The Red Notebook

I’ve always admired Aubrey Manning’s BBC television programmes about the making of the British landscape, but, to my eternal shame, I must admit that I never before took the trouble to find out who he is!

It turns out that Manning is an extremely distinguished biologist, who wrote the book on ethology.

Drawing my brief trawl of the web to learn more about Manning, I came across a wonderful five-part YouTube video conversation between Manning and fellow ethologist Richard Dawkins. The video takes the format of a cosy chat between two scientists who clearly have great respect for each other (warning: the video contains an unscheduled appearance by a cat):

This is wonderful television. Except that you tend not to get this sort of thing on television these days, because clever people talking to each other is no longer seen as good television.

I do so much prefer it when Dawkins talks about actual science like this, rather than pursuing his relentless god-bashing. I think he’s far more effective at getting his message across when he takes this approach. I suspect, from what he says in the video, Manning might agree.

Ten out of ten!

Around this time of year, on my daily drive home from work, I am sometimes lucky enough to see one of Britain’s natural wonders: flocks of starlings wheeling in the sky above Chat Moss between Liverpool and Manchester. There are sometimes a couple of hundred of them. The displays can be pretty spectacular, but nowhere near as spectacular as in this remarkable video of starlings above Otmoor in Oxfordshire, filmed by Dylan Winter:

As Richard Dawkins explains in his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the starlings’ remarkable aerobatic ballet results from each bird within the flock following a relatively simple set of rules. The birds’ wonderfully complex flight patterns emerge from the cumulative, simple actions of the individual birds, in a similar way to water’s wetness and turbulence emerging from the relatively simple interactions of individual water particles.

In my opinion, the fact that such complex behaviour can emerge from simple sets of rules does nothing to detract from the displays; indeed, if anything, I would say that it adds to the Wow! Factor.

As a 100%, card-carrying, take-no-prisoners atheist, Richard Dawkins, like myself, must rue the fact that he will never get to meet his hero Charles Darwin in any sort of afterlife. Unlike me, however, Dawkins can console himself with the fact that he appears to have met the great man in a previous existence.

On Ash Wednesday, 20th February, 1828, five young men from Christ’s College, Cambridge signed their names in the Registrary’s book, thereby becoming undergraduates at the university. John van Wyhe’s excellent little booklet Darwin in Cambridge includes an image of their signatures:

Darwin’s and Dawkins’s signatures

That’s right, 181 years ago, Charles Robert Darwin and Richard Dawkins stood shoulder-to-shoulder and confirmed in writing that they were fully paid-up members of the Church of England.

I think Prof. Dawkins has some explaining to do.

One of the more useful developments in podcasting in recent years has been the publication of full, unexpurgated versions of interviews as supplements to the podcasts in which they originally appeared in edited format. This gives people who were interested in the edited interview the opportunity to delver deeper into the subject.

I am glad to note that this very useful development is starting to be adopted with video interviews. Richard Dawkins’s official website recently published on YouTube full versions of interviews Dawkins conducted as part of his recent documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. I have to say, I didn’t particularly enjoy the series, which was rather light on Darwin, and rather heavy on God-botherer bashing, but I found the following unedited interview with Steve Pinker very entertaining (despite my general disdain for evolutionary psychology):

Richard Dawkins scared of scorpions: who’d have thought it?

The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews can be purchased from the official Dawkins website.

[Hat-tip to Nada Cabani for the link.]

As everyone already knows, Dawkins is doing Darwin on Channel 4 this evening. My Sky+ box is set to stun.

Here, to whet your appetities, are some clips of Dawkins being interviewed at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June this year:

• Dawkins on Darwin’s Theory of Survival of the Fittest (05:03)
• Dawkins on who was first – Darwin or Wallace? (03:55)
• Dawkins on Darwin’s the ‘Eureka’ Moment (02:48)
• Dawkins explains Evolution by Natural Selection (01:57)

(Daw)kins Selection… Geddit?

Suit yourselves.

I caught Richard Dawkins ripping the BBC’s toughest and rudest interviewer apart on Radio 4 this morning. It was great radio. He berrated Jon Humphrys for going too easy on religious interviewees. Towards the end of the three-minute interview, Humphrys (himself an atheist, I believe) clearly realised he didn’t have a leg to stand on. You can listen to the interview in horrible RealPlayer format for the next seven days here.

