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‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Simon Conway Morris

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/14

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/014/001-007

Collection title: Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum

Interviewee’s Conway Morris Title: Professor surname:

Interviewee’s Simon Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Date and place of birth: 6th November 1951, Palaeontology Carshalton, Surrey Mother’s occupation: Nurse Father’s occupation: Lawyer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 28/10/15 (track 1-2); 4/12/15 (track 3-4); 20/1/16 (track 5-6); 12/4/16 (track 7)

Location of interview: St John’s College, Cambridge

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital

Recording format : Audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 7 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 7 hours 37 mins 40 secs (HH:MM:SS)

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: Open

Interviewer’s comments:

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[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me when and where you were born?

Thank you. My name is Simon Conway Morris and I was born in Carshalton in Surrey in 1951, sixth of November.

And as much as you can tell me about the life of your father?

Well, I should perhaps put a whole set of health warnings in here because of course I’m relying on memory, which is often imperfect, and there are other members of my family, especially my brother, who probably would be better informed about various areas. But my father was a solicitor, a lawyer, if you like, and he took articles, I think, in Bangor, because that part of the family was from north Wales, hence Conway Morris, Conway Morris being the surname – and there’s another set of stories as to how we came up with that name - and then moved to London, met my mother shortly after the war. He had been serving in the desert, Western Desert, in the RAF, not, I hasten to say, as a fighter pilot or anything like that, he was on ground staff doing radio communications and so forth. And then he set up his own practice and was extremely successful, very talented man, but he was a so-called sole practitioner. And then in the late seventies he developed, rather suddenly, some cancers which killed him rather abruptly, unfortunately, which was a great blow for us, of course. And then my mother only died a couple of years ago and there’s a set of stories there, but I don’t think, unless you’re interested, they’re really ones which are necessary to explore, except that she was obviously as influential on me as my dad was in a rather different sort of way. But that’s the background if that’s some sort of help. But you interrupt and stop and start and, you know, you tell me how you want things to go.

This is good, thank you.

Okay, right.

[01:50] Did you come to know anything about your father’s childhood?

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Not a great deal, unfortunately, no. He was born, I think, sorry to sound so… it may well be that I can perhaps get some further information from my brother. He was brought up in London. His father was also a solicitor, or a lawyer, and he worked, I think, for the London Water Board, or something like that, and they lived in Hampstead, I think at that stage not in the place which they ended up in. And he would have been born, I think, in 1922, thereabouts. Again, subject to correction. And he went to Westminster School. He was obviously a very bright boy, very talented, and I’m yet to establish, but it sort of bears on a sort of wider interest of mine, I don’t think he was in the same year as Ribbentrop’s son, who of course was the German Ambassador for about eighteen months in this country, but Ribbentrop’s son was there. But he was just in that pre-war cohort of people and then I think he volunteered rather than being called up, as I recall. And his brother went to Bomber Command, John was his name, my father’s name was Richard, and they both survived, slightly to my grandmother’s surprise, especially in the case of my Uncle John. He was flying Stirlings and was a lucky man, definitely. And then he also became a lawyer, based in Highgate. So it’s been mostly London based in that area and I was brought up in London as well, in Raynes Park.

That’s excellent, and something similar for the life of your mother?

[03:28] My mum was born in Toronto, actually. She was part of the Scottish diaspora to Canada and for reasons of which I’m not clear, nothing spectacular or sinister, they came back to Scotland when she was age two, so she has no memory of the country. And her father was a minister in the Church of Scotland, most likely there was some living he was offered in Scotland. In fact in Glasgow, so she was brought up in Glasgow and she as a young woman was very talented, a sort of potential artist, very interested in theatre and sculpture and knew all the plays and all the rest of it and obviously if the war hadn’t happened she probably would have ended up as either an artist or an actress or something like that, but the war did come, so that mucked everybody’s life up. And she trained as a nurse, I think initially in Glasgow, but then principally in Nottingham. I think she spent a bit of time in the war in London as well. Then, as I mentioned, they met probably about 1947, I should think. And then subsequent to my birth they had another boy, Roderick, my brother of course, who is a freelance journalist, effectively, and spent a lot of time

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living in Venice and that’s part of what’s made me so interested in that area of the world, but he’s now back in north Wales principally. So yes, that’s more or less the family, so to speak. And Uncle John, as we call him, had a son, Patrick, rather chequered career, but he died rather younger than he should have.

[05:04] When you said that your brother is likely to know this sort of thing more clearly than you, why is that?

Oh, it’s nothing. I’m… it’s perhaps not a confession, some people, I’m sure many of the people you talk to, are deeply interested in their families and, if you like, the genealogy and so forth, whereas I’m afraid it’s never bothered me too much. Obviously what one wants to know is the extent to which their characters are imprinted on you and in some ways it’s alarming and in some ways it’s very pleasing to see sort of traits and other sort of peculiarities of both your parents coming through in particular ways. And you can take this as a rather sort of deterministic, you know the ones who never get free of your parents. It’s not like that at all, but so far as the details are concerned, I’m not one for writing things down and I don’t have the sort of recall which my brother has. But I can certainly – I’m actually going to see him in a couple of weeks – so I can certainly jot down some more detailed information and try and get some of this down in a slightly more coherent fashion. It’s not out of lack of interest, it’s just, I’m afraid to say, I don’t think it actually matters very much.

[06:09] What though are the traits that you mentioned that you think you recognise in yourself from your parents?

Well, without boasting, both were extremely intelligent people and we don’t have to get stuck in the nature/nurture view. My mother in a certain sense drove us both, my brother and myself, quite hard in terms of scholarship, if you like, we had to really work at school and she was very keen that we both came to Cambridge, or Oxford. I had no desire to come to Cambridge at all as an undergraduate, but my brother did come to Churchill College. In fact I then came to Churchill at the same time as he did as a PhD student. But she was very literary, very well read,

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very enthusiastic about the theatre and later in her life became really quite a good painter, did a little bit of sculpture as well, and clearly her creative was, if you like, plastic in the making of things and the way in which plays reflect a great deal of the human condition in all sorts of ways. And she was very good, as my father was, when we were relatively young, taking us to the Old Vic and taking us to a very famous production, for instance, of Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Hall, if I remember correctly, Peter Hall, at Stratford [Slight ambiguity; we went to Stratford quite often but the Peter Hall production was in one or other theatre in the Aldwych.], and those sort of good things. My father was less sociable, extremely amusing when you got him in the right wavelength, very, very talented as a solicitor and as I mentioned, did extremely well, and from what I gather, because I had to sort out a lot of his affairs after his death with my mother, very much loved by the people working with him and very much admired by the people he helped to defend in all sorts of court cases and the like. And he, if you like, was a bit sceptical about the wisdom of the world. He had a useful phrase that the world was – it’s a rather sort of 1940s phrase – the world was cracked. [laughs] There was a sort of streak of madness in the world, which wasn’t necessarily disagreeable, but it wasn’t as straightforward as people thought. He read omnivorously, especially interested in history, history of London I think in particular. And also he was… he wasn’t a very good driver, but he drove like a taxi driver. You’d be going to somewhere through Wandsworth and suddenly you’d find yourself in Piccadilly Circus, he knew all the rat runs and that sort of thing. Because he had to, obviously when you’re going to court appearances you have to get all over London at rather short notice. So yes, he was a terrific chap.

[08:50] What do you remember doing, what do you remember of time spent with your mother as a sort of younger child, spending time with her?

Well, I’m not sure it’s of great interest. I should say, and I don’t think it’s any particular secret, in the end the marriage was not a great success, which is not by any means unknown. They never formally divorced, but they really separated towards the end of their time, or my father’s time. And she really wanted two things. Ideally she wanted sun, because she liked warm places, and she wanted somewhere quiet to read. And so at that time we didn’t have much money, at least to begin with, so we’d go camping and I was very keen on fossils already, so sometimes we

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go down to Dorset where the summers were usually atrocious, you know, sort of storms and ships going down in the Channel, left, right and centre. So it was quite a vigorous time there. But she was very patient with me. My father having spent four or so years in tents in the Western Desert, the last thing he ever wanted to do was get in a tent again and he really was so busy at work, he grudged the time, I suppose, having holidays with us. So mostly I, my brother, sometimes a friend of one of ours would go with mum to one place or another. And then fairly early on, and I think this actually has had a lot of influence on me in a way, she was quite adventurous with travelling, not quite in the Freya Stark department, but going to France, first of all in an ancient Morris Minor, then by bike, and we’d cycle to all sorts of strange places, again, sometimes with some fossil collecting thrown in. So we got to know France in the sixties when it was still genuinely a foreign country. Then later on we went to Greece and again, just went round, initially on bikes, but even she hadn’t quite appreciated the level of heat in the Peloponnese in August, so we took buses and then boats and all sorts of things. And again, you can imagine, at the age of fifteen or so where you’re just getting on these ferries and crossing some storm, sort of stormy seas, to Syros, for instance, this was quite a time. Sort of makes you sort of much more independent, if you like.

Was this again with your mother and brother and perhaps a friend?

Yes. Pretty much so, yes. My brother then spent more time going to Greece, in fact ended up living there for a year, in Athens and then also in Istanbul later on, and did a lot more travelling around then. He speaks Greek pretty fluently, and Turkish as well, so he had much more connection there as well. But so far as we were as children, there was a sort of sense of being independent, camping maybe’s not the first stage to climbing K2, but even so, it’s a way where you actually have to in some sense sort things out for yourself rather than just booking into a bed and breakfast and the like. And then subsequently these trips round France and so forth, we were very much left to our own devices and could wander off and so forth. In France we’d use campsites and I guess I was probably about fourteen or so. There’d be the bottle of wine on the table, taken for granted that children had a small amount of wine, perfectly natural.

[12:07]

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What was your mum’s kind of interest in travel, apart from seeking heat and quiet? Was it an interest in, say, landscape or you could imagine it might be an interest in building or history? What kind of interest in travel led this?

Not especially, as far as I remember. I mean I’m glad you asked me because it provokes me to try and remember, because as children you’re mostly rather unreflective about why you’re being dragged off to these various places, which is right and proper, of course. No, I think it’s really she wanted to get out of Britain because it’s typically cold and damp and she was very glad to sort of move around and so forth, and enjoy reasonably good food, I remember those things. But then again, not extravagantly or anything like that. I think it was more just a way you could get into a part of the world where you could enjoy a summer and that you had sufficient quiet that you could read uninterruptedly and so forth. I mean later on, much later on, again, keen to get out of London, it was even then quite blighted with Heathrow, she bought a very small boat which we put on to the Oxford Canal just outside Oxford at a small place called Thrupp, and she found to her dismay that there was Kidlington, or Oxford Airport just nearby, so, heck. But again, how does one put it? It wasn’t that either of my parents were monastic and they were both sociable in slightly different ways, but both of them I suppose valued, as probably I do, a certain amount of space around oneself and not a sort of feeling you ought to be engaged with everybody else’s business on a sort of everyday sort of basis, if you like. So it was really just time to get time to yourself, I suppose. Not a very adequate answer.

[13:52] But you said that when you went on the Dorset holidays you at that stage were collecting fossils. What age would that have started and why did it start?

Well again, my memory’s imprecise here. I know that from really quite a young age I became fascinated in what you might call ancient life. And as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the impetus I think was probably when I was about six or seven, at that stage you could get these books which had a series of tear-out, for instance, flags of different countries in the world and one was laboriously sort of – they had perforated, like giant stamps really – and you had to get the right stamp in the right box inside in the little sort of, almost like a comic. And there was one on ancient life, and for some reason that just grabbed my attention and I became more and more

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fascinated in fossils and palaeontology and geology and all those sorts of things. And Dorset, even though, of course now it’s almost too famous as the sort of Jurassic Coast and World Heritage Site and those sorts of things, but at that stage it was easy to find campsites, Charmouth, places like that. You could go down to the beach and it was perfectly safe, you know. Occasionally the cliffs began to fall on top of you, but you know, heck, this was taken for granted, one was reasonably careful, that was all. And I guess at that stage I would probably have been about ten, eleven, twelve, something of that sort of age, and wasn’t very good at finding fossils at all. But even so, it’s a sort of cliché now, but people are always complaining that children are too protected and too enclosed. I should ask, do you have children yourself?

Mm hm.

Yeah, so you know. And they’re always terrified they’re going to be abducted or something like that, awful, which would be absolutely horrible. Whereas those days, you know, it’s a cliché, but we had an enormous amount of freedom and we could cycle where we liked and do what we liked and so forth, and parents trusted you to be reasonably sensible and they knew that occasionally terrible things happened, but otherwise you wouldn’t be in the end the adult you wanted to be, if you like. So that was part of the background and similarly in France, almost by accident we came across the localities near Royan which had been very badly beaten up by the Americans and the Germans when they were scrapping away towards the end of the Second World War, so the centre was almost completely destroyed, but there are wonderful chalk cliffs there, very rich in fossils. So again, it’s almost accidental where you end up, but you start collecting fossils, have a small collection, which you’re very proud of and so forth. And in that context I should say we used to go up to the Natural History Museum and one or two people there were fantastically unhelpful, but many more were very helpful and very supportive and you could actually give specimens for identification. And you’d go back a week or two later and they’d return them with a neatly written label. And at that stage this was terrific, it was very sort of pleasing. And we got to know some of the people there a little bit, not in any sort of detail, but again, it was at a time when it was a much more informal arrangement than it is now and the number of people visiting was much, much smaller than it is today, and so on and so forth, so it was a different atmosphere which was… they were terrific and very helpful.

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When you say ‘we’ went there…

Oh, I’m sorry. Principally, we had some neighbours called the Bishops, and Michael, or Mick as we called him, was a near contemporary of mine and we spent several years together at the same school, as in King’s, Wimbledon, principally. And he then went to other schools, actually near what is now called Milton Keynes, and then he went to do geology in London. We were very close friends at that stage and we might go up together to the museum and one time Mick and myself, he could drive, I couldn’t – I guess we were about seventeen, ridiculous – and his father, who was very much involved with the sort of car industry as a journalist in particular, revamped a Triumph Herald and off we went to France, to do some more collecting. Just the two of us and it’s just at a stage in one’s life when girls are becoming very, very interesting indeed, and all these good things, and nothing sensational, but again, we were given this freedom to go to France and they knew we would be alright, more or less. A few things happened, but yes, it was very entertaining.

[18:16] When you describe yourself as then, I think we were talking about Dorset, not being good at looking for fossils, could you put yourself back into that position and describe how you were going about it? Some of the people, many of the people listening to the people may not know how to look for fossils themselves, so it’ll be a matter of describing what you were doing and why that wasn’t right.

Well, it was a combination of incompetence and amateurishness and ignorance, I suppose. The cliffs of Dorset are in many cases extremely fossiliferous and so in a certain sense you have to be an idiot not to find something. But in contrast with some of my friends, because we used to do quite a lot of collecting round this country, we used to go to the brick pits near Bedford or near Peterborough, which involved all sorts of silly things like climbing under fences we shouldn’t have been climbing underneath and being near moving machinery, which we certainly shouldn’t have been near, and so forth. But mostly the quarrymen just turned a blind eye to us, or even helped us on occasion. Occasionally we got a bollocksing and had to leave, but, heck. But in any event, some of my colleagues are just gifted at seeing a fossil and spot it a mile off, whereas I’ve never had that ability and I’ve never wished to have it, it’s not any matter of regret at all, but

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it’s very striking. I suppose in the same way as if you think about a connoisseur of art, he’ll know instantly that however convincing it looks, it’s a fake. He can see that there’s something in the brushwork which reveals that however carefully the person has tried to fool the market, in point of fact, no. So in any event it was just great fun because one could find the things on the Dorset coast which everybody associates with amateur fossil collecting as a schoolboy: ammonites, belemnites, brachiopods, those sorts of things. And always the great hope is you’d find some piece of vertebrate, and again, fantasy quickly takes over where an entire ichthyosaur will be discovered, and this is sort of almost sort of Enid Blyton territory, but we never went there. Found some bits of fish and so forth. But I suppose in a way it’s like anything one is trying to provide the foundation of your life, there’s nothing deliberate about this, but it’s just developing a familiarity with the world around you. And of course some things come much, much later, such as an appreciation of landscape or appreciation of paintings and whatever. But the very fact that, you know, you’ve been immersed in this world in a sort of uncomplaining and rather uncritical way allows you then when things actually begin to click, come together, you say, ah yes. So it’s not forced, it’s not pedagogic, it’s not sort of as if one’s going through some ghastly Teutonic exercise, one has in a sense been absorbed by the country and the country accepts you, I suppose

Thank you. Could you say more about the extent to which the people working on the brick pits and quarries sometimes helped in the finding of fossils?

Well, when I say helped, really I mean they turned a blind eye. Because frankly these were not very safe places. Some areas there was active working going on, and obviously we had enough intelligence to realise that you didn’t go near large cranes and conveyor belts, though I do remember one time, I think near Peterborough, where the draglines were taking up a lot of this Oxford clay, which is very fossiliferous, and put it on to this conveyor belt rattling along, and we stood by the conveyor belt and picked off fossils, which was probably rather silly of us wasn’t it? And in other places there were very deep pits and unstable slopes which could collapse and, you know, I suppose we were probably lucky, we didn’t do a great deal of this but we did it enough to make you realise that these are potentially hazardous places. But we were, thank goodness, not assailed by ‘elf and safety’. No helmets, you know. People knew where we were. And Mick, my friend who we did the fossil collecting, his father being sort of, as I mentioned,

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mechanically inclined, one time I think he had on loan an E-type Jag, so we went roaring off in that to do some fossil collecting. And another time, maybe more than once, we went off on his motorbike. One time I remember, at this stage his family, Mick’s family, were sort of living in Letchworth Garden City, because his father was working for Borg Warner, which was an American firm dealing with transmission gears, if I remember correctly. Any case, there was a small pit near Shepreth, which is close to where we’re presently talking, in Cambridge, and it’s a part of the succession which is just beneath the main chalk and near Shepreth there was a very large quarry called Barrington, which is now disused, a cement works. But this was just a small pit worked by a couple of gaffers, and they were terrific, they were old type gaffers, quarrymen, and they were very relaxed about us going into the quarry, splitting open rocks, finding ammonites and sharks’ teeth and those sorts of things. And one time I remember I cycled up from Letchworth to Shepreth, I don’t know, I suppose about fifteen miles, and found what turned out in the end to be a very rare ammonite, rare in terms of its species, and the people I think in the Geological Museum got quite excited about it. Now I believe it’s in the Sedgwick Museum. But in any event, here was something where probably fifteen or sixteen you’re cycling on a fairly busy road, you’d just cycle into Shepreth, wander round on a summer’s day and the chaps were very welcoming, made no fuss at all. You could fossick around, put it in your rucksack and cycle back to Letchworth. So it’s making it sound as if it’s idyllic, I’m not meaning to sound like that at all. Next thing I’ll start talking about Spitfires, if you like, it’s not a sort of Cider With Rosie territory, but it was just the gratitude, I suppose, that we were allowed this degree of freedom. When I say allowed the freedom, I don’t mean that, there was no grudgingness in that sense, my father was always nervous of our welfare, that’s for certain, but on the other hand, in no way were you constrained on what you wanted to do, they assumed that you were… and I guess probably both my parents as young people were in the war, my mother was certainly dealing with people injured in bombing and so forth and I’m sure my father saw some fairly unpleasant things during his time in Egypt, but he never talked about it. And his father of course was in the First World War and he would never talk about, it was things which were behind them and they didn’t want to know about it again, they were very pleased to have gone through it and the like, so they probably realised that their children have this opportunity, unconsciously perhaps, with something which was greatly to be valued and perhaps today has been partly lost.

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So you’re arguing, you think there’s a connection between the experience of very unpleasant things in war and the freedom afforded to children after war in some way? You said that it might be unconscious.

It might be unconscious and I hadn’t - perhaps that’s an advantage of this sort of interview – really thought about it in that way beforehand. And certainly there wasn’t a sense, I think probably both of them were extremely pissed off with Hitler, you know, because well, we don’t have to go into that territory, but my own view is that Europe has been done unrecoverable damage as a result of the Second World War, and that I think is apparent at the present day, unfortunately. But that’s another story perhaps for another time. But one can’t help but feel that in many ways it had enormous challenges because the country was bankrupt, I had a ration book only for sweets, they’d come out of a very, very difficult time and they did in a sense enjoy some degree of prosperity in due course. But it wasn’t easy, they both worked ferociously hard, my mother to bring us up, my father to make a living, and they probably didn’t assume that their childhood was much different from ours, but there wasn’t any question that we should have a childhood, that we were not being constrained into being this, that or the other. Other than, as I mentioned, my mother’s keenness that we go to university. And I should say, perhaps in parenthesis, to the best of my knowledge I’m the only scientist in our family at all. In fact, my enemies might say I’m not a scientist at all.

Thank you. [26:07] Other than fossil collecting, were you doing at any age other things outdoors? So cycling to places and doing things in the outdoors, the doing of things, was that ever not collecting fossils but fishing or birdwatching or something else?

No such luck, I’m afraid. I’m still terribly ignorant about natural history. I’ve learnt a little bit more about plants, mostly thanks to my wife Zoe. In a way a little bit more about the natural world, but not in any specialist way at all. We were close to, where our school was, both my brother and myself went to King’s, Wimbledon and before that to a preparatory school just opposite called Squirrels, and so we cycled mostly to and from work, or to school I should say, rather than work, and really in a sense I’ve never stopped getting off my bike. So I cycle

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everywhere in Cambridge and we had four years in Milton Keynes when I was teaching in the Open University and the bike sat in a shed. I once cycled down to the Open University from where we were living, never again. It wasn’t… not much fun on the A5, I can tell you. But no, not really, I used to collect stamps as many children did and probably spent a lot of time just fossicking around rather than doing anything particularly sort of worthy. Probably read a lot more than I realise.

Was, I mean you collected fossils with Mick, was fossil collecting something that people at the quarry would have thought, oh here come some boys fossil collecting, boys are always collecting fossils, was it like bird’s nesting or birdwatching, something that many boys around you were doing or were you and Mick unusual in pursuing this?

We were probably unusual, in a sense, but as mentioned, my parents and also Mick’s father in particular were very supportive about this and in one way or another one or other of them would drive us, either on a holiday or a short excursion. I remember one time my father drove me up to the Cotswolds. I found a rather nice fossil starfish on that occasion, which also, funnily enough, turned out to be relatively important, I think. So I suppose so. I mean in the school itself I was very lucky with the biology teacher and there was a small collection of fossils there, and he was particularly supportive in the sense of, you know, what one wanted to do, whereas one has to say the school otherwise was not particularly inspirational in terms of where one might have a career, and who can blame them in a certain sense. After all, most jobs provide security and a reasonable salary and it was only sensible that most boys should go and be chartered accountants. But, no thank you. So I suppose in that sense, I remember one time when we were down near Orford in Suffolk, there’s a so-called Coralline Crag there, which are quite recent deposits, a couple of million years old, and it’s a rather fossiliferous unit down on the creek, Butley Creek, and this probably relatively elderly gentleman came across and we explained what we were doing. He was absolutely delighted. He said, ‘Jolly good. Just what young men should be doing’, sort of thing, just the fact that we were actually outside doing something, which pleased him and we didn’t think about it at the time, of course. But I suppose relatively speaking, there were fossil collectors, but that world’s probably changed quite a lot as well. There are, as I mentioned, so many restrictions on health and safety and everybody’s terrified cliffs will fall on top of you, and they do sometimes, rocks do fall off mountains, and all the rest

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of it. And of course we have to be extremely careful with our students, but even so, there’s always an element of risk in what you’re doing. So I suppose so, yes. I mean you may have met other people who said, oh yeah, I used to collect fossils as well, but…

Not many.

[laughs] Right.

[29:58] That interest in fossils came out originally of a question where I asked you about remembering time spent with your mother. Now, apart from the time involved in your father driving you to places, as you’ve mentioned, are there things, as a younger child, as an older child, that you remember doing just with him?

Not very much, I’m afraid, he was so busy, being, as I mentioned, a sole practitioner of a growing law firm. He used to buy companies [law practices] actually, he had a little game where these things would come on the market. I don’t suppose he paid very much. He had a whole string of names and all these sort of, you know, otherwise sort of non-functioning companies. But obviously you’ll get the goodwill of the company and you might get some sets of law reports or something like that, so it wasn’t a trivial exercise, but even so, he seemed to have a weakness for hoovering these things up. Not as far as I know, because as I say, he wasn’t keen on coming on holiday. I don’t think he was a great holiday person in any case, and obviously when we were very young he would be with us, went to places like Hayling Island, which was fine as we were then as really quite young boys. In fact that’s right, I remember in Hayling Island, it was a charming little hotel but again, would now be regarded as antique, hearing on the radio about the first Sputnik. And I was listening to the radio avidly, I suppose I had some interest in science, and there were a lot of crotchety old people who didn’t like this young boy listening to the radio, so I had to keep it nice and low. But in hindsight of course, one might say, gosh, this is the catalyst to become a scientist. So I guess there was something there which intrigued me. And I was very keen on astronomy as well, but of course in hindsight that would never have worked because I’m hopeless at mathematics. But Patrick Moore was naturally an inspiration. I had the

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pleasure of meeting him not long before he died, we did a short programme together, The Sky at Night. Terrific chap, really wonderful boy, yeah.

[31:49] Thank you. Your childhood home, was it the same throughout your childhood, the home in London?

Not quite. Again, I’m not sure it’s of interest to anybody, I’m not even sure they’re of interest to me now, frankly, but no, we were in a maisonette, I suppose it would be now called, quite close to Wimbledon station, for a few years. I think my brother was born here. He won’t remember but… My earliest memory, I think, was standing in a cot, reaching out for some sort of dummy with some sticky juice in it, I guess I was about eighteen months at that stage, which apparently is fairly young for memories. And then we moved to some flats close to the school, King’s, Wimbledon, not deliberately for that reason. A ground floor flat, it was quite good, except it was infested with cockroaches and I suppose these days people would be absolutely horrified, but I used to get my brother to sort of sit on a stool and I’d point at a cockroach and he’d jump on it, so that’s the way you pass your time of day, isn’t it? We were very good friends and we’re much closer now than we have been for many years, not out of any falling apart, but simply because he’d been very busy, really as I suppose a sort of journalist and art critic, living in Italy. But then we moved to Durham Road, which is sort of in between Wimbledon Hill, if you like, and Raynes Park station. And then that’s where I was brought up, effectively. That’s a detached house and very suitable in its own way. It was still quiet, in London.

Could you take us on a tour of that?

Of the house itself?

Yes.

It was, I suppose, Victorian. It had a front garden which now would be regarded as gigantic, was a modest size, some roses in some beds. And then when we moved there, and I think I

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remember it, it had your typical heavy wooden door with sort of Victorian stained glass in it, which my mother loathed, so that had to be changed. And I suppose in a certain way that reflects her sort of, a willingness to sort of, you know, sort of open skylights and all the rest of it, so she put in – she wanted a plain glass door and my father said no, we’re not having that, but any case, it was completely replaced with a modern door. It really had been hardly changed so it was full of Anaglypta and all these things and a series of crippled heating systems which we both inherited and then tried to supplement, and this was just a set of disasters, you know, absolutely ridiculous. And I suppose at that point we didn’t really have very much money either. And then it had the standard kitchen towards the back, there was an outhouse, which probably had been a loo once upon a time, but it was full of my dad’s sort of ancient documents, which are of no use to anybody now, from different law firms. Sitting rooms and stairs upstairs, we each had bedrooms, a bathroom. So very straightforward, nothing… I suppose in comparison to many people it was actually above average in its own way, but it wasn’t certainly luxurious.

When you see your, like in your mind’s eye, if you do, your parents in that house, where do they tend to be, what did they tend to be doing?

Well, again, dad was out a lot and very occasionally I think one of his clients or somebody else would ring on some business and once or twice I remember there was a major shouting match, and I’ve no idea what it was about, and we were given strict instructions about handling the phone, if people phoned, what information to give and what information not to give, and the like. And there was a little bit of gardening done, after a fashion. At that stage we had a television and I suppose we probably watched more television than was good for us, but perhaps I learnt my lesson then, because I haven’t had a television for forty years. And my mum again would be reading otherwise, sort of standard thing. I’m sorry, it sounds terribly boring and in a way, thank goodness it was. It wasn’t sort of dramatic, there were bicycles there and one would go out and cycle sometimes and rush around the place, go to the recreation parks and rush around like lunatics, and the like. And some sports, but I was never good at cricket and rugby, so I mostly did cross-country running, which again is a rather solitary exercise and probably that again reflects what I like doing, not being a great mixer, if you like. Close friends, clubs, cabals, but not a huge network of companions.

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[36:16] What did you play with inside?

Pff. Well, fiddling around with the fossil collection in part, fiddling around with the stamp collection, I suppose. And probably again, you know, I’m glad you provoked me, probably reading quite a lot. I mean fairly early on I enjoyed, as one does, a lot of science fiction and probably that again had more influence on me than I now realise, but perhaps now going back to reading some more science fiction or re-reading it, I think it’s an exercise in imagination and I suppose in the end the thing I’m most interested in is how are we imaginative, where do our imaginative powers come from, how do we make things understandable, how do we know anything. So these are ultimately philosophical questions and they perhaps had their seeds in other worlds, if you like, where you could, even now of course, you know, you interpret all this through hindsight. You know, if I was now sixteen I’d have probably have been rather awkward and sort of staring at my feet. Perhaps I still am.

Can you tell me more about which authors you were reading?

Oh gosh. I did read the CS Lewis ones, but again, gratifyingly, they almost went completely over my head at that stage, you know, his trilogy Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet. I don’t think I read That Hideous Strength at that stage, although I may have. And probably most of the standard ones, Blish, I read some of, but again, the great pleasure’s going back to these people and rereading them. And that’s excellent, as it should be, because you know, in a way, as CS Lewis famously says in his account of being a boy in Ireland, the house was full of books, and I suppose we had a good number of books there and there were books suitable for children. There were other books which certainly were not suitable for children, but they were given free rein, and we weren’t quite like that, but you know, the fact is that you read whatever comes to mind and there wasn’t a thing of making an organised list or anything like that. At that time Penguin had quite a good programme of publishing science fiction of one sort and the other. Probably most of it’s rubbish now, but that doesn’t matter, it’s not important.

And any other reading material other than books?

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Gosh. You provoke me. Not… sorry, provoke me in a positive sense. I wonder what else I was doing. Who knows? If it sounds as if I only read science fiction you make me sound a very dull boy. I don’t think I was, but… The school work was really quite heavy. I mean, you know, not in a way which was painful or enduring, but A levels in particular were more demanding than they are now, I think, and that’s no bad thing. I mean I wish they were more demanding now, is what I’m trying to say. And in that respect I was… by the time I really knew I wanted to be a palaeontologist and I’d become pretty interested in biology then, you know, I was probably reading, not a lot, but I think we took New Scientist for instance, and about that stage there used to be a, either it was weekly or daily, probably weekly, in The Times there was a little column which came from Nature and I used to read those avidly, which again makes me sound like a bit of an anorak. And correspondingly, what was the other… sorry, it’s gone out of my mind. That’s right, I persuaded my dad to subscribe to Geological Magazine, which was sort of fairly standard. And in hindsight this was completely ludicrous, because these were scientific papers and I probably wouldn’t have had the first clue about what they were really saying. But for a number of years Geological Magazine arrived and probably I got some benefit from it. But I suppose, and again, the point one’s trying to make is one is in a milieu, one is in this environment which is not one where you depend on exact memories, it’s a reasonable degree of security, a great deal of encouragement and a definite sense of freedom. That’s all you need.

Thank you. [40:13] Can you tell me about churchgoing as a child?

Highly intermittent. I was baptised, that I don’t remember, though I do vaguely remember my brother’s baptism, in St Mary’s, I think, in Wimbledon. As I think I mentioned, my mother’s father, my grandfather, of course William Maxwell, was Church of Scotland and eventually they went to South Africa where he became a professor of theology, more or less, at Rhodes University to begin with. And probably early on my parents would have gone to church fairly regularly and if I say, as most people did, I don’t mean that as a sort of demeaning thing, it was simply part of the social fabric was that to go to church as a couple was unexceptional. Nobody made a big fuss about it. But that sort of rather petered out. I don’t know in any real detail what my mother’s beliefs were. I think they, hm, I’m not sure. She wasn’t an atheist, as far as I

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know. But my father, fairly shortly before his death, by that time he was living in Bethnal Green, that was where his practice was, so he was living above the shop, so to speak, was going to church really quite regularly. I don’t think at all as a result of knowing that he was ill. He was in a sense rediscovering part of himself and that probably had some effect on me, but my main impetus in that direction was really more when I was, not even at Bristol in university, but subsequently probably in Cambridge, but that sort of time when I was roughly twenty, twenty- one. So rather sporadic attendance, local church was called St Matthew’s and my brother, as ever, I suppose the wonderful thing about being a child is that you take so many things for granted. And as soon as it’s pointed out to you it’s sort of self-evident. This was quite a new church and really it was quite straightforward because there had been an older church there which had been hit by a V-1, by a doodlebug, and completely destroyed. I don’t know how many people were injured in that particular case, but in any event, they rebuilt the St Matthew’s afterwards, and I remember going there on occasion and I think there was a sort of church hall and I think I must have belonged to the cubs for a couple of years in the way children do, but not in any particularly committed way, you know, just one of the things you do, and the like. So if one’s interested, insofar as I have an interest in theology, science and religion, all those sorts of things, that’s been very much a very long, long trajectory with ups and downs and the like, but nothing which I sort of thought at that stage, gosh, you know, or do I know more about God, or something like that, definitely not. But there was a background, if you like, that it was Christian belief, but it was unexamined again, and of course, as I’ve mentioned, this was as much a social fabric as any sort of, I suspect, deep conviction.

Did you say prayers as a child?

Seldom, I’m afraid to say. Seldom today, I’m afraid to say.

[43:06] Are you able to take yourself back and say whether you believed certain things to be true or not about Christian…

I’m afraid not. I’m sorry to be so disappointing as an interviewee. No, I think, I mean this is looking far ahead, these days I would describe myself as a Christian, of course. That will

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probably lead to some raised eyebrows in some areas. They think, that character, he must be joking. And in that sense I subscribe entirely to what GK Chesterton, which is another bag of stories, would describe as orthodoxy. So, you know, the central tenets which I think the majority of Christians would subscribe to very crudely; there’s the central role of the Jewish people, the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection, are all absolutely, not in a sense non-negotiable, but they are the heart of what the faith is and, you know, that’s what you really have to get your mind around. But these days, I’m not sounding, I hope, too much like some fashionable theologians, I suspect the whole story is much more complicated, that in a way these facts are telling us something much deeper about the arrangement of the world around us. They’re not simply things which I subscribe to and therefore are true and make me safe or safer or anything like, rather the reverse actually. But they are the things which are, if you like, the starting point for the investigation. But this has all been arrived at really in the last twenty years, I suppose. And I suppose there was some degree of childhood sort of impetus there, but not, as far as I remember, in any sort of particularly direct way. I’m probably too unreflective about this, I’m afraid.

That’s wonderful, thank you.

Ah, perhaps. Thank you.

[44:58] Could you tell me then, we’ve got a sense of your parents’ belief, what about their sort of political outlook?

It’s difficult to be sure. They were, I think, voting for the Liberals, which at that stage were a rather different sort of beast than they subsequently became with the Liberal Democrats and so forth, and I remember at least one, I suppose it was a general election, and there were some neighbours. Now, I’ll misremember the name and I apologise, my brother’s not here to prompt me, but I think they’re called the Secretans, and they were actually in the same road as my friend Mick Bishop lived in, and that was more or less the centre for the canvassing and for discovering whether cars or anything could be sent out to help people get to the polling stations. So it was a very, very busy time towards the evening and so forth, and I must have helped in some form or

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fashion. Whether I ever did any leafleting or anything like that, I forget. But they were, I think at one stage, really quite involved with that. Both of them were, in fact, as I remember. And that was part and parcel of the fact that they felt they were citizens of this country and that therefore they should make a contribution to it, again, having seen how dangerous a country is without a democracy. They probably felt, and in a slightly inarticulate way, that this was the right sort of thing to do. Beyond that I don’t know at all, I’m afraid. I don’t think… they probably belonged to the Liberal Party as it then existed, I suppose. And I imagine they probably voted Liberal. Later on I’ve no idea how their political views would change, my guess is that my father, being sceptical of the world at large might have been instinctively a Conservative, instinctively, but probably regarded them as a complete shower and therefore they might get the vote, but that was neither here nor there.

Thank you. [46:51] Before I ask you about your prep school, could I, because I forgot, could you tell me how you arranged your fossil collection? In other words, it may not have been in your bedroom, but perhaps it was, but could you give a sense…

It was, as it happened, yeah.

So where it was and how you arranged it?

It wasn’t arranged in a particularly orthodox fashion. We had a few display cases, I think we might have even bought one. I seem to remember I went with my mum down to one of the local stores. And these were, in a rather solemn way, put on shelves with labels. One time I remember my dad helped type out some labels for me, because this was long before there were word processors and that sort of business. And then my friend Mick also had his own fossil collection and probably I spent more time round there, chatting and so forth, than I did at home, in this way. But it was just a typical little amateur collection. This is a sort of sad story, I suppose, but I suppose if you are kind of keen on fossils it would be a good idea to find your first fossil, and to that end we dug this gigantic hole at the end of the garden, immense size, and in hindsight of course, it’s almost completely futile because it’s river gravels there. And

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underneath there – I should apologise – probably London clay in fact, but in fact there I did find a fossil sea urchin which was in flint and had been reworked, and so forth, and I was over the moon about it, if you like. So that was part, if you like, of the exploration. But it wasn’t organised in any taxonomic way or stratigraphic way that I remember, it was just the fascination of the objects. And I think those people who’ve ever split open a rock and found a fossil, and it’s naïve, but this is an organism which hasn’t seen the sunlight for a hundred million years, I mean it’s a completely false way of looking at it, but there’s something about that thing of smashing open a piece of chalk and there is a sea urchin inside it. And I suppose we did a little bit of preparation in our rather amateurish way with toothbrushes and so forth. And in fact that even continued when I was here as a PhD student. A very good friend of mine, Ken McNamara, we did PhD together, this would be about 1970, we used to go out fossil collecting. He had a car and so forth, we’d go to local pits again. Again, had a run-in with one of the owners once, but we bluffed our way out of it, in a way. He wasn’t very pleased to see us, for some reason. But yes, we used to go and pick up things here, there and everywhere. So I suppose it’s been a recurrent part of my interest, just wandering around. I suppose in the same way as amateur archaeologists like to wander across fields and pick up flints and so forth. There’s just something about a cabinet in the broadest sense of the word which is a pleasing part of oneself, the same people, same with the library.

What were you reading alongside the collection? Were there, other than geology journals that you mention, were there sort of, at this time, key texts that might inform you about the fossils that you were collecting in some way or other?

Not that I recall. I’m sorry to be so poor on memory. There is, was a famous book called, I think, Principles of Physical Geology by Arthur Holmes, and we had I suppose what would have been a first edition, and I remember also I think having The Observer’s Book of Geology. And once again, it’s in hindsight, it’s almost pathetic, but these little particular pictures, which of course in the Proustian way when you see them again now, you have this sort of surge of mixed emotions when you open a copy of one of these ancient books. But as far as I remember, very little. I mean Holmes we used to sort of dip into, trying to understand geology, after a fashion. And the school didn’t offer O level or A level geology, it’s probably just as well. I think it’s much better to come to geology at university level rather than beforehand, but that’s not

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something everybody would agree with, of course. But of course this sort of deluge of books we have now, especially aimed at children and all the sort of dinosaurs, I’m sure it’s all to the good, but if they existed I don’t think we spent a lot of time looking for those sorts of things at all. It was again, it was strictly amateurish.

Are there pages of, for example, The Observer’s Book of Geology, that when you’ve opened them later in life that you’ve felt that you’ve recognised?

Oh yes, yes. I mean after a fashion, I mean, I suppose this is a part of a larger discussion and I don’t really come out of this with any credit, but I have a suspicion in fact we never forget anything. In fact there are some interesting stories of this happening to people, and that of course begs all sorts of questions about the nature of memory and all the rest of it. But I haven’t ever got round to re-buying a copy of Observer’s Book of Geology, I buy a lot of second-hand books now, much to my wife’s despair, and not infrequently I see a copy of this Observer’s Book and occasionally pick it up. And there’s a particular one I remember, I think it’s in there, and I hope I’m right again, of the cliffs in Torridon in Scotland, and these are, actually we now know, fossiliferous in a certain extent, but of obviously the fabric of our country. And we go to Torridon now regularly and it’s a beautiful part of the world, we’re very, very fond of it. And that if you like ignites a memory, but not in any sort of way of somehow building a set of connections. I notice you’re putting arrows between different things, and that of course is highly necessary, but it isn’t quite the way one’s childhood was. It was more being immersed in a world where, you know, in hindsight you’d see things which you might pick up again. But they weren’t ones where, I suppose in a certain sort of way we were taught fairly well most of the time, occasionally badly, that didn’t matter. But there wasn’t this sort of relentless instruction, it would have been exaggeration to say it was Socratic, it wasn’t anything like that, but there was a sense that you would read books, in history in particular, and probably in hindsight they were quite elementary, but probably they would be beyond some people today, perhaps. We’d probably better delete that statement or we’ll have letters, won’t we? But in any event, the aspect was that one wasn’t being constantly driven in particular areas. Perhaps some people were, perhaps our teachers desired that, and obviously we had to pass exams; O level and A level and the rest of it, but it was probably rather undisciplined in a way. No bad thing.

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[53:22] Could you then tell me about your memories of your first school, which is, I assume, the prep school?

Yes. Well, I think we were…

Or did you go to a little one before that?

We went to a kindergarten, which was just at the bottom of the hill leading down from Wimbledon village, and I don’t have many memories of that. The memories I have are not at all unhappy. And then we were in, the preparatory school was called – I think it still functions, I should check – called Squirrels. And that was fine, as far as I remember. I think it was a headmistress, or maybe she had a brother, Mrs Turner, who seemed at that stage a very decent stick. And I think one of my teachers was called Mr Marsh. Probably even at that stage I remember, I didn’t go and I suppose I must have left Squirrels when I was about twelve, but one time one of our teachers went off with several boys to a cricket match in a sports car. [laughs] That was the sort of thing you could do, you know, nothing unusual about it. I forget the chap in question. And it was just again, that sense of freedom. I’m not at all interested in cricket, I’m afraid to say. But then after that there was a Common Entrance examination. I did take the eleven-plus, I’m not quite sure why, but I failed it. But there was no expectation I should pass. Are you okay there on your tape? Sure.

It’s fine, yeah.

So yes, and then went to King’s, Wimbledon, first in the junior school and then obviously into the senior school and the like and did the normal O levels, English, history, I suppose. Some sort of science, mathematics, which I always struggled with. Then on to sciences after that because I knew I wanted to do some sort of science at university.

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[55:12] Do you remember yourself at Squirrels well enough to tell us whether you remember seeing yourself as being like or different from other, you know, your peers, other boys – would they all have been…

They were all boys, in both schools in fact, yes. This was long pre co-ed. I don’t think so, no. I mean, track one of them down and ask them, frankly. I honestly don’t… I don’t think so, no. I mean I seem to remember we had one boy with very violent behavioural problem, for instance. I think, because this is a little bit like that episode in Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, Lord Tangent, who was shot, if I remember, and subsequently dies, who inflicted some injury on some other boy. But somehow, I mean these days you’d never hear the end of it. Oh, obviously it was a very serious matter, it wasn’t it was taken lightly, but it was in its own way unsensational, if you like. But overall, it was a very sort of pacific school and I seem to remember it kindly. I mean maybe I’m putting too much of a rosy glow on it, and similarly in its own way with King’s, in fact, you know, not a school like… they have asked me to be associated with them subsequently, in a sense because I’ve become a little bit better known than I was then, and I’ve politely declined. I mean, again, a little bit like my lack of interest in my family’s genealogy, what I remember I’m happy to remember, but I won’t go to any great effort to recover it. Whereas I think my brother, again, would probably be more curious in that way. And that’s excellent, you know, it’s not that I think it’s unimportant, it’s just not of great interest to me. And they probably regard this, that is King’s, as rather churlish, I’m afraid, but I just prefer, you know, that the past is behind me. It’s not so much it’s a different country, it’s more that it’s there and I don’t need to do anything about it.

[57:12] Thank you. Could you tell me then your memories of teaching and learning at King’s School?

Gosh.

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And I realise, I mean if I think what I can remember about high school, it’s limited. So it’s whatever you can remember about particular teachers, even aspects of subjects that were striking enough then to seem sort of memorable now.

No, not in great detail. How do I begin? I remember struggling with mathematics, and I don’t want to go into the details at all, but the teacher at that stage was one of the few deeply unpleasant teachers I’ve ever met. He was a nasty man, indeed. But, I say, the details don’t matter. Nothing sensational here, but he was eventually dismissed, and again, nothing sensational, it wasn’t that sort of territory at all. But I remember being completely flummoxed by simple things in that stage and probably in hindsight had a better teacher been able to explain it, it might have been more transparent earlier on. And I suppose in a way, and alas I can’t remember many of their names, partly it was, I did, gosh, we did two O levels in English and there was the mainstream English and I think it was called English literature. And I recall that we did Henry V, as I remember, which is a terrific play, just re-saw it, streamed from Stratford, very much in the news again in various ways. Henry V that is, not Stratford. And also some Chaucer and in both cases in a way probably at a very elementary level things began to click, you suddenly saw. There was, if you like, there was intellectual territory here. Not in a sort of Bloomsbury way, but just that there were ideas at play here, very amateurish again. So that was very helpful at that time. We had a lot of Latin forced down my throat, which probably in hindsight’s been a great advantage, because so far as I write well in part it’s because we did probably too much Latin. I did a tiny bit of Greek. Again, my mother’s influence, we could have a choice doing German or Greek and she sort of, she didn’t insist, but she suggested Greek would be better, and maybe she was right, but probably as a scientist German would have been more useful. But heck, it doesn’t matter, it’s okay. Anybody can learn a language, for goodness sake. And otherwise, so far as the sciences were concerned, towards A level, lack of maths didn’t help me, but I wasn’t at all good at physics and I made no pretence of not being interested in it. Which was a big mistake, I should have tried a bit harder, it’s not quite as difficult as it appears. But in the end I failed A level physics, simply because I knew I needed three A levels to get to university, and taking four, because of doing zoology and botany, which were separate at that stage, along with chemistry meant that I couldn’t really see the point in working for four when I only needed three. But that’s a matter of regret. [1:00:34]

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The person who taught me biology principally was a chap called John Hard, who I have kept in contact, or had kept in contact and subsequently he moved ultimately I think to Wells School, and he was great, he was a terrific inspiration and again, what is I suppose charming about young, not young men, is that the teachers are often only a few years older than you are because they’ve just come back from university, but of course they already seemed immensely old. They weren’t, they were young men as well. And he was very, very supportive and taught very well and had a careful line on discipline, which wasn’t heavy-handed at all, but you know, he had the class’s attention, I think. And chemistry was good in a way because they introduced a new scheme under Nuffield, which was somewhat experimental and again, in hindsight would probably be laughably amateurish, but it was effectively how do you make grass into milk. So you had to approach the composition of the grasses and the composition of the milk and so forth, and do the sort of chemical investigations in between. And that struck me as being very imaginative. I don’t know what happened to that scheme subsequently. But I did reasonably well in chemistry, again, fairly well taught. And probably in physics as well had I bothered to pay more attention to it. So in that way again, I think most of the teaching was quite good. One or two areas were definitely less than good. I mean a number of the cases, I think at least two, there’s a chap, Sammy Thurlow, I think was his name, I think he’d been a prisoner of the Japanese, and of course the older of these people, rather than the very young men who’d come to teach us, of course had all been in the war. You know, this is well-known territory, but just as with my parents, it had changed them and I think Sammy, if I remember this correctly, was like a lot of people who were in Burmese theatre, I’ve been told in parenthesis more or less, that the people who served in Burma, but more particularly the people who led, most of them were never given jobs of responsibility afterwards, for the simple reason that it was just so shattering. It was the most terrible theatre of war. I mean it was bad enough, you know, bad enough in Russia of course, it was bad enough in Europe, but fighting the Japanese in Burma, it was a terrible experience, I think. And in hindsight of course, whether this is actually true, I should check, but the nature of warfare there was awful. And it’s amazing in a way that principally the British Army, and the Indian Army actually, did as well as they did, with some very imaginative leadership, but you had to have some pretty eccentric leaders who were willing to think out of the box to get round the problems of dealing in this very, very hostile terrain. I mean it’s another story perhaps for another time later in the interview, but my supervisor here in Cambridge, Harry Whittington, had been teaching in the Baptist College in Rangoon and arrived less than a year, I

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think, before the Japanese turned up in very large numbers and he had a terrible journey to safety, and he wouldn’t talk much about this, but again, he said a few things, specially towards the end of his life when his memories would come flooding back, and so forth. That’s all in parenthesis, but again, at that stage in hindsight, we were in the sixties, for heaven’s sake, it was already modernising all over the place and we were very cocky, but the people who were teaching us had often seen very, very different things and were very patient with us, I think.

In retrospect, was any of this experience sort of obviously manifest in the way they conducted themselves or spoke or didn’t speak? In other words, when you say that it had changed them, was that apparent at the time?

Not at the time, no, no. And again, being children we take these things for granted. We don’t interrogate. Probably, I mean just as with my father I wish now very much that I’d asked him more about, you know, because when he went to Egypt, as I recall, I think he must have gone on the Queen Mary, which of course was a troop carrier at one stage, very fast boat and therefore less vulnerable to the U-boats. And they went all the way round the Cape, of course, for obvious reasons, and no doubt he stopped at various places on the way down, no doubt stopped in Cape Town, maybe stopped in Madagascar, I don’t know. I know nothing. But in a certain way I think, you know, for people of his generation, to travel at all, even if you’re trying to defeat the Nazi, was, you know, a most unusual occurrence. And they just wanted to win the war and get back to work. There wasn’t any particular glory about this, it was just a bloody nuisance and it had to be done, there was no dispute about that, there was no shirking or anything like that. Okay, you can romanticise these things, but both my uncle and my father I just think just felt naturally they had to fight for their country. And I suspect many of our teachers were just the same, but they didn’t make any deal about it. But in hindsight, you know, you realise that, you know, all of them had their lives changed forever. [1:05:47] And probably, obviously I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I think was 1963? I should remember these things. And seriously remembering walking down – so I would have been there about twelve, I suppose – walking down home and thinking I’m surprised I’m alive this afternoon. And the world was too close for comfort to a nuclear exchange. As I say, as an American state department pointed out later, a chap from the State Department pointed out, the

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Russians and the Americans were looking at each other eye to eye and the Russians blinked. And it’s worth remembering.

Thanks.

Sorry, I don’t mean to pursue it. It didn’t terrify me, I was too unimaginative to think what would have happened had there been a nuclear attack on London, but I do remember walking back thinking, oh, I’m still here.

Was it something you discussed with your friends at school, with…

Not that I remember, I’m afraid. We might have. And similarly, with my parents, my mother was very sort of angry because she realised, I think more perhaps being trained as a nurse, that for all intents and purposes there was no useful defence against nuclear attack, and probably at the back of my mind there was a sort of fear, if you like, but not one I think which has corrupted me in any sort of particular way, but there was a realisation that it was possible that we’d all go up in smoke. And they had some sort of civil defence scheme, and the idea was how to… And in hindsight actually, although it had many pitfalls, the civil defence in this country in the Second World War ultimately, not completely, ultimately was very successful. Not perfect, but not bad. Very, very long stories about building deep shelters and all this sort of stuff, which is just what I’m reading about at the moment, not just about… London in the Second World War. But she was furious because, you know, it was clear that the sort of ability to survive that sort of attack was very, very different from a nuclear attack. But in a certain sense there was nothing we could do about it and, as I say, it’s not a thing which somehow corroded me, I don’t think, but we could probably have done without it, but of course we can’t.

Do you remember any sort of public information type material on…

Not myself, no. There may have been. And… no, not that I know. I mean even if there had been a war it may have been different from what everybody had envisaged. But maybe not.

[1:08:24]

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Did you get on to the zoology, the teaching of zoology, which was one of your A levels, is that right?

That’s right, yes.

Also taught by the botany teacher?

Yes, I think, as I remember, there were two biology teachers. A chap called Springthorpe and John Hard, as I mentioned. And so far as I recall, between them, they taught the biology. But so far as I was concerned John Hard was the chap who was influential on me. Not directly in terms of the fossil record or anything like that, but you know, just a range of the things you learnt. And I think the syllabus was actually quite broad at that stage. We did real dissection, which apparently is not very common, perhaps rightly so. And that’s a bit of an eye-opener really. And of course many of the people who were being trained, it was quite a small sixth form, were going off to train as medics. It was called the Medical Six and the majority were aimed for Oxbridge, and many of them got there.

[1:09:25] And apart from the fact that you didn’t need it for university, why didn’t you find physics engaging?

Well, I wish I knew really now. I mean, as I say, partly I’m not good at mathematics at all, probably – and it’s probably my fault – but either way, if I had become more competent it would have been a lot easier. Because the sort of maths we did then was really pretty elementary. It didn’t even involve calculus to any extent, which sounds rather incredible, I suppose. No, I think it’s probably because in a sense I was a biologist and of course it was my fault, not to realise that without a good knowledge of physics you’re disadvantaging yourself massively. And since then I mean I’ve got quite interested in the way so-called structural problems in biology are solved and the way in which biology gets round all the things to do with stress and strain and the flow of fluids and that sort of… I don’t do research on this, not directly, but I have something more of an understanding about it now than I would have otherwise. So probably I learnt things at

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King’s, Wimbledon which taught me physics which no doubt were absorbed, but they weren’t examinable.

[1:10:39] What seemed to be the status of the sciences in relation to the arts at the school?

A good question and one I can’t easily answer. I think probably it was always, you know, in the way it was, I don’t want to talk about CP Snow and two cultures, but there was probably an element of that, I should think. But I don’t think, if there was hostility, perhaps I was too blind to notice it. And the science labs were good, they were well equipped and they did the things they were meant to do in a fair degree of safety, and the like. But my brother, as I say, did English and very talented boy, and he was very lucky, he had a fantastically good teacher, extremely influential on a whole generation of schoolchildren there. And this teacher treated them really as young adults, you know, this was the… he’d been in Cambridge himself and I think had been influenced by Leavis and the like, so there was this sort of passion, if you like, for literature, that they could do. And in a certain way I suppose we did it in science in that sort of way, that it wasn’t just blocks of facts which you had to absorb, you were living in a particular world, but of course this is not pre-DNA, naturally, but really pre-molecular biology for all intents and purposes and pre the revolution which has happened since then. And probably in a certain sense, just as well, because we spent more time looking at whole organisms, which in a way is what I’ve always remained interested in.

[end of track 1]

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[Track 2]

Who did you talk to towards the end of your time at school about what you wanted to do next, options about careers, where you might want to go to university, that sort of thing, who were the people you were talking to about that sort of thing?

I think rather few. The school at that stage was not like public schools are now. I have views on that which are mostly unprintable. But there was the expectation that the brightest boys would go to Oxford and Cambridge. There was no disgrace going elsewhere, but that was a natural home for these people, and for the most part, when it came to either university, they flourished, you know, they were very lucky, I think by and large. I didn’t want to go to Cambridge, I mean partly because it was pretty well unisex, and I’m not trying to sound as if, you know, vigorously heterosexual, I think, but it wasn’t, just having been brought up in an all-boys’ school but liking girls very much indeed, I didn’t really want to subscribe to a place which had a, to put it bluntly, a shortage of girls. Not that I have any great credibility in this area, far from it, in fact. And I think, and again, I’ve no idea where that information came from, that Bristol University had a good reputation in geology. As it turned out that was, I suppose, justified. It was a good course, by and large. And I, yes, that’s right, I remember going for interviews in Leicester and Newcastle, and Bristol of course, and UCL, I think. Yes, UCL, that’s right, because we were talking… yes, you were asking me earlier about books I’d read and I cautiously said to the interviewer there that amongst the books I read a lot of was Orwell. So he promptly asked me about a book which I’d never read, of course. That’s quite right too, that’s exactly what an interviewer should do. Obviously I’d read 1984 many times and Road to Wigan Pier, once I think, and Down and Out in Paris and London. But in any event, Bristol was really what I wanted to go to. And the other places were fine, they were all very supportive, you know, very keen to recruit. And I think Bristol offered me something ludicrous like, in A level parlance, two Ds and a C, which really in hindsight was a pretty low level, but heck, that was fine and there I went and that worked out pretty well. But I don’t think anybody, I mean the school really wasn’t geared to deal with people who wanted to do geology of any sort at all, and that was, you know, they perhaps could have been more imaginative, but I don’t think they were. But again, my mother in terms of being the main sort of, if you like, academic motor was very much driving us to, and again, not in the way of a slave master, but the underlying assumption was that you

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would do well, you would get good grades and you would go to university. And I think much later on she did sort of say when she was really quite old that perhaps she pushed us a little hard, but if she did it, she didn’t do any harm, at all. Perhaps in fact rather the reverse. Both my brother and I really do work pretty hard and it’s not a matter of complaint, but we’re glad we do it, I think, yeah. So that was really the sort of background to it, so there would have been other possibilities and Mick Bishop went to University College London. But this of course is around about 1968/69 and the whole world has changed since then, in many, many ways.

[03:44] When you said that the school wasn’t well set up for someone who wanted to study geology, you didn’t mention that there was any geography teaching at school, was there?

There was, and in fact, I could find the certificates probably too, I did O level geography and I enjoyed that very much, and perhaps in part, although I think the geography we were taught was really rather noddy and we must have done, I suppose, some physical geography which would translate into geology. And again, I don’t remember the exact dates of that, but fairly shortly before I did the O levels I was extremely ill with meningitis and of course my mother was terrified because it very often led to blindness or deafness in particular, I was very ill for a few days, in an isolation ward and so forth. And I don’t think it had anything to do with it, quite amusing if it did really I suppose, but I was doing alright at school but I wasn’t a star pupil by any stretch of the imagination, but after that, and especially actually, oddly enough, in geography, I did really extremely well. So I can’t believe that that horrible disease did anything positive. I was really, you know, I don’t know how ill I was, but certainly my parents were terrified. And then subsequently, there’s another story for another time perhaps, but my brother was diagnosed with a hole in the heart, so he had to have that sorted out, about the age of sixteen, and he also had a, he was very lucky, he had wonderful surgeons and made a complete recovery. But even so, you can imagine the parent, the last thing, one child down with meningitis and a few years later the other one has to go off for major heart surgery. But yes, and perhaps the geography, that was one which I sort of shone in and maybe that was part of what actually then allowed me, for want of a better word, to be more confident. But this is looking at it very much in hindsight.

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Do you remember what, in terms of the geography, you were shining in? You said you think it might have been a bit noddy, do you remember what it was…?

I think it was, at that time of course, said he naively, or not, no, that’s not the word to use. I mean this country was a manufacturing nation so a good deal of what you needed to know was what happened in the various towns. I daresay there was a great deal else I was taught, but I don’t remember it, but you know, it was a time when shoes and Northampton went together and so on and so forth, steel and this sort of stuff, and the like. Not that I knew the country particularly well at that stage in any case, you know, I hadn’t travelled that much in Britain, ironically, if anything probably knew France slightly better in terms of the geography. But yes, I mean there must have been other things in it and probably with an effort I could recover some of this stuff. But I don’t remember, we had few, if any, fieldtrips. But that’s okay, it’s all very well dragging children all over the place, but, you know. Certainly when my children went on fieldtrips they probably achieved something, but I’m not sure they achieved very much, other than a day out, which is no bad thing. Maybe, because you said you have children - how old are your children, can I ask?

Yeah, they’re seven and four.

Oh right, so they really are extremely young. Yes, okay, so they’re just blossoming I hope. Exactly, yeah. No, sure. Well, best of luck with them.

[07:00] Thank you. Could you then tell the story of going up to university? I don’t know whether you do something between school and university in terms of a sort of holiday or work or anything or whether you go straight…

I think, oh dear, I hope this is right. I went to Greece again with a friend of mine, a school friend called John Beardall, who since has become a very distinguished sort of molecular biologist, botanist in Australia, I saw him some years ago. Otherwise I’ve not been in contact with him and we, really from what I’d learnt going to Greece previously with my mother, we went mostly round the islands and again, I can probably get some of the things. We took the train, as we did,

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you go through Milan and then down to Brindisi and then across to Corfu on the boat, and we stayed in Corfu and that again, not to be nostalgic, but was unspoilt, as it had been even when we were there in the other place, it was a completely different world. And spent probably a week there and then we must have carried on down to, that’s right, we went down to Patras, and stupidly we thought we could hitchhike, which was a big mistake. Not out of unfriendliness of the Greeks, very much the reverse, but it’s just not a practical way to get round the country, so we started taking buses. Went up to Delphi, spent a couple of days there as I recall, then to Athens, then took boats down and eventually ended up in Crete and on the south side of the island, a place called Matala, which at that time was quite a hippy colony and was quite well known, but nothing wild or weird and so forth, and my friend John fell in with an American girl and we lived in one of these sort of rock shelters and so forth. It was all a bit ridiculous really, but in any case, it was what we did. Before that we’d been on an island called Amorgos, which - is very under-visited, and we were staying up in the high, in Chora, the high town, away from the port. And there’s a long steep descent down to the Mediterranean and, you know, dusty paths and so forth, very deep sea. And again, just wonderful. Two young men wandering around, it’s great. So very nice indeed.

Apart from wandering, what were you doing? Was this somewhere where you would be taking an interest in the landscape or was this leisure and other kinds…

Leisure, basically. Yeah, it’s a holiday effectively, yes. Yeah, I don’t think, I mean now I know a little bit more about the geology of Greece because I’ve been on fieldtrips there with colleagues of mine in Cambridge, and the sort of the tectonics and the tilting of the fault blocks and so forth, which explains why Amorgos has such a steep side and such a gentle slope on the other side. But we never had any earthquakes, so that’s right, we went to Santorini as well. But, you know, principally just slept on the beach and did the usual things and did it on a pittance. Not out of reluctance of my parents paying for it, we just didn’t need very much money and you could do these things without any problem at all. [10:01] And then I went up to, must have gone to Bristol afterwards. And rather foolishly perhaps, though probably just as well, the great majority of first year undergraduates go to the hall of residence. And I think you had to write to the hall of residence or apply and give a bit of

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background, and I rather stupidly said, well actually, I’m fairly independent. So they took me at my word and didn’t give me a place in the hall of residence, which I think in hindsight was slightly unfair, because that is a time when you’re going to meet lots of people. But I never, you know, it’s not a grudge then and it wasn’t a sense of unfairness then, but I was in some digs which were fairly ghastly, in a slightly out of the way place. But again, living in a small room with a somewhat curmudgeonly family is no bad thing. [laughs] Teaches you things. And probably in fact they weren’t as curmudgeonly as I thought they were, and probably had their own difficulties as well. So one tries to remember to be generous. And then the second two years I was living in Clifton, which was not quite as fashionable as it is now, but was lovely then, I daresay it’s lovely now. And again, it was a bedsit room, but it was about four or five of us living in a very nice house, which was Victorian, just beneath Royal York Crescent, and yes, we had a great time there and just used to wander round and there were local pubs which were always enjoyable to go to. And the course in Bristol by and large was very good, very small class, good fieldtrips mostly, one terrible death, but you know.

[11:31] Could you, as far as you can, just describe the content of the teaching and learning there? I don’t know whether you can divide it up in your memory into the three years, or whether it’ll be a matter of giving me the content as a mass. But a sense of the course, because there’ll be listeners to the recording who don’t know what a geology degree might be.

No, no. Quite right too. I hope they don’t. It was pretty traditional of course, and I suppose inheriting from my A levels, there were separate courses in botany, now called plant sciences, and zoology and geology. And you did three sciences in the first year and I did very well in, not top, but very well in, I think, zoology and botany, and pretty well in geology and I think they were, the zoology/botany people were keen that I carried on with them, but I very politely explained I’ve really come here to do geology. And that was again, probably in hindsight pretty elementary stuff we learnt, but quite wide ranging. And then that involved some fieldtrips, and then geology for the next two years, because at that stage it was only a three-year course, whereas most universities go for four years. And we did the whole range of things in the way that geology was. Because geochemistry was beginning, but the technology was primitive, and it wasn’t my interest, but even so, I mean mass spectrometers were much older than that, but you

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know, the fact that now in a geology department the great majority of people spend their time talking to machines hadn’t yet happened. Similarly with computing of course. And I knew I wanted to be a palaeontologist and the palaeontology, I have to say, the teaching was probably not of the greatest. Well, that’s not quite true, there was one rather inspirational chap there called Bob Savage who taught the vertebrate palaeontology, but I didn’t have a great deal to do with him in fact, because in Bristol at that stage, and I think they continued it after a fashion, you could combine courses. So a number of my friends there were taking what was called GZ, in other words, you’d be taking geology and zoology, and a handful were taking geology and botany, and those sorts of things. But in any event, amongst the things I did enjoy, apart from the fieldwork, and anybody who’s a geologist, the fieldwork is the cement. As a friend of mine who’s a professor here pointed out, when you, the professor, are on the same windswept hill as your student and everybody is freezing and it’s raining, you know, it’s a terrific bonding experience, you know, you’re all in this together. The them and us stuff pretty well evaporates. But I particularly enjoyed the petrology and met a man called Bernard Leake. And in hindsight actually, I hope Bernard never listens to this, but I apologise straightaway if you are, Bernard, but I mean his teaching was absolutely dreadful because all he really did was read out his notes. [laughs] And we had shorthand for the different sorts of minerals, OPX was orthopyroxene and so forth, but it didn’t matter, it’s not a problem. You know, nobody was sort of clamouring that they had to have the best possible teaching and we did a huge amount of petrology, using thin sections. And probably I was quite good at it at one stage, I’m not now. But again, it was just, you know, it wasn’t it was unhurried, but there weren’t, if you like, the distractions of computers in a way, and things weren’t virtual. So most of it was, you know, there really were rocks and really were thin sections, and those people who are familiar with thin sections will know that you use a system of polarised light and the way the light shines through the crystal lattices is dependent on all sorts of different things, including their crystallography and their composition and so forth, and it’s a highly multi-coloured experience, you know, have all sorts of amazing sort of shapes and colours. But again, it’s just fascinating and it was just something which I enjoyed very much indeed.

What was the aim of looking through thin sections of rock with polarised light in petrology? What was at stake in seeing different patterns and colours, what were you getting at?

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Well, I mean very crudely, it is of course the rock clearly can be interrogated with a hand lens or with a hammer and you might see particular minerals, but not always skilled petrologists will be able to recognise a particular sort of mineral just in terms of the composition on the surface of the rock, but by and large if you want to have any detailed understanding of rock you’ve got to grind it to round about thirty microns, thirty-five microns thickness, which renders it transparent, or semi-transparent. And then if you look at it in ordinary light you can see often all sorts of important things, but when you put it in a polariser, which then polarises the light so it’s only got one direction of vibration, then the different minerals tend to have different colours and all sorts of textures come clear and subsequently – this is not work we did at all – one would interrogate either that section or a polished section, inasmuch as if you’re looking at a normal petrological section light has been transmitted through the slide, so so-called transmitted light, versus if the light’s being bounced off a reflective surface, rather different techniques, which is probably used more widely. And this again was pretty well pre-electron microscope days. But there would be chemistry involved with these, not that we did that sort of thing, but obviously in the end, especially with an igneous rock, of course it starts as a molten mass of material which might be in a magma chamber which perhaps would be half a kilometre across, and it’s either erupted suddenly through a volcano, so it cools quickly or it solidifies in position, and the chemistry is such that different minerals will form at different stages and the first minerals typically will form unimpeded in a magma – and this is simplifying enormously, it’s a level I understand – so they have well-developed crystal faces. But subsequently as the thing converts from a liquid of crystals to a mush and eventually a solid rock, of course all the other minerals have to grow in the interstices of it. So I daresay, it makes it sound as if this is a sort of eureka moment, but again, it’s just the way the science works and you begin to unravel the story. And probably I learnt much more through doing the petrology than I now realise, or until I talk now. But it’s that sort of way of looking at the world, and it’s a very detailed, you’ve got a tiny area of visible, maybe half a millimetre, two millimetres or so at any one time. You move the slide around, of course, you’re looking for rare minerals or orientations and so forth. Yes, so that’s sort of…

That’s useful. So it’s a matter not of, not just of identification, but attempting to understand the history of the material by looking at this?

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I think yes, that’s right. And in a certain sense, I mean evolution is history, fossil record is history and perhaps, perhaps – I’m not sure it’s really the case – it’s a chicken and egg thing, some of my interests in history generally are what are the starting points, what are the bad turns, the false turns in human history and so on and so forth, you know, how you interrogate the evidence. Yes.

[18:47] Thank you. And you’ve described one kind of laboratory science there, the looking at these discs. Could you describe some of the practices of the field sciences that you were… of the fieldwork that you were learning, presumably forms of mapping and drawing and observings?

No, with pleasure. I think, I hope I recollect correctly, we went to Pembrokeshire in our first year, and that would be a rather large class, because of course there were a lot of people who would be going off to do other sciences. We went on a fieldtrip, and actually I went on a number of fieldtrips, and some of the young staff or postdocs were very keen on just, either get in a car or something and just bomb off to the Mendips or somewhere like that. And probably I did more of that than I now remember clearly. But there was this one terrible occurrence down in Cornwall where we were at a place called Trebarwith Strand, which oddly enough I’d been to years before with Mick Bishop as relatives of his lived there. But any case, that area of the coast of course is very rugged and very tectonically, the placement of the rocks has been very controversial, in part because the outcrop more or less stops at the coast. The coast is superbly exposed with all these cliffs, but inland it’s all grass with cows on and the whole history of that part of Britain is, I think, is probably much better resolved, and in parenthesis this was pretty well pre-plate tectonics days. So, tectonics and mountain building, they were all understood, but how you got the juxtaposition of rocks such as you get in The Lizard, for instance, and what the significance of these rocks which might be involved with some sort of ocean crust were, and I think to some extent still rather controversial, so as this country is so marvellous, you have this microcosm sort of geology which in other parts of the world you might have to travel for several days before you get into a different rock, whereas we have everything stuck together. Any case, we were down there at Trebarwith Strand and I found it a very sinister day – this may be hindsight – but it was a stormy day and these big cliffs and these large quarries there where they used to take the slate out of. But in any event, we’re down towards the little inlet and so forth,

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and one of our number’s fooling around on the rocks and a big wave sweeps him off. And at first we thought it was a terrific joke and then very quickly realised it was not and he was drowned. His body was never recovered, I believe, and it was terrifically shocking for us. A chap called John Lewin, he was an absolutely delightful man, he really was terrific fun to be with and I suppose probably he was being silly, but I’m sure all of us thought that could have easily been us. And ever since then, even though I lead fieldtrips and I don’t make light of health and safety, because obviously we don’t want anybody to be injured, but you know, having seen that, then it brought it home very, very forcibly indeed. It was a terrible tragedy. But in another way, you know, it was a thing which happened. Nobody wanted it to happen, it was in a sense his fault, and you could point fingers at all sorts of people, but when you’re outside there are risks and that’s the way the world is. But that was something which shook us a lot, inevitably. I knew John quite well. And then subsequently, I think probably beforehand, I had a number of lecturers there who I admired very much. They were with few exceptions very good. There was one chap called Crosbie Matthews, he was a very irascible Scot, dead now, but not a happy man really. Probably drank too much in the end and his relationships with women, I think probably were sort of somewhat titanic and rocky, and so forth. And eventually he moved to Sweden where he had very good friends and he was very far ahead of his time, he was very interested in Cornish geology and had original ideas there. But he was very supportive of me and he helped to run a trip in France where we learnt mapping, and it was across in Brittany. And maybe I make this up, but we were just told to get there. They just said, you know, turn up at this place on the Crozon peninsula, you know, no instructions how to get there, just go there. So we did it. I mean I went by myself, I think I flew to Paris, I must have taken a train there, I remember taking a bus from the terminus, I suppose somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and got there, fractured French, asked where, you know, l’equipe Anglais is, and so forth, and fine. So, but again, it was a small group of us and we had a great time, very interesting geology.

What were you learning, and it’ll be obvious to you, but how are you being taught to produce a geological map, say, of this area?

Well, effectively what you have to do is join the dots and most areas of the world have suffered some sort of deformation. It might be sort of tearing apart in the form of fault or it’s been folded, and in this particular case the peninsula is more or less an enormous fold. But as I

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remember, I think it was a syncline, that is that you have the youngest beds in the middle and the oldest beds on either side in contrast to an anticline. So the anticline you must imagine as an arch and a syncline as a basin, if you like. And in principle the rocks on either side of the fold should be more or less the same, because originally they were horizontal and they’ve been compressed into this thing. But actually the rocks on either side weren’t particularly similar, so we had some fun trying to work out what was going on. And Crosbie Matthews was there with a demonstrator, a chap called Peter Sadler, who was terrific fun, he was very good indeed, and he’s since had a very distinguished career in America, has done some extremely original work. And you just identify a rock in one area, which of course in terms of the scale of the map is a pinprick, and then you try and extrapolate where the outcrop might go. And of course in a way analogous to Cornwall, most of the interior, unless there happens to be a quarry or something, is unexposed, because it’s fields and so forth. And so you’re trying to work out where the rocks have gone and in principle it’s a predictive science, you sort of say right, okay, if this layer of conglomerate, say, is here and given that it has what’s called a strike, in other words, you follow it out through country, I predict I’ll find it here. And almost invariably it’s not there, which means that something’s happened to the geology in the meantime. And the thing with a geological map is that there are people who are very skilled at mapping – I’m not one of them – and everybody’s map is different, because you’re all interpreting things. You know, okay, if you stripped off, in fact it’s said that if you have too much exposure it actually makes it more difficult, because in the end the actual details are almost always extremely complicated. So in a certain sense you’re simplifying, but on the other hand of course you’re involved in economic decisions where you need to know where, let us say, you know, an auriferous or some other body which has got economic potential is, you’d better get it right because it’s going to cost a great deal of money to drill in the wrong place. You may not keep your job. But that was very helpful and Crosbie Matthews also, being Scottish, brought up in Galloway, I think it was, we have to do, as we do to the present day, which I’m very pleased about, the students do what is called independent mapping. These days pretty much you have to go at least as a pair, if not more, which is probably sensible, but I deplore, in the sense that when you’re on your own, but you will have gathered I’m something of a loner, I suppose, on the geological map of Britain there’s an interesting looking area around Girvan, and I talked to Crosbie about that and he said, yes. He’d actually, I think, done some mapping there and he knew somebody who subsequently had again a very distinguished career, but had really cut his teeth on it, a chap called Alwyn

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Williams, who ended up as vice-chancellor and all sorts of exciting things. And he thought that was a good place, so I must have made enquiries, found a caravan I could rent for four or five weeks, took the train up there. Took the bus down, yes, that’s right, to a place called Lendalfoot, stayed there and just walked over the whole area mapping, badly, it wasn’t a good map at all. In hindsight probably I could have done it better, but the great thing there, and perhaps that goes back to things we had been discussing, you got to know a bit of the country almost inside out. And it was pretty deserted, had one or two run-ins with dogs on sheep farms, they were perfectly friendly, there was no problem there, but the dogs were a bit wild. And all sorts of things like an enormous bird, I’d never seen it before, heron, for heaven’s sake. So, you know, one was on one’s own. Mostly the weather was okay, occasionally it was dreadful, and you could eat your sandwiches looking across to Ailsa Craig out in the Sound and so forth, so it was lovely, it was very good.

What did the sheep farmers think that you were doing when they…?

I don’t think they were bothered. I was English, I suppose. I remember one time the dogs got very excited and I didn’t react very well. It was okay, I mean just once you know dogs then you understand how one should behave. But that’s again… a cow’s charged me once or twice, you know, one gets used to these things.

And what did you do in the evenings here on your own?

Mostly read, I think. One had to prepare notes and probably do some inking in on the maps and so forth. In this trade you have what are called field slips, which are the things you take out in the field and you mark in the localities and the nature of the rock. I did some fossil collecting there as well, there was a nice little quarry, rather rich material in it, and then you have to do a final map which was then given as part of your, that’s part of your examination and so forth. You get, I think it probably accounted for perhaps twenty per cent, I forget the details now. And it was a good area to map in a sense that the outcrops were just enough, but the central hills were made of granite and then just to the south there’s an extremely complex area of igneous rocks, which I didn’t tackle, or didn’t tangle with. But the granites were reasonably, no more than scrambling, but granites one should perhaps explain are rocks which have been intruded into the

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sediment, therefore they’re younger than the sediment, again the history of it, and this process of intrusion is generally fairly slow and the temperatures are not that high, but the actual process of intrusion is rather complicated and in this particular case there was a tiny outcrop of granite which I did find, so in a sense, Crosbie had been there as well and he was very pleased I’d noticed it, so that sort of thing. So that was part of the training. And we must have had fieldtrips elsewhere, but gosh, let me remember.

[29:37] When you say that Crosbie was very supportive of you, what are you referring to, what are you remembering about your relations with him?

Well, I think two things. Partly, as I say, he was quite rebarbative, but I think was pleased to encourage people who wanted to be encouraged, if you like. I think he rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and he was sometimes quite prickly, but heck, doesn’t matter. The most important thing by far, I think, was that apart from a slightly sardonic view of the world, which probably has done me no harm either, is that he was actually, I think, he had his ear to the ground in all sorts of ways and it was he, I am sure as anything, who told me about the project in Cambridge, about the Burgess Shale and the fact that it was being led by Harry Whittington who had fairly recently come from Harvard to be the Woodwardian Professor in Cambridge. And he suggested that I might write to Harry and see whether there was a possibility of some sort of work. And Crosbie had done a bit of palaeontology and he in his own way was actually rather far ahead of the game, because in the end it comes into our understanding of what’s called the Cambrian explosion, of which the Burgess Shale is part. Before much was known about these soft-bodied fossils, which I’ve done a lot of work on over the years, there are also these very abundant, what are called small shelly fossils. And these are mostly fragments of skeleton, they appear very abruptly at the beginning of the Cambrian and a great deal of progress is being made, but at the stage Crosbie got involved, the principle information came from Russia. And he developed some connections with people in Russia, and of course this time it was Soviet Russia, and he published a very influential paper which drew the attention of people in the West to this particular area. And he’d learnt this technique, in a sense, because the microfossils you get from younger rocks, including ones in Cornwall, are known as conodonts, and these are very useful for dating rocks. So he’d done a great deal of work here and then he got involved with that. So

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it may have been that his sort of interest in what we now call a Cambrian explosion and this role of these sort of tiny skeletal remains, the small shelly fossils, then segued into his understanding of this new project on the Burgess Shale. But he encouraged me to write to Whittington, and that’s probably some other time, but in any event, there was a small collection of these fossils from the Burgess Shale in the Bristol, in the department museum in Bristol, and I remember looking at those. We probably had them out in a lab as well, and that certainly spurred my interest there. So I owe a great deal, I mean I owe a great deal to Bristol, again, I don’t keep contact with them, I mean it’s all changed, they’ve moved to another building, it’s a very successful department, there’s some extremely talented people there, but that’s all past history. But it was a great place to be in, it’s a great city. Yeah, we did lots of silly things.

[32:42] Can you describe the small Burgess Shale collection that you remember seeing there in Bristol, either in the museum or in a lab?

Not in much detail. I think almost certainly they would have been a gift, though some people say he actually extracted money for them, but the person who discovered the Burgess Shale was an American called Charles Walcott and small collections are sent to many, many universities and I’d always assumed that they were gifts and I’ve also told, whether there’s truth in this or not, I don’t know, that in a certain sense although the material was published, it wasn’t that people didn’t believe him, but in a certain sense you had to see the material itself. And quite how it was that Bristol ended up with this collection, I’ve no idea. I think most of this material was sent out in the thirties maybe, or the late twenties, and by this time, Walcott, well Walcott died in round about 1927, 28. But in any event, I’ve looked at many of these small collections in various places and occasionally when you visit somebody will say, did you know we have a small collection of Burgess Shale, said no, I didn’t, and always have a look at them. I’ve never seen anything there which is important. They’re the routine material which was sent out as a representative collection, so my guess is there would probably have been a couple of sponges – I’ll have notes somewhere which says what’s there, because I did check that collection at one stage. And most of the material which was sent out was not spectacularly well preserved. I mean, it would be unfair to say it was second rate, but it wasn’t the sort of stuff you do research on as a rule, it was representative. And either looking in the lab, most likely in the lab, perhaps I

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talked to the curator and we pulled some drawers open or something and I had another look at them. But again, I don’t remember many of the details, but I had a very strong hunch that this was, you know, going to be important.

[34:37] Why, why do you think?

Don’t know, no idea. Sorry. Just a hunch that it was, you know, and when I came up to Cambridge, so I don’t want to take this interview or conversation in areas which can wait till later or in any way divert you from any narrative, but I came up to see Harry Whittington. I think he was a bit surprised I came with an enormous black cloak on and so forth, but he’s a wonderful man and we became good friends. But he explained what was going on, he explained that they had one student already in position, with money in his own college which was Sidney Sussex and that I would be welcome. Well, he sent me a kind letter saying I hope you keep us first. What I never told him was that I didn’t apply to anywhere else. And then quite late in the day, the research councils at that time had a scheme whereby people who got first class honours and were looking for a PhD got funding, they had a reserve pot, not many as I remember, and so quite late in the day I learnt that I’d been lucky enough to get one of these, so that enabled me to come to Cambridge and the like. And after then I didn’t have much to do with Bristol, I don’t think. I must have gone back there a few times, probably I saw Crosbie once or twice, maybe at meetings and the like.

[36:00] What other work on fossils was taught at Bristol?

Well, apart from the chap, Bob Savage, who was mostly on vertebrates, and he’d done a lot of work in Africa, partly in Libya and I think he’d done some work also in East Africa, and he knew the Leakeys and this sort of thing, there was a chap called John Cowie, who , who was a trilobite worker. And he actually died only quite recently. He’d done some very early and in its own way important work in Greenland, and he had some amusing stories he told me about that later on, because again, this was in the fifties, you know, where it was a very different matter of getting there than it is at the present day. But the sort of palaeontology we were taught in its own

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way was very uninspirational. It was really taxonomic and so forth, and again, so far as I remember the labs, and I don’t remember them very clearly, it was just staring at specimens and drawing them. It wasn’t anything designed to inspire anybody, but that didn’t matter. One was there just to see a whole cross-section of geology. We did a lot of work on maps, of course, which was not only being taught how to map ourselves, but quite a lot of time analysing maps. And that’s a sort of interesting sort of skill, if you like, actually reading geology.

[37:20] To what extent was the teaching of palaeontology interested in the fossils as sort of markers, if you like, as daters, or in a sort of more biological evolutionary sort of interest in them. In what way were they of interest to geologists as far as this course is concerned?

I mean those days, I mean if you’re a vertebrate palaeontology, well, you have a disadvantage inasmuch as you normally need two or three people to carry the specimen around, but you have a relative advantage inasmuch as you know that the whole thing is integrated skeleton which is determined by the certain musculature, nervous system, all that sort of stuff, so in a way it’s very complex but at a certain level it’s a rather easy problem. In principle it’s advanced enormously. So far as palaeontology was concerned more generally though, it was at that stage almost entirely stratigraphic, the fossils were being used really to date rocks. It’s not that we were taught that way, but one just, as I recall, and this is not with great clarity, was you just went through group after group after group. And that’s no bad thing in fact, because then you do develop a certain degree of familiarity with these groups, but the sort of renaissance of palaeontology, which ironically of course was started in pre-war Germany, in palaeobiology, and then was of course annihilated, literally and metaphorically, really was a result of the so-called Chicago School, principally, or Rochester School then Chicago, with a group of very talented people. And they in a sense, you know, brought palaeontology into palaeobiology. And I suppose in hindsight we were really lucky because if Harry Whittington had stayed in Harvard, because his wife was American and he’d really been in the States for a long time, come briefly back to this country after the war after teaching in China, having been chased out of Rangoon by the Japanese, you know, he really didn’t know this country particularly well, but back they came, thank goodness. Otherwise that project would have stayed in Harvard and in a certain sense that would have been entirely expected and some very, very talented people in the States would have

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had the privilege of working on the Burgess Shale, but happily he came here. And so at this stage, really in the early seventies there were a group of Americans: Tom Schopf, Jack Sepkoski, David Raup, and a few others, and they really revolutionised the subject. Stephen Jay Gould was also part of that group. Of course he then went off to do lots of different things, became much more publicly well-known than the others. But they really were inspirational in looking at the fossil record in completely new ways. And I think with the Burgess Shale, because we were looking at soft-bodied animals, which by and large didn’t really have skeletons, we were forced to be biologists. And that came, if you like, not part of their story, but it’s something which meshed easily with this new American school.

Could you just expand on the reasons why working on particular fossils, soft-bodied fossils, why that was more likely to take you into biology than other kinds of fossil?

Because the animals with the hard parts are very common, because to the first approximation they don’t rot. So if you’ve got the carapace of a trilobite or the shell of a brachiopod or a bivalve, then they can be prone to destruction, but all things being equal, they’re pretty robust. So the fossil record was almost entirely composed of hard parts. And some were small, microfossils like conodonts, some were big like dinosaurs, and because of evolution of course, any one species only survives geologically for a very short period of time, and therefore in this way each and every one of them has potential to date a rock. So most of the money for palaeontologists in the fifties and sixties, and even in fact beforehand, was from economical geology, if you like, from oil companies, gas companies, and so forth, who wanted to know the age of the rocks. And also the environment, this was often important. But the fact that these organisms had once been alive in a certain way really didn’t matter, they were dead. The soft- bodied material, of course we now know, is relatively more common than anybody ever expected, but at that stage was thought to be just a handful of examples which the Burgess Shale was already well known, relatively speaking. But here you’re dealing with something which in a sense is just a unique occurrence which has no stratigraphic use whatsoever and has no skeleton, and yet it’s another part of the story, some of these fossils were very difficult to interpret. In hindsight they were simply, in my case some ignorance and stupidity and all the rest of it, but in any event they were things where you had to try and understand how they lived, what they were related to, and these are biological questions really. And I suppose some years ago I was asked

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to write a very brief sort of page, they used to have this thing in Nature, I forget its title and I can dig it out, where effectively it’s a sort of interview with a scientist and one of the things is what book influenced you the most, in science, that is. And oddly enough it was a book by a chap called RB Clark, I think it was, called Dynamics in Metazoan Evolution or Dynamics in Animal Evolution, and it was just again a way of looking at an organism, which was functional and said, you know, if you’re going to operate in this way what do you need to do. And since then there have been a number of other books in that area, especially by a chap called, an American called Steven Vogel, which are just terrific reads. But the whole context here is dealing with the animal as it lived on the sediment, moved through the sediment, and because some of the animals in the Burgess Shale we now realise in fact it’s not quite as we thought it was, but looked really strange indeed, mostly because we didn’t really know what we were looking at in the way of science and so subsequently their relationships would become a great deal clearer. But in any event at that stage they really were, some were simple, fairly simple. There were groups which may not be common today, but we knew a bit about. Other ones at that stage were much more of a challenge. So that’s really why things like the Burgess Shale, which in a funny sort of way should have become much better known much earlier, but I think, you know, it was more or less with the palaeobiology revolution in the States, it was a way of looking at the fossil record, which in a certain sense took them out of the museum drawer and back into the ocean.

Thank you. [44:32] What, when not working on your degree in Bristol, what would we have, if we were there, seen you doing?

Oh dear, best not ask. Er… well, I met my wife there, which would take some time. As any sensible Englishman enjoys, used to go to pubs. And geology I wouldn’t say is a drinking culture, but the fact you’re on fieldtrips and so forth, going to pubs is regarded as a perfectly normal thing to do. And there were a number of pubs in Clifton, the Coronation Tap, which served an extremely mean sort of scrumpy. And a number of other ones and so forth. But I wasn’t that we were heavy drinkers or anything, but that was just part of one’s social life and the like. And it was always, I mean just wandering around Clifton was always a pleasure, I mean the suspension bridge there and across into, I think it’s Nightingale Valley and Nightingale Woods,

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one could go for strolls around in that sort of area there. And the architecture round there, of course I knew much less about it than perhaps I know now, was very pleasing, and most of it escaped serious damage in the war, fortunately, there were very few places where the Luftwaffe had taken out a building, one or two certainly, but not that bad, I mean compared with the docks down in Bristol, it’s a very different story of course, they were very badly hit. No doubt doing a great deal of reading, I daresay, of one sort and the other.

Any clubs, societies?

No. No.

No societies?

No, no. No, sorry.

Sporting activity?

Certainly not. [laughs] No, I’d done my sport at school and that was fine and I enjoyed what I did, cross-country running, but I had no desire to carry on doing that at all. No, I mean I’m clubbable in a small sense but not in the sense of wanting to join the mountaineering club or the speleologists, which would be the sort of things you might expect somebody to do, and all credit to the people who did it, but I just wasn’t that way inclined in fact.

I can’t remember whether you said it was Bristol or later that you started to go to church more often. Did you go to church while in Bristol?

Very seldom. Very seldom indeed. And I mean in a way, I mean I suppose a sort of Cambridge answer, my interest, as I’ve said to other people when they’ve been kind enough to ask, my interest in Christianity, I wouldn’t put myself in any other way comparable, is otherwise similar to CS Lewis, inasmuch as it’s intellectual. It’s not to say that there aren’t aspects of the faith which are to be side-lined or ignored or in any way other people come to the faith through very, very different avenues. And that’s, you know, I have no quarrel with that and I’m sure they’re

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the better for it, but it is the argument that this is the best explanation for the way the world is, you know, the things which really might take us too far afield, at least at the moment, but certainly the question of so-called radical evil and the like. It seems to me that, you know, this is not an answer you’re being given, but it’s a narrative which is incomplete. For example, I mean there are many other aspects about it, I mean the historical evidence and the gospels again seem to me, as they did to Lewis, to be convincing and my own view, which will not be shared necessarily by you or by anybody else, is that these stories were not made up and they’re not simply various sorts of proto-churches arguing over sort of political territory, these aren’t turf wars in that sort of sense where they’re trying to establish… I mean everybody sees Jesus through different lenses and if they didn’t, then there’d be something very wrong with the religion, because he is the most extraordinary character in many, many ways and that’s very clear from the accounts you have of him. And again, we don’t have to be diverted into that, but one here is being invited into an extremely rich world, if you like. And in the end of course this must have some implications about the way you see the world, the way you do your science, but in no sense is it a direct influence. It’s not a thing where you say right, because I believe this I cannot believe that, for instance, or I cannot do that. It’s not like that at all, at least not in my experience. So not really, no, I don’t think so. I think probably, if, so far as there was an impetus, I would imagine it’s probably… started to read the Narnia books, and Lewis was always very entertaining about this, saying it’s amazing how much Christianity you can smuggle into a book without people realising, and I started to read those I think at one time when I was with my mum on the Oxford Canal, we were pottering up somewhere where she had this little boat, and as is sometimes the case, once you’ve read one you must immediately read the next one, and the next one. And probably that and me and Christianity at that stage were, if you like, the first motor to get me going in that area. But subsequently, I mean other people have been very helpful and sort of supportive and said have you read GK Chesterton, you know, and so forth. But yes, that’s really where my interest was. But I don’t remember much of that in Bristol. I think, I mean it’s a boring statement, I probably was working pretty hard. I didn’t mind it at all, I enjoyed it very much, and I socialised, but I wasn’t a great partygoer or anything like that, and wasn’t reclusive, but I didn’t go out of my way, you know, to make sure that, you know, was getting smashed with everybody else on a Saturday night.

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[50:03] And how did you, under what circumstances did you meet your future wife?

The bedsits were run by a very nice family indeed, and they lived basically – sorry, it sounds like Upstairs, Downstairs, it wasn’t like that – they occupied the basement and ground floor, effectively, and they let out the rooms and a friend of mine said that, Paul Scriven I think was his name, the room beside him was coming up and I’d been looking for somewhere to move after this rather miserable year in the digs, not miserable in terms of… I was very glad to leave, that’s all, it wasn’t, as I say, a sort of growling resentment. And I went round to see the room and it had a beautiful view across Bristol, very small, perfect, just what I wanted, and people came and went in a manner of speaking; some people stayed a few months, some people longer, and Zoë, my wife, moved in, I think slightly after I did, that’s right, and then there was a woman opposite me called Anne, and a rather complicated story, she eventually ended up marrying my wife’s father. Okay, got that? But all it was is Zoë’s mother had died many years beforehand of cancer and he’d been a widower for many years, so there was a funny sort of connection there. And then it probably is not worth going into any great details, but then she, when I started my PhD, she came up to Cambridge to live as well, though we weren’t really living together, and that didn’t really work out terribly well, but then subsequently we eventually got married, just outside Cambridge in fact.

What subject was she reading?

She did botany in Glasgow, she’d been brought up in Glasgow, her family had moved there, she has two sisters and a brother, and they were actually really from the Bristol area, but for various reasons her father wanted to get out of Bristol and he was a sort of engineer but did many other things, very nice chap indeed. And then she went off to do some virology sort of vet school, spent a little bit of time in Kenya and then I think we, yes, we would have met because she was working in the vet school in Bristol. That’s right, so again, she just needed a bedsit room and so forth, yeah, so she was upstairs, so to speak, and I was just on the next floor down, and the like. So yes, again, it was a very gentle household. Occasionally people were too noisy and sometimes I didn’t behave terribly well, but most of the time it was an awful lot of give and take and yeah, the family who sort of were in charge were very kind and understanding. It was also at

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the time of the three-day week, for instance, which I suppose certainly opened my eyes in a very primitive way to what happens when a country begins to go wrong.

What did you see of that?

Well, effectively, I mean it wasn’t in any way serious, and obviously there has and was political disturbances then and there probably will be till kingdom come, but at that stage, you know, the fact that you had a country which was officially paralysed, you had to have whole areas sort of in blackout, I mean it’s complicated story, it’s not something where I feel very strongly about either Heath, the Prime Minister, or the administration at the time, or the miners, I’m not trying to make that point, it was simply that it was rather ludicrous that we’d got ourselves into this stage. And maybe it had to happen any case, but yes, suddenly seeing a whole area of the city just blacked out. Only for a few hours, you know, I mean it was very well managed, it wasn’t that anybody was in any danger or anything, but it was rather ludicrous. Maybe no more so than today, yeah.

[end of track 2]

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[Track 3]

Just a couple of questions on things you said last time, and then we’ll go on from where we got to, which was the end of your degree. The first thing is you said that there was a story behind Conway Morris, how you came up with the name Conway Morris, which if it’s interesting you might like to tell us?

I’m not sure it’s interesting. In this country of course double-barrelled names are often regarded, often are, the result of marriage and the insistence often of the daughter’s father that the name is preserved, and that’s very reasonable, and according to my father, he was entirely unsure where the Conway Morris had come from. But in fact, according to his brother, my Uncle John, who I may have mentioned, they were both in the RAF in the war, but he was in Stirlings in Bomber Command, my uncle. He thought in fact that it was to do with a lot of the Welsh at that time, north Wales, were in the shipping, maritime. In fact my grandfather, as I recall, was born in Brazil because there was a great deal of coastal shipping, which was run by the Welsh, effectively, in South America. And he was, one of their ancestors was on SS Conway and therefore when he came back to the village, you know, he was - Morris the Miller, Morris the Baker - Conway Morris. So he was, you know, so just to identify all the Morrises around and so forth. So that’s perhaps the correct, I don’t know at all. But of course these days it causes endless confusion, partly because it’s assumed to be a sort of marriage, if you like, of two names and it’s without a hyphen, how confusing, so it goes on, exactly. Yes, a small story.

[1:38] Thank you. And the other thing, can you say any more about the book, or was it a comic, that you think might have been involved in the sort of beginning of your interest in ancient life? You said that this book, comic, was very different from the kind of thing that a child can get their hands on today.

I think that I may have even had one in the same series which was flags of the different countries and so forth, and who knows who published it, it was probably sort of an offshoot of something like The Daily Express or The Daily Mail, who knows, Harmondsworth, something like that perhaps. But beyond that, no, I’m afraid I remember nothing about it, I don’t think it was kept, it

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was probably thrown away in my teenage years if not beforehand, so that’s all I remember, I’m afraid.

[02:21] That’s great, thank you. Could you then tell the story of the transition from Bristol to Cambridge? We’ve got to the point where you have visited Cambridge once to discuss a PhD and that’s about as far as we’ve got. We’ve got to the end of your degree. I know you go to Cambridge in 1972 but the details of how and when and why and all that.

Well, as I recall, and to reiterate again, my memory is not necessarily perfect in this regard. And perhaps I’d already mentioned Harry Whittington, who was to be my supervisor, had already made it clear that one significant part of the Burgess Shale project had been allocated to Derek Briggs, that was fine of course. And that he’d written to me when I was in Bristol and said – and I’m sorry if I repeat myself here – that he hoped I would put Cambridge first, and of course I’d applied for nowhere else. That was fine in that sense. But I didn’t know I was able to go to Cambridge until very late in the day, because again, as I might have mentioned, the Research Council, NERC, had a small bucket of funds for people who were looking for PhDs, had got a first, as it happened I did, and they could therefore have, if you like, a sort of emergency funding for a small number of people, and presumably Harry Whittington did the spadework. I don’t know anything about what went on behind the scenes and so forth, and so I arrived in Cambridge in September/October 1972, promptly went down with appendicitis, perhaps due to the stress of moving and so forth, I believe appendicitis is often linked to those sorts of things. So I was in hospital, got an infection, so I wasn’t very well for a few weeks and so forth, and then took up the reins and went on from there. So that’s more or less… And so far as the transition was concerned, I’m afraid I remember very, very little other than I was in Churchill College and even at a rather late stage they obviously had accommodation in the college itself and they looked after me very well indeed. My later wife, girlfriend at that time, Zoë, came with me but at that stage it didn’t really work out very well, so she wasn’t in Cambridge for that long in fact. And so I was in Churchill in terms of the college for about two and a half years and then before my PhD was finished I got a research fellowship in St John’s College, and so then moved to St John’s and at that stage, being the third year of my PhD, there were four of us living in a small village called Lode – L-O-D-E – just outside Cambridge. Two were undergraduates and I would

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like to say they were both delicious girls, but they weren’t, we were all men there, and there was my friend Ken McNamara, who was also doing a PhD at the same time with Harry Whittington, but on trilobites, which was Whittington’s main area of specialisation. And so we had a very happy time in that third year in Lode. It was a nice village, had a pub and a church and all the rest of it and I used to commute in most days, either with Ken McNamara driving his car, which had the nickname HAMIX, which I think was some crippled Austin, or the bus, which had a good bus service and so forth. So that’s more or less… and then we got married in Lode, and that would have been 19… gosh, let me get this right, 1976. If Zoë was here she’d correct me straightaway. And then we were in the accommodation provided by the university for a short period of time before we could buy a house, and so that’s another set of stories. So, not a terribly exciting time in a way, I mean so far as things were going on, it was sort of with regard to the PhD work and working on the Burgess Shale, and that was extraordinary.

[05:56] Could you describe the, I mean you start working in Whittington’s sort of team, but can you give a sense of what that consisted of physically, so sort of where were you working and then who’s around you and what are they doing, that sort of thing?

Well, all the things you wouldn’t expect. Because I was very late arriving in the department in terms of them knowing that they needed some space, I was actually put in a tiny out of the way cubbyhole, literally, right at the top of the building, which didn’t displease me at all, and it was a minute office really and it was an annexe, if you like, to what at that stage was a sedimentology lab, so it was an area where they taught some of the sedimentology and, you know, at that stage it was not primitive, but even so, it was a very traditional area. So I was left there almost undisturbed. In terms of the PhD, Derek Briggs had been allocated the arthropods, but we didn’t really have a great deal to do with each other, we didn’t spend much time sort of talking about our mutual interest, if you like. And Harry Whittington himself was, in my view, a perfect supervisor, perhaps being a disappointment to others. He was very much hands-off, he would occasionally come up and have a chat, but he would more often just say come along to my room, you know, every two or so months, tell me what you’ve been doing. There was a slight connection inasmuch as originally he thought I might work on the palaeoecology, which was a rather diffuse area. But he did say there are the worms, and there was a little bit of, I wouldn’t

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say so much a conflict of interest, but one of the worms, which turned out to be a priapulid worm, one of the more abundant ones in the Burgess Shale, called Ottoia, actually seemed to have a similarity to a rather interesting group of parasitic worms which are found in the guts of birds and things, known as the Acanthocephala. And a friend of Harry Whittington, who subsequently became quite a good friend of mine, a David Crompton, was working in the Molteno Institute at the other end of the Downing site. And he was working on the Acanthocephala. So at one stage, and in fact David Crompton and I in the end actually wrote a paper about the possible relationships, which we now know is completely wrong, because the molecular phylogeny, showing our conjectures, which at the time were reasonable, were absolutely bogus. But in any event, there was a sort of sense that Harry and David might work on one of these worms as well, and I’m not sure I put too much pressure, but I explained as tactfully as I could that really I needed this as part of my PhD. And there was no disagreement or whatever, but it was, I suppose, a slight area of making one’s stake to a particular area. So there I was allocated to work on the worms of the Burgess Shale, [08:40] and as we may have mentioned, the Geological Survey of Canada had got permission to reopen the quarries in part, because before that the Burgess Shale was, collection studies were almost entirely in the Smithsonian Institution, because they’d been obtained by Charles Walcott and technically in fact, their export to the United States was illegal, because even then, Yoho National Park was a protected area where you weren’t allowed to just move things away. But those were early days. So the Canadians I’m not sure were feeling sore about it, but in any event they realised they didn’t actually have much of a collection of what turned out to be one of the most important fossil deposits in the world. And this was associated with a larger programme of mapping the geology around and this was very important because it put the Burgess Shale in a regional context, refined the age and all the rest of it. But Harry Whittington at that time was in Harvard, he had been invited to lead the palaeobiology of the Burgess Shale and if he’d not come to Cambridge of course, and in a way perhaps, as we mentioned previously, it was a bit surprising he did come to Cambridge, because his wife was American, and he’d been in Harvard for many years, but there were perhaps some personal reasons for not wanting to stay in Cambridge [USA]. Any case, the project came here and he was looking for a couple of PhD students and he’d have tried, I believe, to interest one or two other people in other areas, but for one reason or another they hadn’t really taken the bait. So that’s really what we did. So although the Geological Survey of Canada had obtained these collections from the Burgess Shale, they were a

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very small fraction of the total available, the bulk of which was in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, so we spent a lot of time in Washington DC, working there, you know, I think maybe up to a month at a time. And the people there, specially a chap called Fred Collier who was in charge of the collections, were exceptionally helpful. They left us alone, we were in this rather sort of grim cubicle, it wasn’t beautiful, but we had free access to everything and we could prepare material, we could borrow material, except for what we call holotypes, so that’s really why we had to be there, because they’re the things which you had to – the holotype, as you probably know, is the sort of type example of the species and it’s all the sort of complexities involved with this. So if you decide that the other specimens belong to the same species, in a sense you’re meant to compare them to the original holotype. It’s a bit more complicated than that, it’s not terribly interesting either, in my view. So, there I was, you know, looking through all the drawers of material. There were something, I think in the end some years later I did a count of all the specimens, it’s round about 60,000 specimens. Many, many drawers of material, some heavy. Not particularly well organised, so you really had to look through everything. And during that of course I came across a number of other things, which have almost invariably turned out to be incorrect in terms of my interpretation, but then started one’s mind to think about the wider significance of the Burgess Shale. But principally I was there to work on the worms, yeah.

[11:41] You said, last time I think, and you also say in The Crucible of Creation, that you had a kind of instinct that this material was going to be important. And you mention your use of sort of hunches and instincts and you say also even dreams that scientists often… Was that so in your case in terms…?

Thank you. Excuse me, I don’t remember any dreams. I remember plenty of dreams, but in this one it was more just a sort of, the hunch, that you know, this was something which was going to turn out to be interesting. Now, to what extent, that’s really just sort of subconscious thinking, when you’re reading around the area and the rest of your brain is doing the work for you. I don’t know, I think there may be a bit more to it than that in that regard. And of course there are famous examples of dreams; Kekulé’s one, I think, about the solving the structure of benzene. I think it was these monkeys all with their tails and arms all joined together, to provide the ring, of

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benzene. But that’s right, yes, no. But it could have been, you know, to be more prosaic, simply looking at the few specimens in Bristol, even though I knew nothing really about them, gave me a sense of what the potential was. And really, what’s rather surprising, and perhaps we touched on this beforehand, is that the Burgess Shale was hardly looked at at all until Harry Whittington started to look at the Smithsonian collections and he visited it probably in about 1967, 1968, they’d had two seasons of collecting in the Yoho National Park, and in fact they had permission for a third, but because they were a year late starting, they weren’t allowed to roll that on for a third year. And there are various other things, which are nothing to do with me, but it turns out in fact in the excavations they didn’t realise that how much of the original quarry was still full of rubble, which Walcott had left, and in hindsight what they should have done, subsequently what was done by the Royal Ontario Museum when they started to re-excavate the quarry in a much more ambitious way, was actually to clear out the quarry completely, get down to the original floor, and so a whole lot of things which Walcott had discovered were not recovered by the Geological Survey of Canada, probably because they weren’t actually digging quite deep enough into the quarry. So yeah, we had a… it was a useful little collection, probably about 8,000 specimens, maybe a bit less than that, some magnificent material amongst it. But all sorts of key fossils like Pikaia, I think there was not a single example. So we had to use entirely, at that stage, what the Smithsonian had.

[14:13] Could you describe (a) the archive at the Smithsonian? You’ve mentioned drawers, but in a little more detail describe it. And then go on to describe what this material is for people who have never seen it or anything like it?

Well, today I believe – I haven’t been there for a few years – the configuration has changed a lot and it’s much more high security and you’re not just allowed to wander around. But at that stage it was effectively sets of cabinets with metal doors which you sort of unhooked at the top, just little turn things there and then you unhooked it off the cabinet and then you had all the drawers in front of you, and I guess there were probably about ten or twelve drawers in each cabinet. But one cabinet stacked on top of another one so it was double row, so in places you had to sometimes get a small kick stool or stepladder or something like that. And all I did was take, as I remember, apart from looking at typed material, is you just take down each drawer and you look

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through every specimen. There was a sort of order, but it really wasn’t very satisfactory, and that was fine because it meant that things that might have attracted attention earlier were just sort of sitting there waiting to be discovered. And Derek Briggs and Harry Whittington, and also Chris Hughes, who was a research assistant, I suppose, to Harry Whittington in Cambridge, and another man called David Bruton, who was also principally a trilobite worker, but I think at that stage was in Oslo already, but who was an Englishman but married to a Norwegian, they were really all in one way or another arthropod focussed, whereas I in a certain sense had the worms. There are a number of other fossil groups in the Burgess Shale, the sponges for example, which have subsequently received quite a lot of attention, but they weren’t ones I was especially interested in. So what one does is takes out a drawer of material, I think we probably carried them – health and safety would have had nightmares, no trolleys at all – and we had this little cubicle, very elementary, with a simple desk on it and binocular microscope, and the binocular microscope we actually brought with us from Cambridge, and it think for at least the first couple of seasons Derek Briggs and I sort of went together, so to speak, and we stayed in a so-called international student house on R Street, north-west Washington, just off Dupont Circle, which was very nice. It was a very international area and simple accommodation, mostly shared rooms, but that was fine. And very kind, philanthropic people there, as you might imagine. And then we just looked at the material under the microscope, made drawings of them, because part of this is that it’s not only your eyes, but as Harry Whittington pioneered a number of things, one was he was a very careful drawer, he was one who was interested originally in sort of engineering and mechanical and, you know, the sort of drawings an engineer or an architect would use, very precise. And the microscope, to explain, has an attached mirror so you can combine both the image of the fossil and project it on to a piece of paper beside the microscope and you can thereby draw the fossil. And what Whittington realised really very early on is that because these things were quite complicated and often quite small, by making an interpretive drawing of the fossil, you could explain what you thought you saw. And this in a way probably helped enormously in the sort of acceptance, if you like, that the level of detail there was extraordinary. Because if you look at a photograph, unless you’re the specialist, it’s not immediately obvious what you’re looking at. So that was a large part of what we had to do, looking at the material which was of further use to us and could then be borrowed, versus material which was probably less well preserved or whatever. [17:47] And then the other thing was that, oddly enough, it turns out that the sort of photography which would have been most suitable is what we didn’t

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use, but we also brought a box with a whole lot of camera equipment, and of course this is in the days of 35 millimetre film, and Harry Whittington had realised that using ultraviolet light seemed to give particularly good results. And again, Harry was very interested in photography of fossils and in his own way had been something of a pioneer. Again, it was a sort of precision, his sort of engineering instincts as to how to capture what you need to show to the rest of the world. So there was an adjacent darkroom, we set up the material there and had this rather eerie, bluish glow of the ultraviolet light, no talk of health and safety. I believe it was safe, we hope it was. Certainly neither of us suffered any problems, as far as I’m aware, from that. And then we would process the films in the old-fashioned way, you know, spool them on in the dark and then develop them and not print them normally, just take the negatives back, and so forth. So really, it was most of the work in terms of actually the sort of concentrated work had to be in Cambridge, but it was only by going to the Smithsonian Institution that we were able to actually survey the whole material. And at that stage, although I was working especially on a group of worms called the priapulids, which includes this animal, Ottoia, there were a number of other strange beasts including something we called Hallucigenia and an animal called Pikaia, and both in their own way have earned a certain degree of notoriety subsequently.

[19:17] The material itself, you’ve got the drawers, you pick a bit of material out, what is it like? What is it sort of made of and feel like? And a related question perhaps, do you have to do things to the material in order to get a better view on it to draw, or do you just take it out, put it under and draw? Is there anything you have to do in between?

Well, if you imagine a small piece of slate – most of them are fairly small, they’re occasionally very large slabs, but of course just the way one works in the quarry when one’s collecting originally, it’s not practical to bring back enormous slabs, although more recently people have been rather more adventurous in that regard because often there’s important palaeoecological information when you have many specimens on a large slab. But typically, because the fossils are relatively isolated, clearly what Walcott did and I don’t know whether he did the sawing mostly in the Smithsonian, I suspect he did, was that you identify the fossil, in his case you put little chalk marks, red chalk – red crayon in fact – and then you just saw it down to a convenient size. So many of them would be only a few centimetres in size and in their own way, although

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the drawer itself was quite heavy because there were hundreds of specimens in certain cases, in other regards then you just must imagine a piece of dark slate on which the fossil lies. And the story of exactly how these fossils came to be preserved and what material they’re preserved on is still in a certain sense ongoing, there are many things we understand, but there are still a few problems. But in effect, if you had a fossil in your hand, at least to the untutored eye they don’t look very impressive. They’re not quite as bad as a blob, but they are, you know, sort of darkish. But as soon as you get them into the appropriate illumination and sort of begin to rotate them backwards and forwards, and as it so happens I have a very near point with my eyes, so I actually need a microscope like everybody else, but I can see a lot of detail just with the naked eye. Then you move it around and you can see the details of the fossil, but to do anything serious you’ve got to put it under a microscope, of course. So that was one aspect about it. The other thing Harry Whittington realised quite early on, because his first paper was published in 1969 just before I started my PhD and he’d already been working on some of the material for a couple of years, was that the fossils had clearly been transported in what we call a turbidity current, that is there’s a turbid flow of water and sediment, which is a bit like a mudslide, except it’s more dilute than that. And the net result of this, especially with the smaller fossils, is when the deposition of this sediment occurred, which was probably rather rapid, two things happened, often the fossils would be buried at different angles, so they weren’t all parallel to what we call the bedding plane, and in the case of animals like arthropods which have a series of appendages, sometimes a carapace. If you think of something like a lobster, then you’ll appreciate that the sediment can sort of work its way between say, the carapace and the appendages, and this subsequently compacts into hard shale. But what it means is, and again, Whittington was able to pioneer, is that by very careful excavation you could destroy part of the fossil if necessary, or, remove overlying sediment which hitherto had obscured one part or the other of the animal. Now, in the case of the worms, which don’t very crudely have so much in the way of appendages, they were more often just flat on the surface and generally needed somewhat less preparation. Whereas in the case of the arthropods often they needed extensive preparation. There was this tiny little sort of, it was a drill which had a chuck which converted a rotary motion into a hammer motion, into a percussive motion, and so again, working under the microscope, one would then tap away and if you were good at it – and I wasn’t terribly good at it – then one could chip away bits of sediment quite carefully and hope not to make too much damage to the fossil film. Subsequently things have moved on in ways, in terms of the preparation, they’re using different sort of drill

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heads now, which are much harder, tungsten carbide and so forth. But even so, to the present day, the preparation of the Burgess Shale fossils is a very, very considerable part of the time you have to invest to expose the entire fossil. So yes, that was in a certain way routine palaeontological investigation, except of course you had these unbelievably well preserved soft- bodied fossils.

And what – and this is a sort of a very low level question perhaps, but what did the fossils consist of? You know, what in terms of material is being preserved, what is the trace?

Well, it was clear that they were either rather dark or rather reflective. And to the first approximation, if you were looking at one of my worms, for example, the intestine, which is not normally preserved, would be rather reflective, but the surrounding part of the body would be rather dark, but then if you waggled it around in light you’d see some fainter reflective strands, and those, for instance, I interpreted as muscles, and so on and so forth. Now, exactly what they were composed of was not really solved for a long time and even now there’s some degree of controversy. I can’t quite remember how I got into conversation with somebody, but there was a technique called Auger spectroscopy, which is a way of analysing the surface of the fossil, and I think the fossil went down to the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. Again, this is in the early seventies, yes, there are some very hi-tech machines around, but they weren’t in the sense that almost everybody had one on their benchtop. And the report that came back was - and I wish I could remember who interpreted the work, I’ve probably got the details in Cambridge – was that it was made of silicates, so analogous to, well, similar to clay minerals. And now subsequently it’s turned out that that’s probably wrong, inasmuch as there probably are clay minerals which are on top of the fossil, but the fossils themselves are, not surprisingly, composed of carbonaceous material. So in a sense they’re analogous to coal. And of course, given they’re organic material, then you would expect them to have this sort of composition. One of the surprising things in a way about the Burgess Shale, something which only became clear from the regional investigations, was that in fact the Burgess Shale itself is technically a metamorphic rock. In other words, it’s been heated to a considerable degree, so that makes it all the more remarkable. And typically when you have a metamorphic rock, very often the forces in the earth’s crust impose a cleavage in the same way as a Welsh slate will split evenly because that’s not the original bedding plane of deposition, it’s where the tectonic forces have realigned the

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minerals so that when you split rock it follows a line of weakness and provides you with a roofing slate. Except in the Burgess Shale, it turned out that adjacent to where these fossils accumulated, there was a so-called reef. It’s not really a reef, but it was made of limestone. Now it’s made of another mineral called dolomite, it was enormous size, and probably the Burgess Shale was deposited at the base of this so-called reef, the top of the reef was rather shallow water, probably sunlit, but the Burgess Shale was probably a hundred feet or more further down, so relatively deep water. Any case, in due course when the Rockies were being built and there were all these tectonic forces, because this enormous mass of dolomite, it was absolutely colossal, had a resistance to the deformation, it provided a sort of shadow zone, so that a penetrative cleavage could not run into the Burgess Shale. So the Burgess Shale was cooked, but it wasn’t cleaved. And there’s a further twist to this, which is still controversial, but perhaps when the people first fanned out from the Canadian Pacific Railway looking for minerals and perhaps coming prospecting, and I think at that stage they must have come across the Mount Stephen trilobite beds, so I think already Walcott had his mind opened that there might be other deposits in the region which might be analogous to this other deposit which had been found before then, in the, I think around about 1885. But, in any event, the dolomites are actually quite rich in zinc and zinc mineralisation and lead. And this is linked to the hydrothermal fluids. And it’s controversial, but one idea is in fact the hydrothermal activity was more or less at the time of the Burgess Shale. And if you get sort of brines leaking into the seafloor, which are otherwise very poisonous, this could be part of the explanation for this exceptional preservation. In other words, if there were these sort of submarine pools, if you like, which are very salty, have got various metals in them and so forth, if animals were transported into that sort of environment, then this would favour their preservation because it would exclude the animals which might break them down, it might change the rates of bacterial decay. But that’s certainly only a local explanation and there’s no suggestion that the Burgess Shale forms as a whole, which we now know are scattered very widely around the world, owe their preservation to that specific reason. So there’s a sort of connection here, if you like, going all the way back to the people who were building the Trans-Canada, or the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and then subsequently of course the Trans-Canada Highway went through there as well, to perhaps one part of the explanation of the preservation of these fossils.

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Thank you. So should we think of the intestine of a Burgess Shale worm, should we think of it as being compressed biological material, in other words, compressed preserved gut material, or is it the impression of that left in an inorganic sort of substrate?

It’s the former, so far as one can tell. It is actually organic material, but because the rock has been cooked, the carbon, it’s not quite graphite, but it’s a high temperature. But even so, Nick Butterfield, a colleague of mine, was able to show that despite that history, in certain cases quite a lot of microstructure could be obtained from some of the fossils. Now, in the case of the intestine, you can work out, you know, pretty well what it must have been composed of. I mean frankly, one intestine’s much like another, if you like, and you would expect to have secretory cells, you’d have muscles and all the rest of it, but those things are not preserved. In the particular case of Ottoia, this worm which belongs to this group called the priapulids, one thing which I found quite early on is that quite a few of the specimens had gut contents which were identifiable, and in fact they actually had a different sort of shellfish in them. Now this is quite a well-known group to palaeontologists, they’re little conical shells called the hyoliths. And they have a long range, I think they existed for most of the Palaeozoic, but in any event, that was one line of evidence to suggest that this particular one was a predator, and this in turn of course has spun on to all sorts of other areas of enquiry, to the extent to which the Cambrian explosion is an explosion of ecology, or is it an explosion of sort of Darwinian evolution and the formation of many different sorts of body plans. But that was one of perhaps the first lines of evidence that in fact predation, which in a general Darwinian context of competition and so forth is not terribly surprising, but it’s the sort of proof positive, if you like, that here was a priapulid, it’s swallowing hyoliths. And I think the largest number I found was about six in one gut, and almost without exception, because the hyolith has a conical shell, they were all swallowed the same way round, which makes sense, because if they’d done it the other way it would have been extremely uncomfortable.

[31:10] Could you then, so you’ve had this period, have you described the work looking at fossils that you did throughout your PhD in what you’ve said so far, or is there another stage of this and another stage of this leading up to the final PhD?

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Yes. I mean again, it’s disgraceful I don’t remember all the details, but the short writings, as they’re called, which I put in for the research fellowship competitions was a distillation of my PhD. The bulk of it was to do with the so-called priapulid worms which are a group which live to the present day, but are relatively obscure, relatively speaking. They tend to live in rather sort of out of the way environments, often with little oxygen and so forth, whereas here we had an extraordinary diversity of different forms, all clearly related to each other, but again perhaps that was part of the idea of this sort of explosion of life that there were six or so species, but in one way they all looked as different from each other as they would in any other sort of cross- comparison. I was also lucky to work on a group called the polychaetes, these are the annelids and this is a phylum which is otherwise best known from the earthworm, but the marine ones, as the name polychaete suggests, have many sort of chitinous bristles, whereas the earthworms are called oligochaetes, so they only have a few bristles. And here too there were several species, one called Canadia, which were beautifully preserved, absolutely spectacular preservation. They were great fun to work on and in that case the preservation was more similar to the arthropods because the bundles of chitinous bristles typically are borne on two lobes separated by a space, and sediment would work its way between these two lobes, and therefore in this particular case one had to do preparation to expose more fully the anatomy. And then there were a few odds and ends. There was an animal which I made seriously wrong, which we ended up calling Hallucigenia. And this was a very rare fossil, there are probably only about twenty specimens, most of which were not very well preserved. And the best preserved, the holotype, had been described by Walcott and he had called it an annelid, inasmuch as it looked vaguely like one. And then I was looking at the holotype, and to try and describe it, it’s a sort of horizontal tube and from one side you have seven pairs of spines, and on the other side there appear to be a single row of quite elongated tentacles, each one of which ended in a little sort of reflective area. And in a way it’s ridiculous that I didn’t get the solution first time round, in fact somebody else was the one who corrected me. But it really looked an absolutely weird animal and I reconstructed it as having these pairs of spines being embedded in the sediment and that the elongated tubes might have even been separate mouths. You know, it’s a ridiculous idea, it’s absolutely absurd. And I was with Ken McNamara and he had a small office as well quite close to where I was working, on the top floor of the then geology department, so effectively the Sedgwick Museum, and we were just tossing names around because he was also describing new trilobites and one of his trilobites was one which enrolled, a bit like a woodlouse, and he decided

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to call it ‘rollmops’. So he got an infuriated letter from somebody later on saying, don’t you know that rollmops is the Danish for squashed herring, or something like that, so we took that in good part of course. And so we were tossing names around and suddenly we said ‘Hallucigenia’, because it just looked so dreamlike. And that staged, the sort of sense was that these were sort of what subsequently became known as the Weird Wonders. These were sort of new phyla, which really didn’t fit into anything anybody had expected. Of course, in hindsight I was completely wrong, because the spines were not embedded in the seafloor, they were defensive, which any idiot could have seen. There was not a single row of these elongated tentacles, and in fact they weren’t tentacles, they were legs, and there was a double row. And one rather poorly preserved specimen and mostly you could just see the reflective spines because they were the most obvious and the most robust. The rest of the fossil was generally very poorly preserved. As I mentioned, at the end of each one of these tentacles there was a little reflective area, which I’d interpreted more or less as part of the mouth. That we now know of course is the claw at the end of the leg. And there was another row of these little reflective ones away from the rest of the specimen and I did not twig that that of course was the other row of legs. And in hindsight, of course, it’s all obvious. And subsequently it’s been shown to actually be a very primitive sort of arthropod and many many more related forms are now known, especially from the Chinese equivalent to the Burgess Shale. So it’s not exactly a good career move, and I think so far as I was concerned, obviously you would like to get it right, and we were probably in a bit of a hurry, but heck, you know, we didn’t have much material and we should have been more careful, but in a certain sense science only gets to one position having had the mistakes of the previous generation revealed, if you like. So that was another. There was another animal called Odontogriphus, and I’m not sure I had much Latin training at school, I had a great deal of Latin, I’m not sure I had much Latin training, which means effectively ‘toothed riddle’. It was only a single specimen and there were tiny tooth-like structures around the mouth, and these were teeth, and I thought they were actually similar to a very interesting group of fossils known as conodonts, which are very abundant and have been important especially in stratigraphy, and they too have had a long and chequered history as to what they were related to. But I interpreted this Odontogriphus as a conodont animal. Wrong again. But only a single specimen. That subsequently turned out to be quite closely related to yet another animal in the Burgess Shale called Wiwaxia, which I also worked on. And in the case of Wiwaxia I think I got it pretty well right in the end in terms of the reconstruction. The difference is that Wiwaxia has a very large

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number of individual scales covering it, sort of vaguely armadillo-like, but again, elongated spines, some of which were broken off, again consistent with protection from predation and so forth. And we now know that Odontogriphus, which lacks these scales, and many more specimens have been found subsequently, is actually closely related to Wiwaxia. So if you look back over sort of the best part of forty years, a great deal is now understood, which at that stage was, you know, very, very puzzling indeed and I mean it’s a good object lesson in just being perhaps a little bit more humble, reminding yourself that the hypothesis you are trying to erect is probably very, very fragile indeed, but it’s the best you can do.

[38:18] When you say that you reconstructed these animals, was this imaginatively or were you sort of doodling and drawing in order to sort of generate your sense of what this fossil could be a fossil of? How were you doing, how were you reconstructing?

