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Associated Teachers’ TV programme
RSA Lectures: Steve Jones – The Literary Ape
RSA/New Writing Worlds
Adventures in thought: experiment in literature and science
Manifesto Challenge: Developing a Capable Population
Speaker:
Professor Steve Jones - scientist, author and broadcaster
Chaired by:
Professor Jon Cook - Professor of Literature, University
of East Anglia and Director of the New Writing Worlds Symposium
Date:
Friday, 16th June 2006
Venue:
University of East Anglia, Norwich
NB
This is a part edited transcript of the event. Whilst every effort is made to
ensure accuracy there may be phonetic or other errors depending on inevitable
variations in recording quality. Please do contact us to point out any errors,
which we will endeavour to correct.
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www.theRSA.org
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 1
[Note: There is a short section
missing from the beginning of the
recording and transcript of this
lecture.]
Professor Jon Cook: What
Steve Jones says tonight will feed in
to some of the discussion on the
relationship between literature and
science that will be happening in the
New Writing symposium tomorrow
and as you may have seen from the
presence of cameras here, it is going
to form the basis of a television
programme for Teachers’ TV.
So
there are a number of different levels
at which the event is working and it
marks the beginning of what I hope
will be a fruitful collaboration between
the New Writing Partnership and the
RSA and I am very grateful to the
RSA for their support for this venture.
I know and I’m sure that Steve
Jones’ work is well known to many of
you; he’s a Professor of Genetics at
University College London, where he’s
engaged in fundamental biological
research. If I understand it rightly,
he’s actually trying to find answers to
the question about why there is
variation at all.
In addition to his work as a
leading research scientist, he’s also of
course extremely well known for his
commitment to making scientific
enquiry and scientific discovery both
accessible and entertaining to a wide
public audience.
He’s appeared on television
programmes, on radio programmes
and it would take me too much time
here to list all of the books that he’s
written, but they include ‘The
Language of Genes’ first published in
1993, now in its ninth reprint; a book
based on the Reith lectures that he
gave in 1991; ‘Almost Like a Whale’
published in 1999, an update of
Darwin’s theory; and most recently
in 2002 ‘Y: The Descent of Men’ (not
‘The Descent of Man’); it’s a book
that at least for some of us in the
audience poses the rather disturbing
possibility
that
men
may
be
biologically on the way out. That’s
not going to be, I don’t think, his
topic tonight; it’s adventures in
thought, literature and science.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a
great pleasure and honour to
welcome Steve Jones.
Professor
Steve
Jones:
What I am going to be talking about
is beautifully illustrated in the first
slide; the tie between literature and
science which in some ways is
strong, but in many ways actually I
think is less strong than some of its
proponents actually claim.
This of course is Charles
Darwin and Darwin is reading in this
cartoon, it’s one of the very earliest
pieces of literature we all know
about of course, which is Homer’s
Iliad and that’s really what I want to
talk about, the tie which has
recently been made between literary
theory and the theory of evolution;
the extent to which the plots, and
stories themselves may be related
to our existence as an evolved
primate.
Now clearly that is quite a
striking statement and a rather
interesting one and I believe and I
certainly can’t call myself an expert,
but there’s now a whole field of
literary Darwinism. I have recently
looked at a book whose title was far
more fascinating than its contents,
its title summarised the contents of
that field; it was called ‘Madame
Bovary’s ovaries’. It’s a statement
that there is a lot to be learned from
our biology about our literature.
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 2
Many eminent authors have
made quite strong affirmations about
truth; Ian McEwan of course who is a
graduate of this eminent institution I wonder what became of him – wrote
in the preface of one of those books
“If one reads accounts of the
behaviour of troops of bonobos,
which are pygmy chimpanzees, one
sees rehearsed all the major themes
of the English 19th century novel”.
Now what bonobos get up to, I would
not describe in front of a mixed
audience, but certainly they get up to
serial mating, to rape – if you can use
that word in the animal context – and
to murder; so there’s plenty that’s
going on.
In fact, this notion of literary
Darwinism is an extension of a
scientific field or perhaps if one was
being a bit cruel you might say a
quasi-scientific
field,
which
is
sociobiology, the notion that we can
understand ourselves by referring to
the animal kingdom.
Now clearly that has some truth
which is why we do experiments on
testing drugs with mice, but I am of
the opinion its truth is rather more
limited than many of its proponents
might claim.
