An Appetite for Wonder Read online

  Yorick wished to become a bus conductor but, [Iris Murdoch] noted, was the only person in the history of the bus company to fail the theory test . . . During his single driving-lesson the instructor left the car as Yorick drove on and off the pavement.

  Having failed to make the grade as a bus conductor, and dissuaded by Wittgenstein (along with most of his other pupils) from a career in philosophy, Yorick worked as a librarian in the Oxford forestry department, which may have been his only connection with the family tradition. He had eccentric habits, took to snuff and Roman Catholicism, and died tragically.

  Arthur Smythies, grandfather to the Dawkins and Smythies cousins, seems to have been the first in my family to enter Imperial service. His paternal ancestors for seven unbroken generations back to his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather (the Reverend William Smythies, born in the 1590s) were Anglican clergy to a man. I suppose it is not unlikely that, had I lived in any of their centuries, I might have been a clergyman too. I have always been interested in the deep questions of existence, the questions that religion aspires (and fails) to answer, but I have been fortunate to live in a time when such questions are given scientific rather than supernatural answers. Indeed, my interest in biology has been largely driven by questions about origins and the nature of life, rather than – as is the case for most young biologists I have taught – by a love of natural history. I might even be said to have let down the family tradition of devotion to outdoor pursuits and field natural history. In a brief previous memoir published in an anthology of autobiographical chapters by ethologists, I wrote:

  I should have been a child naturalist. I had every advantage: not only the perfect early environment of tropical Africa but what should have been the perfect genes to slot into it. For generations, sun-browned Dawkins legs have been striding in khaki shorts through the jungles of Empire. Like my father and his two younger brothers, I was all but born with a pith helmet on my head.5

  Indeed, my Uncle Colyear was later to say, on seeing me in shorts for the first time (he habitually wore them himself, held up by two belts): ‘Good God, you’ve got authentic Dawkins knees.’ I went on to write of my Uncle Colyear that the worst thing he could say of a young man was:

  ‘Never been in a youth hostel in his life’; a stricture, which, I am sorry to say, describes me to this day. My young self seemed to let down the traditions of the family.

  I received every encouragement from my parents, both of whom knew all the wildflowers you might encounter on a Cornish cliff or an Alpine meadow, and my father amused my sister and me by throwing in the Latin names for good measure (children love the sound of words even if they don’t know their meanings). Soon after arriving in England, I was mortified when my tall, handsome grandfather, by now retired from the Burma forests, pointed to a blue tit outside the window and asked me if I knew what it was. I didn’t and miserably stammered, ‘Is it a chaffinch?’ Grandfather was scandalized. In the Dawkins family, such ignorance was tantamount to not having heard of Shakespeare: ‘Good God, John’ – I have never forgotten his words, nor my father’s loyal exculpation – ‘is that possible?’

  To be fair to my young self, I had only just set foot in England, and neither blue tits nor chaffinches occur in east Africa. But in any case I learned late to love watching wild creatures, and I have never been such an outdoor person as either my father or my grandfather. Instead:

  I became a secret reader. In the holidays from boarding school, I would sneak up to my bedroom with a book: a guilty truant from the fresh air and the virtuous outdoors. And when I started learning biology properly at school, it was still bookish pursuits that held me. I was drawn to questions that grown-ups would have called philosophical. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? How did it all start?

  My mother’s family came from Cornwall. Her mother, Connie Wearne, was the daughter and grand-daughter of Helston doctors (as a child I imagined them both as Dr Livesey in Treasure Island). She was herself fiercely Cornish, referring to the English as ‘foreigners’. She regretted having been born too late to speak the now extinct Cornish language, but she told me that when she was a girl the old Mullion fishermen could understand the Breton fishermen ‘who came to pinch our crabs’. Of the Brythonic languages, Welsh (alive), Breton (dying) and Cornish (dead), Breton and Cornish are sister species on the language family tree. A number of Cornish words survive in the Cornish dialect of English, for example quilkin for frog, and my grandmother could do the dialect well. We, her grandchildren, repeatedly persuaded her to recite a lovely rhyme about a boy who ‘clunked a bully’ (swallowed a plumstone). I even recorded one of these recitations, and sadly regret that I have lost the tape. Much later, Google helped me to track down the words,6 and I can still hear her squeaky voice saying them in my head.

  There was an awful pop and towse7 just now down by the hully,8

  For that there boy of Ben Trembaa’s, aw went and clunked9 a bully,10

  Aw ded’n clunk en fitty,11 for aw sticked right in his uzzle,12

  And how to get en out again, I tell ee ‘twas a puzzle,

  For aw got chucked,13 and gasped, and urged,14 and rolled his eyes, and glazed;

  Aw guggled, and aw stank’d15 about as ef aw had gone mazed.16

  Ould Mally Gendall was the fust that came to his relief,–

  Like Jimmy Eellis ‘mong the cats,17 she’s always head and chief;

  She scruffed ‘n by the cob,18 and then, before aw could say ‘No,’

  She fooched her finger down his throat as fur as it would go,

  But aw soon catched en ‘tween his teeth, and chawed en all the while,

  Till she screeched like a whitneck19–you could hear her ‘most a mile;

  And nobody could help the boy, all were in such a fright,

  And one said: ‘Turn a crickmole,20 son; ‘tes sure to put ee right;’

  And some ran for stillwaters,21 and uncle Tommy Wilkin

  Began a randigal22 about a boy that clunked a quilkin;23

  Some shaked their heads, and gravely said: ‘‘Twas always clear to them

  That boy’d end badly, for aw was a most anointed lem,24

  For aw would minchey,25 play at feaps,26 or prall27 a dog or cat,

  Or strub28 a nest, unhang a gate, or anything like that.’

  Just then Great Jem stroathed29 down the lane, and shouted out so bold:

  ‘You’re like the Ruan Vean men, soase, don’t knaw and waant be told;’

  Aw staved right in amongst them, and aw fetched that boy a clout,

  Just down below the nuddick,30 and aw scat the bully out;

  That there’s the boy that’s standing where the keggas are in blowth:31

  Blest! If aw haven’t got another bully in his mouth!’

  I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult. If I went into a Penzance pub and attempted to speak the Cornish dialect of English I’d be asking for trouble, because I’d be heard as mockingly imitating. But if I go to Germany and attempt to speak German, people are delighted. German and English have had enough time to diverge. If I am right, there should be examples – maybe in Scandinavia? – where dialects are on the cusp of becoming separate languages. On a recent lecturing trip to Stockholm I was a guest on a television talk show which was aired in both Sweden and Norway. The host was Norwegian, as were some of the guests, and I was told t
hat it didn’t matter which of the two languages was spoken: audiences on both sides of the border effortlessly understand both. Danish, on the other hand, is difficult for most Swedes to understand. My theory would predict that a Swede visiting Norway would probably be advised not to attempt to speak Norwegian for fear of being thought insulting. But a Swede visiting Denmark would probably be popular if she attempted to speak Danish.32

  When my great-grandfather Dr Walter Wearne died, his widow moved out of Helston and built a house overlooking Mullion Cove on the west side of the Lizard peninsula, which has remained in the family ever since. A lovely cliff walk among the sea pinks from Mullion Cove takes you to Poldhu, site of Guglielmo Marconi’s radio station from which the first ever transatlantic radio transmission was sent in 1901. It consisted of the letter ‘s’ in Morse code, repeated over and over. How could they be so dull, on such a momentous occasion, as to say nothing more imaginative than s s s s s s?

  My maternal grandfather, Alan Wilfred ‘Bill’ Ladner, was Cornish too, a radio engineer employed by the Marconi company. He joined too late to be involved in the 1901 transmission but he was sent to work at the same radio station at Poldhu around 1913, shortly before the First World War. When the Poldhu Wireless Station was finally dismantled in 1933, my grandmother’s elder sister Ethel (known simply as ‘Aunt’ to my mother, although she wasn’t her only aunt) was able to acquire some large slate slabs that had been used as instrument panels, with holes drilled in them in patterns that traced out their use – fossils of a bygone technology. These slates now pave the garden of the family house at Mullion (see the picture section), where they inspired me, as a boy, to admiration of my grandfather’s honourable profession of engineer – honoured less in Britain than in many other countries, which may go some way towards explaining my country’s sad decline from a once great manufacturing power to the indignity of being a provider of (often, as we now sadly know, rather dodgy) ‘financial services’.

  Before Marconi’s historic transmission, the distance across which radio signals could be received was believed to be limited by the curvature of the Earth. How could waves that travelled in a straight line be picked up beyond the horizon? The solution proved to be that waves could bounce off the Heaviside Layer in the upper atmosphere (and modern radio signals, of course, bounce off artificial satellites instead). I am proud that my grandfather’s book, Short Wave Wireless Communication, went through many editions from the 1930s to the early 1950s as the standard textbook on the subject, until it was eventually superseded around the time when valves33 were replaced by transistors.

  That book was always legendary in the family for its incomprehensibility, but I have just read the first two pages and find myself delighted by its lucidity.

  The ideal transmitter would produce an electrical signal which was a faithful copy of the impressed signal and would transmit this to the connecting link with perfect constancy and in such a manner that no interference was caused to other channels. The ideal connecting link would transmit the electric impulses through or over it without distorting them, without attenuation, and would collect no ‘noise’ on the way from extraneous electrical disturbances of whatever kind. The ideal receiver would pick up the required electrical impulses despatched through the connecting link by the transmitter of the channel and transform them with perfect faithfulness into the required form for visual or audible observation . . . As it is very unlikely that the ideal channel will ever be developed, we must consider in what directions we would prefer to compromise.