Well in, let us say the case of Hallucigenia, the majority of specimens were more or less preserved on their side, but in fact one of the specimens collected by the Geological Survey of Canada was buried at a much deeper angle and you could see, in this case, that the spines formed an angle to each other on either side of the body about sixty degrees, and that of course is because they radiated from what we now know as the upper surface, the animal’s defensive array. But Harry Whittington, in particular, when he was looking at the most abundant of the arthropods, an animal called Marella, which was named after one of Harry Whittington’s predecessors in Cambridge, another Woodwardian professor, called Johnny Marr, who was active in the twenties, because they were buried at all sorts of different angles, in a sense he had the privilege, if you like, of being able to see the specimen preserved on its side, on its top, on its back and so forth, so he had almost every angle you liked. Whereas in most of my material, that was less easy. But the first approximation, one had camera lucida drawings from the original specimens and this allowed you to construct, if you like, in your own mind what the original animal looked like, and then it was simply a question of making a sketch, which you would refine as best you could. Now, subsequent to that, people have developed much more sophisticated computer techniques where you can rotate the fossils and so forth. And one thing which Derek Briggs showed rather nicely was that in fact in a way, the preservation of fossils was a little bit like a photograph. So if you imagine we’ve got a three-dimensional object and

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we’re photographing it from different directions, of course we’ll see different things, but when we hold the animal, or the object in our hand, we can see it’s completely three-dimensioned. But what he realised in essence was, he had a particular example of a rather strange arthropod which had a rather complex tale, that he could reconstruct it with a great deal of accuracy by making a model and then photographing it from the different angles and then refining the model so that in the end he got a perfect fit between what the fossil showed and what his model showed, so the two were consistent. So it’s building up the information, effectively. You know, one’s saying there’s this bit here, there’s that bit there. In the case of the Ottoia, I don’t know, maybe it was sort of original at that stage, actually the reconstruction I did was a dissection, perhaps because when I was in sixth form in my school in Wimbledon, we did quite a lot of dissection and this, I had the animal reconstructed as if it had been pinned open on a dissecting tray, with the various bits labelled in the typical anatomical way. Because at that stage, then one could show the exterior and the interior, because in the case of Ottoia, there was an unusually large amount of information regarding the intestines and the muscles, and even the nerve cord. But there were many specimens as well, and that’s one of the things, if you have a particular species where you have hundreds, if not thousands of specimens, you’re more likely to get the right answer, whereas in Hallucigenia, maybe twenty specimens, Odontogriphus at that stage, one specimen, then, you know, clearly you’re on rather thinner ice when you’re trying to reconstruct these animals. But that’s right, yes. And then, oh dear, well, Harry Whittington’s no longer with us, but he had been asked to write an article by Scientific American, [41:55] because by this stage the Burgess Shale was becoming fairly well known, and this is no reflection really of Harry at all, of whom I was extremely fond and he was extremely generous to me, but he wrote well but he didn’t write fluently, he wasn’t a stylist, if you like. And he’d written an article for Scientific American and they had said thank you and decided not to publish it, which is a bit strange any case, because I’m not sure that many articles in Scientific American were that well written, but there was a stage, if you look at the old issues of Scientific American there’s something gloriously dated about them, if you like, it’s a sort of a Cold War America. Everybody’s got short backs and side and all the rest of it. So they then approached me and asked me if I would write it. I think, I cannot remember if they asked me if I’d rewrite it, or whether they asked us to collaborate, or whether I suggested to Harry we collaborate, I entirely forget. But in any event, we had an article, we published it together and at that stage I also drew a sort of reconstruction of the seafloor, which I suppose was not ahead of its time, because people had been doing similar

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things with ordinary fossil assemblages, but it was trying to put everything into, if you like, a diorama of what was going on. So there were the worms living in the sediment, other animals swimming, other animals pursuing their existence in one way or another. And the Scientific American people of course redrafted it and produced a very, very nice reconstruction, very professional and beautifully executed, but on the basis of the sketches I’d done. So, in that way that was probably the first thing which began to draw the attention of people beyond the immediate palaeontological group to what the Burgess Shale was all about.

What was the effect of that, drawing attention of a wider group?

Well, I couldn’t say precisely. Of course in those days you used to get reprint requests. You used to get postcards asking you to send things. And I daresay, perhaps in my files there’s some correspondence on that, but the other thing was that mostly at the Palaeontological Association, which has a Christmas meeting in this country, and then there were other palaeontological meetings in the States, one or other or all of us would go and give talks. And so Harry Whittington gave a talk, it must have been probably just after I started my PhD, and no doubt that was influential on my thinking. And he’d been working on this very strange animal which was vaguely arthropod-like, called Opabinia. And it’s a remarkable animal, even today it’s not fully understood. It’s relatively large, about seven or eight centimetres in size, and it has this extraordinary sort of elephant-like trunk coming out of the anterior, which ends in a series of grasping claws. And then on the head there are five eyes. So it really does look weird. It’s pretty clear it’s some sort of arthropod now. But when Harry Whittington put up a reconstruction of this Opabinia at the meeting, in fact it was in Oxford, there was loud laughter. And it wasn’t derisory, but apparently Harry was very hurt, because of course he had put all this effort into trying to make sense of this animal and it was a sort of a mixture of sort of amusement and disbelief. No question that Harry had got it right, you know, he was well-known to be an extremely careful observer. So, those sorts of creatures were being announced at almost every meeting. And so, and in fact I gave my first talk at a later Palaeontological Association, I think in Newcastle, probably towards the end of my PhD, and that was a disaster, absolute catastrophe, it was a dreadful talk. But then, at the various meetings, you know, we were all very active, we were all publishing a great deal and publishing, you know, four or five papers a year on different things. So, there was quite an avalanche of material and at that stage I was very happy to go to

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conferences and give talks about this sort of material and then Harry would come on. He tended to, he was not an over-demonstrative person, he would speak clearly but not loudly, and not slowly, but ‘Well, here we have…’ you know. And he was very, very measured and one knew with Harry that he, you know, had thought about these things extremely carefully, he’d left no stone unturned in trying to understand it. So in that sense he was inspirational to us, not in terms of direct instruction, but really as a sort of, to use the over… phrase, a role model. Somebody who wasn’t flapped, you know, took his time looking at the material, and was an extremely precise observer.

[46:23] To what extent did you get to know him as a person beyond him as a scientist, if you like?

Reasonably well, I think. I suppose we would call ourselves friends. At one stage, I think he’d gone off to Australia, maybe on a sabbatical, and I wrote him several long letters, really just saying what I was doing. Then of course I left Cambridge in 1979 to work in the Open University and part of that time was actually spent in Sweden as well, and then I came back to Cambridge four years later. By that stage he had retired and he was really back to his first love, trilobites, but we would chat quite often. And I didn’t see him, you know, all the time, and then towards the end of his life he in fact moved into an old people’s home very close to where we live in Chesterton. And in fact we saw a lot more of him then, we used to wheel him down for Sunday lunch regularly and talk quite a bit at that sort of stage. But it was not, if you like, a close and extended friendship and probably because we were really different generations. And his own life, it was very remarkable in many respects, and he was closer friends with people like David Bruton and Chris Hughes, who were more his age, if you like, on that side. But, no, no, I mean he was very, very supportive of me as far as I know. I was slightly surprised to get a job back in Cambridge. I had the unworthy thought, in fact he might have preferred another candidate, but whether that was true or not, he would never worry, at all. He would never regard this as somehow he hadn’t won the fight, or whatever, and he was, you know, very generous to me. But, as I say, he had retired. Or if he’d not retired… no, he probably retired a year or two later, but in any event yeah, it wasn’t that much longer.

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[48:09] Did you at the time of the PhD, were you at this time having thoughts about the sort of wider significance of the material in terms of, for example, questions of evolution or development of life, that sort of thing?

Er, yes.

Which we know you, obviously we know you have later, but while working on it, while looking at this material for the first time in detail?

Yeah, I think so. As ever, most of it would have been pretty inarticulate, but certainly animals like Odontogriphus and Wiwaxia, the animal with the scales, relative of Odontogriphus, and notably Hallucigenia, really did seem to be extremely strange. And at that time I was playing with both the idea that these were, quote, new phyla. I mean in hindsight this was all absolute nonsense, of course. And linked to that, really quite early on, in fact when I gave my interview talk in Cambridge, I chose to talk about Wiwaxia, which I don’t think I put in my PhD, but was eventually published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where quite a lot of the major monographs appeared by Whittington and Briggs and Bruton and so forth. And at that stage I said, well it’s a bit like a mollusc, which of course includes animals like oysters and so forth, but it’s not. And therefore if you were to, as Stephen Jay Gould later said, to re-run the tape, I don’t think I used that phrase, but if history was to be a little bit different, then this might have been the animal which succeeded rather than the molluscs. So, if we look at the early molluscs then we know they evolved into things like ammonites and octopus and all that sort of thing. So there the idea is that there would have been a different and alternative history. Now, my views on that have changed 180 degrees, but of course that was the thing which then Steve Gould ran with in his book on the Burgess Shale, Wonderful Life, but that’s perhaps further down the conversation. But yes, no I think I was thinking about it, but it was, if you like, the fascination with just the strangeness of these fossils and they weren’t as strange as we thought.

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[50:12] Are you happy to say a little bit more about the development of your relationship with Zoë over this period? You just mentioned that she came to Cambridge with you, but you weren’t together for all of that time, or she moved away and came back?

That’s right. I mean I don’t think there’s anything actually of any great interest here at all, to be honest. I mean she came and I think… she was working as a secretary, that’s right, and as I say, the relationship didn’t really flourish at that stage. And then she went back to Bristol and then in fact set up a coffee shop in the Bristol Guild, which was extremely successful. It had all sorts of pioneering things like homemade food and no smoking, so it was way ahead of the curve. And she did very well, but it was very, very tiring, it was a huge amount of work. And I used to go and see her in Bristol and eventually, in fact what happened, perhaps this is, I’m not sure it’s a story worth telling, but when I got the research fellowship in St John’s, Harry Whittington had come to my room some months beforehand and I suppose, obviously that was a sort of mark of his sort of, not favour, but his sort of interest in my work, he said had I thought about applying for research fellowships in the Cambridge colleges, which are a standard part of both the Oxford and Cambridge scheme, where effectively they’re highly competitive and typically they’re for either three or four years, whereby you’re given college accommodation, you become a Fellow of the College and you get usually a little bit of research money, and they pay you a salary. So they’re very, very nice things to have. And in the case of St John’s in fact, to the present day, the first year is entirely without condition, you can do whatever you like. And so that’s wonderful. Any case, I’d applied for a number of colleges and I apparently got reasonably close on a couple, but was basically told to come back next year, because I was a bit young, I hadn’t finished my PhD. But St John’s elected me, and I was going down to London to meet with my parents, and also to meet up with Zoë who presumably came up from Bristol, and I, rather strange, I mean one sometimes wonders whether the Post Office works, but there must have been a second delivery and there was a rather bulky envelope in there saying I’m very pleased to say you’ve been elected to St John’s, and so forth and all sorts of ancillary details. So I just put it in my pocket because I had to run down to get to the station. And then we had a meal beforehand, before we went to the show, and I can’t remember what the show was, I’m afraid, it was the theatre, and I just got the letter out and passed it to Zoë, said you might want to read this, and so forth. And then we agreed to get married very shortly afterwards. So that in a sense is what

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happened. And then we got married in Lode, as I think I mentioned, in, that must have been my third year, and set up house sort of fairly shortly after that, in fact. And so we’ve been together since and two children, one of whom now has his own children, and so forth, so that’s another story, exactly. But I mean, without being ridiculous, I mean she’s always been fantastically supportive of my work. She decided, and I was very happy with that, that when we had children she would stop working, and obviously when they got to a certain age then she’d begin working again, and so forth. But she regarded her most important role in life was to make sure the two boys were brought up as happy as possible, and I think that’s worked, fortunately. And then subsequently she did various sort of, if you like, secretarial, but administrative jobs including in what later became the Gurdon Institute, but at that time CRC Wellcome, in East Asia Studies in Cambridge. And she enjoyed those very much because she, you know, met either people working in sort of Chinese, Japanese or working in molecular biology and so forth and was, you know, in-house magazines, all the usual stuff, student admissions, all sorts of strange things, specially in East Asian studies, which is slightly ex-collegiate. So that was the background to it, effectively, that’s right, yeah.

[end of track 3]

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[Track 4]

Could you tell me about the development of your interest in Christianity at Cambridge? I think you mentioned that it was about the age of twenty-one that you started to develop a serious intellectual interest in it. I wondered what was going on during your PhD in this respect?

Oh dear. Not a great deal, I’m afraid. [laughs] It’s been very, very gradual, fits and starts, perhaps backwards and forwards as well. In Lode itself there was a relatively small church, which was Victorian in construction, and the vicar there was a man called Geoffrey Ellerby, who was a man of transparent goodness. He in fact was the one who married Zoë and myself, and I decided more or less, I don’t quite know why, that if I was going to get married then I ought to be confirmed, which I never had been. And again, I forget in any detail, but I’m afraid that when I was at school we had a chaplain there, whose name I think was Kinghorn, and I wasn’t very kind to him and he was very exasperated with me. But the confirmation classes he ran were of course pretty elementary, not because he wasn’t actually quite a considerable intellect, but of course it was, you know, mostly the children, you know, the teenagers from the village and the like. So that was relatively… we used to go occasionally to services, not every Sunday, and so forth, and not, I’m saying, of course that church attendance is necessarily an indication of anything at all, far from it. And since then I think probably it’s a long and not terribly interesting story. It’s been, as I think I might have mentioned previously, initially sparked by the Narnia stories of CS Lewis and then at some stage reading his ‘Mere Christianity’. And then the other – which in fact, oddly enough, I haven’t reread, which would probably do me good if I did. And then becoming more and more interested in the Inklings. And Zoë gave me, in fact on graduation, The Lord of the Rings, and I don’t want to get too detoured into that, but my own view is this is one of the most extraordinary mythopoeic books ever written, and so I’m not here to defend fantasy literature. I suppose I was quite keen on science fiction. But there’s always been that side to me, I suppose, which ultimately now has sort of crystallised, oxymoronically, into the sense that the world we live in is only a very small part of what there is, as one would say, in sort of orthodoxy worlds, visible and invisible. And obviously this then segues into my interest in evolution: the evolution of intelligence, evolution of nervous systems; evolution of brains; how can we communicate using language, is it just animal vocalisations; how can we do mathematics, no animal can do a sum. This is probably taking us far too away from where one

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wants to be, but you know, in the sense to describe how I’ve got to where I am today, the Burgess Shale, if you like, was a sort of litmus test for getting things wrong, but also inviting you to think about bigger questions. And so for the most part, I mean, my attendance at church for many years has been, you know, on and off. Not, as I say, I think simply attending services other than a public demonstration of one’s faith is unimportant, far from it, and if somebody sees you coming out of church they think, good heavens, I never knew. Which may or may not please them, but that’s another story. But overall, I mean in terms of the intellectual structure of any theistic argument, I certainly find Christianity by far the most… I should ask you, I know we’re being recorded and I know it would… Are you a Christian yourself?

I’m not, no.

No, that’s fine, it’s okay. Have you any religion to speak of or…?

No.

No, that’s fine. That’s the commonplace, I would say, yes.

[03:44] Can you tell me about when you read the Narnia books and when you read them, and I know you said you were reluctant to, but do please tell me about Lord of the Rings and why you think it’s significant?

Well, I think in a number of ways, and I become pretty boring about it pretty quickly. I imagine you’ve read it and perhaps dislike it.

No, no.

It doesn’t matter. No, no, sorry, I’m not trying to interview you, though I could end up doing that of course. Why didn’t he talk about himself? Let’s talk about you. There are a number of aspects about it which I think are quite interesting. I mean in a nutshell, it was apparently there was a young, fairly young boy, maybe twelve or so forth, who, I can’t quite remember how the

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story goes, but when he realised that this world didn’t exist, burst into tears. It was so real, it had been constructed with such conviction and one can say, and I’ve not read a great deal around this, there’s an awful lot of material published on Tolkien of course. But it does seem to me that there’s something there does ring true, that somehow, and I think Tolkien began to wonder whether in fact he had actually discovered this world rather than invented it, which is ridiculous. It can’t be true, can it? And what do we mean by that in any case? And we know historically, you know, so far as we’re concerned, we know enough archaeology to understand that there was never a place called Gondor, but I’m not sure that doesn’t prevent Gondor existing somewhere, if you like. So he had this remarkable ability, and of course much of it was because of his constant rewriting, you know, every word was sifted. And of course we now know a lot about his interest in language and how influential Owen Barfield was on him in regards to, you know, what are the origins of language, what is the mythopoeia, what is it which makes us so different from animals and that sort of thing. So there’s that axis to what I find so, so astonishing. The other aspect, which has been often commented upon, and I almost think if I had time I might try and write something myself on it, is that, as is very clear, there’s no religion in this world to speak of, there’s some observances of piety, but they’re very, very muted. There’s certainly a sense of overriding powers, both good and evil, and again, this takes me aside at a tangent, but unfortunately just in fact in the last weeks I’ve been reading several books about the 1930s and then into the forties and the more I learn about the Nazis, the more bizarre I find it. It’s totally extraordinary but it was totally awful. It’s not Mordor, but it’s rather similar. In fact it’s very similar. And of course there’s been a long argument as to whether the Ring is equivalent to the atomic bomb, and blahdy blahdy blahdy blah, and the extent to which Tolkien’s own understanding of Mordor was very much based on his experiences in the First World War. And there’s little doubt that these played a very important part in his life and in his subsequent friendship with Lewis, who was also in the First World War, and so on and so forth. But despite all that, there is this, in my view, very clear strand not only of Christianity running through it in an entirely non-proselytising way, but also again and again you come across things which in a sense are from the Gospels, as I read it, but are, well if I said they’re taken out of context, in fact they’re put into a context. And so the whole thing is, the more I read it, and I’ve read it many times now, it’s permeated with, well, as he points out himself, this so-called ‘eucatastrophe’ at the end, where everything seems absolutely bleak and hopeless, be it one’s forthcoming death of oneself or the possibility of some terrible collapse of civilisation or unrestricted evil, which we

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see all around us again today, but despite all that there’s some good news beyond it. So – and of course he also famously said he wanted a mythology for England, because we didn’t have anything like the Kullervo, or the Kalevala in Finland, nor the Nibelung or anything equivalent to that, in Germany, and so forth. And so he also wants to make something which would make the English, who are otherwise very prosaic, sometimes rather dull people, provide their own mythology, if you like. And he said, I think, at the time, people will laugh at what I’m doing. So this for me has overall, along with much of the writings of Lewis and Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, had enriched my life, you know, beyond all measure. Obviously I read a great deal else and there are many other things which actually, if you like, the book I’m reading as I came down on the train today, which is about the use of statistics and the Gallup Poll and the way in fact our lives have been hijacked by statistics and the fact that, you know, if the national productivity’s going up and down, this is a matter of rejoicing or despair, whereas in fact we know perfectly well the reliability of these things is dubious in the extreme. But that’s another story. So that’s in a sense the thing which I suppose has consolidated my interest in Christianity. And I think it’s true to say that the first approximation, CS Lewis, who was a far more eloquent sort of public advocate for Christianity in his ability to explain things with a remarkable degree of clarity, but overall he didn’t particularly like, I think, going to church, other than the fact that it was good to kneel and that you were in a sense submitting yourself in humility in a way, which Williams also emphasised, to a priest. And this was, he regarded as a central part of ultimately what the Catholics would go on to identify as transubstantiation, the presence of God amongst us. And he didn’t like hymns. I can’t sing to save my life in any case, but he thought that the intellectual arguments were by far the best. And I think he’s right, I think both in terms of the historical evidence, the Gospels, and people saying well, they’re all competing versions by rival churches in different parts of the Roman Empire. No, I don’t think so. The historical evidence of the resurrection, which I think is overwhelming. And also the problem with what we call radical evil. It’s not just bad things, it’s terrible things happening to innocent people. And not so much in the case of, you know, something awful like a child developing cancer, that’s bad enough, but much more how we see this, you know, the Shadow, as Tolkien always said, returns. And, you know, having just finished a book, and I’m sorry I can’t remember the author, about the so-called Nazi empire. I think in this country, first of all of course, most of the camps were liberated by the Russians, because of course they were in general government, you know, former Poland and the rest of it, but Belsen of course wasn’t, that was liberated by the Canadians, I

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think, and the English, and, you know, they could not just believe what they saw. You know, bombing cities might be one thing, this was a different order of badness. But, what comes out in such a terrible way, is just how the whole of the continent was permeated by this evil, it wasn’t simply, you know, a group of the SS or a [Hans] Frank or somebody like that engaging in these terrible things, it was everywhere. You know, it wasn’t just isolated spots, the whole of Europe had been corrupted, and if you look at what happened in Greece, look at what happened in Italy and so forth, it’s awful. And it’s not, I don’t want to end up sort of sounding incredibly pessimistic about this, but I don’t think, I don’t think in a sense any of these problems are soluble, but we should never be surprised. But, of course Tolkien beyond that holds out this hope which most people would simply say is just wish fulfilment, wouldn’t it be nice. Whereas of course his view would be that it isn’t a question of wouldn’t it be nice, it is true. So that’s really, that’s why I subscribe to this, because in a sense having something, I suppose, of a mythopoeic tendency and more and more sensing, you know, the world I’m in, clearly if I choose to walk out of the room in front of a bus, the bus will kill me. Buses don’t go through me, sort of thing. But I do very strongly sense that the world around us is, I wouldn’t say more complex, but it’s not multi-layered, but as I think I mentioned, it has got invisible components to it which are just as real as our, what we call the real world. But this must be nonsense.

[12:26] But do they, are those invisible components ever discernible to you? When you say if you walk outside a bus will kill you, but is it, you know, is it faith in something that’s invisible or is it possible to detect?

I mean I think you can, in a very parochial way, although I’m not at all skilled in mathematics, it seems to me, though this is not agreed by everybody, that mathematics is discovered, and don’t ask me to explain in any detail, but there’s a famous essay which I re-read the other day, by Eugene Wigner, called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, published in 1960. And he points out that’s it really not at all clear why maths works so well. Not only that, but there are things like complex numbers, which as I understand it, very, very crudely a sort of square root minus one, and these numbers don’t exist per se, and yet, not only can they achieve enormous tractability in particular equations but they have very real consequences in physics, they impinge on the real world. And again and again we find mathematics, which appears to be entirely

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theoretical, actually turns out to have some bearing on the way we do our work. So that’s one aspect of it, okay? And okay, of course mathematics is written down, naturally enough it’s always in a medium, that’s fine because we live in a material world, that’s beyond dispute. But as far as I can see, you know, where is this mathematics, I mean is it in our neurons? I don’t think so. It’s channelled through our neurons, just as I would subscribe to the general belief that our brains are not making mind, they’re filtering mind. So again, that’s got a theistic ring to it, whereas of course the majority, especially materialists, would have to insist that our minds are in our brains. But I think that is highly unlikely to be true. So that’s one aspect. Another one, which takes us into slightly dangerous territory, and I don’t really want to go into the detail of it. I don’t mind being thought to be mad, that doesn’t distress me at all, but it’s a question of whether people are willing to listen. For some reason I got interested in the very famous Indian mathematician, Ramanujan and there’s a biography of him by a chap called Kanigel, and in fact the film which is being made about him at the moment I think is largely based on Kanigel’s book. But, to cut a long story short, and I’ve used some of these quotes in some of my work, including throwaway remarks in a paper about why animals don’t have maths, and also at the end of my last book, The Runes of Evolution, which as we speak has only been out for a few months. But, Ramanujan of course is a very famous story, because he was an extremely gifted mathematician, was not exclusively, but largely self-taught, and he tried to contact various mathematicians, I think in America as well as in England, but only Hardy paid any attention. And he got this great bundle of manuscripts, and of course this is the area which is usually referred to as ‘writings in green ink’. And we all get things from people who, you know, for instance I had an email the other day about the pyramids. So that’s okay. I didn’t reply, I’m afraid. But Hardy began to flick through this stuff, so the story goes, and became more and more astonished. It turns out, in fact several things, first of all some of the proofs which Ramanujan arrived at were actually false, other ones had been independently arrived at, which of course again is an interesting area of sort of intellectual history, how is it that the same thing happens, and I think Rupert Sheldrake’s interested in this in a related way. But from what I can understand, even now Ramanujan’s writings are an enormous treasure trove for future work, you know, there’s sort of basically a group of people who do little else but work on the implications of his work. But what was fascinating in Kanigel’s account were two things, first of all – and again, sorry I don’t have the book in front of me, so I won’t give the names – but Ramanujan would claim that when he saw the equations, he saw them through the medium of Hindu gods

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and goddesses, and it was associated with bleeding, not of himself, but that blood had some part of it, which is actually quite interesting, and he would see these scrolls on which the equations were written. And this was a god, I think it was a goddess, which he paid particular devotion to. And you think, well, okay, he’s a Hindu, he’s putting it into his cultural context. And you could argue that just as I could only see a theistic view through Christianity and the Trinity, so far as Ramanujan could see it, he could only see it in a Hindu. But what struck me was that the related passages more or less said, you know, what Ramanujan was doing was, if you like, on the edge of magic. It’s not magic per se, but it’s extremely mysterious. This was somebody who really was going into very deep areas and I’m sorry I can’t give the exact words, I think it was either a Czech or a Polish writer who was describing this deeply mysterious ability of Ramanujan to access this material. So that’s an aspect, if you like, of this invisible world. And I’m not saying at all, and of course Christianity has a tradition in that area as well, so of course does Pythagoras in another way, I’m not trying to use this as a theistic argument, but I’m trying to say that actually, the world we inhabit is much, much different from what we expect. And I mean there are corollaries to that, inasmuch as if you decide that the world is entirely material, for the sake of argument, sort of perhaps something somebody like Atkins might subscribe to, I wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth for a moment, then your mind will be closed. But correspondingly, if you say, well supposing the world is something where mathematics is in a sense real and in an entirely analogous way going all the way back to The Lord of the Rings, supposing in a way it is real, it’s absurd of course, but this I think is, it rings true to me. So that’s one aspect of, you know, not being mathematically competent at all, you know, I can intuit some of the simpler stuff but no more than that. So that’s part of the argument.

Thank you.

Sounds mad, doesn’t it?

[18:59] To what extent do you remember in the seventies doing your PhD discussion at any level of relations between science and religion? This could be among colleagues, it could be your memory of it sort of taking place in newspapers and sort of general media. But to what extent do

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you remember there being then in the seventies debate at any level on this question, this relation between science and religion?

That’s a very quick answer, very little indeed. Not to say it wasn’t happening, it may well have been. But even when I was fortunate enough to have my research fellowship in St John’s, and I remember talking to some of the theologians then, probably not to any great level. And in fact the chap who in a way was most influential on me at that stage was a very interesting man called Renford Bambrough, who was a philosopher, in St John’s, and he apparently had been – oh dear, what do they call it? You’ll have to remind me, I’m afraid. The sort of teenagers more or less who had been sort of recruited in the Second World War into industry – Bevan Boys, that’s right. And I think he actually worked, if not in a coalmine, in the coal industry during the war. And I’ll have to struggle to remember the name, so this will need some careful editing, but he then drew my attention to a chap in Liverpool. I apologise, I’ll have to remember the name later and we can interpolate it, it’s hopeless, I’m a bit tired at the moment, unfortunately. That in a different sort of way began to spur my interest in this, but these were very diffuse and different ways of doing things and all the sorts of things which happened more recently, obviously the Templeton Foundation and the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Faraday Institute, and all these sorts of things. I mean these are much, much later developments. Or maybe the Templeton was already going at that stage, in at least its nascent form. But no, no, so far as I was concerned, I mean it was almost a personal journey, I mean so far as research is concerned I’m pretty much a loner, I’ve had only a handful of PhD students. It’s been fine, you know, I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m not one who’s ever wanted to build up a big group of any particular form. [21:15] With regard to the three books I’ve written, in a sense Crucible of Creation has little bits in code scattered here and there, just little throwaway remarks. Not designed to irritate anybody or attract anybody’s attention, just the way my thinking was beginning to go. And then the Life’s Solution of course has got effectively a sort of meta… well, it’s got a metaphysical conclusion and it’s got a silly conclusion. And then Runes of Evolution in a certain sense has hardly moved on in one regard, except that right at the end, so inasmuch as this is published, without spoiling the plot, as they say, and – I’ll mention it and you can edit this out later, probably would want to – have you come across this book by Dan Hodges [Dan Rhodes] called The Professor Gets Lost in the Snow? [When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow] And what happens is that somebody

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called Richard Dawkins is going to give a talk to a Women’s Institute in a remote part of the Midlands and they get trapped in the snow, and so he’s put up by a vicar and his wife, so you can imagine how it goes. It’s very, very entertaining. Sorry, I’m going off at a tangent, which is not important, is it, but it’s an amusing book and it’s got a very clever ending as well. In The Runes of Evolution, it’s much influenced by the fact that my brother was, until quite recently, living in Venice. We used to go and visit him a lot, the most beautiful city, and the opening chapter, apart from an introduction, is just called Dinner on the Lagoon and it’s just sort of two people talking and they’re having a nice dinner. I’ll tell you the restaurant if you’re interested, it’s a well- known one on Burano and we know it reasonably well. But any case, it’s just sort of going round the thing about, you know, why does convergent evolution matter. And it’s all a bit hammy, frankly. Then in the last chapter, Return to the Lagoon, I think it’s called, the protagonist, called Mortimer – and if we get on to Wine Committee in St John’s College we can take that full circle if you so wish – and his unknown companion, but you can assume that’s me, they had planned to go back to Venice, but no, Mortimer says actually we’re going separate ways now, don’t worry, a water taxi will take you back to Venice, but I’m going down to the little quayside at the end of the church there. And what he does is when Mortimer goes, he goes across to the Franciscan monastery and that’s where he’s going to stay, he’s decided to, and he’s welcomed there. He says, ‘Ah, Dottore, Mortimer’, etc. And my brother very kindly did translations of the Venetian dialect for the gondolier and Italian for the head of the Franciscan community, the Francesco del Deserto, I think it is. Which you see from Burano, it’s a little island just to the south and those are sort of throwaway remarks. But before that, they have a little sort of conversation, and again, without spoiling the story, just by chance I was reading David Bellamy’s biography. I’ve never met the chap, everybody I know who knows him says he’s a wonderful man. But when he was a boy, he was walking home and their grandmother, well, his grandmother so to speak, has been living with them some time, and this was a weekday and he suddenly sees… and you know where the story’s going to go and they’re very common, these stories, he suddenly sees his grandmother at the bus stop in her Sunday best, black, and he knows instantly she’s dead. So of course he gets home and the parents are very distraught, both by the death of – I can’t remember whether it’s the father’s or his mother’s side – and in fact that David was very fond of this lady. But he knows what’s happened, so you know, he says, don’t worry, I saw granny. And there are so many stories, and Zoë in particular, my wife, knows two people, one very tragic one, of a child dying and so forth, where they clearly saw the person

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who’d just died. And you can say well, it was on their mind, and whatever. But as Bellamy pointed out in this particular case, you know, she was in her Sunday best … and it’s a weekday, so you don’t normally… So that again, this goes off into some pretty strange territory and there’s a great deal of fraud and, you know, all the rest of it. And most people say well, there’s a perfectly natural explanation for this sort of thing. But I don’t think there is actually, I think something rather odd’s happening here, at least from our perspective. So there are a couple of other stories. Another one, which I don’t if it’s true or not, but the other person who’s been very influential in my understanding of Christianity is GK Chesterton, and I think in turn he was very influential on CS Lewis, and Chesterton again is not terribly well remembered today. He was fantastically prolific, and of course he was a freelance writer, he never had a job to speak of, and his early essays are, I think are just wonderful gems. And he converted to Catholicism probably about ten years, a bit less than ten years before he died. Immensely overweight, you know, he’s not exactly a role model, then he drank too much, and all the rest of it. Loved his wife, was faithful to her absolutely. But his conversion to Catholicism was due to a man called John O’Connor who was a priest near Burnley, I think, and he wrote a book called The Real Father Brown, because he was a role model for Father Brown in the GK Chesterton detective stories. And again, I like those, a little bit like the much more mysterious Man Who Was Thursday, because in the same way as Charles Williams and his sort of theological shockers, so Father Brown is doing it in a rather more gentle way, but of course in all of these detections there is a moral and a metaphysical message and of course Chesterton knew perfectly well what he was doing. Any case, in the case of Father Brown, in his – well, rather Father O’Connor – in his book The Real Father Brown, he tells a story which I have never checked and I’m not even sure one would be able to find the information about going to a lunatic asylum, probably about 1935/36, where a lunatic had been admitted the day beforehand and put in a padded cell. And he was summoned up to this lunatic asylum near Burnley, or somewhere in that area, and the cell was empty, and there’s a high window and it’s broken and the lunatic’s disappeared. Anyway, as the warders say, we think you might be interested in this. And the thing there again is, we all like a yarn, we all like a story, we all sort of think, gosh, you know, it’s a bit like ghost stories, you can terrify yourself without a great deal of effort. And you have to sort of pinch yourself and remind yourself this is just fiction. But he says, it’s a rather short account, he just says this is true, this happened. And knowing the fact that priests, like doctors, generally are very, they guard confidentiality, they don’t make up stories, they’re not… they see enough extraordinary

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things any case. I think that happened. I mean it can’t happen, but it did happen. So that again, I mean it’s a… the trouble here, you can get into, you know, madness almost this way lies, because there are so many weird stories. But yes, I think that again is a sort of, I would say it’s keeping your mind open. My colleagues would say he’s deluded. And who’s to say who’s right? Yeah.

Thank you.

[28:42] Sorry, I keep on going off tangent.

No, no, this is great.

I apologise.

Could you then take us on from the submission of and the getting of your PhD and take us on in your scientific career a little further?

Briefly, because in a sense there’s not a great deal to be said, the St John’s Fellowship gave me unlimited time and resources to do what I wanted to do, so we were very, very active publishing papers mostly, trying to get five or six papers out a year, and in a sense that’s necessary just for getting a job. And then at that stage there were a variety of posts being advertised. One was in then Chelsea College, I think it was, which later became part of Royal Holloway, one was in Aston University. And so all of us in that generation did the rounds and one by one we were picked off and they got jobs and I didn’t, so that was okay. None of these places I particularly wanted to work in. Oh, there was also a position in the National Museum of Wales. And the people who got the jobs certainly were the right people, so I think the interviewing panels did a very good job indeed. And then a friend of mine, Peter Skelton, who we’d been together with in Bristol and done geology for the three years, he’d gone off to Oxford to do a PhD, had been quite successful, and he got a job in the Open University. And he came across to see us in Cambridge, and he was very, very enthusiastic about the Open University, he really loved being there, it was quite newly founded, even then, there was still a buzz in the air. And he’d bought a little place in

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what’s now Milton Keynes and there was a job advertised there which I think I’d applied for, but he really inspired me to sort of make a serious effort to get it. And so I went for interview just before Christmas and was offered the post, in fact they offered two posts, so we then had four years in the Open University. And that was absolutely wonderful for me, first of all because it got me out of Cambridge. I was told, though with what truth I don’t know, that the College might have kept me on as what’s now called a CTO, in other words, a non-university teaching officer, they might have continued to pay my salary. But I’m very glad they didn’t, it was very important to get away from Cambridge, and that time I wasn’t over happy there, I mean I was very happy with Whittington and so forth, but the department was not terribly lively and a year or two later in fact they amalgamated with what was then called the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology, which was next door, but they practically didn’t talk to each other. And there was another place out in west Cambridge, called the Bullard Institute, which was really where a good part of plate tectonics was pioneered and Dan McKenzie of course, who I know in a different context, is one of the leaders in that area. So I wasn’t sorry to leave Cambridge. And the advantages, so far as they were, of the Open University were several-fold. First of all, we had to write, because it was mostly course units, and I wasn’t very good at that, but we had very good drafting facilities, draftsmen and all that sort of stuff, so you had quite a lot of interaction with these people and one began to appreciate a bit more how important it is, if you’re going to make the impact, to have the right illustrative material. And I think my slides I used in my talks, or PowerPoint as it now is, are very much in that thing, they’re very striking pictures and no text, by and large. There were summer schools, which were quite interesting, and again, you met the most extraordinary cross-section of people, which you’d never meet if you were teaching in an ordinary university. And I remember there were people of all ages and descriptions, people working in a post office, there was one old chap who had been a Battle of Britain pilot, there were policemen. Lots and lots of different people and they all, again, it sounds as if I’m almost talking on behalf of the Labour Party, but it was genuine that these people had not got the opportunity to get to university and they were all anxious to learn and they were grown up enough to enjoy themselves. So they were very, very entertaining. We had a nice time, I was mostly based in Durham and Reading, occasionally Stirling and so forth. And perhaps most important otherwise, so in hindsight perhaps less important, if that doesn’t sound too paradoxical, is that it was still the early days of the Open University and though we didn’t do the work in Milton Keynes in the studios there, mostly did it at other sites, outside broadcasts or in

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Ally Pally, Alexandra Palace, so I learnt to do some television. And again, the first one was absolutely appalling. But I’m not saying I’m good at television, but I’m not too bad at it. And that really taught me something, I think, about, if you like, how to try and put things across moderately succinctly, though clearly this interview now has taken it in the reverse direction. How to present things, how to look – at that time you were always trained to look into the camera rather than at the interviewer – so how to look into the camera as if there’s somebody really there. So that’s something which I think, you know, I wouldn’t say it opened my mind and probably if I’d been a bit more ambitious I could have become much more involved with television. And I do a bit here and there and generally they seem to be very happy with what I do. But that’s fine, I’m happy to see it on the door. I regard it as completely… we don’t have a television at home, for instance. So I don’t like seeing myself on the television either, a horrible sight. But yes, that’s I think the other aspect about the Open University. And again, they were very supportive, they were still in the first rush of enthusiasm. And then a job came up in Cambridge and as much because I think I’d done really what I wanted to do in the Open University, we lived in a little village at that stage called Deanshanger, just outside Milton Keynes, near Stony Stratford, and we lived in many ways in the nicest house we’ve ever had; it was a small cottage, stone-built, probably around about 1750. And it was, property prices were fabulously depressed because there was an enormous factory in the middle of the village, so one got things at half the price, and it didn’t bother us at all, mostly because the prevailing wind took – it wasn’t dangerous, it was making pigments for paint mostly – and eventually of course with the collapse of industry in this country it closed down, it’s all been redeveloped, but that was after we left. But the school there where the children would have gone was okay, but no more, and looking ahead we thought, well we’ll probably move to Oxford, because that’s a bit more academic and there was a colleague there who thought I might get some sort of association. I’m very glad that didn’t happen, for many reasons. And then a job came up in Cambridge. There were four of us interviewed, including Derek Briggs, and slightly to my surprise, I got the job. I don’t think I was the best qualified, and I’m not sure I am even now, but even so, they decided to offer it to me, so we were very pleased to come back to Cambridge. And in a certain sense, you know, the rest is history, in a way. I mean it’s been, rather boringly, if you like, a steady progression to readership, to professorship, and so forth. Getting elected to the Royal Society far too young, but I think, I’m told – of course it’s all completely confidential and I wouldn’t be given access to it in any case – I’m told that, I think I was elected in my second or third year,

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which is a little bit unusual, was a glowing reference from, an absolutely over the top reference from Stephen Gould, Stephen Jay Gould. And of course, since then, of course I decided to disagree with him, he wasn’t very happy with that, and the like. But at that stage, I think I must have been thirty-nine or forty, on paper was a very great honour and probably in fact it was a mistake. I don’t mean this in any negative way, but it was a mistake to be elected so young, because most people aren’t elected till their fifties, even later. And okay, I mean there are a few people of genuine, you know, of total ability and I’m not in that category at all, who ought to be elected in their twenties or thirties because they are genuinely brilliant. But it was really here just, you know, a historical accident. I might have been elected in the end, I’m not sure I would have been, because only, I think a year, maybe less, the Hallucigenia denouement, where the animal I thought was one way up turned out to be upside-down, well, you know, that doesn’t look too good on a referee’s report, does it? So I was lucky, undoubtedly. Yes, so that, yes, and obviously I’ve been very involved with the College. I’ve been quite involved with the Wine Committee in a number of ways, and the tasting notes I write for that are almost a miniature novel. So somewhere embedded in a sentence there’ll be some description of what the wine is so even I can vaguely remember whether it’s a robust wine or whether it’s going to be long-lived or short-lived, whether it’s going to go with this food or whatever, and the principal sort of, the invisible figure, is this shadowy figure called Mortimer. But in the College it’s sort of quite well known. It’s not quite a private joke, it’s not meant to be exclusive or anything, but if you talk to people and you say, ‘What would Mortimer think?’, he’s a very sort of bluff character, wife, is it? His wife, Mildred? Labrador, pipe smoker. And he has this ability to move through space and time. It’s all rather ridiculous isn’t it?

[37:56] When you said that it was really important to leave Cambridge, can you say a little bit more about that, about your perception of what was negative about Cambridge?

At that stage, and I don’t need to give their names, they’re dead now in any case, but there were a couple of people I really didn’t get on with at all. These were senior members of staff. And the funny thing about Cambridge not infrequently is that almost without exception the people there are very gifted. They are very – I’m not saying that’s not true of many other parts of the world - but you can be pretty sure that people there are clever. But their cleverness doesn’t

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necessarily translate into effectiveness, and so they might be ahead of their time in all sorts of ways, but if they don’t actually connect to the wider picture, then in a certain way their opportunity is missed. And these two people were really rather difficult in my view, but probably I was very difficult as well. And in fact, in fairness, when I came back to Cambridge four years later, one of these people was extraordinarily friendly, extraordinarily helpful, just any sort of antagonisms had been entirely forgotten. So that was a good object lesson in any case. So really not a lot was happening in that department, probably if a job had come up I’d have applied for it and I might have got it, I don’t know, but I wasn’t sorry to go. It would be too much of an exaggeration to say it was moribund, but it wasn’t sparky. I mean okay, if anything significant had happened it was Whittington’s group and the palaeobiology, but Derek Briggs I think had already gone, Chris Hughes had really gone back to trilobites, David Bruton was in Oslo, and Harry had really gone back to the trilobites by then, because that was his first love. So, as I say, I didn’t leave feeling furious or anything like that, I just thought I don’t need to be here and I’m glad I’m going somewhere else. And the sort of long term plan, so far as there was one, was that having been in Bristol as an undergraduate, I thought at that stage, completely erroneously, that it would rather nice to go back to Bristol in the longer term, and that would have pleased Zoë very much because she’s got much more connection with the West Country. And there are many advantages of the West Country against the Fens. But that didn’t happen in any case and I’m glad it didn’t, for various reasons. So yes, it was, no, in a way the research fellowship in St John’s, to some extent I suppose slightly detached me from the department. Newly married, so you know, we’ve got other details. [40:38] It was during that time my father died rather unexpectedly, and I can’t remember if we mentioned this before, and it’s, in a certain sense parents will die won’t they, but he developed cancers and really had very little time to live and he was a, what we call a sole practitioner as a solicitor, so he was the only guy, so he’s leaving a firm with probably five or six people completely adrift. So we had to move extremely quickly to try and rescue the firm, not least because he had no life insurances to speak of, that was the only source of money which my mother would be able to use, apart from the house. So that was all pretty traumatic, so we spent a year from the funeral onwards trying to sell the practice, obviously helping my mother as best I could. It wasn’t a good year at all. So there, I mean it’s almost going full circle. Two things: he phoned me up and said, you know, he was very ill, and I very stupidly didn’t go and see him as I had to run a fieldtrip, and I should have just said, stuff that. And he said don’t worry, typical father. Is that on the day after, the day he

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died, I think it was – sorry to sound so vague – the phone rings, it’s from my brother, who was in Athens, where he was ostensibly doing a PhD, and he said I think there’s something wrong with dad. Certainly there was, in a manner of speaking. So he had no idea why he had this sort of hunch, but again, that’s actually very frequent in times of family crisis that, you know, one can put it in all sorts of ways, he probably knew that dad was ill, I don’t even know if he did actually, because he was living in Athens, learning Greek and Turkish for his, at that time, PhD. And then I’m never sure to this day, and I won’t be until I meet my father, is that I think that when I came down to Wimbledon, where my mother was living, and where they had more or less separated by that stage, I think he looked on me when I was almost asleep, I can’t be sure, actually in a sense I don’t mind, I didn’t expect anything, but I’m pretty sure he was standing there. And that again is by no means unusual, a little bit like the Bellamy story, it’s not at all that things don’t happen. But I never really thought about it, I didn’t sort of think, you know, grip the table and think, goodness me, you know, this is going to change my life completely. Which is very often the case, I think. The occurrences I know of are terribly matter of fact, they’re not sort of ‘ta-dah’ moments, as they say, they’re not sort of strange, you know, lights and so forth, they’re just terribly material, as it happens. So, that was another aspect of things which, you know, having to go down to London again and again and again and find a locum to run the firm, nightmare. Then eventually selling it on to some other crowd. Oh, it was very bad indeed. Well, not very bad, it was just, I didn’t mind doing it, I didn’t grudge a moment of doing the work, but it was something we could have all done without, obviously. So, all those things are sort of, you know, in a certain way wanting to make your own way, the stress of the father’s death, my mother and so forth, so a whole lot of… she died more recently, and so forth. So yeah, that was the sort of aspects to it. And probably being a young man with, about to start a family, so a very good idea, as you’ll know. So yes, get some clear space. And again, the advantage of the Open University is that they were very keen I stayed, they didn’t want me to leave, they made me various, not ridiculous offers, but they made it very clear that, you know, promotion would be pretty rapid if I so wanted it. And I’m sorry about that because they had been so generous to me, and I don’t think I was using them, but obviously I seemed to work quite well there, and all the rest of it. And if you go obviously, you know, the pressure is to try and get a job in Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge, as a young person, but of course there’s so much pressure on you to achieve, to perform. Whereas there, in a certain sense, there was plenty to strive for but you weren’t competing against anybody. You know, you really had your own space, and I got into a

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very bad habit, because in those days it was pre-word processor, so each, two members of staff had a secretary, and this is a bad habit I’ve never got out of, because I still handwrite all my manuscripts, and these are then word processed, of course. Then of course I can word process for myself, but the way I think, the way my ideas come, are much more easily expressed on fountain pen, and so forth. And again, I don’t know how it is with most writers, but I do find the process of writing slightly mysterious. Obviously the words come out and all that sort of business, and there are certain days when it doesn’t work at all and you just go and do something different, but again and again, and clearly a lot of it is practice and a lot of it is reading very, very widely, but even so on occasion, for instance in our website which has just gone live as we speak now, called 42 Evolution, that’s, mostly, they’re not exclusively the inspiration of Victoria Ling, who’s one of the team, because both of us are very keen in rather different ways on Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the radio version in my view was by far the best medium for that. And those who know that will remember the thing when the computer, Deep Thought as it is, you know, asked the question to life, the universe and everything, and after whatever million years of cogitation he says, ‘The answer is forty-two. I don’t think you actually know what the question was.’ But in that I’ve done a whole lot of Questions and Answers. We have various things, we have a lot of videos, Victoria’s written so-called Pioneers, which are mostly, not exclusively, people who have not really had their time in the sun. Mags Leighton has written a whole set of articles, some of which we call ‘Here and Now’, which is this is what we know, everybody’s happy with it, to what we call ‘Far Horizons’ which are really things which you only talk about over a gin and tonic, for instance. And then I did the so-called Questions and Answers and forty-one of the forty-two are now written. And these are all very, as short as possible, round about a thousand words, and the first one I thought of when we were just thinking what we could put on the website is, Question and Answer number one is, ‘Is my dog conscious?’ Now, we have a dog at home and most people have, either know pets or have pets of their own. So is my dog conscious? Well, of course he is, you know, don’t be stupid, you know. He’s got emotions and all the rest of it, he knows what’s going on and so forth. But actually, when you look into it in a bit more detail it’s far from obvious that they’re conscious in any way which we would understand. So what do you mean by consciousness? So each one of these questions and answers has the three things: yes, don’t be stupid; no, you must be mad, or something on that… And then, so what do we want to talk about. And the case of the dog is particularly interesting because, again, I’m not the expert on it, but my reading, they are

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effectively, well, some people have even called them a social parasite. This is a group of carnivores which turned up and realised that by wagging a tail and having big droopy eyes and so forth, they get regular dinners and might have some ancillary services like chasing burglars. But, you know, basically they saw a meal ticket, you know, 30,000 years ago. But they are entirely attuned to us. It’s not to say they can’t go wild, but they depend entirely on gestures. They don’t know what we’re thinking about at all, they haven’t got the foggiest, they have no intuition. And in that sense I don’t think they’re self-aware, at least as we would understand it. But beyond that then you say well, in the end what do we actually mean by consciousness. And this goes full circle, again, into the area of, I studied lunacy: and I came across a story which I cannot find, of a dog – this is probably in the thirties – and it was a troop of actors and actresses and they’d been playing in Drury Lane and they were going off for the season in New York and it’s, I think, you know, they’re down in Southampton, they get on the liner, maybe the Queen Mary, who knows? And the dog unfortunately gets left behind, oversight. Up goes the gangway, you know, can’t turn round a liner because the dog’s on the quayside, so the dog goes up and down, you know how pathetic it is. And then the dog, in a sense metaphorically scratches its head and says, well, I’d better do something else. And some days later it’s busy scratching the door at Drury Lane, so he finds his way back to Drury Lane. Now, I can’t find that story, though I remember reading it somewhere. There’s a similar story, very similar in a number of respects, where I think he was Dutch and he was doing the sort of Pacific trade from Vancouver, Seattle, across to Indonesia and Japan. And a dog gets left behind, actually because the ship was moved to another part of the docks and the dog hadn’t realised that, and then the boat sails and they can’t turn back. So the dog is wandering around for a couple of days and keeps on going on to boats, and eventually gets on to one boat and just will not move, and so the boat departs and of course, no prizes where that boat’s going, it’s going to the same destination as the first boat. Then the dog gets more and more excited when it comes into Yokohama, and in fact he sees his owner, I think he was a master rather than the captain, in a small boat, jumps into the water and they’re reunited. So what’s going on there? Now, these stories are true. You get in and you can… Rupert Sheldrake, I think, would sort of say, I hope if he was sitting here, I mean in many ways I wish he was, he might say I’m not in the least bit surprised. Or he might say, actually really Simon, you’d better grow up. I think he might be more towards the former. So I mean many others. Are there extraterrestrials? Are there Martians? Can you get green dandruff? Can you live on only water? And each one is a little sort of nugget of evolutionary theory or

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observation in the thing that of course you can, no you can’t, so let’s talk about what we want to talk about. Whether they’ll work or not, I don’t know, but they’ve been enormous fun to write. It’s been very, very entertaining, and as I say, when one’s writing these, I mean usually now it’s taking me longer to get the final draft than it used to, but I mean by the third draft it’s pretty well there, but then it probably needs about twenty terribly small alterations, awfully small caret mark here, you know, move in it a bit there, and cutting out superfluous text to get something which is, yeah. So that’s, in a way, in all sorts of different ways, there are, I suppose, I’m not inviting myself to think about my own life, and you are, you know, it’s the way these different things have come together in perhaps unexpected ways. How are we doing for time, by the way? Sorry.

[51:40] Could you tell me, in the early part of your career, so this is sort of PhD and then the research fellow, perhaps going into Milton Keynes a bit, but to what extent did you have contact with American scientists who were working on the Burgess Shale material and arguments?

Quite a lot, I think. Again, I would need to get my memories more in order than I’ll probably be able to do now. In the United States, or America I suppose, they had a thing called the North American Palaeontological Convention. And the first one was held in Chicago, and that’s the time when Whittington gave his first announcements on the Burgess Shale. And there was a little, one component of the proceedings was a set of papers on exceptional preservation. And since then I got quite interested in a number of other soft-bodied faunas, so although we’ve been talking about Burgess Shale, for instance I worked on an amazing animal from Montana, absolutely astonishing, what I nicknamed my extraterrestrial goldfish. And that one still is a weird wonder, to the best of my knowledge. But any case, I then went to, I think I must have been… the second one… sorry, I’m wandering all over the place. The second of these North American Palaeontological Conventions was held in Lawrence, Kansas, which actually had a rather important group of palaeontologists working there. And that must have been, I think, 1975, ’74, ’75. I was in Canada and I think I’d probably gone out to the Burgess Shale area with a chap called Ian McIlreath, who had done the mapping of that area, and we didn’t actually go to the Burgess Shale itself. I think it was that trip, I may get it confused with another trip I had out there. But we found some other Burgess Shale fossils either on that or another trip, and they

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turned out to be actually indicative of a wider distribution of these fossils and that actually segued into some quite interesting work, mostly done by other people, and that’s fine. But any case, there was an air traffic controllers’ strike in Canada and I was flying out the following day, and like an idiot I didn’t phone the airline, so I arrived at the airport in the morning ready to fly south and no planes, nothing. And there you are in Calgary and you’ve got to get to Lawrence that same day and you just think, what on earth am I going to do. Because I couldn’t drive at that stage. But I just happened to be chatting to some people in the car park and said, you know, are you going south of the border, can you give me a lift as well? And they said yeah, we’ll squeeze you in. So we drove down to Grand Falls, I think it was, and then flew out to, well to Kansas city, and there’s a little, it’s a single-engined plane, will take you to Lawrence. But the talk I gave on the Burgess Shale there was very, very successful and I think – well, so was Derek Briggs - I mean we made quite a hit, I think. And more or less at that stage I got to know people who were principally involved with the so-called Chicago School, and most notably a chap called Jack Sepkoski. And Jack was one of the most influential figures in American palaeobiology at that stage. There were a number of others, more or less his age, Dave Raup, who’s a bit older than him. Dave Raup had a very mathematical view of palaeontology. And Stephen Jay Gould was involved at one stage with this enterprise, but then he sort of went off more into the public understanding of science. And Jack Sepkoski, again, had really thrilling ways of looking at the fossil record, completely new. And they certainly influenced me very much, but I think again, they were very interested in our work on the Burgess Shale, so there was some sort of contact. And I got to know Jack pretty well. He died rather young, I’m afraid, he smoked and drank. Not in the terms of being an alcoholic, but you know, he didn’t look after himself as well as he should have. It’s a great shame, he was a very, very decent guy indeed. So, at that stage I really had quite a lot, I’d go to Chicago quite frequently, just probably en route and got to know the people there and sometimes gave a seminar. And went to Harvard. Actually, that was probably a tiny bit earlier, but there again, in fairness to Gould, they have a small collection in the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard and I said I’d like to come and look at the collections, everybody was very helpful. Must have taken a train up, I think, from Washington DC, or flown. And I’m up this ladder and Gould’s at the bottom saying, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Not quite like that. And I said what I’m doing, he said, ‘Come out for lunch’. So again, took me out for lunch and we talked a bit. And I think I had very little inkling about, even then, how famous he was. And we found some interesting things

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in the collections and all the rest of it. So yes, I spent a lot of time, you know, in the States in one way or another and of course, with quite frequent visits to, first of all to the Smithsonian Institution and then subsequently developing some sorts of associations in Toronto. But I think probably the first job I applied for, even before the ones in this country, was actually in Rochester, New York, and that again was a disastrous interview, absolutely terrible. I was completely out of my depth. And very occasionally a couple of times people in some American universities have asked if I’d be interested in going, but I’ve always said no, I’m not interested at all. Thank you for asking. I think America’s a wonderful country, I mean it’s obviously got lots of faults, I’ve never met a country which doesn’t, but I’m a great admirer of the United States. You know, I think they are, for all their failings, not least the fact they’ve bailed us out in two world wars, which is non-trivial in my view, but in any event, you know. More recently I’ve obviously been a little bit involved with Templeton and that’s in a sense American based. And I was quite involved at one stage with the SETI Institute, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence in Mountain View in California. And got to know a group of people there, and of course that’s another area I’ve developed a fair amount of interest in in the last few years, whether to any good effect is another story entirely, but again, it’s just, as ever, my view of just it’s widening one’s horizons, and that sort of thing. So yeah, that’s in a nutshell. But Jack Sepkoski was absolutely terrific, he was a great chap. I mean the others were really good as well, but he was very warm-hearted and very intelligent.

What was your first impression of Stephen Jay Gould then, having…

Well, I think he, again, I can’t remember the details and it probably must have been, it must have been much later than that, there must have been another meeting where… I don’t remember too clearly the lunch I had with him and we were probably only there for forty minutes, if that, but it was kind of him. At one other meeting he came – this was in the States – and he said he wanted to write a book about the Burgess Shale, which of course subsequently became Wonderful Life, and he came to Cambridge and talked to us and yeah, I got to know him a bit and I stayed with him once in Harvard. I don’t think, I wouldn’t say I didn’t understand him or did understand him, but I don’t think we ever had any particular rapport, in a way. But clearly, as I mentioned with regard to what I believe is the case in the Royal Society with my election, and no doubt elsewhere, he was a terrific fan of mine until I changed my mind. Then I think he was rather sort

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of disappointed, if you like. And I met him fairly shortly before he died, in a meeting in Germany, we got on okay. But I just felt in the end, I think I can say this, I felt slightly sorry for him, because he’d become an entirely public figure. He didn’t give very good lectures, in my opinion. They went on for too long. He was a bit sort of huffy and a bit of a prima, and so forth, and he just seemed to spend his entire time travelling. I mean that was his life and that is some people’s life, but I’m very glad I don’t have that life and I just thought, you know, what sort of life is this? Just spend your entire time in hotel rooms. And okay, turning up to adoring audiences, you know, thousands of people, a very, very public figure, and good luck to him.

[end of track 4]

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[Track 5]

A few questions on last time and then we’ll continue.

Sure, please.

You… George [Geoffrey] Ellerby, your vicar in Lode, you said that he was a man of transparent goodness. Can you expand on what that phrase means, because I think you’ve used it again with someone else and I wondered what it meant to you?

I suppose it’s trying to capture people who at one level appear to be, if I said almost simple, of course one associates that with a certain lack of brainpower. Very much the reverse. It’s, if you like, people who show no obvious guile, you don’t sense that in any way are they plotting to do things either for your benefit or are against you. In a way they’re sort of, not outside the world, but are people who seem to be less troubled, if you like. Now, no doubt if I got to know him better, he would have said there are many things in his life which had troubled him deeply, I wouldn’t be at all surprised, but his persona was one which I don’t think was false, was one where you really felt that he believed at heart the world was good and his own life reflected that.

You said also last time that you think it’s unlikely that our minds are in our brains and that you think that instead our brains filter our mind. Why do you think it unlikely that our minds derive from or are in our brain?

Oh, what an enormous question.

Yes, okay.

Of course. In essence, I mean if you say that something has a location, or if you use a word like filter, then one again is using analogies, which are very, very imperfect. But I think my sense as to why, if you like, a materialist explanation for consciousness won’t suffice is to begin with if we look at our own powers of reasoning and imagination, and with the virtue of language at least in some cases they seem to be of almost unlimited potentiality. That I realise is not an argument

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to say that in any way the mind has to be outside the brain, but when one reflects on the organisational powers of our minds, it gives one pause for thought, especially if you compare them to very closely related animals, like chimpanzees, or indeed other very intelligent species where the arguments have been made, and we could return to that if it’s of any interest, are certainly intelligent, can certainly learn, are conscious in a sense, but seem not to have a fully developed mind. And that begs all sorts of questions as to why they’re so very close, in some ways the gulf seems so enormous, perhaps. And another aspect of that which impresses me very much, and I apologise if I mentioned this anecdote earlier, but both in the realms of music and mathematics, which I’m pleased to say I have absolutely no competence at all in either direction, there was a paper – did we talk about this before?

The Unreasonable Effect…

Oh, sorry, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, and did I talk about the paper about animal music? I’m sorry, I should make my own notes. In any event, there was a paper published some years ago by a group of musicologists, animal behaviourists, in the journal Science, and it drew attention to various sorts of animal music and pointed out that there was every reason to think that these were convergent in terms of having separate evolutionary origin. So if we look at birdsong, if we look at some whale song and so on and so forth. And more importantly, at least some of these animal songs are ones which very much reflect human music making in terms of the harmony and invention, sometimes the adoption of new songs, and sometimes whale groups take on a new song, and so on and so forth. So one can see that animal music has very close parallels to our music. But then in this paper, what struck me very forcibly as soon as I read it, and I’ve re-read it several times since then, who’s to know whether this was a jointly agreed statement or whether one of them just decided to go slightly off-piste, it doesn’t really matter, I think. They said well, we can explain these convergences in terms of such things as the physics of sound production, and you could to some extent also explain them in terms of convergence in cognitive capacities, nobody doubts that songbirds and whales are relatively intelligent. But, they said, there’s a completely different view which is not an alternative but it’s, if you like, complementary, and that was to say that supposing there’s a universal music, quote, out there, which is obviously very much a platonic idea, the idea that you have these beyond the shadows on the cave, you have real things in every possible sense, and that our music, and to

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some extent animal music, is reflecting that universal music. A song of the spheres, as it had been referred to in medieval times, and we might take that yet further, perhaps. But in any event I’m not musically trained, I like listening to a lot of music and just the other day we went to a performance of Rheingold in Saffron Walden and it was a stunning performance. It was staged, not acted, but there was a great deal of interaction between the principals, as the story developed. And apart from anything else, as a piece of music, and The Ring Cycle as a whole, I – this is by no means widely shared – I regard is as one of the most astonishing human achievements in music and one has to ask oneself how is it that music like that in my case, though not for everybody, but more often in much of the music of Mozart, how this seems to transcend our mundane world. And of course the simple response to that is that it’s either an epiphenomena or it’s ultimately connected to sexual selection, perhaps, or whatever. And I don’t doubt that there are elements of it which are true, because after all, birds sing to attract mates, but I think we can take the argument a great deal further. So this idea that there’s a music out there in the same way as there’s a mathematics out there which has a separate reality which is otherwise invisible, persuades me that, if you like, our minds are intersecting with a larger mind, and I don’t have to equate that with God, by the way. In fact there might be theological reasons why you wouldn’t want to do that. And in this way part of us is in a rather paradoxical way, immaterial. So that’s, if you like, the heart of the argument. And then of course, far, far beyond that there are areas which are generally regarded as absurd, involving such things, for instance, as near-death experiences, which so far I am pleased to say, probably I’ve never had. And of course there are alternative materialist explanations for those which may well be valid. It’s not that one would expect the mind to survive death, but there are a number of sufficiently well documented cases which appear to be reliable, involving people who are trained doctors, who are not liable to exaggerate things to suggest that something seems to happen. Now, this is not a proof, and of course most people wish it was simply a wish fulfilment, but that too is sometimes used as another line of evidence. I’m open-minded about it, I mean it doesn’t seem reasonable, but there’s a rather famous example published in The Lancet some years ago. A chap, as I remember, in The Netherlands, who had a heart attack, young man but very overweight, as I recall, so people are jumping up and down on him trying to get his heart working again, and there he is sort of observing what’s going on, and he either – and I’m sorry I can’t remember the story more accurately – he either had false teeth or spectacles or something. In any case, these had to be taken out to allow the intubation to go on, and they were put in a corner, and when he

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eventually came round, because he survived his heart attack, he asked if he could have them back and told them where they’d been stored. So, in other words, he’d seen all these activities from above, in a manner of speaking. So what are you to make of that? I mean The Lancet is a respectable journal, doesn’t necessarily mean that these people weren’t doing this as an April Fool’s joke, but one has a sense that probably it was an eyewitness account. So those are the aspects of why I think the brain is more analogous to a filter, rather than simply everything being in the brain itself.

[08:34] Thank you. I’m going to keep on asking questions about last time, which is really the 1970s that we covered, but we will, I assure you, quickly get on to the eighties.

Don’t worry, no. I’m at your disposal, as they say.

But I wanted to ask you, because you say that you began to examine the claims of Christianity properly at about the age of twenty-one and that this was around the time that you were beginning the work on the Burgess Shale, the obvious question is, are these things just coincidental, are these two things, do they happen to happen at the same time but are unrelated?

I see no reason to think they’re related at all, as far as I can remember. The only thing I might say is that either for the sort of work I was lucky enough to do on the Burgess Shale and/or my interests, if you like, broadly in theological questions in their rather different ways, opened new doors, scientific, if you like, and metaphysical. I’m not trying to connect these in any direct fashion, but one can, if you like, think about how it is that one’s imagination is sparked to find these areas interesting, you know. Not to find direct parallels, far from it, but in its own way at that time, although most of what I did was actually wrong, that doesn’t bother me at all, but most of it in hindsight was pretty amateurish. It was a very, very exciting time because we really had a completely new field, and in hindsight, to some extent, I suppose we partly defined the field as it now is, and obviously it’s been taken on by many more talented people since then and I’m very glad it has, you know, I’m not sure anything completely new is being said, but certainly we have a far better set of perspectives on the question than we would have had, say, in 1975 when I and Derek Briggs and others started it. And correspondingly, I mean my own view, which is

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obviously one which many people would find difficult to share, is that Christianity, I think, taken seriously is a thrilling prospect. But, you know, the implications of it are so ridiculously enormous that we can either just pack it into a sort of anthropology and decide that it’s another version of the war dance, or whatever, or we can actually decide that it too is touching on some fundamental realities. But I wouldn’t want to draw the parallels between those any more closely and certainly I didn’t think at that time that somehow they were speaking to each other or reinforcing each other, but I suppose in their different ways, especially in the last few years in fact, they’ve both provoked me very much to think about some wider topics which means one of two things, either this is the time when you should, or the poor boy’s going off his trolley.

[11:26] In that case, can you identify other factors that explain why it was then at that time, at that age that you began to take Christianity seriously as a sort of intellectual project? You mentioned, for example, that your wife or wife to be then gave you a copy of Tolkien and that sort of thing, so that’s sort of one, we could see that as sort of one factor, but what else was contributing to it? I wonder whether Zoë herself was involved in encouraging you to think along these lines, or your father, sort of rediscovering Christianity? I don’t know.

Neither do I. [laughs] No, I don’t want to slander either the memory of my father or how my wife has helped me in many ways through my life. But I don’t think so. I think it was, you know, more, as I perhaps mentioned previously, fits and starts, it wasn’t a sort of continuous set of enquiries, which somehow I always felt, you know, I always felt there was something here, but in a certain way it was as much driven, if you like, by curiosity, the sense the world is really a very remarkable place. And of course, at that time one is fantastically busy, or one appears to be, if one is ambitious one needs to publish papers, one has young children, universities to be moved to, houses to be found, houses to be sold, and all the rest of it. So no, I wish I could sort of say that there really were those people who were sort of instrumental, but in a certain way – and in no way is this a disrespect to Geoffrey Ellerby, for instance, or to Zoë or to my father – I am to quite an extent a one-man show, as I may have mentioned. I’ve never had large groups of students, generally been the occasional PhD student and so forth. I’m a bit of a loner perhaps in some respects, and that suits me fine. I’m not sure it suits everybody else, including people who think about me, that’s another story. But no, I’m sorry to give a rather sort of flat answer. It

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does seem to me that… or, I suppose one could say partly with the books I’ve written and the work I’ve sort of done, and recent work, which has involved, for instance, the nature of extraterrestrials, if there are any, the nature of animal minds, if they have them, the extent to which animals can understand mathematics, if they can. None of these areas of investigation, which are entirely based on other people’s work, would have been possible, if you like, without the route I took. Each one of them, if you like, is an open invitation to in the end, connect the dots across a wider area than one would have ever thought conceivable twenty or thirty years ago. But that’s a risk of course, as you move into new territory and especially, for instance, if you’re reading about experiments on chimpanzees which are attempting to establish whether they do or do not have cognitive powers which are genuinely similar to ours, involves very technical detail and I’m not there to understand that. I have to take this work on trust and I have no problem doing that, but inevitably there is a risk of somebody who’s worked on an area for thirty years seeing my speculations as being effectively superficial.

[14:59] To what extent in the seventies do you remember evolutionary palaeobiologists in the UK or the US talking about, among themselves, the sort of metaphysical implications of the work that they were doing?

To the best of my recollection, almost none. I mean in part I suspect it is because those people, just as their modern day descendants, or they themselves if they’ve survived, are very much part of a secular world, which is effectively driven by materialist considerations. And they may be right. It’s not a criticism at all. I think again I really have to recollect more seriously than perhaps is appropriate at the moment, that broadly speaking the sort of science and religion area has really only got up to speed in the last fifteen years in a fairly serious way and in part perhaps it has been provoked – and I mean this as positively as I can, which is difficult with regard to the creationists, if you like, they provided a target, for want of a better word, and the necessity to refine your arguments. Whether you approve of this or whether you in fact think the dialogue is worth it are different questions, but that may be to some extent true. But I don’t remember anybody there… But I suppose in the end, part of the problem is that other than Stephen Jay Gould writing about our work on the Burgess Shale and suggesting, as indeed I had also supported, before in fact Gould for what it’s worth, but that’s no credit, there are other people

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who thought about this long before either Gould or I had, that the routes of diversification were very various and therefore there was no predictability in the process and that’s still very much mainstream assumption in Darwinian biology. And they may again be right, but my own work on evolutionary convergence persuades me that they’re not right, to put it as bluntly as possible, and that actually evolution has a set of directions which are much more likely to happen than others. And in that sort of way some people, including some creationists, would probably want to bring that as a theological argument, and again, I would say absolutely not, for the very simple reason that all the science we do is provisional and we know from previous experience that attempting to use scientific arguments as some sort of proof of God has nearly always ended in tears. And that isn’t the way the world works any case and I think, again, it’s a misplaced theology, apart from anything else. Obviously my – I won’t say enemies, it sounds as if I’m feeling on the defensive, I’m not at all – but those people who disagree with me would insist that I’m conflating my own beliefs with my scientific programme, but so far as I can say as clearly as possible, that ain’t true.

[18:04] At this time then, that suggests in the seventies, and then the eighties that we’ll talk about today, you weren’t encountering in the UK or even in the US, creationism or creationists or creation scientists in any way. I mean were they in evidence at this time in the seventies and eighties or are you suggesting that it’s only a recent, like in the last fifteen years that they are groups that you’ve been aware of, or use arguments you’ve been aware of?

So far as I’m aware of it, certainly it’s been relatively recent, probably a bit more than fifteen years because time flies. Certainly, so far as I understand it, creationism per se, well, in a way goes back, well, you could say it’s biblical and in the sense that I would certainly subscribe to the idea that our universe is a creation, ex nihilo, which is fairly standard theological orthodoxy, I have no quarrel with that. But in the way in which creationists would talk and use arguments for evolution, that I think is nonsense. But that as a sort of movement of course goes back at least to the twenties, and to a certain extent of course before that. I mean there were anti- Darwinian sentiments published shortly after the origin, and of course corresponding, as has been pointed out many times, Paley was a creationist and his evidence is of the creator’s goodness and the stumbling across the watch on the heath and all the rest of it, and the apparent

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design which you see in organised form is something which clearly influenced Darwin very deeply indeed. And my own view of – my apologies if I’ve mentioned this previously, and stop me straightaway if we have – some years ago on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150th of The Origin, I was asked to write a short essay for Current Biology with several other people and it was called ‘Re-reading The Origin’. And of course I had to point out very carefully that I had never actually read it cover to cover beforehand, so it wasn’t exactly a case of re-reading it, it was reading. But what struck me in reading The Origin, and as it so happened I’ve got an 1860 edition, I picked it up cheap years ago in Bristol, so that’s the one I used, and I know that Darwin’s sort of argument developed towards the sixth edition. But what struck me most forcibly, I think, is that the book at heart was actually an attempt to lay the ghost of Paley. Of course it was all about adaptation and natural and artificial selection and bio-geography and the fossil record, I’m not disputing any of that, but I think the ghost at the banquet is Paley, because at first sight, as indeed I think Richard Dawkins in a way explains with great clarity in The Blind Watchmaker, you know, the design argument, you can see why it appeals to people, organisms do look engineered, and the ability for Darwin to explain that was revolutionary. And I suspect that Darwin really felt that Paley was, if you like, still a sort of threat, an intellectual threat. What I find curious, if I remember correctly, is Paley’s only mentioned once in The Origin, at least in the first and second editions, and that is in the context of natural evil. And this of course then goes off into the whole area of theodicy and how is it that very bad things happen, and the rest of it. So immediately you stumble from an evolutionary perspective which is, so far as we know, uncaring, to the fact that we do care very much about things. And I rather suspect that if you read a little bit more about some of Darwin’s sort of ruminations in his correspondence about, you know, whether a dog could think, and all the rest of it, right at the background of his thinking there is this uneasiness about what is it which allows us to think, where does this come from, how can we trust our minds, and so on and so forth. So Darwin wasn’t unaware of these problems and so far as he was cogent, he tried to wrestle with them. But he never took the challenge seriously, because in the end, as you know, he really just turned into a mincing machine. He was just somebody who absorbed vast amounts of data. [telephone ringing – break in recording]

[22:31]

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Could you sort of confirm something? Is it correct that your thinking about biological evolution at the time of your PhD and just after it with the fellowship, was close to the view that Gould goes on to publish on, on the sort of role of chance, sort of alternative histories, replaying the tape, etc, etc, but in fact he was partly inspired in the writing of that book by something that you had said in a conference paper?

He may have been influenced by that and it may well have been at a conference, he certainly was at some of the talks I gave and I was at some of the ones he gave, of course in the States. And yes, I think at that stage so far as he was a very talented evolutionary biologist and had at that stage, though he wasn’t much older than I was, much wider range of knowledge. He was a very clever man in many ways. Yes, I would say with that sort of qualifications, the views were identical. But, he may well have been thinking about this in other contexts, I’d be surprised if he hadn’t, because I think it’s fair to say, and obviously in a certain sense this should be a discussion rather than an interview, there should be other people here to qualify or bring me up short. My own view of Gould is that at one level, at one level only, he was in a sense if not anti- Darwinian, he might say post-Darwinian. And of course that’s not necessarily unusual. But I think at heart he felt that the formulation in The Origin to the very first approximation of natural selection being the principal driver was incomplete, and many other people would agree with that from one perspective or another. But I think behind that there was a philosophy and also a metaphysics and a sense of fear that if evolution was deterministic, this could then be hijacked for political or sociological purposes. And the story I was told, and I don’t know if this is true otherwise, some of his relatives, he certainly had Jewish antecedents, I remember very clear evidence in the house, I stayed there once, in Harvard, but also that some of them were Hungarian Jews and of course, as appalling as any of the other parts of the Holocaust inasmuch as the Jews were in relative safety in Hungary till quite close to the end of the war, and then they were deported and in a sense analogous to the French, and I’m not trying to point fingers here, but the then government was less than helpful. And because of the utter catastrophe of the Holocaust, which I think has poisoned Europe ever since, that’s another story and we’d better not go into that area, but I think Europe has been probably irreversibly damaged by the Holocaust. But in any event, Gould was very, very anxious that there shouldn’t be any evolutionary justification for anything which would allow these sorts of programmes to get any traction. And of course we can think of lots of other examples connected with racism and all the rest of it,

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there’s no point in going into all those areas. So on one level that’s a very sort of worthy thought, and I would agree with him, entirely. But therefore, if we were, as I think he wanted to argue, more or less accidents of history, in other words, we were not meant to be here and certainly we weren’t in any way imago Dei, we weren’t in any sense the image of God and all the rest of it, which is something which theologians get interested in, to what extent can we be the image of God given we were descended from apes, and so on and so forth, and I think there are ways you can approach that problem, but if you think that it’s a meaningless question then Gould’s view would be that as we are accidents of evolution then we are, if you like, genuine products of The Enlightenment and therefore we can make the best of all possible worlds. And I wouldn’t want to return the difficulty for him, but this again is going off into metaphysical territory, but one of the reasons paradoxically why I’m persuaded by the truths of Christianity, but I think that would apply to most monotheistic religions, is the reality of so-called radical evil, which we have plenty of evidence at the present day, thank you very much indeed. And in any event, you can explain this as merely bad potty training, poor teaching, poverty. And no doubt they play a part, I don’t doubt that for a moment. But even so, when you see the sort of sheer viciousness of some societies and some people, it does give you pause for thought. So, Gould’s view was, I think, in its own way rather noble, you know, that he was wanting to use his science to ultimately underpin a metaphysical argument. The problem, as ever, is that those arguments cut both ways.

Did you say then that you spoke to Gould’s family?

All I vaguely recall, I think… oh dear, no, I won’t say what I think I don’t remember in case… not that it’s anything offensive, I think, if you omit this from the later interview, I vaguely recall – and we can easily find this – I think he had a son who was in one or other ways disabled, I think sort of mentally. Not, you know, not mad or anything, but I think. But back to the interview, I stayed with him, I think just one night. I can’t remember what I was doing in Harvard at the time, probably looking at some Burgess Shale collections. I met his wife very briefly and I think that marriage in the end didn’t turn out to be a great success in the longer term and there were certainly some aspects of the Jewish faith evident in the house and I rather suspect, though I could be wrong again entirely, that his wife was perhaps more connected with that than he was. But he, again, the Jews fascinate me as a people in many, many ways, they’re

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very remarkable and it’s not a thing whereby one says he’s, you know, believes in God or doesn’t, there are plenty of atheistic Jews around who somehow still believe in a sort of god [laughs], with their wonderful humour and their intelligence and everything else, I think they’re very, despite all the difficulties, a very admirable people. But in any event, that’s as far as I think my sort of personal knowledge of him went, and otherwise it was just a matter of meeting him in conferences and so forth. Of course he came, as I think I mentioned, to Cambridge and we had these fairly protracted interviews, and so forth.

No, we haven’t covered the Cambridge interviews.

Oh, I’m sorry. I beg your pardon.

[29:28] When were they…?

Well, he cornered me at a conference in the States, I think it was in Colorado, and said he was thinking of writing a book about the Burgess Shale and, you know, did I mind. And obviously I don’t, because I don’t have a copyright on it. And then subsequently he came across to talk to Harry Whittington and myself, in fact we invited him home for dinner one day. He was here I think for a couple of days and we Xeroxed a lot of our papers. There was one paper, which was really a popular article, published in a now, I think, defunct journal, if it’s not defunct it’s not well known, called Geology Today, which spelt out exactly, if you like, Gould’s thesis, in a very sort of sketchy way and over just a few hundred words, but more or less saying – I didn’t use that phrase, but to rerun the tape of life we’d end up with something completely different. And by accident or otherwise he had a copy of that paper and he never referred to it. Make of that what you will. But I’m not saying that he hijacked our ideas, because the ideas are free and they’re available and anybody can do what they wish with those ideas. But perhaps he was… he was very generous to us in the book, it would be churlish of me to complain, he more or less said we’re the group who really deserve the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, so he wasn’t downing us in any way at all and he was very interested in our work and all the rest of it. But that just rankled ever so slightly. And in science, by and large, you acknowledge, you know, very much the person who first said it. And I didn’t probably first say it any case, so I’m really, I’m turning

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into a bitter and twisted individual. I’m not that at all, but you know. That was a very slight sort of eyebrow raising thing. But in any event the book was a great success, and certainly, so far as I’m well known or was well known – I think it’s much less the case now, fortunately – to a very large extent I owe that to Gould’s publicity in Wonderful Life and I wouldn’t deny that for a moment.

So when were the, you describe them as long interviews in Cambridge, with Gould?

Mm.

When would this have been? The book comes out in ’89.

It does.

When would he have been coming to Cambridge and saying I’m going to write a book?

Well, if we were in my office I could, without a lot of trouble, dig out the diary. I would guess, he was a fast writer, I would guess he probably came through some time in ’86, thereabouts. Maybe the year before, but probably not. I would think, yes.

And you describe them as interviews, so what happened?

Well, in the way that you and I are doing, I’m talking and you’re kindly taking some notes and beginning to interrogate, he was really just interested in how I think we did our work. I think he was fascinated in this technique of drawing the fossils whereby you have a so-called drawing tube, it’s called a camera lucida, which isn’t quite correct, but you’re able to make a drawing of the fossil under the microscope, which Harry Whittington, my supervisor, realised was a very important way for showing the world what your interpretations were. But also, and I’m sure he realised that, but it was something which I certainly appreciated quite early on, is that it forces you to interpret things. You can’t leave the page blank. If there’s nothing there, that’s fine, but if there’s any structure there you have to add it. It then provokes you into working out what is the inter-relationships of the different layers of the fossil, for instance, which applied more to his

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area of arthropods than my worms, which mostly were more or less flat. But even so, there were lots and lots of details there and this camera lucida technique was one which actually in a sense showed an interpretive sketch of what you saw. But Whittington himself, as perhaps has been mentioned, had an extremely acute power of observation. I think if anything he had a sort of precision, if you like. He was, it was almost that of an architect or an engineer that everything, a bit like one of these complex drawings which these people produce, which you can look at in any direction and it makes sense. It’s not like a Piranesi where there’s a convenient cloud of, you know, somebody’s fantasies, there’s a convenient, clouds obscure where the buildings meet, or even in fact like Escher. You’re stuck in an endless circuit of a mad architecture. So yes, I think Gould was very intrigued with that and I think he asked a bit about how the photography was done, and of course this was very largely due to Whittington’s innovations which had started before I began. And again, in fairness to Gould, when he wrote his essays for Natural History, although I think he went rather off the boil, but who wouldn’t after writing so many, again and again there would be some new scientific discovery and he in a way, Darwin in the early days was saying we just sort of rejoiced in such wonderful stories, sort of wonderful parts of biology and evolution where something became clear. And he had this knack of course of conveying these often quite complex issues into very accessible prose. I don’t think he taught me how to write, but nevertheless, he in his own way was by far the most public figure of evolutionary biology at the time when I was starting off in this career.

And at that time in 1986 you still shared the sort of interpretation of the, of evolutionary biology that he went on to describe in Wonderful Life?

Well, not keeping an accurate diary, I rather suspect even by then I was beginning to rethink things. But probably they were more or less being rethought at the time when his book, Wonderful Life, actually appeared. Again, I don’t have precise information on that. And that was a gradual process perhaps already discussed whereby supposed ‘weird wonders’ of the Cambrian turned out to be old friends in disguise and by no means all these questions have been sorted out. In fact just at the moment we have a new fossil we’re working on and we have a clever idea about where it belongs, but the referees don’t agree with us. We’ll see how that story develops. But yes, and then, as I say, that area snowballed into my general interest in convergent evolution and so forth, and perhaps, I don’t know, probably if I read some of my earlier papers,

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might see occasionally hints of where my thinking might be going with the realisation that there were various sorts of convergences in terms of nervous systems, brains, that sort of area, behaviours. And that of course provokes you to think about where the origin of these things might lie, so perhaps that was the route which got me on to these even more speculative areas, such as is the brain a filter for mind. If there are extraterrestrials they should look like us if convergent evolution tells us anything, but if that’s the case then we would expect to find them. No evidence, and so on and so forth. But they’re all, again, different areas for discussion perhaps.

[36:30] Would at this time in 1986 when he came, would that have been a time when you would have discussed with him implications of one view of biological evolution or another metaphysical implication? Even religious or political implications of seeing things one way or another?

We didn’t. As far as I can remember. When he came round to our home we invited some friends, a very nice chap called Ken Joysey, and his wife, and we had a nice evening, it was all very jolly and it was well supplied with wine of course. But I don’t recall anything in that sort of area and I think probably by that stage, Gould in a certain way, I really, you know, I’m not here to defend his record or to tarnish it or praise it, I’m trying to be as neutral as possible. He certainly was very, very influential on many people and was a force for good, that’s beyond dispute. But he was turning himself into this public figure and maybe that’s something that persuaded me never ever to go down that route.

[37:40] Thank you. Can you tell me about the timing of your clear interest in, which has already come across in these interviews and is very apparent in your books, your interest in history, especially history of twentieth century Europe and in sort of counter-factual history as well, because I want to know whether that interest was there before all of this work or whether you become interested in it at a particular point in your career. So the sort of timing of that interest that you clearly have, and this is partly because you are clearly thinking in some of your books about the analogies between sort of biological history and human history.

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Gosh, I wish I could be a better memorialist. I think we were quite well taught history at school. We did an awful lot about the Incas and the Aztecs and that sort of stuff and we had a ton of English history, and quite right too. Most of it taught from one perspective. But probably at the same time when I started my PhD I was quite interested in Elizabethan England, in a vague way I suppose, pretty amateurish. But more recently, as you indicate, it’s to some extent focussed on the twentieth and to some extent the nineteenth century, much less, not exclusively. And unfortunately I suppose in a certain way these things are self-catalytic and, you know, one reads into the area and then that provokes you to read more about that area. And certainly, I mean what intrigues me, especially at the moment, is this sort of train crash of the rise of the Nazis and of course the more you learn about that, I mean I think two things become fairly clear. First of all, the roots of it go deeper than might be popularly supposed. Certainly the Versailles Treaty was a major factor, but it wasn’t the only one, I think. And correspondingly, and I’m sorry, I can’t remember the book, the author that is, it’s been made clear by many people, but when people talk about the Holocaust or indeed the Nazi atrocities, there is understandably a concentration on, so to speak, the camps and especially the one which was liberated by the English and the Canadians, Belsen. But what becomes clear in some of these accounts is just the extraordinary pervasiveness of the appallingness of it all. It wasn’t just that, you know, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were being gassed or shot, or whatever, the entire plan to starve millions of people to allow ‘living room’ for one nation and so on and so forth, and the degree of cooperation with many of the satellite countries, and so on and so forth. And obviously you can depict this as very much a black and white enterprise and whether the carpet bombing of the German cities was legitimate, and so on and so forth, and we can talk about that if anybody’s interested, and it’s not that we come out of it sort of free of problems or even guilt, but nevertheless, I find it astonishing that our country was able to resist in a way which made no sense at all. I mean the idea of course after the fall of France is, amongst the senior sort of administrators, it was more or less, well, we’d better muddle on and something will turn up. And Churchill obviously hoped that the Americans would, and they did, though in a sense by default. But in any event, you know, then of course this segues into our current dilemmas in Europe, and I’m not trying to make direct associations in any form or fashion, but some of our problems at least are directly inherited from the catastrophes of the 1930s and forties and our attempts to restore it, I think, have been gone about in completely the wrong way. But that tells me something deeper about the nature of history, and I don’t intend to talk about that, because I

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begin to rant, and it’s not my aim at all, but one suspects that, you know, there are structural faults within the continent which go far, far deeper and simply putting Sellotape and Elastoplast on political systems and thinking that they will then function normally is cloud cuckoo land.

