Two things:
First of all, I wonder if we don’t have too much comedy these days. When I was a kid I used to hide under the bedclothes with an old radio I’d got from a jumble sale, and listen enraptured to Beyond Our Ken, Hancock, The Navy Lark, even the Clitheroe Kid, anything that made me laugh. It was like showers and rainbows in the desert. Then there was I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again and a few short years later the full glories of Monty Python. The thing about Python that hit me like a thunderbolt, and I really don’t give a toss if this ends up in “Pseud’s Corner,” was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn’t be expressed any other way. From where I was sitting in my boarding school in deepest Essex, it was a thrilling beacon of light. It’s curious to me that the Pythons came along just as those other great igniters of a young imagination, the Beatles, were fading. There was a sense of a baton being passed. I think George Harrison once said something similar.
But nowadays everybody’s a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.
Creative excitement has gone elsewhere—to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate. So this is my second point.
Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And when one idea fails, there’s another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as fast as rock albums used to in the sixties.
There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: “These scientists, eh? They’re so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know they’re meant to be indestructible? It’s always the thing that doesn’t get smashed? So why don’t they make the planes out of the same stuff?”
The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn’t really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium, they’d be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb—in other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behaviour, you should try living with it) that didn’t rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.
My turn toward science came one day in about 1985 when I was walking through a forest in Madagascar. My companion on the walk was the zoologist Mark Carwardine (with whom I later collaborated on the book Last Chance to See), and I asked him, “So come on then, what’s so special about the rain forest that we’re supposed to care about it so much?”
And he told me. Took about two minutes. He explained the difference between temperate forest and rain forest and how it came to be that the latter produced such bewildering diversity of life but was at the same time so terribly fragile. I fell silent for a few moments as I began to realise that one simple piece of new understanding had just changed the way I saw world. I had just been handed a single thread I could now follow into the tangled ball of a bewilderingly complex world. For the next few years I hungrily devoured everything I could lay my hands on about evolutionary science and realised that nothing I’d ever understood about it at school had prepared me the enormity of what was now swimming into my view. The thing about evolution is that if it hasn’t turned your brain inside out, you haven’t understood it.
Then to my surprise I discovered that it was converging with my growing interest in computers. There was nothing particularly profound about that enthusiasm—I just unashamedly love playing with gadgets. The connection lies in the counterintuitive observation that complex results arise from simple causes, iterated many times over. It’s terribly simple to see this happening in a computer. Whatever complexities a computer produces—modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur—it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon.
It’s much more difficult to see it happening in the case of the evolution of life. The time scales are so vast and our perspective so much complicated by the fact that it’s ourselves we’re looking at, but our invention of the computer has for the first time let us get a real feel for how it works—just as our invention of the hydraulic pump first gave us an insight into what the heart was doing and how the circulation of the blood worked.
That is also why it’s impossible to divorce pure science from technology: they feed and stimulate each other. So the latest software gizmo for transferring an mp3 sound file from one computer to another across continents is, when you peer into its innards and at the infrastructure that has given rise to it and that it, in turn, becomes part of, is, in its way, every bit as interesting as the way in which a cell replicates, an idea is formed within a brain, or a beetle deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest digests its prey. It’s all part of the same underlying process that we in turn are part of, it’s where our creative energies are being poured, and I’ll happily take it over comedians, television, and football any day.
Present somebody with a questionnaire clipboard, and they lie. A friend of mine once had a job preparing a questionnaire for people to fill in on the Web. He said the information they got back was enormously heartening about the state of the world. For instance, did you know that almost 90 percent of the population are CEOs of their own companies and earn over a million dollars a year?
Is There an Artificial God?
This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn’t think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, thought, “What could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you’re just a bunch of guys! It’s been rife with ideas, and I’ve had so many myself through talking with and listening to people, that I’d thought what I’d do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I’ll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there’ll be an outburst of chair-throwing at the end.