An Appetite for Wonder

by Richard Dawkins

  I exaggerate a little when I advise never to take notes. If a lecturer produces an original thought, something striking that makes you think, then by all means write yourself a memo to think again about it later, or look something up. But struggling to record a piece of every sentence the lecturer utters – which is what I tried to do – is pointless for the student and demoralizing for the lecturer. When lecturing to a student audience today, all I notice is a sea of tops of heads, bowed over notebooks. I prefer lay audiences, literary festivals, memorial lectures, guest lectures at universities where if the students come it is because they want to and not because it is on their syllabus. At such public lectures, the lecturer sees not bowed heads and scribbling hands but alert faces, smiling, registering comprehension – or the reverse. When lecturing in America, I get quite cross if I hear that some professor has required students to attend my lecture for ‘credit’. I’m not keen on the idea of ‘credit’ at the best of times, and I actively hate the idea that students are getting credit for listening to me.

  Niko Tinbergen, my later mentor, entered my life as the lecturer on molluscs. He announced no special affinity for that group save a fondness for oysters, but he played along with the department’s tradition of handing out a phylum to each lecturer, more or less at random. From those lectures, I recall Niko’s swift blackboard drawings; his deep voice (surprisingly deep for a small man), accented but not obviously Dutch; and his kindly smile (avuncular, as I thought it then, although he must have been much younger than I am now). In the following year he again lectured to us, this time on animal behaviour, and the avuncular smile broadened with enthusiasm for his own subject. In that heyday of his research group in the gull colony at Ravenglass in Cumberland, I was enchanted by his film on eggshell removal by black-headed gulls. I especially liked his method of plotting graphs – laying out tent-poles on the sand for axes, with strategically placed eggshells for data points. How very Niko. How very un-PowerPoint.

  After each lecture there was a practical class in the laboratory. I had no aptitude for practical work, and – so young and immature was I – the opposite sex was even more of a distraction in the laboratory than in lectures. It was really only the tutorial system that educated me, and I shall forever be grateful to Oxford for this unique gift – unique because, at least where science subjects were concerned, I think even Cambridge was not equal in this respect. The Cambridge Natural Science Tripos Part I, which occupies the first two years of the undergraduate course, is commendably broad but in consequence it cannot give the student the exhilarating experience, as Oxford does, of becoming a world authority – I mean it only slightly short of literally – on a set of (admittedly very narrow) subjects. I explained this in an essay which was published in various places and definitively in a book called The Oxford Tutorial: ‘Thanks, you taught me how to think’.41 Parts of the following paragraphs are derived from this article.

  I made the point there that our Oxford course was not ‘lecture-driven’ in the way that many undergraduates like their studies to be, feeling that they should be examined on, and only on, topics directly covered in lectures. On the contrary, when I was an undergraduate the entire subject of zoology was fair game for the examiners. The only constraint was an unwritten convention that the exam in any one year should not depart unfairly from the general precedent of previous years. And tutorials, too, were not ‘lecture-driven’ (as I fear they may be today); they were zoology-driven.

  In my penultimate term Peter Brunet managed to secure for me the rare privilege of tutorials with Niko Tinbergen himself. Since he was solely responsible for all the lectures in animal behaviour, Dr Tinbergen would have been well placed to give ‘lecture-driven’ tutorials. I need hardly say that he didn’t. Each week my tutorial assignment was to read one DPhil (Oxford-speak for PhD) thesis. My essay was to be a combination of DPhil examiner’s report, review of the history of the subject in which the thesis fell, proposal for follow-up research, and theoretical and philosophical discussion of the issues that the thesis raised. Never for one moment did it occur to either tutor or pupil to wonder whether this assignment would be directly useful for answering some exam question.