It’s summarised
perhaps by this slide of Jane Goodall,
who as many of you will know is a
very
eminent
primatologist
and
sociobiologist, and her friend and
she’s a part of that movement which
is powerful now which is attempting
to give chimpanzees in particular
rights, even quasi-human rights
because they’re almost human.
Now one can argue about that,
but certainly if that is the case, we
might indeed learn a lot about our
storytelling abilities from those rather
charming creatures.
The founder of sociobiology,
Ed Wilson recently wrote “If
literature can be solidly connected
to its biological roots, it will be one
of the great events of intellectual
history”.
So there’s no false
modesty about the sociobiologist
there but there never has been, so
not much change.
Well I have to say that I
frequently think of sociobiology as
the pompous reaffirmation of the
bleeding obvious; it’s that old men
prefer young women for example
and that men tend not to fancy their
sisters. These things are true but
they don’t need a whole science in
order to explain them, but there are
certainly
some
other
human
attributes that might be explained
by sociobiology, possibly including
literature.
What I want to do in this talk
is to explore Gilbert and Sullivan’s
claim that Darwinian man, though
well behaved, is really just a
monkey shaved.
How much are we chimps and
do we write books about it? Well,
clearly in some boring physical
sense, chimps are what we are;
some of us perhaps slightly more
than others.
I always find it very surprising
that
there
are
150
million
creationists in the United States
when the evidence is all around
them of our close relatives of the
living world. So that’s clearly true;
we are chimps, we are shaved
monkeys, some of us perhaps more
shaved than others and there are
aspects of our behaviour which it’s
hard to deny is related to our joint
ancestry with chimps. For example,
one of the worst punishments you
can give somebody, unless you
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 3
happen to be George Bush of course
who has himself signed 131 death
sentences, is to put them in solitary
confinement and men and women in
solitary confinement invariably go
mad.
So clearly that relates to the
fact that we descend from a social
primate like a chimpanzee. If we
descended from a solitary primate
like an orang-utan, the worst possible
punishment you could give somebody
would be to send them to a dinner
party. I have to say I think I’ve been
to those dinner parties, but it’s a
statement really that we can learn a
little bit about our nature by looking
at our ancestry. But how much can
we do that and how much does that
tell us about ourselves?
Of course there are large
numbers of people, including George
Bush himself, who has said famously
“The jury is still out on how God
created the human race”.
Some
people believe that we are not related
to the living world at all, that we’re
specially created in some way. What
concerns them I think is not the
evolution of let’s say fruitflies, but the
fact that perhaps we’re not only
animals but just animals.
That view can summarised in
this cartoon from Punch, which shows
the horror of horrors, a chimp in a
dinner jacket being served by a
flunky in a suit and that really is the
statement of what worries people
about
evolution;
that
evolution
somehow takes us off our pinnacle
and turns us into mere chimps.
Well I hope I’ll be able to
persuade you that that’s not true and
I hope also that I’ll be able to suggest
that
literary
theorists
perhaps
misunderstand what evolution can
and, more importantly, cannot tell
us about ourselves.
The idea of evolution itself is
in fact much older than Charles
Darwin. This is one of the very few
distinguished Joneses in history; this
is a chap called Sir William Jones,
who was a linguist, as many of you
will no doubt know, who in the 18th
century discovered as a boy that he
had the most extraordinary facility
of language; he learned as a matter
of course all the ancient languages,
Latin, Greek and Hebrew; he very
soon became fluent in the languages
of Europe and then he went to India
and he learnt various Indian
languages and what Sir William
Jones noticed was, for the first time,
there was some kinship among
these languages and he began to
make
lists
of
similarity
and
dissimilarity, plenty of which are
obvious. Here are the numbers, 1,
2, 3 and so in English, Latin, Greek
and the ancient and extinct tongue
of Sanskrit and they’re obviously
related to each other (tu duo doi
deva?) and so on.
Sanskrit stopped being spoken
about a thousand years ago in
Northern India, but in fact William
Jones went further; he suggested
that these things had changed by a
process of what we now call
evolution
and
evolution
was
described by Charles Darwin in three
very succinct words, “descent with
modification” and I have a recording
of the Queen speaking at the age of
fifteen in about 1940 and her speech
is really quite different from the way
most of us speak today and entirely
different from the way most of my
undergraduates
and
the
undergraduates no doubt at UEA
also speak.
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 4
So language changes with time
and because it changes, you could
make a tree of relatedness. That’s an
old idea, I think it was Detheroe who
said that English is just French badly
pronounced, but William Jones took
that further and he began to make
family trees. Here is a family tree of
the word ‘father’ in various Italianate
or Latin language; clearly related and
clearly what he then did was to
reconstruct the ancestral word, in
what he said was Sanskrit which
sounded a bit like pater and in fact
Darwin picked up that idea in the
origin of the speech.
He says as
much in the first chapter.
So actually evolution began
with literary theory, which is perhaps
rather a startling thought. Evolution,
in Darwin’s term, “descent with
modification” we can simply rephrase
in three rather simpler words today
“genetics plus time”.
So there is an unexpected tie
there of biology with literature. Now
some of those ties of biology and
literature are equally unexpected. I
only actually found them out myself
over the last few months. This being
a literary gathering of course I have
to push my latest book and here it,
it’s called ‘The Single Helix’. I stole
the title from perhaps the most
famous
book
of
scientific
autobiography of all, which is ‘The
Double Helix’ by James Watson who
was one of the core discoverers of
DNA; double helix being of course the
famous molecule itself. Mine is ‘The
Single Helix’ and all I can say is that
if it sells half as many copies I’ll be
delighted, but it shows no sign of so
doing.
The Helix word has another
meaning because it refers to a snail,
which is on the cover there, which I
spent much of my life studying.
Well
the
technical
word
for
somebody who studies snails is a
malacologist. I once was asked that
at a dinner party full of Greeks who
had to be scraped off the floor
because they laughed so much. It
means soft and floppy in Greek and
it has a rather special meaning, as
an insult.
So I speak probably as a
malacologist and there have been a
number of other malacologists who
perhaps became better known in
other fields. There’s another word
for a malacologist who studies the
hard part of snails and that’s a
conchologist and one of the earliest
and best books on the study of
snails is called ‘The Conchologist’s
first book’ published in the 19th
century in the United States by a
chap you may possibly have heard
of – as we go down we read the
animals are given with their shells
by Edgar A Poe of Philadelphia.
Edgar Alan Poe was one of the many
individuals who proved that it was
only possible to become famous by
giving up snails because before he
started writing mythic fiction, he
wrote scientific texts like ‘The
Conchologist’s first book’.
He wasn’t the only one, here
is Lewis Carroll looking typically
ambiguous surrounded by young
people and rabbits. Lewis Carroll
was a naturalist and of course Lewis
Carroll
invented
all
kinds
of
fascinating creatures including the
Jubjub bird and most of all the
frumious Bandersnatch. What’s a
Bandersnatch? Well my theory is –
and just remember Carroll really
knew what he was doing when it
came
to
nature
study
–
Bandersnatch in fact is the German
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 5
word
for
a
bandit
snail,
a
bandaschneck and here we have my
snail, Cepaea Latin name, it’s German
name is den banderschnecken so
that’s where the Bandersnatches
came from.
Robert Louis Stevenson also
famous for his fiction of course. He
wrote “It is a more fortunate destiny
to have a taste for collecting shells
than to be born a millionaire” and
finally
an
individual
who
I
corresponded with and unfortunately
never met, worked for many years on
the bio-chemistry of the shell
pigments of snails; he was a
predecessor of mine at University
College London. He moved into a
notably non- malacological field when
he wrote ‘The Joy of Sex’ and Alex
Comfort worked too for many years
on the biology of molluscs. So that’s
proof that if you stop working on
snails, you’ll start getting famous.
So where did biology impinge
upon their writings and other people’s
writings? Of course even since the
days of Alex Comfort, we’ve learned a
huge amount about what makes us
what we are. We all know about the
famous DNA molecule, the double
helix, there’s a lot of it about. If any
one of you consumed by tedium at
this talk were to rush out into the
streets of Norwich and be squashed
flat by a speeding bus, the DNA in
your individual body would stretch to
the moon and back eight thousand
times. There are many millions of
miles of DNA in everybody in this
room, all of which comes from the six
feet or so in the fertilised egg. It has
of course been sequenced to give
perhaps the most tedious piece of
experimental literature ever written
which is the human DNA sequence,
three thousand million letters AGC
and T and that’s a little tiny of bit of
it.
