An Appetite for Wonder Read online

  That paragraph encapsulates the central metaphor of the book, and also its science-fictiony feel. Indeed, I began my preface with the words:

  This book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliché or not, ‘stranger than fiction’ expresses exactly how I feel about the truth. We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known about it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it. One of my hopes is that I may have some success in astonishing others.

  And the opening lines of chapter 1 continued the science fiction mood:

  Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

  Niko Tinbergen hated that opening, when the book was published and he read it. He didn’t like anything that suggested that humanity is an intelligent species, and he felt deeply wounded by the terrible effects we have had on the world. But that really wasn’t the kind of point I was making.

  I should say something about the last chapter: ‘Memes: the new replicators’. Given that the rest of the book thrust the gene to centre stage as the starring replicator in the evolution of life, it was important to dispel the impression that the replicator has to be DNA. In keeping with the science fiction mood of the opening, I pointed out that on other planets the evolution of life could be fostered by a completely different system of self-replication – but that, whatever it was, it would have to have certain qualities, such as high fidelity of copying.

  Casting around for an example, I could have used computer viruses if they had been invented in 1975. Instead, I lit upon human culture as a new ‘primeval soup’:

  But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

  The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.

  Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

  I went on to discuss various ways in which the idea of memes might be applied, for example to the spread and inheritance of religion. My primary intention, however, was not to make a contribution to the theory of human culture, but to downplay the gene as the only conceivable replicator that might lie at the root of a Darwinian process. I was trying to push ‘Universal Darwinism’ (the title of a later paper, based on my lecture to the 1982 conference commemorating Darwin’s death). Nevertheless I am delighted that the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the psychologist Susan Blackmore and others have run, so productively, with the meme ball. More than thirty books have now been published with the word ‘meme’ in their title, and the word has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (whose criterion is that it must be used, without attribution or definition, in a significant number of published places).

  Publication of one’s first book is a heady time for a young author. I made frequent trips to the stately neo-classical OUP building in Walton Street, and sometimes the London office in Ely House, to meet the various people involved in the complex business of production, design, marketing and so on. When it came to jacket design, the science fiction mood of the book led me again to the elegantly porticoed North Oxford door of Desmond Morris. As well as being a biologist, television personality, anthropological collector, (implausible) raconteur61 and best-selling author, Desmond is an accomplished surrealist painter. His paintings have an unmistakably biological feel. He has created a dreamscape in which other-worldly creatures live and move and have their evolution – for they do evolve, from canvas to canvas: just what was needed for The Selfish Gene. He was delighted by the idea of providing a jacket design, and Michael Rodgers and I went to look at the paintings on his walls and in his studio. The Expectant Valley stood out, not just for its bold colours and air of brooding fecundity, but also more mundanely in that it provided a convenient space to accommodate the title. We chose it with pleasure and I believe it enhanced the sales of the book.

  As it happened, Desmond had an exhibition around this time in a small gallery in Walton Street near the OUP building, and The Expectant Valley was one of the paintings on sale. Its price, £750, happened to be exactly equal to the advance the publishers had paid me for my book. The coincidence was too much to resist and, after repeated visits to the gallery during which I became fond of many of the paintings, I bought The Expectant Valley. I think Desmond was a bit embarrassed, and he kindly threw in another, slightly similar painting, The Titillator. The two go rather well together.

  The Selfish Gene was published in the autumn of 1976; I was thirty-five. It was reviewed widely, surprisingly so for a first work by an unknown author, and I still don’t really know why it received the attention it did. There was no launch party and no obvious fanfare organized by the publishers. Some months after publication it came to the notice of Peter Jones, one of the producers on the BBC’s ‘flagship’ science series Horizon. Peter asked me if I would like to present a documentary on the subject, but I was much too shy at that time to dare appear on television, and I recommended John Maynard Smith instead. He did a good job – he had a wonderfully warm and engaging manner – and the documentary, which had the same name, The Selfish Gene, must have given a good boost to the book’s sales, at least in Britain. But the broadcast came too late to account for the wide review coverage the book received.

