humanity survives, you say?' he said. `It rode out to the stars on tamed comets?'

  `Something like that, Mr Darwin,' said Ridcully. `And it flourishes?'

  `We don't know. But it survives better that it would under a mile of ice, I suspect.'

  `It has a chance to survive,' said Darwin.

  `Exactly.'

  `Even so ... to trust your future to some frail craft speeding through the unknown void, prey to unthinkable dangers ...'

  `That was what the dinosaurs did,' said Ridcully. `And the crabs. And all the rest of them.'

  `I beg your pardon?'

  `I meant that this world is a pretty frail craft, if you take the long view.'

  `Ha. Nevertheless, some vestige of life surely survives every catastrophe,' said Darwin, as if following a train of thought. `Deep under the sea, perhaps. In seeds and spores ...'

  `And is that how it should be?' said Ridcully. `New thinkin' creatures arisin' and being forever smashed down? If evolution didn't stop at the edge of the sea, why should it stop at the edge of the air? The beach was once an unknown void. Surely the evidence that

  mankind has risen thus far may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future?'

  Ponder looked down at his clipboard. Hex had written: he is quoting Darwin.

  `An interesting thought, sir,' said Darwin, and managed a smile. `And now, I think, I really should like to awaken.'

  Ridcully snapped his fingers.

  `We can get rid of those memories, can't we?' he said, as the blue

  glow enveloped Darwin yet again.

  `Oh yes,' said Ponder. `He's asked us to, so it's ethically correct.

  Well done, sir. Hex can see to it.'

  `Well then,' said Ridcully, rubbing his hands. `Send him back, Hex.

  With perhaps just a tiny recollection. A souvenir, as it were.' Darwin vanished. 'Job done, gentlemen,' said the Archchancellor.