There
are
all
kinds
of
surprises; the actual plot turns out
to be astonishingly straightforward.
When I was student, which was a
year after Ian Gibson was a student
at the same place in Edinburgh, we
used to talk about hundreds of
thousands
of
genes,
perhaps
millions of genes, being responsible
to make a human being. We now
know there are only about twentyfive thousand, which sounds like a
lot but which is only about the same
number of pieces as one of London’s
bendy buses. I like to think I’m
more complicated than a bendy bus
but apparently not.
What that means about the
shortage of genes, we don’t know.
It probably means that we know
nothing at all about the way the
genetics actually work.
So it’s clear without doubt that
biology and genetics are important
in our lives and it may well be that
that importance is reflected in the
fiction we write.
Certainly its
importance has grown; it might
appear to have grown, since for
example Shakespeare was alive.
I would like you to look to the
person to your left and the person to
your right. I do this to my first year
undergraduates in their first lecture
and they do this looking a bit blank
and I say “well two out of every
three of you will die for reasons
connected with the genes you
carry”. They continue to look blank
and then I say “well cheer up
because if I’d been giving this
lecture in Shakespeare’s time, two
out of three of you would be dead
already” and that’s true because if
you look at the patterns of life and
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 6
death of children in England, there
has been a dramatic alteration in the
last four hundred years.
About two in three died before
twenty-one in 1600 and by 2001 only
one in a hundred or so died before
the age of twenty-one.
Even in
Dickens’ time, 1800 to 1900, about
half or a bit less of all children would
die, which is why people laughed at
the death of Little Nell, it’s impossible
to read the death of Little Nell without
laughing and that’s because childhood
death was so familiar.
Now of course things have
changed; we’re now killed not by the
enemy from outside cold, starvation,
murder,
infectious
disease
overwhelmingly, we’re killed by our
old friend, the enemy within which
are things like diabetes, cancer and
heart disease which kill most of us
and all of which have some strong
inherited component.
So it might
seem that our fate has changed over
the last few hundred years.
Shakespeare actually put the
problem rather clearly; talking about
Caliban in ‘The Tempest’ and we all
know who Caliban was, he came out
with a useful little phrase which has
been picked up by many people “on
thy foul nature, nurture shall never
stick” and that’s where the phrase
nature and nurture came from and
that’s what I want to spend much of
the remainder of the talk talking
about. How much of what we are is
defined by our genes and hence by
our evolution by our status as
monkeys shaved and how much by
our nurture, by our culture, by our
unique human abilities.
Well one of the universals in
fiction and certainly in literary
Darwinism is that men and women
behave differently. Well I have news
for all you Arts faculty people, men
and women do behave differently
and that probably has something to
do with biology. It’s rather a banal
finding but if you’re a Darwinian
literary theorist, it actually has
taken very powerful evidence to
prove that actually there may be
something in this biological story of
literature.
In one of the classic examples,
a not unimpressive one, from ‘The
Iliad’ itself, as we all know,
Agamemnon steals his Achilles
girlfriend, Briseis and he does it, he
says, to show his power. Literary
Darwinists go through ‘The Iliad’ and
they notice that every raid and there
are many, lots of people get killed in
that, involves killing the men and
abducting the women. Then they’ve
gone to the archaeological records
of that time and they find that in the
graves there’s a great shortage of
females and from there they go on
to argue that perhaps in those days,
as indeed in places like China today,
there was massive infanticide of
young girls so there was a shortage
of women and hence there was huge
pressure on men in order to get a
mate and the only way to get a
mate would be to kill off the
opposition and to steal their
females.
They use that as an argument
behind the biological basis to much
of literature, including the earliest
literature.
Well that’s certainly true,
there are many creatures of whom
that’s
true;
for
example
chimpanzees indeed do an awful lot
of fighting; gorillas are even worse;
male gorillas often get killed in
sexual fights and if you look at
gorilla behaviour, it turns out that
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 7
the alpha male seems to monopolise
all the females and fights off any
other male that tries to get in.
Chimps aren’t quite as bad, but they
too are pretty vicious. So that gives
you an alibi for literary fiction.