  I don’t do it any more, but for that first book I kept a scrap-book of reviews, and I have just been glancing at them again. There were more than 100, and a rereading doesn’t generally bear out the common perception of the book as controversial. Almost all the reviews were favourable. Among early reviewers were the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, the anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Francis Huxley (son of Julian), the naturalist Bruce Campbell and the philosopher Bernard Williams, whom I came to know much later as one of those entertaining conversationalists whose wit had the capacity to ‘raise the game’ of any companion. There were hostile reviews from two biologists identified with the political left, Steven Rose and Richard Lewontin, and – more subtly barbed – from Cyril Darlington on the opposite side of the political spectrum. But these were rare. Most of the reviewers got the message, expounded it fairly and were very nice about the book. Especially warming for me were the highly favourable reviews by Peter Medawar and W. D. Hamilton. Hamilton even hit the particular nail I had originally targeted in my quest to answer Lorenz, Ardrey and the panglossians of the 1960s and the ‘BBC Theorem’:

  This book should be read, can be read, by almost everybody. It describes with great skill a new face of the theory of evolution. With much of the light, unencumbered style that has lately sold
new and sometimes erroneous biology to the public, it is, in my opinion, a more serious achievement. It succeeds in the seemingly impossible task of using simple, untechnical English to present some rather recondite and quasi-mathematical themes of recent evolutionary thought. Seen through this book in their broad perspective at last, these will surprise and refresh even many research biologists who might have supposed themselves already in the know. At least, so they surprised this reviewer. Yet, to repeat, the book remains easily readable by anyone with the least grounding in science.

  There was nobody in the world whom I would rather have surprised in such a way than ‘this reviewer’. I was also touched by the way Bill Hamilton ended his beautifully written review with poems, one by Wordsworth, and the other by Housman, whose Shropshire Lad I often found myself identifying with Bill’s complex personality:

  From far, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

  The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither: here am I

  . . .

  Speak now, and I will answer;

  How shall I help you, say;

  Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

  I take my endless way.

  Not a bad epitaph for an evolutionary scientist, and Bill Hamilton was probably the greatest evolutionary scientist of the second half of the twentieth century. While this volume of autobiography was in its final stages, I found a treasure among a bundle of old papers, with Bill’s handwriting at the top: it was a copy of the last page of his lecture notes, containing a rewriting of another Housman poem, ‘The Immortal Part’, to incorporate the idea of the ‘immortal’ gene. I have no memory of the lecture he is referring to, or when he gave it, and the paper is undated. I have reproduced it in the web appendix.

  Long after The Selfish Gene was published, Bill became my close colleague at Oxford and I saw him almost daily at lunch in New College. I am humbly proud of the role played by my book in bringing his brilliant ideas to a wider audience. But I like to hope, too, that there are other ways in which the book changed the way my professional colleagues think about their subject. I like to think it is no accident that, if you visit a biological field station in the Serengeti, or Antarctica, or the Amazon or the Kalahari, and listen to the active researchers talking shop over their beers in the evenings, what you hear will be laced with talk of genes. It’s not that they’re talking about the molecular antics of DNA – although that is interesting too – but the underlying assumption of these conversations is that the behaviour of the animals and plants under study is aimed at preserving genes and propagating them through succeeding generations.

  LOOKING BACK DOWN THE PATH

  PUBLICATION of The Selfish Gene marks the end of the first half of my life and a convenient point at which to pause and look back. I’m often asked whether my African childhood led me to become a biologist. I’d like to answer yes, but I’m not confident. How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history? I had a trained botanist for a father and a mother who knew the name of every wildflower you could normally expect to see – and both of them were always eager to satisfy a child’s curiosity about the real world. Was that important to my life? Yes, it surely was.

  My family moved to England when I was eight. What if they hadn’t? At the eleventh hour I was sent to Oundle rather than Marlborough. Did that arbitrary change seal my future? Both were boys-only schools. A psychologist might suggest that I’d have turned out a socially better-adjusted person if I’d been sent to mixed schools. I scraped into Oxford. What if I’d failed, as probably I nearly did? What if I had never had tutorials with Niko Tinbergen, and therefore followed my earlier plan to do biochemical research for my DPhil rather than animal behaviour? Surely my whole life would then have been different? Probably I would never have written any books.

  But perhaps life has a tendency to converge on a pathway, something like a magnetic pull that draws it back despite temporary deviations. As a biochemist, might I have eventually returned to the path that led to The Selfish Gene, even if I had then given it a more molecular slant? Perhaps the pull of the pathway would have led me to write (again biochemically slanted) versions of every one of my dozen books. I doubt it, but this whole ‘returning to the path’ idea is not uninteresting and I shall . . . er . . . return to it.