Could you, I know you don’t want to, but…

I don’t want to get carried away. [laughs]

Could you just briefly though, because you’ve mentioned it twice, this time and last time, could you talk about that sense of unrecoverable damage, or just outline what that consists of in your view?

Well I, oh dear, where does one start? It’s not that there aren’t many many people of very good will, let us say, in Europe. We can extend the argument elsewhere, undoubtedly, but let’s just talk about Europe, and there are many, many people who feel very strongly, for example, that the United Kingdom should remain part of Europe, for that very reason that our departure would diminish the whole. One could take another view that in fact that sometimes it’s a good idea to get off the express train when it’s heading towards a ravine, but be that as it may, you can see the arguments in either direction. But perhaps more generally, this is not a comfortable argument, but goes back to at least in Christian theology, the general idea of the fall, then of course everybody starts pointing fingers and saying, god, that clown believes in Adam and Eve and all this sort of stuff, but the point of issue is that in some deep way the world is extremely fractured, something doesn’t work. And you can again put this into a sociological or some other aspect whereby simply the political systems we have are not fit for purpose and if we could reform them in some way then all would be well. But all we know about every single political system of whatever shape or form is it tends to corrupt. So in that way, although this is not a very optimistic argument, it’s first of all, I think, realistic that we should not expect too much, that one is, if you like, always fighting to maintain one’s place. One’s never defeated, but one should realise that, you know, in a way analogous of course to the pagan people that, the Valhalla if you like, the end of The Ring Cycle, which is why that’s so essential to our predicament, if you like, it somehow encapsulates the disasters we’ve experienced. So it’s, if you like, again, in a wider sort of context and it does mean that, you know, one should just be careful. If you dream up

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some brand new scheme, and what strikes me very much about many of our political leaders, is they seem to have this extraordinary degree of carelessness, as if almost they have no historical knowledge, they just sort of think that they can make things happen and legislate at speed and somehow these things will happen, unaware perhaps of the way societies work. So that, if you like, it’s hardly an explanation because it’s not a very encouraging answer, but it is deeply distressing, I think, to sort of see all these previous train crashes and think, well, can we avoid the next one. We should be able to, god knows we’re intelligent enough and there are enough people of good will around. And I mean in many, many ways the world is a great deal better now than it ever was, I mean in terms of life expectancy, in terms of degree to which the majority of people are well fed and have good health and so forth, I mean one shouldn’t simply pretend everything’s ghastly. But one suspects that amongst some people there’s a degree of existentialist uncertainty. On the surface things are fine, but beneath that there’s perhaps a sense that it’s not quite clear what this whole game’s about. Again, my critics would say, well that’s why he’s retreated into Christianity, whereas I’d follow CS Lewis and Chesterton and say that’s exactly why Christianity matters. Turn it around entirely. So, is your leg okay? I was just wondered if you had cramp.

Oh no.

If you had cramp or something, you needed to wander round.

No, no, no.

So are you comfortable there? I beg your pardon.

Yes, very much so. Are you?

Oh, I’m perfectly happy. I do get cramp, but yeah, not yet.

[46:06] And would you, I know you’re finding it difficult to sort of pin down the exact timings of when you became interested in one thing or another, but the reading of counterfactual histories and

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the interest in counterfactual history as a kind of historiographical way of thinking. When do you see yourself sort of taking an interest in that?

Gosh. Again, I’m not sure. Probably to some extent in the 1990s. I really should, as Virginia Woolf might have said, I really should keep a diary. But I’m not going to. I’m not sure what the first book… one of the earlier ones was Kingsley Amis’s book. I mean I read some Kingsley Amis and his Lucky Jim, I mean it’s extremely comic, very entertaining. I’m not sure he was such a nice man, but there’s nothing unusual there, including myself. And apparently, I just read the other day that in Lucky Jim, Professor Welch, who’s regarded, portrayed as a sort of clown, was based on his father-in-law. [laughs] He was a very pleasant buffer, you know. But be that as it may, subsequently he wrote a book called The Alteration, which is posited on an idea that there wasn’t a Reformation. So we’re now in the twentieth century Catholic England and we’re part of a Catholic Europe. And it’s full of – I don’t know if you know this book at all – but it’s full of all sorts of clever observations. I mean right at the beginning, if I remember correctly, it’s the funeral of, I think King Stephen, if I recall, and there’s this great cathedral just outside Oxford and the ceilings of this Catholic cathedral have been done by Turner. And amongst the mourners there, there is the head of the Russian state, Beria, and so forth, so it’s full of all these little jokes. And AJ Ayer is Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Oxford, and so on and so forth. So it’s very, very ingeniously done, and the Pope is actually based on Harold Wilson, he’s an Englishman. But that way in which the Reformation – was it a historical accident? Somebody said the other day, so far as Henry VIII is concerned he was correctly described as ‘petulant’. It probably was, not the excuse, but the reason for the Grete Matter of the divorce and so the accession of Anne Boleyn, but on the other hand, there have been many strands of reformation in Catholic Europe beforehand, and there were subsequent ones as well. And I think, you know, some sort of reformation not only was very likely to happen, my own view is that it’s essential it happened. You know, a Christianity which doesn’t undergo periodic reformation is a dying religion. Not to say that I’m unsympathetic to the Catholic world view, in fact my sympathy is wholly in that direction, but nevertheless it’s essential that one revisits the fundamentals of why you think the religion is part of your country. And there’s a related book called Pavane, which I haven’t read, more recently, which again posits the same sort of thing. So it’s very, very intriguing and Amis was a very gifted writer, as indeed his son is, of course. And just sort of putting these, dropping sort of hints here and there and there are little hints scattered all through

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it and if you know what he’s talking about, of course that’s one of the pleasures of reading the book. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter. And maybe subsequent to that, and maybe not the first, I had a little bit of correspondence with a chap called Harry Turtledove, who’s an American science fiction writer and he’s written a lot of counterfactual books, and he very kindly sent me some. I think he’d come across The Crucible of Creation, my own book. And then there were these books edited by Robert Cowley, which are a set of essays and there are ones such as, you know, if Gettysburg had gone in the other direction or if the Battle of Actium had gone in the other direction. And the one which I always use in my talks is what would have happened if Jesus had been set free by Pontius Pilate. That’s a wonderful story, because Jesus is standing there and he knows he’s going to be crucified, he knows that’s part of the deal, and he makes it very clear when he’s talking to the Disciples beforehand, and I think he did realise that, I don’t think this was added afterwards, but other people disagree. So there he is suddenly free, it doesn’t make any sense at all. So what do you do? So in fact what happens, without I hope destroying the enjoyment of anybody else, is that he is indeed a messianic leader and he does indeed found a world religion, and then in his late nineties he has a stroke or something similar, and he dies. And he dies alone, as of course is insisted on, and people come in and they bury him reverentially. And then three days later they go back, he’s gone. [laughs] So in a certain sense, you know, the history can go in many different directions, but the denouement remains unchanged. So subsequent to that of course is his religion now spreads through not only a large part of the Roman Empire, but also further to the east, is that the post resurrection appearances are not only restricted to Judea and so forth, but across a large part of the known world. Very, very ingenious. So these ideas of if you rerun the tape of life, even if you look as if you’re going in a completely different direction, you may well end up more or less at the same place. And I think just the way of thinking about things, and there’s a lot of course which has been speculated about if this country had either capitulated to the Germans or had some sort of peace treaty, which either way would have been utterly disastrous in my view, but were by no means impossible in 1940. And there’s one book recently written, a thriller by Robert Sansom [CJ Sansom], if I remember correctly, called Dominion, which is a rattling good read, terrific stuff, about what it’s like to be in a sort of German satrapy. So, you know, the German ambassador at the memorial, the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, is one Erwin Rommel. So you can play these things around and I think just as imagining the world from a different context is very, very enriching.

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[52:27] Can you tell me more about that correspondence with the science fiction writer, exactly how it happened and what it was about? You seem to suggest that it started with him writing to you, him having read The Crucible of Creation.

I believe so, so far as I remember. I probably kept the correspondence, I mean this was almost pre-email days, and I think we may have had letters, maybe even emails going to or fro. Wasn’t an extended correspondence, and he sent me several of his books. One or two, I’m sorry I can’t remember the titles, was to do with what would have happened if the Spanish invasion of England in 1588 had succeeded, which again was by no means impossible, if the weather had been slightly different. I’m glad we won, as it happens, but you know, it wasn’t… Even if they had invaded successfully, of course it’s not at all clear, there wouldn’t have been a Charles I for the sake of argument, but let that pass. But one of the books he sent me was called A Different Flesh and that probably has provoked me not in a way that I hadn’t previously realised, but in an invisible way, and in this particular story, what he speculates is that the Americas were never colonised by modern humans, and for various reasons, from what we know about the ocean- going ability of modern humans, this is exceedingly unlikely, but let that pass. So, the only humans which are there are early hominids, roughly equivalent to Homo erectus, so they’re roughly two to three million years older than us. So when the Europeans arrive, there on shore is a reception group of very early hominids. So what happens when you telescope three million years of history and we meet them. So it’s a very fascinating set of explorations and of course it then segues into, given that they were far from stupid any more than a chimp is far from stupid, they were toolmakers and all this sort of business, had complex social systems as far as we know, probably had language – less clear, but… What is it that happened in our own history which led from just another ape to ourselves? And his own story in its own way is, as is the case with all the books I’ve read of his, and he’s a very prolific author, very well told, but overall actually it’s a rather depressing story. It’s more or less that they turn up effectively as experimental animals analogous to chimps, being tested for HIV or similar. So it’s not a very happy story, but that’s not, his job is not to tell happy stories, it’s just to explore the possibilities there. But of course that’s provoked me, partly from what I have to learn about to teach this area in a very elementary way, and I read a fair amount about human evolution as well. And again,

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it’s very, very contentious. But in any event, that’s the sort of thing. Yes, so he was certainly very influential on me, I think, and he might have even been one of the earlier people to provoke me about counterfactual thinking, but that’s become a very popular area, of course, and I’m delighted, obviously.

[55:28] And how direct is the relationship between that and your thinking in evolutionary history?

Well, I don’t think particularly, because in a certain sense of course, as Gould would probably agree, the tape has been rewound many times any case, because if you’re on an isolated island or an isolated continent, then to some extent, then the tape of evolution runs by itself until contact is remade. And that’s most obviously true in South America, which has a very interesting history for the last, well, until it reconnected with North America, then it was more or less an independent crucible of evolution. But I don’t think it’s so much that, it’s more, without sounding grandiose, that such stories of counterfactual human histories just provoke my imagination, they invite you to see the world through a different set of lenses. They say, you know, because we tend to take things for granted and that’s probably necessary on a day-to-day basis, but to imagine how would this country have been different if such and such had happened. I mean it’s not specifically the case, but the very fact we’re an island of course is more than a cliché, but of course the fact that we’re largely an island is connected partly to sea level rise, of course, but also because there was an enormous river system which ran down what we now call the English Channel. So it was a way in which the sort of – if I understand correctly – the sort of proto Rhine deluged out partly into the North Sea, but also through the Straits of Dover, which in a certain way predetermined what was going to happen in this particular… obviously it’s not that we’re isolated but it’s made a profound difference on our whole outlook, in every, climate, to topography, to building materials, in many, many ways. Being on the edge of the Atlantic, which really only the edges of Europe otherwise are, I think has a very major effect on our whole attitude. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I mean I think if you go to Hungary or Turkey, you know you’re on the edge of Asia. It’s a very different feeling, it’s in its own way fascinating, but it’s a very different world.

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[57:46] Thank you. Now we’d got last time to the point where you’ve come back from the OU to Cambridge, and apart from this brief meeting with Stephen Jay Gould in 1986, we know nothing about your research in the 1980s, and so we therefore, the listener, don’t know how it is that roughly over that decade you develop thinking on evolutionary convergence, because we don’t know what collections you’re looking at, what organisms you’re interested in, what new lines of research you’re pursuing, or anything like that. So could you take us back to you coming back to Cambridge in 1983 and give a sort of account of your research life over that decade?

I wish I’d brought a copy of my CV. I can’t remember, accurately that is. To the best of my recollection I mean it was mostly pretty mainstream, inasmuch as we were still doing some work on the Burgess Shale and wrapping up some work there. I think in fact the full description of Wiwaxia, which was one of the sort of items of interest in this rerunning the tape argument, I think that was published in 1985. I really should remember, but my excuse is that, from my perspective only, it doesn’t matter. I also was interested in other Cambrian faunas and in addition, one of the other areas which had already begun to take off, and partly thanks to some very early work by my teacher, Crosbie Matthews in Bristol, are the so-called small shelly fossils. And if you work in the Cambrian and you study the Cambrian explosion, to the very first approximation, you either work on the mainstream faunas – trilobites, brachiopods, they’re very interesting of course – or you work on Burgess Shale type faunas, which of course we now know there are very many, and to some extent I’ve been involved with those, especially in China and Greenland. And then the so-called small shelly fossils is that, simplifying quite significantly, in the earlier stages of the Cambrian many of the rocks are made of limestone and if you put them into basically the equivalent of vinegar, you can dissolve them. And it turns out that they’re often extremely fossiliferous and contain very large numbers of disarticulated bits of skeleton, typically in the order of a millimetre or less in size. And the reason they survived the digestion process in comparison to the limestone, which is made of calcium carbonate, is because they are either originally made of phosphatic minerals, the same material which makes our bones, or have been secondarily replaced. And this means you can extract very large numbers of these so-called small shelly fossils and you principally need an electron microscope to work on these. And I had a colleague, friend, in then Uppsala, though he now is actually just retired in Stockholm, Stefan Bengtson, and he’d already done some very important work, mostly on Scandinavian faunas, but

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he spoke Russian, fluently, I think because he’d been trained as part of their sort of equivalent of the National Service in the intelligence area, and obviously Russia and Sweden need to know about each other, or certainly Sweden knows about Russia, that’s for sure. And he’d developed contacts with people there and we did spend time later, and again, I’d have to get my diaries out, partly sort of guided fieldtrips, a little bit of work in Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. But quite early on and I would think probably around 1984-ish, we went on a trip to Australia, with the help of a chap called Bruce Runiger, who’s a very, very original and talented palaeobiologist, who is Australian originally but has spent a lot of time in the States. And we collected a lot of these limestone examples from south Australia, more or less from round Adelaide, and we wrote a very large monograph on this material. And that certainly didn’t set the scene because this stuff was already quite well known. But the reason they were important is that quite a few of them were enigmatic, so they sort of had an echo, if you like, of the sort of weird wonders of the Burgess Shale. In other cases it became clear quite quickly that they must have some connection to fossils we otherwise only knew from the Burgess Shale. So, for instance, if you think about the animal called Wiwaxia from the Burgess Shale, its skeleton is composed of several hundred individual plates, sclerites, we call them in the trade, and on the death of the animal these disarticulate so that they’re scattered widely. And the corresponding ones can be found, are these small shelly fossils. So I did a fair amount of work on that area. But again, it’s sort of fairly mainstream in that regard. And then one of the trips we had, oh gosh, it must have been only a year or two later, was to China. That would have been, actually it might even have been earlier, might have been even 1982. So China of course at that stage was a very different country than what it is now, and they have very significant deposits, especially in Yunnan Province and Sichuan Province, of the same sorts of limestones which we were collecting from Australia, and I had several trips there and did quite a lot of work with a colleague from Beijing, Chen Menge on those, from Sichuan especially, and then also a little bit of work in Xinjiang with another chap, from Ürümqi. And so, this was basically you got buckets of stuff smelling of vinegar, acetic acid, digesting these things, picking the fossils out, trying to identify them, mounting them on what we call stubs, little aluminium holders, and then putting these in electron microscopes. I spent an awful lot of time using the electron microscope, not in an advanced sophisticated way. So that again was great fun to work on, it was at a time when in a sense this area was pretty untouched, at least so far as Australia was concerned. [1:04:06]

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And then, again, I wish I could remember exactly, partly because I had some contacts in China somewhat later when it became clear that they had a Burgess Shale equivalent. This is now moving, I’m afraid, into the nineties, called Chengjiang. Eventually I became involved with a group in Xi’an, and have done a lot of work with them, specially in the nineties and sort of up to about 2006, 2007. And correspondingly, I was in a meeting in Uppsala, which was about the Cambrian explosion, and again, I’d have to get my diary out, but I guess it would have been, oh dear, oh dear, probably about 1985. And a friend of mine who I knew somewhat, though not well at that stage, called John Peel, who at that stage was in the Greenland Geological Survey, was the palaeontologist for the Greenland Geological Survey, so basically all the fossils which came back from the mapping programmes which the Greenland Geological Survey was doing – the survey itself being based in Copenhagen, landed on his desk. So he had a very, very wide knowledge of fossils, especially Palaeozoic ones, and they’d been mapping in north Greenland, far up in the north, it’s actually a couple of Englishmen as it so happened, and they were just involved with making a geological map of the area. But every time you find a fossil you collect it, because often it will give you a rather good idea of the age of the rocks. There are other ways you can date rocks, but things like trilobites are a quick and easy way of doing it. Any case, they found a few fossils on the edge of this hill above JP Koch Fjord in Peary Land, they saw the trilobites, they grabbed them, and these guys basically ran across the country, mapping. They come back to Copenhagen, John looks at them under the microscope and sees, yes, there are fossils, but then he looks more carefully and he sees that there are also Burgess Shale fossils there which are much fainter, much more difficult to see. So he shows me some of these fossils and I’m in Uppsala, and asks me if I’d be interested in collaborating on the description and possibly having expeditions back to Greenland. So in that sense, again, not to rush on the story too much, so far as the scientific work was concerned, sort of Burgess Shale in terms of its classical form in Canada was largely behind me, not exclusively, and I got very involved with the work in Greenland and in China. And that turned out to be very interesting, and pretty successful I suppose. [1:06:33] In the meantime, back in the Burgess Shale, and again, I don’t have the exact dates and forgive me if we’re going not so much in circles, but I’m repeating myself, probably round about 1978/79 I was back in Calgary. I think what I wanted to do was actually get some limestone samples, because I described a fossil from the Burgess Shale and the teeth in it I thought belonged to a group called the conodonts, and that’s a whole set of stories which I’ve been only peripherally involved with. But that was completely wrong, there was only

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a single specimen, and this was an animal called Odontogriphus, which basically means ‘toothed riddle’. So I collected these limestones in the hope of finding by this acid digestion technique the same conodonts which are made of phosphatic material and finding a link to this animal called Odontogriphus. Well, that was a complete failure, we didn’t find anything. We found some other things but nothing I ever published. But I was working with a colleague called Ian McIlreath who had been responsible for the mapping around the Burgess Shale and had identified this enormous so-called reef against which the Burgess Shale was deposited, and we went for a hike up on to Mount Field and I found just on the talus some Burgess Shale fossils. Not well preserved, but there they were, and I mentioned this to a colleague in Toronto, and ultimately they a very ambitious field programme which opened many new localities around that area. And in, I think it was 1983, I was on a fieldtrip, actually we camped in the Burgess Shale quarry, and I’m sorry if I repeat myself here, and we did a little bit of excavation back on Mount Field. It’s all rather, not amateurish, but in any event it was just four of us and involved sort of sliding down big shale chutes which is extremely stupid, and going round very steep slopes, unroped, very stupid. And ultimately the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto received permission to reopen Walcott’s famous quarry with the permission of Parks Canada, so it’s now something twice the size it was when Harry Whittington had been there, and they collected something in the order of one and a half times more material than the Smithsonian had. And I have been involved to some extent with some of the new material from there and then my colleague there, a Frenchman, Jean-Bernard Caron, has really taken off and he’s publishing lots and lots of things, and they’ve found a new deposit which is probably, if anything, richer than the Burgess Shale, not so far. And I’m a little bit involved with some of that work. So, if you like, I mean the Burgess Shale, Cambrian explosion, Cambrian faunas, has been going on even to the present day. As I say, we’ve got one paper which we are about to resubmit to a journal in the hope that we can find a home for it. But behind all that of course are my interests in convergence and all the things which go with that, and then I wouldn’t want to be unfair, but I gave a talk in Oxford a couple of years ago with the title, ‘Is Convergence Becoming Too Popular?’. And I think it’s become of more wide interest, and I’m very pleased with that, but if it’s becoming popular I’m off.

Can you describe, tell the story of key events in the move from a sort of multiple histories, rerunning the tape type way of thinking about evolution to your ideas about evolutionary

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convergence, the navigating to similar end points, thoughts about, you know, only a small amount of I think what you call hyperspace being occupied, that sort of thing. I mean what the standard sort of popular science understanding of what happens is that you will have been looking through a box or something and found a particular specimen and looked at it and thought, ah, you know, the sort of flash of inspiration and that sort of thing. But I wondered whether you can – which may be what happened – but I wondered whether you can reconstruct this change in your view, including if you can, sort of actual stories of things looked at, compared, thought about.

It certainly wasn’t a eureka moment. And sorry to interrupt, would you like some water or anything? It’s very warm in here.

[end of track 5]

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[Track 6]

Could you try to reconstruct your change in view over this decade, your changing view of what the sort of history of evolutionary biology consisted of, coming to ideas about convergence, taking in if you can sort of key bits of fieldwork or key specimens, or key readings, you know, the actual things that happened that led to a different way of thinking so that by the time Wonderful Life comes out you have a completely different sort of view of what might be said about evolutionary biology.

Well, I think probably at the time when Wonderful Life was actually published, I would have had very few quarrels with the basic thesis, but by the time I’d written my own Crucible of Creation, which I think was 1996, if I remember correctly, which isn’t that long, really I’d moved full circle, or at least through 180 degrees, rather. And in part, I think it was, I suppose, my growing interest in sort of metaphysical questions which, if you like, there are a few scattered remarks through that book, which those who are alert to it will read and those who are not alert to it, it doesn’t matter at all but they’re there if people want to pick them up, just throwaway remarks, principally. And probably the sort of impetus, if you like, was the realisation, not by me of course, but by other people, that Hallucigenia, the sort of iconic weird wonder, was very far from being a weird wonder, it belonged to a group of primitive arthropods. And in hindsight I should have realised that as well, not that I think I’ve ever worked out it was an arthropod, but there was information in the fossils I studied which, when I look back, I should have interpreted differently. But that’s the way the world goes, can’t complain. But what it was that in a sense persuaded more of an interest in convergence I suppose, and alas it certainly wasn’t a particular specimen or as far as I know a particular conference. Though perhaps there was a conference in Friday… in Cold Spring – sorry, not Friday Harbor, I’m quite wrong – Cold Spring Harbor, near New York, and I do recall there that Jared Diamond was talking, who’s a very distinguished and interesting biologist, but there was also another chap who was talking about birdsong, and there was somebody else talking about sort of archaeology, and he specifically mentioned the reinvention of particular sorts of fishing hooks. And I rather suspect, and again, I can find out when that conference was held, but I guess it would have probably been in the early nineties, that might have been the impetus which began to make me think about the thing that if you weren’t rerunning the tape, what were you going to get. And, as ever, the child being the father of the

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man and so forth, is that with regards to the way I work in terms of keeping tabs on things, I’ve always relied on reference cards, just old-fashioned little record cards where I write the references down and they’re organised under subject and so forth. And in a certain sort of way, because I’m now working on all sorts of problems which are linked, partly to convergent evolution, and the website, 42 Evolution as well and these articles at the moment, the one I’m researching is the question of human uniqueness, in a certain sort of way I’ve decided to be stingy and just recycle cards, so I use the blank reverses. And I shouldn’t, it’s not really to my credit, but I’m astonished at the amount of stuff I was looking at, ever since I started writing these cards, you know, there’s always an enormous amount of literature. I don’t generally read the papers, all I do is I make a note of them, put them together under some topic or other, and then when I want to research it, then I just flick through these cards, fish out the ones I need. These days of course you go to the computer screen and you summon them all up from the electronic resources, but within living memory I was using the libraries. So in fact I spent an awful lot of time in libraries. Mostly in the Zoology library and what was then called the Scientific Periodicals Library, now sadly closed, part of the University library system here in Cambridge. So for instance, in part it might have been, but the order’s not quite right, when we went to Greenland to work on the Burgess Shale faunas there, I mean that in terms of the expedition was wonderful, very exciting. And we found these animals called halkieriids, which are a group of Cambrian fossils which are related to, in my view, not everybody else, they’re related to our friend Wiwaxia from the Burgess Shale. And there’s a long history since then and they might be some sort of primitive mollusc, it doesn’t really matter too much. But here was another animal which made sort of sense, and the most extraordinary thing about this animal is it had shells at either end. And I concocted a story how these might be related to another group. So if you like, from that perspective, in certain ways, the realisation that the so-called weird wonders in the Cambrian, especially the Burgess Shale type faunas, had to belong somewhere in the evolutionary tree. This was a very powerful impetus to make better sense of them, and then almost as a drumbeat behind that, because the paradox in terms of convergence, which people repeatedly point out to me and very fairly is they say, well convergence, all very interesting, but hang on a moment, look at the world around us, it’s incredibly divergent, you know, everything’s different, you know. Giraffes, palm trees, all this sort of stuff. And this is absolutely true. And my argument simply there is, you know, I’m very happy that things evolved but I can pretty well reassure you that what evolves once will evolve again. So that’s in a sense the argument, that

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convergence is, as a paper was written some time ago, divergence is local, convergence is global. So everything re-evolves. But precisely what it was which then allowed me to connect the dots there which led from, I think, some hints in The Crucible of Creation to the fully fledged Life’s Solution and now more recently The Runes of Evolution, and as far as I’m concerned, I think I’ve taken that argument about as far as I want to take it. If others want to take it further, good luck to them, they’re most welcome. I don’t think I really have a great deal more to say about that. So hence I’ve branched off a bit more into questions, partly of metaphysics, partly questions about what I call evolutionary myths – maybe we mentioned this in passing previously – but the book I’m trying to write, well I’m trying to write two books, one book is written and if anybody’s listening to this, if they want to publish it, please contact me, on our new website, 42 Evolution, I wrote the so-called Questions and Answers, a Q&A: Is my dog conscious? Yes, course it is. No, it’s not. So what do we mean by consciousness? And each one of those Q&As, although to some extent they’re based on previous reading, has provoked me. And the opening one, Is my dog conscious, to the last one, which I’m writing as we speak at the moment, Are Humans Unique? In a certain sense, sort of the bookends to the argument, you know. And then that then takes one off into all sorts of other strange areas, not least a question of extraterrestrials and so forth. You know, are there any, are they intelligent, are they like us? Etc, etc, etc. So, if you like, and it’s not exactly a satisfactory description of how I came to be here, I’m slightly surprised I am here, in terms of the areas I’ve ended up looking at. I would have never dreamt that I would have been interested in these topics when I first came here as a research fellow in 1975, and that delights me.

[07:56] What then would you say more generally about the role of sort of luck and chance in your own career from the beginnings till now? You, just before we put the recorder back on you were talking about how sort of fortunate you feel. But have you had sort of deep thoughts about luck and chance in your life?

No, probably it’s a good idea not to. [laughs] Partly because it would invite a particular level of selfishness, I think, which is not to be encouraged. No, I think, I suppose as I look back, for what it’s worth is, and in way mentioned with regard to this ability to actually command really quite large areas of literature. And I suspect in part that is why in some ways I’m not a scientist.

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In other words, I think I’m more analogous to my father and in a certain sense my mother, well my mother was very artistic, I think. My father was extremely clever and was a very gifted solicitor, lawyer, and obviously he could marshal the arguments. And I think I’m moderately good at that. Whether the arguments are true or not is not the point, if the jury are persuaded that’s all that matters. Not that my father would deny there’s an ultimate truth, I’m sure, but nevertheless, you do the best you can with the information you have. And in that respect I suppose I’m a little bit unusual inasmuch as having a good memory for some things, not for remembering the book I read three weeks ago, unfortunately, but bringing together apparently unconnected facts. And again, being constantly fascinated and amazed. I mean I think it’s in one of those Q&As, and apologies again if it was already discussed, but as ever, if you mentioned this to another biologist they’d say, oh yes, yes, I read that paper. Because most people of course tend to read, in particular, journals and they probably read most of the papers in that journal. Whereas I’m far more of a gadfly and by and large I pick up the things which look interesting, make a note of them, file them away, if I need them they’ll be dragged out. But this particular example is just like, makes perfectly good sense, Darwin would have enjoyed it. Is that if you’re an aphid – and stop me if I told you this story earlier – and you’re living on a plant, that’s fine, you’re taking the sap out of the plant and the gardener disapproves, that’s another story. And there are a whole lot of other stories to do with this in terms of their symbiotic associations. But a goat approaches, and the goat’s going to eat the plant. Now clearly, so far as the aphid is concerned this is disadvantageous, and you might just think, well that’s life, except that the aphids are sensitive to goat breath, and as soon as they smell the goat they drop off. Of course some of them are eaten but the majority fall to safety. Now of course as soon as you think about, you know, what’s an aphid going to do, I mean the selective pressure to detect the goat breath will ensure that that population survives in comparison to those who were not clued up. But in that way I’m certainly not for a moment comparing myself Darwin, that would be totally ridiculous, but Darwin does have this sort of omnivorous interest in things in terms of the science, you know. Whatever he’s looking at, he’s trying to learn about how it might connect to a wider story. And I suppose in that sense, of course Darwin ends up with his theory of natural selection, and I don’t end up with a general theory, but I do end up with the possibility that the end points in evolution are more constrained than has been popularly thought. This is by no means a new idea, I mean the Soviets were writing about this in the 1920s, but curiously enough they were anti-Darwinian, which I never quite understood because you would have thought

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dialectical materialism and the fact that Marx I believe wanted to dedicate Das Kapital, was it, to Darwin. One would have thought that in their different ways they’re both very materialist agendas, but for whatever reason, and one might invoke Lysenko at this stage, but it goes far before Lysenko and company, they were rather agin Darwin. But that’s another… in any case, there are people there who are thinking about a more theoretical biology, sort of periodic table of organisations, like Vavilov, for instance. So yeah, as I say, I’m not making any claims here for being original, I’m a product of my time.

[12:25] Could you give us a sense of some of the categories in your card file index? I mean how is it organised, if we flick through, what sort of subheadings might we find?

Well, the convergence catalogue is getting – I haven’t got the exact figures – probably got something like 12,000 entries, each one on an individual card. If things are desperate, I’ll actually write on another small card and staple them together, but I try and, when I’m actually writing something what I do is actually write the notes on the card, so when I’m actually then writing an article or something else, I then get this pile of cards together and in a sense read through them again and then abstract what I’m trying to write on the basis of what these various bits of paper do. And that’s the way I work generally, I mean even on Burgess Shale-like stuff, more often there I tend to print out the papers because I have to pay probably more detailed attention to an argument when you’re describing a fossil, whereas when you’re trying to make a general point about, for instance aphids, then in a sense the headlines will do. That’s exaggerating slightly. But in this particular case they’re broadly under… broadly it’s taxonomic. So we start with arthropods and then as soon as I get enough cards, then the arthropods, there’ll be a small number of cards on beetles, and then if necessary there might even be those beetles which engage in agriculture, which they do, and so on. So as far as possible one keeps in things, obviously the weakness of this system is there are often cross-connections and if I had a computerised system I could put key words in and, you know, one could link it in a much more coherent fashion. But I’m not sure that’s an advantage, because I’m not trying to pigeonhole my thinking. What I’m actually trying to do is get different bits of information and weave them together in a slightly new way. So for instance, one of the other Questions …. Answers is, on the website, 42, is something like are plants warm-blooded, by which we mean actually of

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course, can plants generate heat? And as quite a lot of people know perfectly well, they can. They’re so-called thermogenic plants, like some of the arums, for example. And so why do they do this? Well, probably in fact when they are being pollinated, the insects, if it’s nice and toasty warm, work more efficiently. There are other arguments as well. But it turns out that the basic – this is simplifying somewhat – the basic mechanism of making a plant with warm tissue is basically the same as what allows us to be warm-blooded. So there again you’ve got a fundamental principle of how to do it, which basically means shuttling either protons or calcium, it doesn’t really matter too much, across a so-called leaky membrane. And because it’s ‘inefficient’, in inverted commas, it releases heat. And again, as soon as you think about this, it’s glaringly self-evident. But it does suggest that if there’s any organism anywhere in the universe, which is going to be warm-blooded, that’s the way it’s going to work. So all I need to do is have a section, in this particular case, under thermogenesis, I have thermogenesis in mammals and birds is interesting because those are both advanced and intelligent creatures and birds being descendants of the dinosaurs and we being descendants of reptiles, are both warm- blooded, and in fact that warm-bloodedness is almost indistinguishable in terms of molecular mechanism, but it’s different, it’s separate. And then you go further afield and you go to some of the fish, tuna for example, you go to the plants, they too have developed ways to develop heat, and it’s basically the same mechanism. And of course those people who work on thermogenesis know all about this, but most people work on thermogenesis and not much else, which is fine. I couldn’t do the work without it. So that’s really the sort of way I try to work. So, you know, it’s broadly taxonomic, plants here, maybe we should have an interview next time in the office rather than in the College and then you’ll see the other part of the area. But it’s very archaic system and we’ve got, the list of references is computerised, so we hope to be able to download that so that’ll be accessible to everybody, but it won’t be terribly useful other than as a vast data resource of 10,000 plus references for anybody who’s interested, it won’t be organised, I don’t think, in any other way.

[16:38] It sounds to me as if the card index system itself would have been instrumental in you sort of seeing convergence in different areas, because you just mentioned that a scientific specialist might work on this particular feature in one area, but not necessarily have their own card index where they look for a similar solution across different species: animal, plant and so on. So I

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mean does the card index itself have a role in the development of your thinking about convergence?

Oh, I’m sure it does. Yes, as ever, I’m something of an anorak in this area and as my knowledge grows in this area, one realises there are bits you want to subdivide off. And so far as the card index works, it’s a rather massive system now, but it just allows me to find things as efficiently as possible. And so far as possible, there’s no point having a category which only has two or three cards in it, but if it’s a few more than that, then if I’m after something, then I can get there straightaway, flick through the things. Of course the problem is, the areas I cover in a way is almost total and continues to expand, like my reading into extraterrestrials in the last year or so, if there are any, but correspondingly of course, hundreds of papers are published every day. We now have very useful systems where you can find out, if you have a particular paper which, say, published two years ago, you can see who else has cited it. And almost invariably they’re either self-citations, nothing wrong with that, or they’re just marking, they’re just saying, you know, they’re acknowledging the previous work. But every now and again somebody comes along and either qualifies it or actually sometimes actually says the hypothesis is wrong, or extends it into a new area. I mean what’s very striking and again, in my anorak mode I thought perhaps it’s already done, what’s interesting is that the vast majority of papers I see, and I’m always so relieved when that’s the case, have only been cited a handful of times by subsequent authors. Even ones in Nature and Science. Others of course are being cited hundreds of times, but even there, most of the time they are ancillary to my particular needs. But in a certain way it’s quite sobering that, you know, there you are making all this effort and there’s a dreadful thing called the h-index and all the rest of it, but most of my papers have only been cited a handful of times. And that’s okay, I’m not complaining at all. But there’s a little bit of a sort of citation neurosis these days in science, which I don’t think is entirely helpful. But what it does mean is what would have been impossible when I was doing my earlier work, is now if I’m interested, say – what are we reading about at the moment? Well, human uniqueness is a very complicated, very demanding area to get on top of, but going back to the aphids, one of the things they have is inside them they have colonies of bacteria which are essential to make some of the necessary compounds for the animal to live, because the sap they obtain is so deficient in some nutrients that they have to have a symbiotic association with them. And this in turn actually opens up a whole field as to the extent to which probably all organisms are inter-dependent on other

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organisms. So it extends as far as our gut bacteria, for example, which then has a bearing on our nervous systems, which then has a bearing on our mental health, and so on and so forth. So in each one of these cases, I mean this way madness lies. You can go off on almost any route you like, but as ever, what one’s trying to do, which I think is what science is meant to do, is find those deeper connections. And so far as convergence can inform you about that, then that, so far as my research programme has been concerned, has probably worked not too badly. But, it does mean that I can’t cover everything, I can’t be an expert on anything. And sure enough, you realise that if I’m reading somebody’s paper I might spend twenty minutes on it, and that’s probably six months or a year’s work by that person. It’s quite humbling really. And all you’re doing is, you know, if it’s a fairly important paper I’ll probably cover two sides of a card with tiny writing, which has got all the key points I want to make, which’ll then be my aide-memoire when I’m trying to weave the whole thing together into the overall story.

Thank you. [21:24] Can you say something about the use of spatial thinking in – and I’m thinking particularly now of the next book after the Burgess Shale, Life’s Solution – there’s different kinds of hyperspace, different sort of boxes occupied but most of them not occupied, you’ve got the idea of navigation to the same point. I wondered to what extent a spatial way of understanding this was a sort of deliberate intellectual or writerly strategy in this book?

I hadn’t really thought about it. It might be, well I hope that nobody wastes their time, it would probably be better for somebody else to do the critical analysis, you know, to try and read it dispassionately. I think, again, thinking back to what were perhaps very influential on me were two papers, which do in some sense try to answer your point about spatial thinking in this regard. I mean in parenthesis, because I’m not numerate in any serious way, because I’m not mathematical, I tend to think in very sort of literal terms. So I don’t think in terms of functions, if you like, or an equation which will describe a particular form. Nothing wrong with that, I’m all in favour of those who can do it, but I can’t, it’s as simple as that. But there were two papers. One was published by a chap called Roger Thomas, who was a very interesting chap in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and he wrote this paper, very nice paper, on so-called skeleton space. Gosh, it was published a long time ago now, I think it was in Evolution, but I may be wrong

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there. Where effectively what he did is he looked at all possible combinations of skeleton, and of course when we think of skeleton we think of a human skeleton, but of course a moment’s reflection will remind us that there are oysters with two shells, or there are chitons with many, many skeletal elements, so and so forth. And it turns out you can actually reduce skeleton space to a box, if you like. And what he showed, very elegantly – he had a co-author, and I apologise, I can’t remember his name now – was that there are a number of combinations, unsurprisingly, which are unoccupied, they are impossible. And it’s not rocket science to work out why they are. So that’s useful, so already we recognise areas of non-viability. But otherwise, the very first approximation, almost all the boxes have been occupied multiple times, so they’re convergent. And I rather suspect that that paper – Roger Thomas is, he may one day listen to this, I don’t know, I mean in his own way is a slightly under-sung hero of palaeontology, I mean he’s always enthusiastic. I used to know him moderately well, he was always very kind to me and friendly. Almost killed me once in a car accident, but it was not his fault, it was another clown shooting the lights, that was a bit of a surprise. But in any event, we survived, fortunately. Just as well, I suppose. But that way of thinking sort of maps out, you know, reduces if you like, in a way, quasi-mathematically, what is a set of very disparate, you know, what does an elephant and a brachiopod have in common? Well, if we think about their skeleton space, we’ve got somewhere. So that was one, and I daresay that perhaps was, I use that illustration, I think in Life’s Solution. The other paper which was extremely influential on me, and goodness knows how I noticed it, other than I look at Science and Nature every week, as one really has to, there’s nothing wrong with that, was a paper by a chap called Mike Travisano and he – this was very early days – looked at a system which has since been taken on mostly by another American scientist, called Rick Lenski, who again is a very, very nice chap and very, very talented man. And effectively what in the end they did was they took populations of bacteria, E. coli, freely available, and they divided them into twelve separate populations and they more or less said, well off you go, start evolving. And so of course each one is in its own sort of environment, its own flask, it doesn’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world, at least we hope they don’t. So they’re each evolving independently and this very early paper by Travisano and others was effectively trying to disentangle at a rather early stage of these investigations the roles of chance and history versus adaptation. And basically, to cut a long story short, adaptation wins out, history becomes unimportant, it vanishes. The initial starting conditions, all the twists and turns don’t matter, doesn’t matter. Now, since then Lenski has taken on this in all sorts of very

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interesting and remarkable directions. It’s difficult to summarise all of the work they’ve done, I haven’t read every paper. They certainly have examples of what appear to be, if you like, flukes, where contingency does pop up, you know, unique things happen. A famous example using the ability of these bacteria to utilise citrate, which most bacteria can do, but E. coli can’t, which actually in parentheses is useful because if you’re trying to detect E. coli in hospital conditions, if it could grow on citrate it ain’t E. coli. And I think actually they then sort of, at the end of their paper, take this off in a sort of Stephen Jay Gould Wonderful Life direction, saying it’s re- running the tape of life, and all the rest of it. And I wrote a sort of short critique of this saying, well that’s certainly true historically, but actually, if you take a slightly wider view, E. coli can use citrate in another way. So if you’re concerned with will E. coli ever use citrate, then the answer’s yes. Will it do it this particular way on some other universe, perhaps not, but who cares? But no matter, I mean this is not, you know, but that view where you really had a sort of ability to tease apart the roles of chance and adaptation and history was very, very powerful, and as ever, the problem with this area is that as soon as you get these ideas in your head then one’s natural curiosity drives you on and you really lose sight of where you came from. I mean the starting post becomes almost invisible, because you immediately start rushing off in all sorts of different directions to see, you know, whether this convergence is more widespread. And perhaps in parenthesis, but a point I make in the talks when I do give them on convergent evolution, which did strike me quite early on, is that the adjectives which are used when evolutionary convergence is being documented are almost always words, adjectives that is, for surprise. Almost invariably they say ‘stunning’, ‘remarkable’. And that goes almost full circle to the argument of Darwin’s suspicions of Paley and sort of not for a moment I’m saying any of these people are worried about creationism, I don’t suppose they are, but the degrees of similarity are sometimes quite uncanny. But if on the other hand you say well, the bulk of so- called biological hyperspace is uninhabitable, then you can’t be surprised that the same areas of safety are repeatedly reoccupied. But the fact that they use these words of surprise tells me actually rather a lot. You know, they’re not expecting this, if you like. And then some people have extended that argument in the way that physicists talk about so-called attractors, you know, the idea that as organisms metaphorically navigate across the sea of possibilities, they find themselves constantly drawn to particular islands. So yes, that’s the sort of… But those two papers I think, the skeleton space one and the sort of rerunning the tape using E. coli, probably were amongst those which, however I came across them – maybe Roger sent me the reprint, it

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could possibly have been, because in those days reprints were regularly sent. These days nobody bothers, certainly because you can find it at the end of a button.