The interview arose as a result of recent comments made by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the UK’s top Roman Catholic, which lunartalks has commented on.

Curious factoid: Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine. I wonder if he knows Kevin Bacon.

I try to keep comments about religion and other mumbo-jumbo out of the Red Notebook, so why don’t I direct you to the latest post on my other weblog instead? I am rather pleased with the title: Shambhala lies: Dawkins tries mumbo-jumbo.

It is a source of continuing regret to me that I never got to send any of the fan letters I began writing to the late Stephen Jay Gould. They weren’t good enough, and I didn’t want to waste his time.

One of my unsent letters was on a subject which Gould said was in his top-three for reader feedback. In his essay Left Snails and Right Minds (published in his book Dinosaur in a Haystack), Gould wondered why old engravings of snails often show their shells spiralling the wrong way (the vast majority of snail shells have right-handed spirals; the old engravings often showed them left-handed). Some years after first reading the essay, I came across the following letter in Volume 5 of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, which caused me to start drafting another unsent letter to Gould:

Charles Darwin to James de Carle Sowerby, 21st January, 1851

My dear Sir

I am much pleased with the Plates.— […] Only one figure will require a weighty alteration, viz P. rigidus. Nevertheless, I hope that you will loook [sic] over your Figures carefully for I saw a good many little blemishes; & the Plate is not very clean.—

The few reversed figures are unfortunate.— […]

Your’s Sincerely
C. Darwin

Sowerby was artist to the Palaeontographical Society and was preparing the engravings for one of Darwin’s barnacle books, Fossil Cirripedia (1851). From earlier letters, it is quite clear that Darwin was extremely frustrated with Sowerby’s slow progress. In contrast, a few reversed figures seemed relatively unimportant—although I thought Gould would have been amused that his great hero also suffered from reversed engravings.

By a strange co-incidence, shortly after reading Gould’s essay, I read a chapter in Richard Dawkins’s (then) latest book, Climbing Mount Improbable, which also dealt with shells. In it, Dawkins explained how the shapes of all shells can be recreated on a computer using just three parameters (or ‘genes’), which he named flare, verm, and spire. This time, I actually did write to the author:

Richard Carter to Richard Dawkins, 8th August, 1996

Dear Prof. Dawkins,

I greatly enjoyed reading your recent, excellent book, Climbing Mount Improbable and, in particular, the chapter on shells. However, I think I may have spotted a small mistake: on page 153, when talking about what you have called the spire parameter, you state:

Spire has no limits: negative values trivially indicate an upside down shell.

Although it is hard to visualise, I reckon that, if you turned this “upside down” shell the right way up, it would actually be spiralling in the opposite direction to a shell with a positive spire (anti-clockwise, as opposed to clockwise). Although this is hardly earth-shattering, I would argue that it is not trivial – after all, your favourite sparring partner, Stephen Jay Gould, dedicated an entire chapter to anti-clockwise snail shells in his recent, equally excellent, Dinosaur in a Haystack. […]

Yours sincerely,
Richard Carter

To my great delight (and my dad’s: he has boasted about it ever since), Dawkins emailed me straight back, confirming the error:

Richard Dawkins to Richard Carter, 15th August, 1996

Dear Mr Carter

Thank you for your letter of 8th August.

Yes, you are correct that the computer shell with a negative spire would beanticlockwise, and it is certainly not trivial. If I had thought of this,it would have saved me the trouble of building in a separate gene forhandedness. Damn! […]

With best wishes

Yours sincerely
Richard Dawkins

(Let it not be said that Richard Dawkins never admitted to making a mistake.)

Then, yesterday, I spotted another interesting example of reversed images, which, bearing in mind the subject matter, I’m sure would also have amused Gould. While re-reading my recent Red Notebook post The Expression of Emotions in Darwin, I suddenly realised that the photograph of Darwin that was the subject of the piece also appears on the covers of two books I have recently read—but in mirror image:

Original image of Darwin

Books showing reversed image

A quick check of the buttons on Darwin’s waistcoat on a higher resolution version of the image confirmed that the photograph of Darwin on the left is shown the correct way round, whereas the photographs appearing on the covers of the two books are shown in mirror image.

Plus ça change, as we say in Yorkshire.