  Sorry, Grandfather; sorry I was put off reading your book while you were still around to talk about it – and when I was old enough to understand it but was put off even trying. And you were put off by family pressure, put off ever divulging the rich store of knowledge that must have been there still in your clever old brain. ‘No, I don’t know anything about wireless,’ you would mutter to any overture, and then resume your near ceaseless whistling of light opera under your breath. I would love to talk to you now about Claude Shannon and information theory. I would love to show you how just the same principles govern communication between bees, between birds, and indeed between neurones in the brain. I would love you to teach me about Fourier transforms and reminisce about Professor Silvanus Thompson, author of Calculus Made Easy (‘What one fool can do, another can’). So many missed opportunities, gone for ever. How could I have been so short-sighted, so dull? Sorry, shade of Alan Wilfred Ladner, Marconiman and beloved grandfather.

  It was my Uncle Colyear rather than my Grandfather Ladner who prompted me to try to build radios in my teens. He gave me a book by F. J. Camm, from which I took the plans to build first a crystal set (which just faintly worked) and then a one-valve set – with a large, bright red valve – which worked slightly better but still needed headphones rather than a loudspeaker. It was unbelievably badly made. Far from arranging the wires tidily, I took delight in the fact that it didn’t matter how untidy were the pathways they took, stapled down on a wooden chassis, so long as each wire ended up in the right place. I won’t say I went out of my way to make the course of each wire untidy, but I certainly was fascinated by the mismatch between the topology of the wires, which really mattered, and their physical layout, which didn’t. The contrast with a modern integrated circuit is staggering. Many years later, when I gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures to children of about the same age as I was when I made my one-valve set, I borrowed the hugely magnified layout diagram of an integrated circuit from a modern computer company to show them. I hope my young auditors were awestruck and a bit bewildered by it. Experimental embryologists have shown that growing nerve cells often sniff out their correct end organs in something like the way I built my one-valve set, rather than by following an orderly plan like an integrated circuit.

  Back to Cornwall before the First World War. It was my great-grandmother’s habit to invite the lonely young engineers from the clifftop radio station to tea at Mullion, and that was how my grandparents met. They became engaged, but then the war broke out. Bill Ladner’s skills as a radio engineer were in demand, and he was sent by the Royal Navy as a smart young officer to the southern tip of what was then Ceylon to build a radio station at that strategically vital staging post in the Empire’s shipping lanes.

  Connie followed him out in 1915, where she stayed in a local vicarage, from which they were married. My mother, Jean Mary Vyvyan Ladner, was born in Colombo in 1916.

  In 1919, the war over, Bill Ladner brought his family back to England: not to Cornwall in the far west of the country but to Essex in the far east, where the Marconi company had its headquarters in Chelmsford. Grandfather was employed teaching young trainee engineers at the Marconi College, an institution of which he later became head and where he was regarded as a very good teacher. At first the family lived in Chelmsford itself, but later they moved into the neighbouring countryside, to a lovely sixteenth-century Essex longhouse called Water Hall near the straggling village of Little Baddow.

  Little Baddow was the site of an anecdote about my grandfather which I think tells us something revealing about human nature. It was much later, during the Second World War, and Grandfather was out on his bicycle. A German bomber flew over and dropped a bomb (bomber crews on both sides occasionally did this in rural areas when, for some reason, they had failed to find their urban target and shrank from returning home with a bomb on board). Grandfather mistook where the bomb had fallen, and his first desperate thought was that it had hit Water Hall and killed his wife and daughter. Panic seems to have sparked an atavistic reversion to ancestral behaviour: he leapt off his bike, hurled it into the ditch, and ran all the way home. I think I can imagine doing that in extremis.

  It was to Little Baddow that my Dawkins grandparents retired from Burma in 1934, to a large house called The Hoppet. My mother and her younger sister Diana first heard of the Dawkins boys from a girlfriend, breathless with Jane-Austen-style gossip about eligible young newcomers to the neighbourhood. ‘Th
ree brothers have come to live at The Hoppet! The third one is too young, the middle one is pretty good news, but the eldest one is completely mad. He spends all his time throwing hoops around in a marsh and then lying on his stomach and looking at them.’

  This apparently eccentric behaviour of my father was in fact thoroughly rational – not the first or the last time a scientist’s motives were uncomprehendingly called into to question. He was doing postgraduate research based in the Department of Botany at Oxford, on the statistical distribution of tussocks in marshes. His work required him to identify and count plants in sample quadrats of marshland, and throwing ‘hoops’ (quadrats) at random was the standard method of sampling. His botanical interest turned out to be among the things that drew my mother to him after they met.

  John’s love of botany had begun early, during one of the holidays from boarding school which he and Bill spent with their Smythies grandparents. In those days it was quite common for colonial parents to send their children, especially sons, to boarding school in Britain, and at the ages of seven and six respectively John and Bill were despatched to Chafyn Grove, a boarding school in Salisbury which I too was later to attend. Their parents would remain in Burma for another decade and more, and with no air travel would not see their sons even during most school holidays. So between terms the two little boys stayed elsewhere, sometimes at professional boarding homes for boys of colonial parents, sometimes with their Smythies grandparents in Dolton, Devon, where they often had their Smythies cousins for company.