[29:49] And the argument is, isn’t it, that it’s not that… well, the argument is that there’s not enough time for every single slot to be attempted and only the ones that work to be occupied, that actually there’s a kind of, in some way, a drawing towards the solutions that work. Because you could, one way of sort of explaining convergence would be just to say well, everything’s been tried and only the ones that actually are viable work. But that isn’t the argument, the argument is that actually, like the attractor, there isn’t enough time to explore everywhere, and so there’s something, there’s some kind of deeper structure that’s drawing evolution towards these same solutions. That’s where it gets to, the argument, isn’t it?

Yes, that’s a supposition, I mean it’s a promissory note. But the sense might be that in a way analogous to a periodic table, which is ultimately explained, so far as I understand, on the basis of nuclear physics. The periodic table has the structure it does because of an underlying set of principles and I think that analogy’s not completely imperfect, but of course it presupposes what those underlying principles are, and we don’t know. One of the problems is – at least I don’t know, I should be careful what I say – is that biology is strongly hierarchical, so in a sense we’re dependent on genes and molecules and on tissues and so forth, and they all interact in various ways, and it’s clear now that at least to some degree this involves principles of self-organisation, which in a certain sense are not Darwinian, and they’re recognised, but why they’re there, I don’t think anybody really understands. So that’s one aspect of the argument. Another view, which I think is very important, has been put forward by a very interesting biologist called Geerat Vermeij, a fascinating man, I don’t know him that well. He was, well, if I say he was rendered blind, he lost his sight at a very young age and yet he’s one of the world’s leading experts on molluscs and he does all this by feel, and he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of biology, far beyond what I know. And he’s a very, very interesting man, works in America, originally Dutch, but been in America for a long time. And he’s made the argument quite recently that there are certain sorts of combinations which you might expect which don’t seem to be ever found and this may be that there’s some fundamental constraint which we haven’t properly understood, or it might be that in fact there really are things there which prevent it from

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happening. So this I think is a very important sort of warning sign not to get too carried away with this area, to remind oneself there may be unfulfilled potentials, that may well be the case. Of course, one of the problems is that the fossil record is very imperfect. I don’t say that because I’m sort of trying to hint at creationism, not at all, but of course the majority of soft-bodied animals don’t survive and we do know in the fossil record that there are a number of forms which we don’t really have a modern equivalent of. Now, it may be they’ve been weeded out because of the levels of competition and predation have increased since then, that’s perfectly likely. But in any event there are all sorts of arrangements which seem to have no counterpart today and we strongly suspect there are many arrangements which we will never have any knowledge of, simply because the fossil record’s not good enough. So those are important reminders that we should be careful when we start making sort of sweeping statements. But despite all that, I do think the, well, as I say, so far as my thinking, if that is the right word, has been driven forward to understanding how it is that you and I, in a sense, can even have this conversation, how is it that humans have this ability to extend themselves far beyond what any other animal has done, not least producing the science and so forth. Although that sounds as if I’m trying to rush off in a particular direction, so maybe I am, it is very much based on how we got there to start with, if evolution has a relatively limited number of outcomes. And let us say in fact that many of them are fairly trivial, and let us also agree that many of them do evolve a number of times, if not many times. It doesn’t actually necessarily matter, because what does matter is there are particular solutions which turn out to be wildly successful, just beyond all expectation. And those are the ones which in a sense make the world. And the rest isn’t window dressing, but it’s a very remarkable world we live in. But I’m hard pushed to think of anything which has only evolved once. There may be a few examples, I think palms, perhaps. But we would get too diverted into the minutia of the argument.

[34:52] Thank you. Now, in your writing, and I’m not sure whether in these interviews, perhaps in others that I’ve looked at, you sometimes hint that you look on certain kinds of developments in sort of what you might call modern life – this might be an inadequate way of describing it – but aspects of sort of consumerism and the modern world, that you look on those with quite a negative eye, let’s say, and I wondered whether you could talk about – it’s a difficult question to ask – but your sort of view of current trends in sort of society and culture that you see as being

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negative. I mean this is from the point of view of Cambridge, but you do obviously travel around. When you comment on the sort of negative features of modern life, what are you generally sort of responding to? What do you see around you happening that you think that would be better if it wasn’t?

[laughs]

Do you know the sorts of, the bits in the books that I mean?

I probably don’t, I’m afraid. I should.

Shopping, for example, is something.

[laughs]

Shopping and just sort of consumerism in general.

Well, I’m a consumer as well, you know. I buy lots of gin, I buy CDs, I buy tons of books. [laughs] I’m not interested in shopping, many men aren’t, and some women aren’t, and vice versa, so I’m not… No, who am I, one of seven billion people, to sort of pronounce on what people want or should do and I do feel extremely strongly that people, to the very first approximation should do exactly what they want to do, you know. Obviously it’s easy to be censorious and that’s probably not helpful for one’s own salvation. But there are things I sort of regret, in part, but without trying to defend my dislike of shopping, it leaves me cold, it is that I’m sort of, if you think as a tiny example from the time I first went to China to the most recent time I’ve been there, about three years ago now, and obviously it’s much in the news for many other reasons, I mean the degree of change has been really remarkable and it’s a very complicated story. They didn’t exactly get help with The Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, thank you very much, and many other aspects about their country any case. But in that, in a microcosm, sort of is, if you like, thrilling and appalling. And I try and take a positive view on it inasmuch as, without getting sort of dewy-eyed about it, and again, almost going back to the very recent reading I’ve been doing about human uniqueness, and as has been

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pointed out to many people, as may be the case with Nazi Germany, and that’s by no means the only example, we can do terrible things. But in many, many respects, not that we always are, we are extraordinary, as has often been described, as sort of hyper co-operators. I mean our ability, okay it’s not perfect and so forth, but our ability to sort of get on with other people is, you know, the first approximation is, from an animal point of view, pretty odd. And there may be particular biological reasons why we do this, you know, you can put it in an adaptive framework. So, in that sort of way, and again, you know, I’m feeling strongly now that I have grandchildren, in particular without sort of just kissing them on the forehead and sending them off, it’s their world not mine. You know, we don’t want to make a mess of it so far as we can avoid, but they’re the ones who make the decisions. And in a microcosm that’s true of some colleges, not all colleges, but some colleges, for instance, once you’re retired you either lose your fellowship – that’s not true here, fortunately – or you’re not entitled to vote. And it doesn’t really matter where my views are on this, it’s unimportant, but, you know, the sense is it’s always been the case that the old complain about the young, there’s nothing new there. I mean so far as, if you like, I’m disenchanted, it would be that I do feel the world as a whole is disenchanted. Not exclusively by any means, but, you know, thinking back to our earlier conversations and the degree of freedom I had as a child, some children still have that but very many don’t. You know, the ability just to wander off and for your parents to trust you. That’s not to say that doesn’t happen in some parts of the world, I’m sure it does, but in this part of the world life seems more hemmed in. Obviously the ways of communication and so forth have changed radically and there are pluses and minuses, but to the first approximation, I’m not interested. You know, I may be missing something there, I probably am, but I suspect on the other hand there are things I don’t really want to get involved with. And if you like, when you see the behaviour of people in the streets, as Zoë and I when we quite often go and somebody just steps right out in front of you out of a shop door or something without looking in either direction, you just sort of say it seems their social antennae have been cut off at birth. To some extent, in certain cases, I hope rarely, people somehow seem to be curiously unaware of, if you like, the social matrix they live in. This may be an exaggeration. And obviously, as anybody who knows who commutes and so forth, to the very first approximation, unless you’re unusually garrulous or have a friend, you just want to hunker down and get home. And that’s the way the world is organised, but I’m very grateful that I don’t have to go through that trauma day after day after day. And perhaps some people actually find it useful, they’re away from distractions, they read their book or listen to their

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music and chill out and they may well get benefit from that, I don’t know, but I don’t see the positive sides as much as some other people do. So I’m not really explaining it very sort of clearly, because here’s a Cambridge don, has had a very privileged life, and all the rest of it, talking in a world which is haunted with various uncertainties at the moment, various fears in the broadest possible sense – political, social, economic, military and so forth – and in no way at all am I somehow trying to say that people here should be regarded in no way, in any way deficient. There are parts of the world I don’t like. And in a sort of way, in very different sorts of ways, I think although it’s not otherwise admirable, I mean Evelyn Waugh as a writer I think captures that in his novels extremely well, that sort of alienation. And in a different, very different sort of way, do so Tolkien and CS Lewis and Charles Williams. And without going full circle, I mean my view would be that there seems to be an awful lot about, when I say the real world, you know, the world of orthogonal invisible realities, which is being shut out, if you like, it’s being ignored. It’s either been regarded as an irrelevance or a fairy tale or a fiction, and of course we have these very, very vocal secular Darwinists who are insistent of course on, you know, this is the world whether you like or not, lump it. Which I think is just plain wrong. And in a way by losing contact with these various sorts of worlds, then I think one’s own life is more etiolated. It’s thinner. But, you know, having said all that, you know, most people get on. The Rheingold performance we were at the other day, packed, rapt attention, unbroken from beginning to end, no interval, people on the edge of their seat. There’s 500 or more people, all perfect attention, every word. You know, there were people there who really thought this mattered. So I certainly, you know – sorry, I’m rambling. I just don’t want to give any sort of impression that I’m looking down at anybody or sort of despising them or anything like that. It’s not things I enjoy, I think some people may be missing something, and I would be very disappointed if they didn’t come back and say, and so are you too mate.

[43:45] Does this not lead you to be critical of the sort of economic and political system as a whole which leads to people commuting in a sort of alienated way to work and all that sort of thing, arguably, or creates the conditions for it? Do you feel like campaigning against big corporations and against certain kinds of liberal politics and that sort of thing?

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I’ve never felt, I went on, I think, two protest march… three. No, actually that’s not quite right. I went on two protest marches in Bristol when I was an undergraduate there. One was basically organised as an agitprop, that was our Trotskyite friends and we were just willing idiots. And the other one though was a sort of basically anti-car pollution one. And a small group of us went through the centre of Bristol, I don’t know how on earth I got involved with it, and yeah, the motorists weren’t very pleased. Then much more recently, for some, I don’t know who on earth I met there, I did the same sort of thing in Cambridge. This was quite a few years ago and we went down what here in Cambridge we know as Castle Hill into the centre and I think we put deckchairs up in the middle of some very busy crossroads, with sort of gasmasks on or something stupid like that. So that’s as far as my protest goes. And again, it was pretty clear that the people driving past disapproved strongly, and who can blame them, because you know, as people pointed out, irrespective of what you think about motorcars, they are for many people a liberation. It allows them, you know, to get out, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m glad I don’t have a car, simply because, you know, the sort of general freaking out trying to find somewhere to park, you know, blahdy blahdy blahdy blah. But I think in a way here so far as my thinking is directed and of course he was – actually, well you could argue – he was no more effective than I am, is very much driven by sort of GK Chesterton’s view of the world. First of all that, you know, the common man is essential and to be very, very suspicious of elites, indeed. And of course Lewis writes about this in a different way in what he called ‘The Inner Ring’. And obviously I have, in a sense, here I am in an elite university, in an elite college, FRS and all this nonsense, so you know, who am I to talk about this. But I’m very happy to have a banter with the chap on duty at the porter’s lodge in the evening, or doesn’t really matter, but picking up something, some cough mixture in Boots and having a chat with the girl there. So it makes me sound as if I’m a human, you know, just cracking jokes with her. And then one girl was teaching somebody else, when I picked up my Daily Telegraph in the newsagent and so I gave, you know, she said, ‘One pound forty’, I said I’ve got one pound in one hand and forty pence in the other one, and we had a crack about that. He said, ‘Oh, she prefers you’, and he said, ‘Oh, spontaneous, spontaneous’, you know. So, yeah, if you’ve got time to talk to people and don’t treat them as dirt. I’m not saying most people do, don’t misunderstand me. Most people are very considerate of each other. Social antennae do drop off sometimes, I know, and they do with me as well, so I’m not making any claims there. But Chesterton sort of insisted that what he called, I mean a democracy of course, but also the democracy of the dead, the people who had

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allowed us to be where we now are were still part of us, and also of course the democracy of the future. In other words, what we make for the world to be. And Chesterton, my own view, of course he was very influential on CS Lewis and many others, really understood, you know, the dangers of such things as big corporations and the like. You know, of course he was involved with this famous Marconi scandal and they were sued for libel and all the rest of it. But he was very, very suspicious of this stitch-up which you see in Parliament, for instance. And the legislation which we see going on all around us, part of a European stitch-up, some of it local stitch-up, laws being not passed, actually just going through on statutory instruments, not being properly debated. Laws being passed in panic. You know, I mean this is the way the world is and we know about this. Perhaps that’s all I can say. So yeah, but I’m not a campaigner I’m afraid, I don’t sign petitions. And I never sign surveys. How are we doing? Is that enough for you?

[end of track 6]

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[Track 7]

As we’re sitting next to it could you sort of describe this card index physically and say a bit about how you use it, because I just asked you a question about whether a drawer I can see is something that was pulled out of the main thing, you said it’s a bit more complicated than that. So could you just give a sense of how you use it?

Well, it’s probably ridiculous to say that one still uses file cards. A good part of these cards are actually, in terms of titles and journals, on a computer and so forth and at some point we hope to put them on to a website, either the older one, Map of Life or the new one, 42 Evolution. But really for a very long time when I’ve done my own work I’ve found it convenient to keep the references to a particular scientific area just as small file cards and I find it as easy just to flick through those, sometimes a few jottings on them, sometimes more extensive notes. And then as this project on convergent evolution grew and grew and grew, so correspondingly the file cards grew and grew and grew. I guess there’s something in the order of about 12,000 now, I think we’re up to about 11,000 on the computer. And without going into all the details, all one does is take a block of things, so they’re more or less under topics. So this one’s – let’s have a look, if you don’t mind me turning across, a lot of squeaking from the chair – but if we go to insects and arthropods and so forth, there’s a whole lot of stuff, but it includes also those which engage in agriculture, which is convergent on humans, so one has examples of the attine ants from South America, but also, slightly less well known of the termites and one also has actually some relatives of the flies, the dipterans. And in any particular case all we’ve got is the authors, the year, the title of the article and then the journal and then usually in tiny and almost illegible handwriting except to me, there’s a set of notes which may extend some time on a bad day to two sets of cards. But there’ll be a set of notes here and they provide a precis of what I’m trying to deal with in that sense. So I suppose it’s organised after a fashion and I find it a very flexible and rapid system, and of course it’s being augmented the entire time. But if I have to write on something which may cross various sorts of boundaries, usually I can recover that information. And at the moment, for the sake of argument I’m looking actually at an enormous topic, which is broadly why humans are unique, in the sense that from the perspective of evolution it’s absolutely ridiculous, of course they’re not human, unique inasmuch as we’re descendants of apes and there are a lot of things we find in animals which have exact parallels with what we find

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in humans, but on the other hand, there are such things as very advanced, what are called hyper- co-operative societies which far extend beyond any other animal society. And we have language, we have mathematics and we have science of course, and the question is, do these seamlessly extend, extrapolate from – sorry, I’m just going to interrupt.

[brief interruption]

[03:42] So…

Human uniqueness.

Yes, sorry, just untangle myself as well. Sorry, this is by the by and I’m using valuable recording space. Next door actually belongs to geography and – no, not geography, I’m being silly – sorry, archaeology and anthropology, Arch and Anth as we call it. And they’ve had a long-held supposition that really these rooms ought to belong to them inasmuch as beneath this floor where we’re sitting is their library, and so on and so forth. But never mind, any case it’s a long, long story and we still retain possession of this part of the building. Going back to the use of the cards and so forth, yes, a current project is looking at human uniqueness, and so what I’ve been doing in the last few months, with the aim ultimately of writing a very, very short piece, maybe a thousand words, for this website, is what is it which separates us from the animals and inasmuch as we clearly are unique, in terms of language, mathematics, to some extent music and certainly our ability to co-operate with each other, and there are echoes of all these things in many other animals, on the other hand, is it really a case of seamless extrapolation, just an ape, if you like, getting smarter and smarter and smarter, or is there something else in the equation. And if you think about language, perhaps, clearly animals vocalise, there’s some evidence that they can exchange information, have the rudiments of what we call syntax, a sort of elementary grammar. But one would think, all things being equal, as I’ve said elsewhere, that it would be sensible if you could say to your friend out in the savannah, Joe, there’s three lions behind you and eight leopards in front of us, what on earth are we going to do about it? And quite why other animals haven’t developed that sort of sophistication of communication might simply be because they don’t need it. After all, most of them have many other sort of senses which are rather

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atrophied, not least those of smell and to some extent sight. So, one can go round and round this, but people have been doing very interesting experiments and it’s still continuing, where effectively, especially using crows, which are famously intelligent, as to whether they can actually have what’s generally called a theory of mind. In other words, whether they really know what’s going on in somebody else’s head. And there are various ways you can devise experiments. The famous one is the so-called Aesop’s fable, whereby when you drop pebbles into water, and there’s a wriggling worm at the top, the water level will be raised as more and more pebbles are added. And so ultimately the bird in this particular case can recover its food. And indeed, crows can be trained to do that, but then you can extend the experiments to see whether they actually understand the causal principles and why the water rises. And it’s a complicated area, but to cut a very long story short, in the same way as very young children don’t necessarily understand causal relationships, nevertheless we do, by at least the age of three or four, whereas animals probably don’t. And it’s not at all clear to me why that’s the case. And again, it extends into this idea that actually reason, causality and so forth again are abstract possibilities which can be accessed, and that’s really what we’re doing, so trying to move the argument away from either, there was a miracle, it suddenly happened one day, or alternatively it’s simply seamless extrapolation, is to, as I’ve said elsewhere, and perhaps in earlier conversations here, that the universe around us is constructed in a somewhat different fashion than is often supposed, at least by the hard materialists.

Wouldn’t that still leave the question of why humans developed the means to access these sort of abstract forms of reality?

Yes, indeed. Absolutely, yes. No, I think all one can say is that you can see it in a nascent form in many other groups: crows, parrots, dolphins, elephants in some respects. And also chimpanzees. And of course there are major differences; dolphins live in the ocean, use echo location. Chimps to the very first approximation are highly competitive rather than highly co- operative. They can co-operate, they do, but even so, their entire social structure is very different from us. Bonobos are perhaps more similar to us in various respects. But I find that a real puzzle why that might be the case. And I daresay a theologian could, if you say, argue that it’s a sort of gift of God, if you like, we’re given this capacity. And in a certain sense without trying to defend any theological view, one might say the Genesis narratives are such where we

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are presented with a creation and asked to take good care of it, not least in terms of the naming of the animals and all the rest of it. So these two sort of have resonances, as to the sort of world we find ourselves in. But I wouldn’t to use that as a theological argument. I can see again consistencies with that, and I’m quite comfortable with them, but to suggest that they’re any sort of proof, any more than any science is a proof, is I think a very, very risky enterprise, I certainly don’t want to indulge in that exercise at all.

[08:58] Thanks. How is it that you have time to read all of this work in various fields in order to join them up, when as you said last time, most scientists are focussed in their field of study and under pressure to publish in, say, the latest edition of Insect Thermogenesis or something…

Wonderful journal.

Yes. Why do you… do you have a particular contract, or what is it about the organisation of your life that allows you to do it when others don’t, if you see what I mean?

Well, I mean I’m very lucky, for a number of reasons. First of all, if you work in Cambridge, by and large you’re given a great deal of freedom. That’s a matter of trust, of course, and very few people abuse it, if any really. And so the teaching loads here are really quite light and the students are almost without exception very gifted and therefore you have less of a struggle, if you like, to educate and enthuse them. So that’s part of it. I’ve never wanted to build up a group, and I think probably some of my colleagues regard this as, well, a mistake or at least feel that somehow I should have built up a group, and that’s certainly not won me friends, I suppose. I’ve had a number of PhD students, a couple of postdocs, but very few. And undoubtedly if you are running a large group and having to support them with grants, then your time is consumed overwhelmingly, so perhaps selfishly I’ve decided that that’s not going to help me get on with what I want to understand. So that’s certainly an aspect of it. Again in Cambridge, of course most things are now online, as we say, they’re electronically available, but traditionally the libraries which I’ve been using a great deal until the last few years, are wonderful and most obscure things can be found without a lot of trouble. One or two gaps, but again, one can obtain the papers through inter-library loan and so forth, so all those things contribute. I mean beyond

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that, well I suppose I do read rapidly, and I’ll let you into a secret inasmuch as when I read a paper, almost invariably all I do is the introduction, just sets the field, and then a little bit about the methodologies, but then really straight to the conclusions, in a sense. I have to take on trust what these people are doing and they’ve got it right, and seldom reason to think they haven’t got it right, and then only at the end read the abstract. And a good abstract will capture practically everything you want to know about that paper. So on a good day, undisturbed by friends from the British Library [laughs], one might read twenty or so papers and make notes on each one of them. And then overall, if I’m dealing, say, with the question of human uniqueness, which is enormously wide and various, you see various strands beginning to draw things together in the same way as understanding convergent evolution, you might well find that what applies, for instance, to some group of ants actually has some echo or an analogy in a group of orchids, perhaps. So in other words, one’s looking for commonalities, general principles, which all are underpinned by evolution, in a certain sense indicate sort of factors which keep the whole show on the road. And then from that perspective, whether you’re an ant or an orchid frankly isn’t terribly important. Don’t ask me to give you a specific example, I won’t be able to do that in that one chosen almost at random. So the idea here is in a sense you’re just finding out as much as you can about the area, but all the time saying well, where do I find something which is in some sense a parallel or an analogy or at least has a resonance on this. So that’s the… and hence building up this rather arcane file card index, and when I retire and/or die, I know perfectly well that’s going in a skip. [laughs]

Is there not some way that, have you not thought about ways of archiving it?

Well, I suppose one could. Of course, again, understandably from the point of view of the people in Cambridge who are beginning now to archive scientists’ lives in various ways, I hadn’t, to be honest, thought about that. We have an archivist in our department, a very nice woman, and maybe that’s the thing to do, is to suggest they go into the archive and, you know, I have no hesitation to suggest that, I mean it hadn’t really crossed my mind I’m afraid, it’s such a personal creation, it’s what I need at the moment. Yes, or even dare I say, the British Library. Again, not for me to say, but yes.

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Have you been asked or felt yourself under pressure by sort of heads of department, heads of this department, for example, to build up a group?

No, not really. Again, in England and perhaps in Cambridge, a great deal of the sort of communication and sort of understanding is almost done by eyebrows, you know. And the thing is, you know, in my own way I think I’ve had a moderately successful career and have done the things which one is expected to provide in terms of publications and books and giving public addresses and that sort of thing, but I think to our benefit, although I think the world’s changing and now there’s increasing pressure to, so-called mentor, and I don’t doubt actually it’s much more difficult to be a young scientist than it was when I started my work in the seventies, especially in terms of raising funds and so forth. But the Earth Sciences Department I think is extremely generous in the sense that it’s a department rather than a group of self-seeking groups which are all in rabid competition, both with each other and also with the outside world. So I’ve heard stories, for instance, in the United States, that the amount of floor space you earn, and here we are in a fairly big office, is directly proportional to the amount of grant money you’re bringing in. And there’s a sort of logic there, I can understand that. And I have brought in some money, so it’s not as though I’ve been completely incompetent, but nothing like the sums of money which many of my colleagues and friends have brought in. But in the end one has to decide, for better or worse, what sort of cohesion you want and what are the limits of tolerance, and probably I’ve overstepped too much in terms of my own sort of, if you like, career in comparison to building up these groups. And there we are, you know, it’s not a question of apologies, I hope, but nevertheless, it’s not the traditional way.

[15:38] Thank you. Last time you said something like critics would say that I conflate my Christian beliefs with my scientific programme. You say critics, your critics would say that, has that actually happened? Have you been criticised along those lines? If so, by whom and when?

Well, I’m led to believe, but I can’t be bothered to waste time on it, there is a lot of stuff, so to speak, out there on the web, both people, you know, who might share some of my views and those who very much don’t. And again, this probably sounds very arrogant, I can’t be bothered. Good luck to them, I’m afraid to say. For instance, at the moment, for reasons I don’t

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understand, I’m caught up with a email exchange with a group of people and it’s impossible to unsubscribe to this, or if it’s not impossible, it’s very difficult. And as soon as I see these things I delete them immediately. Some of them may actually touch on areas I’m quite interested in, but it isn’t the way I want to work, and I don’t have the time, unlike many of my colleagues, who do engage in extensive correspondence, much of it very productive and genuinely involving a dialogue between different people. And I can see again that perhaps in the future, even more so than today, the sort of, if you like, the invisible college, as it’s sometimes called, will be sort of even more electronic and dispersed than it is in the present day, and perhaps again I’m missing something, but you know, the trouble is that time is short and a great deal of what I regard as being of importance is not touched on by some of my colleagues, or is oblique or possibly even fallacious. So I just don’t have the patience to wait and weed this stuff, I’m afraid. So the sense I get, without sounding excessively paranoid, is that in the West and to a lesser extent in this country than probably the United States, to declare yourself as a Christian and also to be a scientist, is regarded as a sort of split mind. This sort of attack one often has in terms of the general area, not me specifically, that how could anybody sort of possibly subscribe to these things and yet subscribe to the scientific method. They somehow think these things as being so irreconcilable that one needs a reality check. And of course I’d return the compliment in spade loads and say you’re the people who need a reality check, not me.

And have you had any experience of sort of direct criticism from colleagues or sort of hearing about someone else speaking about your Christianity negatively? So not electronic, but sort of real world?

Not so much. I mean again, in Cambridge – sorry, I don’t want to sound too Cambridge-centric but I spend most of my life here, I mean I travel quite extensively but, you know, by and large one’s sort of real life is here, because most of the other time is just short periods to do research or to give talks and so forth – is to the first approximation there’s a great deal of tolerance. I mean some people say actually Cambridge is in its own way is a university more Christian than many other places, after all, traditionally historically almost without exception every college has a chapel, they have a dean and/or some more junior member of the clergy there, to assist mostly the undergraduates, and most of that of course is pastoral and I think very few people would disagree that in itself that’s very valuable, given the sort of pressures a lot of younger people are

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under. And, you know, there are sufficient numbers of examples of people who clearly were very far from stupid, and we’ve mentioned him many times in the past, but CS Lewis being an obvious example, who did spend some years in Cambridge, of course, to at least return the compliment that not all of us are sort of swivel-eyed, knuckle-walking types, and the like. I mean, it might be worth, I don’t know if this is a fair example or not and I don’t intend to sort of read it out, but I did write a short chapter in this book some years ago now and it was republished, called Real Scientists, Real Faith, edited by Dennis Alexander, and the title of the book – please stop me if this is of no interest to you at all – One Impossible Thing Before Breakfast: Evolution and Christianity. And in there I sort of, you know, draw attention to somebody who’s – if you don’t mind me just reading this tiny bit out, it’s pointing out that the people who sort of are very opposed to the sense that a scientist could be also a Christian, ‘On the contrary, the disagreement is strident, often vitriolic, let me give you two examples’. And there’s one I give which is not directly aimed at me, but this chap, an Australian I think, just says, ‘I should first state my metaphysical position, I am an atheist, the arguments for theism appear so preposterous that they’re finding any favour can be accounted for in my view only by sociological means’. So that’s very much a no prisoners. The odd thing about this particular paper is it’s really got nothing to do with theology and science hardly at all, it just sort of comes in out of the blue. And then subsequent to that is somebody who makes some remarks about my own work, a chap called Jürgen Brosius, who I think I’ve met at one stage, but he, as I write – if you don’t mind me reading this out.

No.

Sorry, I don’t normally believe in reading my own stuff out, it’s sort of pretty grim isn’t it. But yes, a footnote in a journal he wrote, and Brosius writes as follows: ‘Although it is highly beneficial to occasionally challenge – note the split infinitive – to occasionally challenge entrenched concepts. And here Brosius is referring to Conway Morris’s papers in 1998 and 2003. I wonder whether this is a poorly disguised attempt to let religion participate in evolutionary thought. If you can’t fight evolution, join it. Instead of catering to the ultra-naïve creationists, Conway Morris 2003 appears to target a more intelligent segment of our non- rationalist population, perhaps those who should know better but cannot liberate themselves from infantile imprinting in religious indoctrination.’ So again, that’s a sort of no prisoners statement.

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‘The relevance of the attack is more obvious than Oldroyd’s, the one I mentioned just a moment ago, but once again one wonders what this little barb is meant to achieve. We can pass by the presumed tacit compliance of the editors who are charged with the control of a scientific article as against mere polemic in a very well respected journal. All one can say is it certainly takes a very strange view of religious belief. It is perhaps regrettable that Brosius did not care to enquire of me what my own views of, quote, ‘ultra-naïve creationists’ might be, let alone bother to quote me on this issue, but that I suspect was hardly the point’. So, I don’t want to… that didn’t rile then and it doesn’t rile now, one’s grown up enough to realise that people have these particular agendas and that they do tend to get rather excitable about these. But that epitomises what I very much regret, is this sort of deep division, this chasm in the sense that if you subscribe to these ideas then somehow one is sort of intellectually, if not mentally, deficient. And that does tell me a great deal, you know, beyond this there are many other examples. And I’m not for a moment saying Brosius or Oldroyd are in any sense inclined to that view themselves, but we know very well in politics and in some areas of religion, these things can turn poisonous very quickly indeed. So, you know, I think when one starts to make observations on an apparently irreconcilable difference between people, you need to be careful.

[23:18] Can you expand a bit on that? What is the danger, what is the very dangerous endpoint of that separating?

Well, my complaint would be really that although I can entirely appreciate why materialists have such great difficulty in thinking about these concepts, and I can see how you could perhaps live, I don’t see quite how, but you could live in an enclosed world which is entirely materialist. I’m not sure it’s really the world I particularly want to inhabit myself, but I can see nevertheless, you can develop a world picture of that sort. It’s more the view that because science itself as far as I can see is an entirely open-ended venture, and we don’t actually know what we’re going to discover next, whereas those areas, which I think currently include evolutionary biology, seem to be more in a sense of closure, there’s not really any sort of particular enthusiasm to wonder whether there are new things to discover, it seems to be mostly, as we say, dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s, or vice versa. I would have just said, well hang on a moment, you know, it may well be that there are fundamental questions, the one of course which interests most of us is

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consciousness, which genuinely may not be resolvable with our current scientific apparatus. Now, if it turns out that they are, well, that’s fine, we know the Nobel Prizes will be given, and good luck to the people who are sufficiently ingenious and clever to resolve this long-standing problem, but one can say not for want of trying. And this is not in any way obscurantist, it’s merely to say that in a certain way it seems we’ve rather reached the limits of what is possible using an understanding of the universe as merely being physical or material, if you like. So, it’s just a cautionary note, you know, and we may well find things which actually are not reconcilable with Christianity, but the context in which we find the world in the future may be very, very unlike the world we think we understand today and anybody who knows the science of history will know that things like phlogiston, useful stuff, perfectly sensible, had its own sort of hypothetical uses, nevertheless is… or the ether connecting the bodies in space are in fact non- existent. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be used, and in fact they provoked experimentation, and so one could argue the same applies to current understandings of consciousness, and the like. So that’s really my complaint, it’s just I’m a bit wary when things are dismissed out of hand as being simply impossible. You know, as one says in another context, how could you be sure?

[26:14] Have you throughout your career felt freer to publish pieces of writing that raise questions about the sort of metaphysical implications of various kinds of science, have you felt freer to do that as your career has gone on, so that I think last time you said that The Crucible of Creation contains a few sort of hints in code, I think you said, and then Lonely Humans, there’s a conclusion, and then The Runes of Evolution is sort of more straightforwardly asking these questions. Have you felt in some way freer throughout your career to publish on this sort of thing for any reason?

I’m afraid not. No, I think so far as one is autobiographical I think simply reflects my own thinking as it’s developed. And perhaps even my interest in convergent evolution. Maybe we talked at an earlier stage, probably goes much deeper than I sort of remember, but because I don’t keep a diary of that sort, nor am I particularly interested to do that sort of exercise, I think it’s as much as one’s, well, to say progress, but so far as one’s thinking begins to move in certain directions. So things which would have probably have seemed outlandish thirty or forty years ago now seem in their own way to make much more sense. And again, I enjoy that very much because I have, you know, a strong sort of hunch, if you like, that there’s a great deal more one

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can learn about these areas and of course it’s a matter of regret that most likely I’ll die long before, you know, if one had a sort of a life span of two or three hundred years then, you know, one probably – I’m not asking for that, by the way – but, you know, if one did, then probably there would be a number of things which at the moment I find very puzzling which actually turn out to be, not straightforward, but put into a wider context. So it’s more, so far as I can explain it, it’s a question of ever widening horizons, which sounds rather grandiose, but in a way analogous to the way I’ve understood convergent evolution, thinking back to our ants and our orchids, if one sees connections which hitherto were not obvious, then one ends up with a wider picture, which in its own way is still coherent. I mean that’s the plan, I mean whether it will come to anything further I wouldn’t like to say, but the scientific method does provoke you and as we were discussing a moment ago, if one’s looking at the experiments done on animals’ capacity to appreciate causality and the like, going full circle, why is it that something which is so glaringly obvious to us seems to be completely opaque to these creatures, what is this invisible barrier. And as I said before, it may simply be that they don’t need to know. After all, thinking doesn’t come cheap, big brains are expensive, animals have to survive and reproduce and feed and all these sorts of things, it’s obvious that they have to invest a lot of effort in things which ultimately lead to mental abstractions, except that of course we now find ourselves in a world which in a certain sense is completely artificial. Most of us would do rather badly on a desert island.

[29:25] Thank you. To what extent do you separate your scientific writing and, if you do, your popular science writing? So, when you’ve been writing about some of the papers that have really caught your attention it’s been because a scientist writing in a scientific journal has, as you’ve put it somewhere, gone off piste or sort of slightly gone beyond a sense of how they ought to be writing and thinking in a scientific journal by appearing to raise questions that go beyond the science. And I wondered to what extent you sort of police yourself when writing a paper for a scientific journal and drop that when you’re writing popular science, so how you negotiate that?

Well, again, with respect I don’t see it in that sort of division.

Okay.

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Really for two reasons. I mean first of all I think I write reasonably fluently and in a sense whatever I write, I enjoy writing. Whether that’s actually true is for others to judge, obviously. But more importantly, if I’m doing a particular scientific investigation, of which I do rather little now, only because, as I think I might have mentioned, I know I can do it, I don’t always get it right, but you know, I don’t want to keep on doing that. Some people remain fascinated in their very specific area to the end of their lives, and so do I in a general sort of way and whenever I see a paper written by somebody which is a nice piece of work I always think great, you know, wonderful, fascinating, well done, you know, I wish I’d thought of that, sort of thing. But more particularly because of the scientific method and the way papers are written, they have to be extremely focussed, they’re not meant to go off piste. And the sort of work I do, especially on fossils, it’s mostly dealing with, you know, things which in one way or another have some degree of being enigmatic, we don’t understand them fully. One has a strong hunch again that come ten years’ time, like a paper, for instance, I’ve just finished reviewing, by a group I think in Sweden, I think they’ve actually made some very nice progress, but the fundamental problem of what these fossils are actually related to is entirely unresolved. So one step, but not a mile’s journey. So, in the same way as when I’m writing those sorts of papers, you know, they just aim to do something extremely specific. I mean the more general writing, of course, is more enjoyable inasmuch as you have more freedom and you can think about things in a more general way. But even so, having said that, I don’t think I’ve yet attempted to write anything which, if you like, even remotely aims to encapsulate my different areas of thinking. I’m not sure I’d be able to do that. I mean it’s bad enough just this recent exercise learning about animal thinking, mentality, consciousness, question mark, and all these other capacities, it’s very, very demanding. And apart from anything else, I’ve enjoyed it very much because it’s a relatively new area to me, I know some of the people who work in this area, but what comes through so startlingly, and I think under-appreciated amongst the scientific community as a whole, is just how incredibly difficult these experiments are. You can arrange an experiment, which you think is absolutely water-tight, to investigate some aspect of an animal’s decision making, and almost invariably it turns out there’s this one or other flaw in it. This is not a criticism, it’s just making experiments which really work, and especially dealing with small numbers, quite often dealing with captive animals, which are very much habituated to human company, and all these other things, and the fact that in a number of cases one or two of the animals are sort of Einsteins of

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their species, but most of them really are as thick as two short planks and just don’t get it whatever you try and do. And again, if you read between the lines, not infrequently the ones which are the absolute dunces are quietly put to one side. And this is not of course very surprising. We know perfectly well that amongst humans that there are some people who are immensely gifted and most people of average intelligence and alas, one or two who are often the most decent people in the world who are not terribly smart but have other resources which of course are not necessarily self-evident in the academic world, and so on and so forth. So yes, it’s not a thing that somehow again one is trying to divide one’s world into compartments, it is in a way the world is a complicated place and sometimes you can deal with a very fine-grained question and sometimes you’re invited to speculate. More often my limited experience is when I give talks, which are sort of broadly on either evolutionary convergence or what I call evolutionary myths, which are not fairy tales but areas, as I think we previously discussed, which are long overdue for a slightly more critical look. It’s the discussion provoked amongst the audience, the great majority of which are usually not scientists, some cases, not always, they are believers of one sort or the other, and very often hold very strongly felt opinions and not infrequently feel that somehow in one way or another science is threatening their belief. So, so far as I can reassure them, one’s trying to say no, I don’t quite see the world that way. And it’s not so much acting as a bridge builder, it’s more trying to say, well science does these things very well indeed, but to claim it has a supremacy above everything is, I think, a risky suggestion.

Thank you. [35:06] Could you tell me, in as much detail as you can, about your relations with the John Templeton Foundation from the sort of beginnings to the present? There’s some fairly obvious sort of markers, such as the Map of Life website on the way through, but how did it begin, including if you can remember the sort of, the people in the foundation that were involved in joining you up with them, if you like, in some way?

Well, I’m beginning to wish I kept a diary. It’s all too late. So far as I can remember, and again, as I’ve said many times in the past, it’s not that my memory’s fallible, it’s simply it doesn’t bother me very much, so I’m glad to be provoked. As far as I can remember, initially it was a contact with a chap called Charles Harper, Chuck Harper, who’d actually done a PhD on

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radiometric dating in Oxford, so had a scientific background and he’d been employed by the John Templeton Foundation. And he was a sort of, if you like, not a troubleshooter, but he spent a lot of time going round the world just hearing about people who might in one way or another have research programmes which might be allied in one way or another to what John Templeton Foundation wanted to do. And he came to see us in Cambridge and I think probably either at that stage or subsequently encouraged me to put together a grant application to them and ultimately that was approved and that in the end provided the Map of Life website, which is doing okay. And related to that I got involved, I think I’ve been twice on the sort of board of advisers in slightly different ways, and been to a number of meetings which they sponsor, and specially through the help of a woman called Mary Ann Meyers who’s in Templeton. Charles Harper and the Templeton rather fell out, and I’ve heard various stories and they don’t really matter very much, but in any event various meetings in often quite enjoyable places, Chicheley Hall quite recently on extraterrestrials, and also meetings in the States and Italy and so forth, one or two. One was in fact in the Vatican, where of course the sort of papal academy of science is. So all of these are areas where Templeton thinks that there are potentially fruitful conversations with scientists. And the people they tend to look towards are very often physicists, cosmologists and so forth. And for instance, Martin Rees who, I can’t be sure this is true, but I think that he is probably at least an agnostic, but he’s a winner of the Templeton Prize some years ago, I know Martin fairly well, very distinguished man in many, many respects. So it’s not as if Templeton is looking for just cheerleaders. John Templeton’s view, vision if you like, a chap I never met, was that there’s a great deal more to the world than meets the eye and science is a very important part of understanding but it ain’t the whole story. And then more recently there’s been a sort of spin- off from the Templeton, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and our second grant came from them and that was to develop the 42 Evolution website. So, in various ways they had a major programme on evolutionary convergence, they invited applications, I was asked to sort of work on a panel, which I was happy to do. So yes, I’ve had various dealings, occasionally research proposals come my way, and all the rest of it. So it’s been a reasonably close association and in the broad scheme of things, going back to your previous points or questions, this would be regarded perhaps not with complete favour by some people, inasmuch as they regard the sort of Templeton being almost analogous to the worst of the Jesuits, you know, sort of skulking around in the background and seducing innocent young minds towards things which are not good for them. And they’re not, any more than Jesuits are Jesuitical, no more are the

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Templeton Foundations, at least in my view. And in a certain sense I don’t envy them because the total number of staff there in comparison to the amount of money which they are able to dispose, is really quite small, it’s partly a family firm. And also I’m told, don’t quote me on this in a manner of speaking, but actually the success rate has fallen markedly simply because they have so many more applications. In fact recently I think their success rate has been not much more than you would see in a typical research council. And I think, it depends, there are one or two people who would never touch the John Templeton Foundation or its associates with a bargepole ever, ever, ever, but actually quite a number of scientists, although you might complain they’re chasing free money, understand, you know, that there are sufficient extensions to their work which really do touch on quite general questions which interest many people. And I think they’re, you know, I don’t think they’re just doing this cynically to get the dollars in, they genuinely feel that, you know, again, in evolution there are some interesting questions which might be put in a wider framework.

[40:30] Can you tell me more about Chuck Harper?

That’s all I know, what I told you, I’m afraid. As I say, he fell out with the Templeton, I have not been in touch with him since. I always got on with him fine, I mean he was, with the greatest respect, a slightly larger than life character. But the thing which impresses me about a number of the people in the John Templeton Foundation is first of all their sort of transparency, and also just their sheer energy, they just live in airports. And you might say, well that’s their job isn’t it? But even so, this sort of unflagging interest in trying to talk to people who might have interesting things to say and as often as they can, I’ve been involved with a few of these enterprises at a meeting with Paul Davies, for instance, in Phoenix. Paul Davies is quite well known as a sort of astronomer, cosmologist and also interested in the so-called shadow biosphere, the possibility that there is an alternative biosphere on this planet which is not DNA based. And I think he’s probably wrong, but on the other hand I don’t mind whether he’s wrong or right, simply because it’s a very interesting idea, just suppose. So, they like to try and get some sort of publication or, you know, some tangible product and typically in a book, or something like that. So I’ve contributed to a number of those as well. But again, I don’t regard myself as being a sort of creature of Templeton. We’ve been, I think, fairly happy with each other’s sort of results, if you

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like. The last grant’s just finished, the final report is with them, we hope they give it its final blessing, but that remains to be seen.

[42:15] Who was involved in the second grant for the most recent website then if Chuck Harper was involved?

Oh, I forget. I think… dear oh dear. It was probably, again, he would correct me immediately, it was partly Denis Alexander, but more particularly it’s a chap called Andrew Briggs, who’s sort of, I’m not quite sure what his exact position is, but he’s very high up in the Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is a physicist/material scientist in Oxford. He does run a big group, he’s a very, very competent physicist. He’s also an obvious Christian. I know him moderately well, I think, and he too in a certain sense has, if you like, this drive to make things happen and the like, and he too spends a lot of time talking to people, travelling with people, you know, finding out what they’re doing, seeing if there’s something here which Templeton can help them and if you like, they can help Templeton. But in a sense Templeton, you know, broadly is a philanthropic foundation and that is exactly why they’re there. And clearly they want to make sure that the money is disposed of as best as possible. They may get some things right, no doubt they make mistakes like everybody else. But yes, that’s more or less, and these people again have been very encouraging. And we put in another grant more recently which failed. But there too, I mean you know, obviously it’s a matter of regret, but the sort of feedback and the discussions which followed from that again were positive.

What did, when you said that Chuck Harper came to see us in Cambridge, who was the ‘us’?

Well, gosh, I can’t remember in detail. Again, the emails have long disappeared if they ever existed and if not out of the blue, he just, probably I got an email just saying I’m so-and-so, I’d like to meet you, and the like, and we met down in coffee as I recall, I think, heaven this is probably fifteen years ago, maybe more than that, and he just explained who he was and what Templeton was about and he was interested in what I was doing at the time. And it developed from there, and again, without this sort of virtual diary and keeping a record of those conversations or the dates or anything like that – I have a few dates I can dig out of my

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university diary, because they go back from when I first came back to Cambridge, but they’re nearly all just, you know, appointments.

And so perhaps he’d read one of your books, if it had been fifteen years ago?

He may have, I don’t know. Again, I mean obviously in a certain sense it’s the invisible college where they just say, look, you might want to go and talk to this guy because we think he’s doing some interesting work, or not, as the case might be. And if nothing had come from it, that wouldn’t have bothered me at all. They’ve been very helpful and I’m very grateful to them and I think the two websites in their own way are pretty good.

[45:13] What did you do on the board?

Mostly, well there were two, first of all there was a so-called European Board which used to meet, one time we were in Vienna, once in Paris, as I remember and then more recently they had meetings in Philadelphia. But in essence they’ve actually now decided to abandon that system, they’re actually going to reorganise themselves in various ways. And it was sort of more or less to do with sort of broad strategy, if you like, where are the areas we should develop. So you have this usual breakout groups and all this sort of stuff. And usually you’d have one or two people come along, very distinguished people, who’d give a lecture or something like that, put things in some sort of framework. And the American system is really in many ways quite different from the English, the way they operate, in a certain way, their way of interacting with each other and so forth. They love to dine round circular tables. Bit like the Chinese actually. And those sorts of things. But yes, it was really these areas we wanted to develop and usually it was based on some sort of theme as well. So it might so far as possible be associated, at least the one in Vienna I think was associated with a meeting about Gödel, Gödel’s Theorem, and the deep nature of mathematics. So some of the people would go to the meeting and then come to our meeting and so on. So again, always trying to, you know, always trying to extend their contacts, who to talk to, why are they doing interesting work, and the like. But again, all the paperwork I long since disposed of. Two-day meetings, typically. And then excursions, so in Vienna we went off to Melk Abbey, for instance. And again, it’s just a chance to talk to people,

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so people you might be unlikely to chat to, once you’re sitting together on a bus or just walking through, you know, a garden or a monastery or a museum, you just get into conversation in the normal way, so it’s a way of, you know, making contacts in a positive way.

Was there anything over your time doing this sort of thing inside the Templeton anything that you, not disapproved of, but were uncomfortable with or thought was a waste of time or an avenue that wasn’t worth going down, or dangerous ideas, that sort of thing, things that you looked at negatively?

Well, you’d expect me to say this wouldn’t you, because I’ve been a beneficiary of them, but no. No, I mean… you could always ask, you know, can you run an organisation in a different way, but certainly, given it is fundamentally an American organisation, that country has particular ways of doing things which have great strengths and sometimes weaknesses, and that’s equally true in this country and in other respects. But I think in fairness to them, one thing they’re often accused of is sort of, you know, cosying up in one way or another to people who are interested in so-called intelligent design. And so far as I’m here to defend them, I would say, and I’ve said elsewhere, absolutely not, no. I mean they’re not sort of cryptic people who are trying to smuggle these agendas in in the way that intelligent design does try and do that. I mean, as I understand it, Sir John Templeton himself was more or less a Unitarian, so I’m not saying this is true of Unitarians as a whole, necessarily him, but very broadly perhaps more pantheist, if you like. The sense that there are spiritual realities in the world, but they certainly wouldn’t be reduced to a Christian Trinity. Whereas my view would be of course that only having the Trinity makes any sort of sense at all, because that actually explains the world as it operates, but that again is not a view shared by everybody. But his son, who recently died, relatively young, was, I think, Episcopalian. So more, if you like, mainstream Christian. And undoubtedly the majority of the people who work for the Templeton Foundations are Christian. Not, so far as I know, exclusively, and certainly to the best of my knowledge it’s not, unlike certain American universities, a requirement. So it’s not a thing that this is sort of, again, are sort of in a cryptic group of people who are burrowing away like those Jesuits deep into the, you know, the heart of society. So they’re unembarrassed about the fact that, as I would certainly subscribe to, the world around us, as I’ve said several times in the past, is much more interesting and much more complex and in certain ways much more unknowable than is sometimes supposed. Now,

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whether these research agendas they are promoting are necessarily ones which are going to get us that far, time only will tell. It’s very, very difficult because I think overall, you know, one sees, as with the case of possible animal consciousness, we sort of seem to run into the buffers quite early on.

[50:15] You said earlier in the interview that your church attendance has always been fairly erratic. Does that continue to be the case, and then question part two, do you in some way pray or worship out of church?

Well, it’s less erratic now only inasmuch as living on Church Street, there is a nearby church and our present incumbent, a man called Nick Moir, is, I think by general agreement, a superb priest. In all senses he’s a very intelligent man, he’s pastorally wonderful and in the Church of England traditionally on a Sunday of course there’s a main service which is usually aimed at families, there’s an Evensong which is something which is done very well in many of the Cambridge colleges, chapels, but there’s also the so-called 8 o’clock, which is the Book of Common Prayer, which is effectively sort of seventeenth century language, if you like. And that’s the service I normally go to. So that’s communion of course, and it has an English, which is deeply felt and extremely succinct, encapsulates what one’s trying to do, without guitars or tambourines, if you like. So that, if you like, is my preferred service. Occasionally I go to college because they have a Sung Eucharist on a Sunday, with our choir in St John’s, which is a very high standard, but less often than I used to go. So in a sense, if people said to me are you a regular church attender, I am, and normally it’s at the 8 o’clock and in fact quite recently I’ve been helping as a sidesman, so you just welcome the people in and typically you have a congregation of between twelve and fifteen, so it’s small, and mostly people of my age. Very few young people, but it’s a little bit like those mysterious women you find in the Moscow flats, the concierges, babu, and of course, every time you go there, they’re still there but you haven’t been for twenty years, so in a certain sense I think were self-replacing. You come to a stage in your life when actually, you know, the sort of worship you want to engage with is more traditional, if you like. That’s certainly not true of many people and I have no quarrel with however they wish to do it, I’m not in any way saying it’s better or worse. Outside that, I’m afraid I’m very slack.

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Does that mean no prayer at all?

Oh, some, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

[52:48] Thank you. Can I ask you a question about the – this is really raised by all of your books but I’ve read The Runes of Evolution most recently – and that’s…

Good heavens. Oh, thank you. [laughs]

Again a question about biological space, and I’m probably asking this in a naïve way, but just in case people listening to the recording need this clarified in the way that I think I do, to what extent is biological space, which is sometimes used as a sort of metaphor, you know, writing, to what extent is it actually just physical and spatial so that why isn’t it possible to understand convergences as just the outcomes of something rather boring like the environment or material spatial limits of what can happen, rather than as pointing to invisible fields or a wider mind or organisms being pulled or attracted. Why is the fact that there are huge areas that can’t be occupied, a few areas that are repeatedly occupied, why isn’t that just the outcome of, you know, geography and physics, if you like. The fact that all the organisms are evolving on this planet and not anywhere else.

Well, in one sense that’s absolutely correct, yes. And the test case will be as and when, if ever, we find another biosphere on a planet circling some remote sun, the degree to which it is genuinely similar. And if it’s wildly alien, then I’ll just have to say fair cop, I was wrong. I don’t think it will be, I think there’s enough strength in my mind and many other people’s arguments to suggest there really are constraints. So again, as with many areas of science, and indeed probably theology as well, and perhaps everything else, you can look at it at different levels and to begin with, as perhaps I’ve mentioned previously, first of all evolutionary convergence is perfectly well understood, it’s a commonplace in biology, but on the other hand I think its relative ubiquity, so to speak, has been under-appreciated, and more particularly at least I think in Life’s Solution, I point out that perhaps surprisingly that the adjectives used when evolutionary convergence is being addressed are almost always adjectives of surprise. Uncanny

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is quite often used, ‘this was an uncanny example of convergence’, ‘this was an astonishing example of convergence’, ‘this was surprising’. And one says, well why, this is adaptation, this is the way Darwin understood the world, and as we understand as, if you like, his inheritance. So that’s a sort of, if you like, a little sort of, you know, warning mark that there might be something else going on. But I certainly wouldn’t want to extrapolate this to the broad points you were making. It might be ultimately there’s some sort of connection there, you know, things to do with mind and so forth, but in essence the thing about biology is that it deals with what a chap called Elsasser, I think, called ‘immense numbers’. So in other words, because of the orders of magnitude, the powers of ten, if you go from say, ten to the forty, to ten to the eighty, this is almost immeasurably larger. It’s not a bit more, it’s a great deal more. And so I’m told there’s something like ten to the ninety particles in the visible universe. It’s a very big number indeed, it’s beyond our comprehension. But if you look at biological systems, if you think of all possible combinations, you typically end up with values of something between ten to the fifty to ten to the 200. You know, these are immensely large numbers of alternatives, and yet, although there is no sort of, if you like, general theory which allows you to predict what you might expect to find, the number of so-called solutions, hence the book Life’s Solution, is very, very small indeed. And the implication is that the occupation of, if you like, hyperspace, all those dimensions which of course mathematically I’m told are reasonably tractable, but far exceed our familiar three dimensions, is an infinitesimally small fraction of all possibilities and that in a certain sense doesn’t explain convergence, but that’s why things are convergent, because they keep on returning to these particular solutions which are, if you like, stable and then correspondingly – and sometimes used in biological descriptions of convergence is one I came across to do with pollination of flowers, especially by bats and by humming birds and so forth, is again they refer to this arrangement as analogous to an attractor, the way a physicist would understand it. And the famous example of the convergence between the marsupial sabre-toothed cats and the real cats, the sabre-toothed cats we find in the northern hemisphere versus the marsupial sabre-toothed cats which are also extinct and lived in South America. The degree of similarity is not precise, if it was I’d be very worried indeed, because it would suggest evolution didn’t happen, they’ve each got their evolutionary footprint. But nevertheless, they are startlingly similar. And as I think I’ve said elsewhere, another thing which becomes clear, which is not quite to do with hyper-dimensional space, but things which at first sight look really quite different from each other, actually have a deep-seated similarity and are employing the same

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sorts of functions and mechanisms and so forth. So that’s really… and then one sort of says, well, in the same way as an imperfect analogy you can say well, why does the periodic table exist, why do we have these ninety-two stable elements with one tiny exception. And I’m not a nuclear physicist, but from the little I understand about it there are particular combinations of elementary particles which are sufficiently stable, and of course there are unstable isotopes as well, but overall these things exist in a much larger potential field of possibilities, which will never ever be realised, they cannot be. And correspondingly you can say, well that ultimately depends on particle physics and perhaps deeper than that systems of physics we only sort of glimpse. And correspondingly beyond that we end up with something called chemistry when these elements talk to each other. So there’s a level of understanding, each one of which is intelligible in its own level but is consequent on the other, both upwards and downwards. I think biology is, if you like, analogous to that and a Soviet scientist, his name was Vavilov, who was an expert on grasses, and of course in Stalin’s day there was great interest in improving agriculture and these sorts of things, so they had expeditions to various parts of Asia looking for new varieties which might potentially be turned into cultivated wheats or barleys or similar. And Vavilov sort of had, again, far ahead of his time, this sort of notion of a periodic table of life. Vavilov’s story again is very tragic, he fell foul of Stalin and the system and eventually died basically of starvation, imprisoned in Stalin’s Russia, and of course he fell foul of Lysenko, so that’s another set of stories. But the idea then is that evolution is, if you like, almost an echo of fundamental organisation in biological systems. And one says, well if that is the case, why is it organised in this way, and correspondingly, how out of it do we have one particular species which can understand this. So there are connections there, but again, I’m not trying to build up some immense sort of empire of causes and consequences and it all makes sense, I think that way lunacy lies, you know. It’s just saying that if these things provoke you to think about other possibilities, then this is a legitimate exercise. It may end in tears, it may turn out to be a false question, it may simply be that, you know, our understanding of it is too imperfect to make any progress at the moment. But again, one feels one’s dealing with unfinished business.

[1:01:14] Thank you. And earlier you were reading something from one of your books. Is it okay if I just quote from The Runes of Evolution in order to ask a question…

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You can try, yes.

…about it.

I probably won’t remember what I wrote, with any luck.

This is really about, well, on the one hand it seems to be about your preference for a certain kind of metaphor, but I think there’s probably something more to it than that. You’re talking about biological convergence and you say, ‘There are several metaphors that try to capture this idea. One is to think of stable positions, attractors if you will, that act as irreversible magnets. An alternative metaphor, which I prefer, is to imagine a map across which life must navigate. The landscape, however, is extremely difficult and it is only by the narrowest of roads that life can thread its way through inaccessible mountains and past impossible chasms.’ And then having declared your preference for this metaphor, indeed throughout the book we have; geometry of life, historical pathways, biology travels through history but ends up at much the same destination, metaphorical landscapes with adaptive peaks, etc, etc. So why, I suppose can you explain why it is that you prefer those metaphors, whether the answer is sort of autobiographical or whether actually there’s a kind of logic for preferring that over the idea of the attractor, which is I suppose an idea in physics, which again, often physicists talk about chaotic landscapes don’t they. But yes, so I think…

Well, I’m afraid to say I hadn’t really thought about it and probably that’s a very good thing. So far as I can answer it, it is first of all perhaps – I’m not an artist at all, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not mathematical, I’m not numerate and I can only admire those people who see reality in the equations, and they do, there’s no doubt about it at all, talking to colleagues and friends about this. So that’s the way I have to think, if you like. And then related to that, perhaps a connection is that, as I think we talked earlier, you know, when I was a boy I would go off and cycle myself quite substantial distances, just for the fun of it, not to achieve anything. I think maybe I mentioned, I mean one time I came back to Sunday lunch and my father said, ‘Where have you been?’ and I said, ‘Oh I cycled to Guildford’. And he said, ‘You can’t have done that’. But I think I did, from Wimbledon. And corresponding travelling with my mum, various sort of places, you know, there was often cycling or walking, sometimes by

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myself, which I enjoyed very much in any case. One deals with landscape the whole time. And we were just talking at coffee today about various things to do with the Duke of Wellington, apart from anything else, was that he was famous for ‘seeing beyond a hill’. He was a brilliant strategist, not least because he understand the weakness and strengths of particular positions; where you might be vulnerable, where you might have strength. So partly, you know, and again we were talking about the history of East Anglia at a time really when it was sort of drained and before that when the sea was much closer to Cambridge and so forth, you know, the landscape has evolved the whole time. So once you begin to see a landscape, it becomes richer, if you like. And as soon as I explained to you, and partly I suppose helped by geology when you know the geology of these islands, then, you know, what appears to be just a line of hills to one person actually is part of the fabric of the country. So I guess in those different sorts of ways I’m more attuned, if you like, to a topographic thinking and the like, be it whether one was going with one’s crazy mum on the Peloponnese somewhere on a bus through mountains, you know, and somehow sort of taking it for granted [laughs] and as I say, at a very impressionable age. I guess, I almost make this up, again, I’ve never sort of thought about it in that sort of way, other than say my total failure in numeracy means that I cannot articulate what might be captured in a mathematical way. And that’s simply, well, I’m not sure it’s a failing, but it’s a fact.

The fact that you mentioned there that you talked of mathematically inclined colleagues about the way that they think raises the question about the extent to which your relations with other Fellows of St John’s College over the time that you’ve been there have played a part in your sort of thinking and your work, speaking to, you know, Fellows from other disciplines.

Well, to some extent I’m sure. But again, without sort of stretching my autobiographical memory, it’s not like that. It’s more that this is a community of souls, if you like, the great majority of which you get on with quite well, one or two you don’t, but that’s in the nature of 150 people thrown together. But overall I think it’s widely agreed that St John’s is a happy college and doesn’t have some of the divisions and enmities and cliques and rivals which you get in some colleges, perhaps. So it’s congenial, if you like. And again, the sense is that if you’re talking to somebody – and again, I have several colleagues who are even more widely read than I am, because I’m sort of quite interested in quite a lot of things, almost invariably you can find something to talk about. So yes, if you like, there’s this community of discussion. But the idea

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that High Table is a sort of hothouse of sort of deeply intelligent debate on areas of immediate and historical and universal interest, I’m afraid would be an exaggeration. Most of it’s gossip. But gossip may in fact serve its own purposes. But it’s not hostile gossip, at least I hope not. And perhaps I mentioned previously, in terms of direct inspiration, there was a philosopher called Renford Bambrough, who died some years ago, he got a rather ghastly sort of senility, it was tragic to see his last few years. And he directed some of my attention to some philosophers in a very sort of understated way. So that was very valuable and of course the point is that perhaps, like my work on convergence, perhaps anything I do, as soon as I find one thing out, almost invariably the mind begins to race. You know, you begin to think, well supposing this, supposing that, what might the connections be? So quite frequently you come across stuff which is in a way congruent with where you think your thinking is going. So that I think is perhaps, I mean the great advantage of the college of course is that we have people from almost every subject. So today we had lunch and you were sitting beside a historian who was an expert on Spanish and Portuguese medieval history, and on the other side is a former professor of Italian; an expert on Dante and also Italian art. Now, we didn’t talk about those things, but if I want to say something about Vasari, for instance, or the counter-reformation, I know immediately that those people will be able to tell me something about those things which I didn’t previously know, if I need to discover. And occasionally of course it’s simply a matter of simply naked help, I mean I hope this is not a boring story. Some years ago I had a telephone call from lawyers and the long and short of it is that my father died intestate and apparently some of the money as a, executor of a will, he being a solicitor, should have been disbursed and wasn’t, which is very odd, I don’t understand this. But in any case, this woman had died, and this was, I think, in the seventies, and had asked money to go to various charities, and they hadn’t. And I don’t understand how that had happened, but the money was found in limbo. And these people on the phone told me that it was my responsibility to disburse this money and they as a consideration would take about twenty-five per cent of that money. And there are indeed sort of these graveyards of funds which are unclaimed, and good luck to them. And I happened to be talking to – I’d better not say who it is, not so much as to embarrass him – but I was talking to a colleague who’s knowledgeable about the law and I said, I’ve got this request, what should I do about it? And he said I’ll go and think about it. And he came back a few days later and he said, well as it so happens, if a person dies without a will, that is intestate, then your liability as an executor of that estate finishes at that point. Had he left a will, I would have been responsible,

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but because of a piece of legislation passed in the 1920s, I could simply write back to them and say I propose to take no further action. So… and I gave them a couple of bottles of very good wine as a thank you, of course. And it’s not that, you know, I would grudge going to a solicitor, which I otherwise would have done, but nevertheless, it’s this ability to have conversations with people on almost anything under the sun, which is a unique privilege really, and really very few other universities, they may have a faculty club and so forth, but this ability to just, if you are reasonably intellectual and you want to talk about something, then you will almost certainly find something you didn’t know by the time you get up from the table, which is no bad thing. So yes, that’s the thing. But not in the sense of, you know, people badgering me and saying gosh, this is exciting work. Everybody takes for granted that they are publishing good work, that they are making an impact on the wider world. And, as we were talking to another colleague just briefly who was on the television last night, another historian, and so forth, you know, some people get very engaged in this world, so it’s a public world.

[1:11:23] Thank you. Are there certain environments where it’s more where you are, or perhaps you think other people might be more likely to sense that there is something more to life than just the obvious physical things that you can see? So are there certain environments in which you get sort of closer to the mysterious? This is inspired, I think it’s in The Runes of Evolution again, ‘In England at least we lament that at night our countryside, once a realm across which the mysterious was never very far away, is now more often than not daubed with pools of yellow vomit’, which suggests that there might be certain places that you can go to where in the same way that you’ve talked about listening to music and that sort of taking you closer to some kind of transcendent or other realm, are there certain environments where that happens?

Well, I think there are. I don’t think Cambridge per se ranks high on the level of the numinous, by and large, and it’s perhaps a little unfair to refer to sodium lamps as ‘vomit’, but that’s another story as to why in fact people under sodium lights look so absolutely hideous, and there is a scientific explanation for that due to our ability to perceive colours, which actually is very interesting, and I do briefly refer to in The Runes of Evolution as it happens, based on the work of an American. But I think again, it’s not so much that, it is undoubtedly there are places which seem to me to be quite mysterious and sometimes they’re recurrent, if you go back to that place

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it’s the same, other places it’s entirely unexpected. Let me turn it, if you like, completely back to front. A few weeks ago I was giving a talk, which I think may not answer, but at least qualify your very fair remarks, giving a talk to a group of people – again, the details are entirely unimportant – here in Cambridge, and I finished these talks with a couple of stories of, if you like, the paranormal, perhaps mentioned previously. One is the case of Harold Owen who was the brother of Wilfred Owen, the famous poet, and is a very well-known story. Shortly after Wilfred Owen’s death in the trenches, he appears in his brother’s cabin in this boat off Africa and as Harold Owen says, I knew instantly what had happened, he was there in his uniform, so he knew instantly that his brother was dead. And you can say well, this is because he was worried about his brother, you know, if you’ve got a sort of life expectancy of about five weeks on the Western Front you mustn’t be over-surprised if you don’t come back. But Harold Owen in the two accounts he gives in two different books is insistent that he really saw his brother, so you make of that what you will. I think he did. Most people just say well, he had malaria, you know, he was worried, blahdy-blahdy-blahdy-blah. But any case, afterwards I was just chatting to a guy, I was just leaving the room in the college, not St John’s, and a chap, one of the people who was at this sort of mini conference, came up to me, he said, I found that very interesting. You know, when I was about sixteen or so, my grandmother, who’d been dead for years, suddenly there she was in front of me. And also, his grandmother apparently had had diabetes, had had limbs amputated, was in a wheelchair, and had died when he was about four or five, but there she was intact and he just insisted that was his grandmother, you know. This was entirely unprovoked, and you might say well, perhaps he regrets, as a rather gauche, brash young boy, not being more considerate of his grandmother who may, for all we know, have been a bit of a handful, complaining in a wheelchair and, you know, over the years began to realise that other people have thoughts and matter. You can make whatever you like, but he just insists, and this was entirely unprovoked. He just said, I enjoyed your story, I found it very interesting, I tell very few people about this, so he didn’t come rushing up to me and say, you know, I just bumped into him when I was leaving. So yes, all the time, and I think again, if you’re willing to keep your mind open and not be surprised, you can go sometimes for years and nothing happens and then every now and again maybe somebody’s story, or it may be something you experience yourself, and they’re entirely unpredictable. If you go looking for them you’ll never ever find ‘em, and I know other people who have such experience is reasonably common, but they don’t make a song and dance about it. In fact in certain cases they actually don’t like them, because

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they’re quite disturbing and there’s one particular friend of mine who has a relative and she knows when somebody in the family’s died, straightaway. These stories are common and, again, you can just say well, they’re wish fulfilment or because our way of understanding our families and our friends and so forth, we know perfectly well, or we might sense that somebody’s more vulnerable, in the same way as dogs often sort of get an idea that somebody’s not very well. You know, there are lots of possible invisible signals people send out, but enough of these are sufficiently detached, a little bit, as you say, as we were discussing very briefly, Rupert Sheldrake’s ideas about dogs which the master or mistress leaves home at irregular intervals and the dog instantly knows when the master or mistress is on his or her way home. And they are anecdotal, not all dogs show this, that’s for sure. And you can imagine other explanations, but dogs are very, very curious creatures, as perhaps we discussed previously. I read a lot about them in the last year or so, about their behaviours and so forth, and basically they are, well, to be unkind, they’re social parasites, but on the other hand, they are basically symbiotic with us. They have not a clue what we’re thinking, have not got the foggiest, but on the other hand are extensions almost of ourselves, and perhaps almost vice versa. Possessing a dog is a very curious phenomenon. We also talked very briefly earlier on about these dogs which find their way home over enormous distances, there are many, many such examples. And you might say well, you know, their sense of smell is remarkable, and we do know that in some cases the degree of dilution of a smell can be far, far beyond what any human could manage, and yet that gives them the clue. But some of the distances these animals cover, and this one I gave you of this dog which actually gets on another ship and ends up in the same harbour as his owner’s ship, separated by the Pacific, again, is a curious story. I don’t take these things in my stride, but I’m in a certain sense unsurprised by them, because I think the world actually works in a more interesting way.

Have you, you mentioned at the beginning of that that certain places are more mysterious than others, is that something that you have…

Occasionally. Yeah, every now and again, yeah. But, as I say, if you go looking for these things you won’t find it. It’s not a thing you can just turn on. It’s on a thing, you know, it’s not like taking a drug or sex or alcohol where, to the first approximation, you’ve got a fairly good idea what you’re going to get, sometimes very good, sometimes less good, but this is entirely unlike

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that. This is a thing of almost familiarity, but also the sense you really are, for want of a better word, almost on the edge of another world.

Can it happen anywhere?

Oh yes. I mean I would suggest areas full of noise, of pollution, of hideous architecture are less likely, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, so it doesn’t have to be rural, it doesn’t have to be in the country. But it’s, for want of a better word, it is a sense, I mean there’s a wonderful story I think by HG Wells, I hope I have it right, called The Green Door, I think it is, where this chap in the end – and I’m sorry, I paraphrase, it’s some years since I’ve read this story and I probably… we’ll get letters about this, I can see, correcting me on the author and the name and the plot, there we go. But in a sense this chap is walking along the road and there’s this sort of rather fascinating door in a wall which is painted green and it somehow has a sort of fascination to him, and then I think, if I can remember the story, one time he goes through and suddenly finds himself in a completely different world, and of course it’s a very common trope of fairy stories and suchlike. And he tries to tell other people about it, and I’m sorry I mangle the story so successfully, but eventually he doesn’t come back and he’s found in a sort of pit which was probably just dug, naturally dead. So he’s gone through into this other thing. The little I know about HG Wells, I wouldn’t think he’d have much time for that, other than being a very gifted storyteller, and I’ve no reason to think he’s actually developing a story on some story he was told, but it is that sense that just beyond your fingertips, actually there are – well, it sounds ridiculous – but yes, there are other worlds.

Has anything like this happened to you in Cambridge?

I don’t recall, no. But elsewhere, yes. I won’t go into the details. They don’t matter, frankly. And again, it’s not at all a thing of having power over these things or that somehow heaven is sort of that sort of thing, or hell for that matter, no it’s not that at all. It is simply the sense that if you enclose yourself entirely and are just manically busy and manically distracted, and surrounded by continuous noise, then it would be that much more difficult. But in point of fact, very rarely, at least so far as I’m concerned, one gets the sense of the numinous, as it’s usually called, and again, like my friend who told me about his grandmother, or Wilfred Owen appearing

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to his brother Harold, these people insist, so far as they can insist on anything, that they’re not making it up. And what else can you do with, you know, they are real. And you can say of course, well, they’re distressed or not paying attention, or drunk or whatever you like. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, it’s not a hallucination, they insist. And you know what, people know what hallucinations are like.

[1:22:16] Could you tell me about your interest in extraterrestrials, including I think you’ve got some, you’ve had some relations with SETI, in America?

That’s right. Again, I hope I’ve called them correctly, the SETI Institute, which is based in Mountain View, or near Mountain View in California, near San Francisco. And part of my interest in that is because if I’m right about convergence, then extraterrestrials, especially sentient ones, will really be very similar to us, that’s the suggestion. So they won’t really be alien at all, time will tell. And at one time, there’s a couple of people I know, one of whom is still I believe in SETI, a very interesting man called Seth Shostak. And there’s another chap I got to know a bit, called Chris Chyba, a very remarkable man who’s both a scientist and interested in political theory, very, very intelligent, both of them, in many different ways. And Chris Chyba, if I remember correctly, worked with Carl Sagan at one stage. So these are people who are interested in the possibilities. And of course that whole area has developed enormously with the recognition of extra solar planets and all the rest of it. And a lot of work has been done on so-called extremophiles, these are organisms which live in the most extreme of terrestrial environments and might well find close analogues elsewhere on remote planets. We might well have much more harsh environments than we associate with. So there’s a lot of activity, scientific, going on there. And the interest then is going back to Enrico Fermi’s thing, where are they? And my own conclusion with the subtitle of Life’s Solution is, you know, Inevitable Humans but we’re alone, which is completely ridiculous. And I suppose it’s something of a stalking horse and it’s quite amusing to irritate people and say no, there isn’t anybody there, you know. And they say well, that can’t be right, can it, it can’t be right. So there are lots of possible explanations. There’s a book written by a chap called Stephen Webb which has got sort of forty- nine different explanations for why we don’t see extraterrestrials, from they don’t exist at all, which he thinks is very unlikely as I remember, to we blow ourselves up or we can’t be bothered

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to travel, you know, our visas are revoked, whatever you like. But any case, I’ve dabbled perhaps more than anything else, and several meetings in SETI again, they were interesting set- ups and research programmes and with my interest in biology they thought I might be able to have something useful to say to them, and again, highly enjoyable, very diverse group of people from physics and chemistry, biology and so forth, you know, just seeing what are the sort of things you could do. And also, I mean one thing which I’ve appreciated more fully now, you might think, naively as I would, you’ve got a radio telescope, you point it to the sky and you just put your earphones on. Of course it’s much, much more difficult than that. Not simply the lack of dedicated time to that sort of use of the instrumentation, but the sorts of things that really are a needle in a haystack. And all one can say is, I think, more powerfully is that first of all, perhaps we discussed this previously, and I apologise if I repeat myself, that it’s clear that the majority of stars have planets, if not practically all. And not all will have earth-like planets, but very many will. Not all will be in the so-called habitable zone, but some will, and so on and so forth. And if I’m right about convergence then that gives you some encouragement. The other thing which is far more sobering is that planetary systems closely similar to the solar system were probably beginning to form seven, eight billion years ago. So in other words, they got a head start on our solar system of between two to four billion years. And if you sort of assume that one has a trajectory of technology, exploration and so forth, then if you assume – this of course is laden – that one has a way of colonising a galaxy, then the long and the short of it is we shouldn’t be here, this planet would have been colonised sometime in the Neoproterozoic or the Cambrian. I make the joke, they arrive and they see these small little fish-like objects and somebody says they look jolly nice, and somebody else says, did you bring the Montrachet? Out it comes, here you are. [makes popping noise] Like this. And that’s us, our ancestors, Pikaia, on toast. Delicious. Very nice. So that’s the thing I think is a real headache, because even if you only assume one in a thousand planets and one in a thousand of those develops a civilisation, one in a hundred of those develops star travel, you only need one to do it. So there are various ideas in a really, well, two strands of investigation, if you like. One is the widespread assumption now which terrifies me that actually anything we’ll be looking for will be a machine-based intelligence, it won’t be carbon-based, because in a certain sense they’re immortal perhaps and indestructible and survive in regimes far more robust than any human could. And the second thing which is sort of weird crazy papers which have very few citations and almost certainly mad, but the sense that perhaps they’re either there. After all, if it’s a piece of nanotechnology

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maybe there’s one on my bookshelf here looking at us. Unlikely, of course, but… Or alternatively, again, if the universe is constructed in a, for want of a better word, a more complex way than we realise, there are other ways, if you like, you can slip between the fingers. All this is crazy and I think it’s crazy as well, but I think Enrico Fermi’s point, where are they, really has reinforced the problem, you know. A number of apparently convenient exit strategies don’t look as though they’re going to work now. So something doesn’t add up, big time, as I’ve said in a number of places quite recently. There are even people who suggest we actually live in a virtual universe. And you think that’s crazy isn’t it, and it probably is, but as soon as you say, well how do you go about proving or disproving that, you can do it, there are ways you can test it.

[1:28:42] What are they?

Well, this is partly – I must keep an eye, the time, sorry – it’s influenced by a chap called Stephen Baxter, who I’ve never met, and in fact a chap called Mike Hanlon, who regrettably died very recently rather young, who was a journalist, a very sort of enthusiastic chap. He was very nice, he wanted me to get involved with some stuff in Dorset which I didn’t want to get involved with at all, so I feel sorry about that. But he sent me this science fiction story, or stories, one of which is called Touching Centauri, and effectively Baxter’s interested in both, mostly through the medium of science fiction, but also through scientific papers – and please don’t ask me to justify the details – if you were to build a virtual universe, then the total computational power of an entire visible universe would only allow you to make a real universe, so to speak, around about two, three hundred light years in diameter. So in essence, when Galileo was looking at the moon, it’s virtual, it’s not really there at all. But once we go there then it’s got to be made real and, you know, this is like The Matrix, which is a film I’ve never seen, but that’s what I’m told. So correspondingly the experiment here is, and again, just for the sake of the story, nothing else, is that they shine a light beam at a planet orbiting a nearby star and because they know precisely when the light beam will be bounced off again, and detected, you know, within a few milliseconds, everybody’s waiting for the echo, so to speak, and nothing, because that body out there doesn’t exist. And at that stage effectively the game is up. And then the whole thing begins to unravel. And it’s a story called Touching Centauri and it’s very sort of powerful and probably, again, it’s a story, but it just provokes you to think just supposing… and I don’t think

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it’s correct, but I think again, I do begin to suspect that, you know, as I keep on saying, the world such as we live in is a great deal more strange than we realise and I don’t know any scientific way really of investigating it, other than, if you like, Baxter’s let’s bounce a light beam off a virtual object. But it’s a way again of provoking people to think, supposing. So, yeah?

[1:31:09] Does the sort of breadth of your interests lead you to sort of receive correspondence from sort of people and from groups that you sort of wish you hadn’t? So I haven’t asked, for example, whether you’ve been approached by creationists at any point in your career because of their misreading of your work or sort of hope about that sort of thing, and of other sort of groups and people?

Not much, no. I don’t want to go into the details. I had one run-in with the ID crowd where I don’t think they acted decently, let’s put it that way. I don’t want to say anything else about it, it’s not very important. I don’t actually get much, no. I get occasional emails and I’m sorry to say, for the most part I just delete them, I don’t bother to reply. Partly because, again, I just don’t have the patience, and like a lot of these sort of discussion groups, there are some people who seem to be quite happy – perhaps you are, I don’t know – to spend hours on the web, this constant chatter. That’s fine, but not for me, thank you very much. And yeah, mostly I’m probably too selfish, but occasionally it seems to me that somebody’s asking a question which I can actually helpfully answer, but most times, I had one recent one, the whole point of their argument and position was so, so far as I was concerned, off the scale that by the time you’d unpacked it, it would take hours and I don’t think anything would have been achieved. I perhaps mentioned I have a, if you like, a correspondent, a chap I’ve never met, who quite regularly sends me clippings and sometimes books, mostly to do with the paranormal, he’s actually acknowledged in The Runes of Evolution, and occasionally I write back to him and say thank you, and I occasionally say do you want some postage, and he says no, no. I know nothing about him at all. I can’t even remember now how he first sent me material, but I read the stuff he sends. And very occasionally get the other sort of bit of correspondence, but not very much I’m afraid, really. But again, I don’t go out of my way to be sort of a public figure in that sense and recently have had, occasionally get invitations to do television, but I usually say, well I’ve got an agent and that’s the end of the discussion. They’re happy to have your services for nothing, but

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fees leave them cold. So I don’t, again, I’m happy to help, I’m happy to do TV interviews as long as I’m, you know, an area I’m comfortable with, but I don’t want to go out sort of looking for work, if you like. And that’s fine, some people do it very well and good luck to them, but it’s not something, you know, I think I do it moderately well, but I quite enjoy it when I do it, but it’s not something which makes my life tick, if you like. So no, overall it’s pretty sort of muted, in fact. I don’t get, you know, every day I don’t get an email questioning me on one thing or another. But I get some pretty strange emails, probably about two a month, and I’m afraid to say nearly always I just look at them and delete them.

What is pretty strange?

Oh, could be anything. Various people, you know, images on Mars, buildings on Mars or occasionally you get some chap in Colorado, I think, who writes to me about pyramids. For all I know there’s something worth talking about, but I just don’t know anything about it and there’s nothing I could usefully say. Again, I’ll keep an open mind about it, I’m not saying that, you know, this isn’t worth talking about, but I’ve got nothing useful to say.

[1:34:56] Thank you. And finally, could you, I think I’m right in saying that Crucible of Creation is published by Cambridge University Press.

Well, actually Oxford University Press, but it doesn’t matter.

Oxford University.

It’s unimportant, no.

And then the next, Life’s Solution by...?

That was by Cambridge, that’s right.

And Runes of…?

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That was by Templeton.

Okay.

And is there any, I mean I don’t know anything about publishing, but is there any reason why there’s three different publishers for those three different…?

Not particularly, no. In fact The Crucible was commissioned originally by a Japanese publishing company called Kodansha, and they are very successful publishers, I think, and they produce these almost sort of pocket books, and there’s a bit of a story there because it was being translated by one chap and a chap who subsequently became a friend of mine, was looking at the translation, realised it wasn’t very good, really because the chap working on it wasn’t a palaeontologist, and he generously said look, I’ll take it over. So he did a lot of work with that and in fact subsequently he translated also Life’s Solution, which was also published by Kodansha. Any case, Crucible was commissioned by Kodansha and I think sold, in the way of things, I think sold very well indeed, it sold tens of thousands of copies, but that’s the Japanese market for you. You know, they’re cheap and people are avid about science and so forth there and they take them on the trains and on the subways and travelling in Japan is always an experience and they’ll probably read two of these a week. So, you know, there’s a lot of this stuff around and Oxford, we sent it via my agent, Barbara Levy, to Oxford and they were interested and took it on. I had a friend called Bruce Wilcock, who I think didn’t help me directly, but had worked in Oxford University Press, a delightful man. And then subsequently Life’s Solution arose from some lectures which Trinity College here had asked me to do, Tarner Lectures, and that provided a nucleus of thinking. And that, I think, went straight to Cambridge and they accepted it. But then with the last one, Runes of Evolution, we had endless rejections, and I think, one can become paranoid about this, but I think they think, oh, here’s this biologist who’s got, you know, a religious side to him, and publishers are very, very nervous about this, because the materialists, not always, but sometimes are very, very noisy, and they’re good at making a loud, loud fuss. And that’s of course by no means, is no means unique to this area, there are lots of very, very noisy people around and perhaps our politicians should occasionally put a bit of wax in their ears. But be that as it may, in any case eventually it was taken by

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Templeton. We had a sort of offer from an American press, but wisely or otherwise, we didn’t go with them. But certainly I think Oxford, Cambridge, one or two others, weren’t interested in it at all. Whereas Templeton were, I’m very happy with what they’ve done, I think they’ve done a very nice job. I should say that, shouldn’t I, but I think it’s very professional and well laid out, very long. And I’ll probably try and write another book, but again, I don’t really know where we’ll find a publisher. But going back to your previous thing of saying well, in a certain sense, are there enemies, are there people out to get you, once you put yourself in the position I am now, there are areas of distrust, which don’t bother me at all, but one has to be aware that one is, if you like, something against the flow.

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