  Another term Peter Brunet, recognizing that my bias in biology was more philosophical than his own, arranged for me to have tutorials with Arthur Cain, effervescently brilliant rising star of the department, who went on to become Professor of Zoology at Manchester and later Liverpool. Far from these tutorials being driven by any lectures on our course, Dr Cain had me reading nothing but books on history and philosophy. It was up to me to work out the connections between zoology and the books that I was reading. I did, and I loved it. I’m not saying that my juvenile essays on the philosophy of biology were any good – with hindsight I know they weren’t – but I can say that I have never forgotten the exhilaration of writing them, or the feeling of being a real scholar as I read in the library.

  The same is true of my more mainline essays on standard zoological topics. I have no memory of whether we had a lecture on the water-vascular system of starfish. Probably we did, but that fact had no bearing upon my tutor’s decision to assign an essay on the topic. The starfish water-vascular system is one of many highly specialized topics in zoology that I now recall for the same reason – that I once wrote an essay on them. Starfish don’t have red blood; instead, they have piped sea water, constantly circulated through an intricately plumbed system of tubes which form a ring around the centre of the star and lead off in branches down each of the five arms. The piped sea water is used in a unique hydraulic pressure system, operating the many hundreds of tiny tube feet arrayed along the five arms. Each tube foot ends in a little gripping sucker, and these shuttle back and forth in collusion to pull the starfish along in a particular direction. The tube feet don’t move in unison but are semi-autonomous and, if the circum-oral nerve ring that gives them their orders should chance to become severed, the tube feet in different arms can pull in opposite directions and tear the starfish in half.

  I remember the bare facts about starfish plumbing, but it is not the facts that matter. What matters is the way in which we were encouraged to discover them. We didn’t just mug up a textbook: we went into the library and looked up books old and new; we followed trails of original research papers until we had made ourselves as nearly world authorities on the topic as it is possible to become in one week (nowadays one would do much of this work on the internet). The encouragement provided by the weekly tutorial meant that one didn’t just read about starfish hydraulics, or whatever the topic was: for that one week, I remember that I slept, ate and dreamed starfish hydraulics. Tube feet marched behind my eyelids, hydraulic pedicellariae quested and sea water pulsed through my dozing brain. Writing my essay was the catharsis, and the tutorial was the justification for the entire week. And then the next week there would be a new topic and a new feast of images to be conjured up in the library. We were being educated . . . And I believe it is largely to this week-by-week training that I owe such writing ability as I may be judged to possess.

  The tutor for whom I wrote the starfish essay was David Nichols, who went on to become Professor of Zoology at Exeter. Another notable tutor who shaped me as a young zoologist was John Currey, later Professor of Zoology at York University. He introduced me to, among other things, his – and now my – favourite example of revealingly bad ‘design’ in animals: the recurrent laryngeal nerve. As I explained in The Greatest Show on Earth, instead of going directly from the brain to its end organ the larynx, this nerve makes a detour (in the case of the giraffe, a spectacularly long detour) down into the chest, where it loops around a large artery before proceeding back up the neck to the larynx. This is eloquent of terribly bad design, but is completely explicable the moment you forget design and start thinking in terms of evolutionary history instead. In our fishy ancestors the shortest route for the nerve was posterior to the then equivalent of that artery, which in those early days supplied one of the gills. Fish don’t
have necks. When necks started to lengthen on land, the artery gradually moved backwards relative to the head, step by tiny step through evolutionary time further away from brain and larynx. The nerve kept abreast – kind of literally – making at first only a small detour but then, as evolution progressed, a longer and longer detour until, in a modern giraffe, its diverted route is a matter of several metres. Just a few years ago, as part of a television documentary, I was privileged to assist in a dissection of this remarkable nerve in a giraffe that had unfortunately died a few days earlier.

  My genetics tutor was Robert Creed, pupil of the eccentric and misogynistic aesthete E. B. Ford, himself heavily influenced by the great R. A. Fisher, whom we were all taught by Ford to revere. I learned from those tutorials, and from Dr Ford’s own lectures, that genes are not atomistically separate from each other, where their effects on bodies are concerned. Rather, a gene’s effect is conditioned by the ‘background’ of the other genes in the genome. Genes modify one another’s effects. Later, when I became a tutor myself, I devised an analogy to try to explain this to my pupils. The body is represented by the shape of a bed-sheet, hanging approximately horizontally by thousands of strings attached to an array of hooks in the ceiling. Each string represents one gene. A mutation in the gene is represented by a change in the tension in that string’s attachment to the ceiling. But – here is the important part of the analogy – each string is not isolated in its attachment to the sheet hanging below it. Rather, it is tangled up with lots of other strings, in a complicated cat’s cradle. This means that when a mutation occurs in any one ‘gene’ (change of tension in its attachment to the ceiling hook), the tensions in all the other strings with which it is entangled change at the same time, in a series of knock-on effects throughout the cat’s cradle. And the shape of the sheet (the body) is consequently influenced by the interaction of all the genes, not by each gene working separately on its ‘own’ little part of the sheet. In fact, no gene does ‘own’ any single part of the sheet. The body is not like a butcher’s diagram, with ‘cuts’ of the body corresponding to particular genes. Rather, a gene may influence the whole body in interaction with other genes. An elaboration of the parable introduces environmental – non-genetic – influences tugging on the cat’s cradle from the side.

  From Arthur Cain, whom I mentioned above, I learned to dissent from the still fashionable trashing of numerical systems for classifying animals by mathematical measurement of the similarities and differences between them. Quite separately, I also learned from Dr Cain to be impressed by the power of natural selection to produce adaptations of extreme perfection – notwithstanding important and interesting exceptions such as the recurrent laryngeal nerve, just mentioned. Both these lessons set me somewhat at odds with certain orthodoxies, which still dominate the world of zoology. Arthur also taught me to be sparing in my use of the word ‘mere’ – an exercise in consciousness-raising that has stayed with me ever since. ‘Humans are not mere bags of chemicals . . .’ Well, of course they are not, but when you have said that you have said nothing interesting, and the word ‘mere’ is supererogatory. ‘Humans are not mere animals . . .’ What have you just said that is more than trite? What weight does the word ‘mere’ carry in that sentence? What is ‘mere’ about an animal? You haven’t said anything meaningful. If you intend to mean something, say it.

  Arthur also told me a never-forgotten story about Galileo, which summarizes what was new about Renaissance science. Galileo was showing a learned man an astronomical phenomenon through his telescope. This gentleman said, approximately: ‘Sir, your demonstration with your telescope is so convincing that, were it not that Aristotle positively states the contrary, I would believe you.’ Today it amazes us – or ought to – that anybody could possibly reject real observational or experimental evidence in favour of what some supposed authority had simply asserted. But that’s the point. That is what has changed.

  For us zoologists, unlike undergraduates reading history or English or law, tutorials almost never happened in our college, or indeed in any college. Nearly all were in the Department of Zoology, a rambling up-stairs and down-dale appendage to the University Museum. It was this warren of rooms and corridors which, as I have already mentioned, was the centre of my being. This was very different from the typical experience of an Oxford undergraduate reading a non-scientific subject, for whom the college was the centre of existence. Old-style college tutors think that tutoring outside the college walls is a sort of second-best. My experience suggests exactly the opposite. It was refreshing to have a different tutor every term, for reasons that seem to me almost too obvious to specify.

  I did have friends in Balliol, most of whom were reading non-scientific subjects. Nicholas Tyacke (with whom I later shared lodgings, and who became a professor of history at University College, London) and Alan Ryan (who became a distinguished political philosopher and Warden of New College) were on my staircase. As it happened, several of my friends were in the college’s acting fraternity, which led me to see some amateur dramatic productions. One of the most moving theatrical evenings I ever experienced was a Balliol College Dramatic Society production of Robert Ardrey’s Shadow of Heroes, about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. More light-hearted were the Balliol Players, a travelling company who each year would put on a pastiche production of an Aristophanes play. I think that when they started in the 1920s the Players did Aristophanes straight, even in Greek. But the tradition changed, and by my time they were rewriting Aristophanes into revues satirizing modern politics. The leading lights of the Players in my time were Peter Snow, who became a familiar face on television, and John Albery, a witty and talented member of the famous theatrical dynasty, who later became Master of University College, Oxford. John Albery did a splendid General Montgomery (‘Now God said – and I agwee with him . . .’), and Peter Snow an equally memorable General de Gaulle: ‘La gloire . . . la victoire . . . l’histoire . . . et . . . la plume . . . de ma tante.’ Jeremy Gould scarcely had to act at all to do Harold Macmillan singing ‘My birthday honours list is certain to contain . . . And plenty of OBEs . . .’ It was the time of the twilight of empire, and the Players did a lovely valedictory song, presumably written by John Albery, of which I remember only five lines:

  Sunset and the evening star

  From Aden to Zanzibar.

  The bonds of the Empire sundering

  And final salutes are thundering

  And man will not cease his wondering . . .

  The same theatrical set introduced me to the Victorian Society, in whose company I spent some of my happiest times in Balliol. We met once or twice a term to sing music-hall songs to piano accompaniment, while sipping port. A master of ceremonies would call up soloists one by one to sing their special songs, and we’d all join in the chorus. Mostly they were cheerful, cheeky songs (‘Where did you get that hat?’ ‘Don’t have any more, Mrs Moore’; ‘You can’t do that there ‘ere’; ‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am’; ‘My old man said follow the van’) interspersed with some sentimental weepies, for which tissues would be handed out (‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage’; ‘Silver threads among the gold’), and the evening would end with jingoistic patriotism (‘Soldiers of the Queen’; ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . . The Russkies shall not have Constantinople’). If there’s one experience from Balliol days that I would dearly love to relive, it would be an evening with the Victorian Society.

  It was much later in my life, but the nearest approach to such a reliving took place at the regular Friday evening sing-song at the Killingworth Castle pub in Wootton, a village just outside Oxford, to which I was introduced by my second wife Eve, mother of my beloved daughter Juliet. The music was British ‘folk’, not music hall, and the drink was beer, not port, but here I relived something of the atmosphere of the Victorian Society: a warm conviviality fuelled by music and community, more than by drink. The soloists and instrumentalists (guitar, squeezebox, penny whistle) on these Fri
day nights rotated between four or five regular performers or groups, all of them good in their different ways, all with their particular repertoires of songs, which were known to the regular chorus including Eve and me. For some songs quite stylish canons and descants would be produced, and – as with the Victorian Society – the chorus was always disciplined and up to a brisk tempo, very different from the usual ‘Just a song at twilight’ drunken dirge. We knew the more prominent members by private nicknames given them by Eve: ‘Two Pints’ (a large, bearded young man with a huge bass voice as muscular as the arms that raised his pints and took the collection for the musicians); ‘Big Daddy’ (a grandfatherly figure with an agreeable tenor, who sometimes volunteered ‘Cock Robin’ as a solo after the main soloists had finished); ‘Maynard Smith’ (a cheery, bespectacled fellow, named for his facial resemblance to the great scientist); ‘the Incredible Hulk’ (one of few who sang out of tune) and others.

  Back in undergraduate days, my Balliol friends and I often went to the cinema, usually to the Scala in Walton Street: intellectual films by Ingmar Bergman, or Jean Cocteau, or Andrzej Wajda or other continental directors. I was especially affected by Ingmar Bergman’s dark monochrome images in Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, and the lyrical love scenes of Summer Interlude before it turned tragic. Films of that kind, and poetry to which my father introduced me – Rupert Brooke, A. E. Housman and above all the early W. B. Yeats – turned my young self into unrealistic, indeed deluded, byways of romantic fantasy. Like many a naive nineteen-year-old I fell in love – not with any particular girl, but with the idea of being in love. Well, there was a girl, and she happened to be Swedish, which chimed with my Bergman-led fantasies, but it was the idea of love itself, with me in the role of a tragic Romeo, that I loved. I moped over her for a ludicrously long time after she had returned to Sweden and – no doubt – had long forgotten her brief Summer Interlude with me.