  The hypotheticals that I posed are relatively large. Take something utterly trivial yet, I shall argue, momentous. I’ve already speculated that we mammals owe our existence to a particular sneeze by a particular dinosaur. What if Alois Schicklgruber had happened to sneeze at a particular moment – rather than some other particular moment – during any year before mid-1888 when his son Adolf Hitler was conceived? Obviously I have not the faintest idea of the exact sequence of events involved, and there are surely no historical records of Herr Schicklgruber’s sternutations, but I am confident that a change as trivial as a sneeze in, say, 1858 would have been more than enough to alter the course of history. The evil-omened sperm that engendered Adolf Hitler was one of countless billions produced during his father’s life, and the same goes for his two grandfathers, and four great-grandfathers, and so on back. It is not only plausible but I think certain that a sneeze many years before Hitler’s conception would have had knock-on effects sufficient to derail the trivial circumstance that one particular sperm met one particular egg, thereby changing the entire course of the twentieth century including my existence. Of course, I’m not denying that something like the Second World War might well have happened even without Hitler; nor am I saying that Hitler’s evil madness was inevitably ordained by his genes. With a different upbringing Hitler might have turned out good, or at least uninfluential. But certainly his very existence, and the war as it turned out, depended upon the fortunate – well, unfortunate – happenstance of a particular sperm’s luck.

  A million million spermatozoa,

  All of them alive:

  Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

  Dare hope to survive.

  And among that billion minus one

  Might have chanced to be

  Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne–

  But the One was Me.

  Shame to have ousted your betters thus,

  Taking ark while the others remained outside!

  Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,

  If you’d quietly died!

  Aldous Huxley

  If his father had sneezed at a particular hypothetical moment, Adolf Hitler would not have been born. Nor would I, for I owe my improbable conception to the Second World War – as well as to much less momentous things that happened. And of course all of us can take the argument back through countless previous generations, as I did with my hypothetical dinosaur and the destiny of the mammals.

  Taking on board the contingent frailty of the event chain that led to our existence, we can still go on to ask – as I did a moment ago – whether the course of a named individual’s life is sucked back, magnetically, into predictable pathways, despite the Brownian buffetings of sneezes and other trivial, or not so trivial, happenings. What if my mother’s joking speculation were really true, if the Eskotene Nursing Home really had muddled me up with Cuthbert’s son and I had been brought up as a changeling in a missionary household? Would I now be an ordained missionary myself? I think geneticists know enough to say no, probably no.

  If my family had stayed on in Africa and I had persisted at Eagle rather than moving to Chafyn Grove, and then been sent to Marlborough rather than Oundle, would I still have got into Oxford and met Niko Tinbergen? It is not unlikely, for my father would have been hell-bent on my following him and half a dozen earlier Dawkinses into Balliol. Despite taking other forks in the road, pathways can converge again. The likelihood that they will do so depends on genuinely investigable matters such as the relative contribution of genes and education to adult abilities and proclivities.

  We can leave raref
ied speculations about hypothetical sneezes and converging pathways, and return to familiar territory. As a man looks back on his life so far, how much of what he has achieved, or failed to achieve, could have been predicted from his childhood? How much can be attributed to measurable qualities? To the interests and pastimes of his parents? To his genes? To his happening to meet a particularly influential teacher, or happening to go to summer camp? Can he list his abilities and shortcomings, his pluses and minuses, and use them to understand his successes and failures? This is the familiar territory I meant, and it is that trodden, for example, by Darwin at the end of his autobiography.

  Charles Darwin is my greatest scientific hero. Philosophers are fond of saying that all philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. I sincerely hope that is not the case, because it doesn’t say much for philosophy. A far better case could be made that all of modern biology is a series of footnotes to Darwin. And that would be a genuine compliment to the science of biology. Every biologist treads in Darwin’s footsteps and, in all humility, none of us could do better than to follow his example. In the closing pages of his autobiography he essayed a retrospective itemization of personal faculties lacked or possessed. Again in humility I shall do the same, taking his method of self-assessment as a model to be followed.

  . . . I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley.

  Here, at least, I can claim mental kinship with Darwin, although in his case the modesty was exaggerated.

  My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; I should, moreover, never have succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics.