View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo ENCOUNTER WITH ZOOLOGY AND ETHOLOGY Sarah Harrison and Alan Macfarlane Contents Preface to the series 3 How to view the films 4 Introduction 5 Gabriel Horn 16th January and 3rd April 2007 7 Patrick Bateson 13 December 2007 32 Bateson in conversation with Horn 13 July 2007 46 Robert Hinde 7th and 20th November 2007 66 Barry Keverne 23 March 2009 80 Other possible volumes 94 Acknowledgements and royalties 95 © Sarah Harrison and Alan Macfarlane 2014 2 Preface to the series There have been many autobiographical accounts of the creative process. These tend to concentrate on one level, and within that one aspect, the cerebral, intellectual working of a single thinker or artist’s mind. Yet if we are really to understand what the conditions are for a really creative and fulfilling life we need to understand the process at five levels. At the widest, there is the level of civilizations, some of which encourage personal creativity, while others dampen it. Then there are institutions such as a university, which encourage the individual or stifle him or her. Then there are personal networks; all thinkers work with others whether they acknowledge it or not. Then there is the level of the individual, his or her character and mind. Finally there is an element of chance or random variation. I have long been interested in these inter-acting levels and since 1982 I have been filming people talking about their life and work. In these interviews, characteristically lasting one to two hours, I have paid particular attention to the family life, childhood, education and friendships which influence us. I have let people tell their own stories without a set of explicit questions to answer. This has led them to reflect on what it was in their lives which led them to be able to do their most interesting and rewarding work. They reveal the complex chains which sometimes lead to that moment when they discovered or made something new in the world. I started for some years mainly in the disciplines I knew, anthropology, history and sociology. But after 2006 I broadened the project out to cover almost all fields of intellectual and artistic work. I have now made over 200 interviews, all of them available on the web. Future volumes based on these interviews are outlined at the end of this volume. 3 How to view the films The films are up on the Internet, currently in three places. Alan Macfarlane’s website, www.alanmacfarlane.com The Streaming Media Service in Cambridge: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1092396 On both of these, the full summary of the interviews are available. Most of the interviews are also up on the ‘Ayabaya’ channel of Youtube. The films can be seen from within a free PDF version of this book by pressing on the image. You will need to download an Adobe Acrobat PDF reader (free) from the web if you do not have it. If you right click on the film, other options open up. The free PDF version can be obtained by going to Dspace at Cambridge and typing Macfarlane Encounter followed by the name of the book, for example 'computing' or 'economics'. Technical information Unless otherwise specified, all the interviewing and filming was done by Alan Macfarlane, mostly in his rooms in King’s College, Cambridge. The detailed summaries, with time codes to make it easier to find roughly where a passage of special interest is to be found, were made by Sarah Harrison, who also edited and prepared the films for the web. The cameras improved with time, but there are occasions when both the early cameras and microphones were less than satisfactory. We have had to wait for the technology to catch up. It is hoped one day to improve this if funding and technology allow. 4 Introduction Cambridge is famous for its zoology and ethology, from Charles Darwin to David Attenborough. And within Cambridge my own College, King’s, was the home of much of their academic career of several important figures in this field in the second half of the twentieth century. Their friendship and partnership is explored in this volume. I met both Pat Bateson and Gabriel Horn when I came to King’s in 1971 and I have remained quite close friends with both of them since then. The relations are not just ones of friendship, but also lie in the fact that Pat Bateson was for more than a dozen years Provost of my College, while Gabriel Horn and his wife Prill moved to the fenland village where we live shortly after we moved there. Pat Bateson was Provost of King’s College, Gabriel Horn was Master of Sidney Sussex College, and the third of the triumvirate, Robert Hinde, was Master of St John’s College. I had known Robert from the 1980’s through a shared interest in kinship and mating patterns. It was at the suggestion of Pat Bateson that I started the science interviews and the interview he did with Gabriel Horn at the start of 2007 was the first experiment in this field. Along with Gabriel Horn, he then became one of my three main advisors on whom I should interview, along with Herbert Huppert, also of King’s. Bateson, Horn and Hinde represent Cambridge zoology and ethology in the second half of the twentieth century, but the tradition of course continues. A younger representative, again a friend in King’s, is Barry Keverne, who gives the concluding interview. 5 The zoology museum in Cambridge, with the whale. Many of Darwin’s objects are here. Alan Macfarlane explains the connections to Robert Malthus, another Cambridge figure. http://downloads.sms.cam.ac.uk/1290276/1290281.mp4 6 Gabriel Horn 16th January and 3rd April 2007 http://downloads.sms.cam.ac.uk/1121995/1122003.mp4 7 Extracted from Wikipedia 22 August 2014 Sir Gabriel Horn, MD, ScD, FRS, FRCP (9 December 1927 – 2 August 2012) was a British biologist and Emeritus Professor in Natural Sciences (Zoology) at the University of Cambridge. His research was into the neural mechanisms of learning and memory. Horn's first academic position was in 1956 at the Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge as a Demonstrator in Anatomy. He became a Lecturer and then a Reader, before leaving to become Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bristol in 1974. In 1975, while at Bristol, he obtained his DSc degree. In 1977, he returned to Cambridge to head the Department of Zoology. He retired in 1995 and was Emeritus Professor. He was Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1992 to 1999 and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the university from 1994 to 1997. He remained a fellow of Sidney Sussex College after 1999 until his death, and was a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1974 and from 1978 until 1992. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, receiving their Royal Medal in 2001. He was given an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Birmingham in 1999 and by the University of Bristol in 2003. He was knighted in the 2002 New Year Honours "for services to Neurobiology and to the Advancement of Scientific Research". 8 INTERVIEW SUMMARY Gabriel Horn interviewed by Patrick Bateson 16th January and 3rd April 2007, filmed by Alan Macfarlane 0:09:07 Father was a tailor, a lovely man; mother managed in difficult circumstances, but also a lovely person; during the war living in poor housing, father ill and mother having to help him in the shop; had three elder brothers, oldest brother about nine years older; mother born in the East End of London and we used to go from Birmingham to see my grandmother there; hated seeing the extreme poverty there; father's parents would have died in Poland before my birth; mother's parents came from Austro-Hungarian Empire; father born 1878 and mother in 1892; I was born in 1927; felt that in terms of the life my family lived we were rather well off compared with mother's family in the East End 5:09:10 My father despised both liberal and orthodox Jews; we did not live in a Jewish community in Birmingham but had their business near the centre of town and later moved to Handsworth; whilst my brothers went to the Hebrew School when the family lived in the centre, there was no such school for me to go to when we moved; they were also too far from the Synagogue to go but rarely; mother did keep a kosher kitchen which was a bit of a problem for me when later I was evacuated; by the time I went to university I had given up entirely 7:13:14 My primary school, Westminster Road Junior School, was next to my home; nothing very remarkable happened there; I was bullied but never remember any anti-Semitism though my older brothers did experience it; my parents did not want me to be exposed to the New Testament so did not go to the morning congregation at school or to religion lessons; I was the only one not to go but it was accepted without comment; I failed entrance examination to the grammar school, perhaps due to disruption of being evacuated for a few months and then returning to find the school closed; went to a school of sorts for one hour a week in the basement of a church; actually did get through the exam but did 9 not get a place; my older brother had been to a Commercial school and one did the exam for that at thirteen; I took it and got into a Technical school and in my first year was near the bottom of the class in most things; in the second year I remember the gym master reading 'The Lady of Shallot' to us; in the culture I came from people didn't read poetry and certainly not role models like him; something sparked an interest and I went from being bottom in maths and physics