Science, perhaps unfortunately,
can test some of those theories which
fiction of course doesn’t have to do
and now there are sort of paternity
tests in chimp bands and it turns out
to be rather interesting. If you look
at the sexual success of the big alpha
male and you look at his DNA and the
young chimpanzees and compare that
with the DNA of those wimpish males
who go to the library all the time, it
turns out that on average they all do
equally well. There are actually two
different strategies, there’s the alpha
male strategy and there’s another
one and I’ll use some technical
language here, which is called the
‘sneaky focker’ strategy which are
that these other males come out and
sneak in and pass on their genes
when the boss isn’t looking.
That’s fine for literary theorists
too because in this ‘Madame Bovary’s
Ovaries’ book there’s an analysis of
perhaps the finest novel of all, which
is ‘Pride & Prejudice’ and in ‘Pride &
Prejudice’ we have, needless to say
the sneaky focker who is Wickham,
who is the seedy little character who
comes in and tries to elope with
Darcy’s sister and then he finally, if I
remember rightly, runs off with
Elizabeth’s sister and if that isn’t
being a nasty little chimpanzee I
don’t know what is. But that does
show the real difference perhaps
between science and literature;
literature has ideas but science
unfortunately needs experiments as
well.
Well it’s hard to deny that
human males are driven by their
evolutionary past.
We’ve all got
that useful thing called the white
chromosome which in many ways,
politically incorrect though it may be
to say so, does drive male versus
female behaviour.
The white
chromosome is a pretty simple little
bit of equipment; it’s tiny and
rotting away as we just heard. It’s
the
most
parasitic
of
all
chromosomes, it’s only got a few
genes on it but it produces a
powerful
little
chemical
called
testosterone.
Now men have lots of this,
women have rather less. Women
have a small amount which is why
elderly ladies sometimes grow a bit
of a moustache but men have large
amounts of this stuff and it certainly
makes males male. Here’s a picture
of a well-known male, this is Steve
Jones who is not in fact me, as you
may have noticed.
One of my
students did come up to me at the
end of the lecture and say “have you
not been well Professor Jones” and I
think they were being serious.
This is Steve Jones, who’s a
bodybuilding champion and he
represents a statement of what
testosterone can do.
I am not
accusing
him
of
abusing
testosterone
although
lots
of
bodybuilders do, but he has turned
into a super male, big, brutal, rather
stupid looking maybe with a fairly
impressive posing pouch; obviously
trying, I would imagine, to attract a
mate.
That’s testosterone and if you
take more testosterone you look
more like that. If you do take more,
you get into all kinds of problems
because testosterone is actually
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 8
rather dangerous stuff. Here is a not
very cheery slide, or at least for half
the audience, it’s the patterns of life
and death in men and women. If you
look at the top left, you can see the
blue line is the mortality rate in men
from the age of birth to the age of
eighty and you can see that men die
at a more rapid rate than women do
throughout.
Well men die from
accidental death more than women,
even at the age of four they have
about twice the rate of accidental
death.
One of the little known facts of
science, although it is in fact true, is
that men are struck by lightning at
three times the rate that women are.
Men of course are killed and are
killers at many times the rate that
women are. Men die also of parasites
and infectious disease and that’s
because one of the unexpected
effects of testosterone is to suppress,
to switch off or slow down the
immune system. So if you’ve got lots
of testosterone, your immune system
doesn’t work as well and therefore, if
you’re infected with tapeworms or
measles or something, you do much
less well as a male than as a female
and the effect is really quite big.
The power of testosterone was
shown
by
a
very
unpleasant
experiment that was done in the
United States in the 1930s when
several thousand young men were
castrated for crimes like shoplifting.
All those guys have now died off in
the fullness of time, many of them
spent their lives in institutions of one
kind or another and men without
testosterone,
castrated
before
puberty, live on the average for
thirteen years longer than men with
testosterone.
That’s a lot, that’s
much more on the average than men
who smoke heavily versus men who
don’t smoke at all. Arguably the
cure is worse than the disease but it
does maybe tell us that actually
being male does have some
implications which would appear in
fiction in terms of adventure, of
murder and tapeworms and God
knows what, which isn’t the same as
being female.
So it’s clear that murder for
instance, homicide as we see here,
is to an extent a male attribute but
it peaks, as we can see. If you’re a
sociobiologist or a naïve sociobiolgist
and
there
only
are
naïve
sociobiolgists, you will see that it
peaks at the age of twenty or so
when males are trying to find a
mate and trying to persuade the
females what a marvellous husband
they would make by going out and
murdering the opposition.
Certainly plenty of biology
about being a man and why not use
that in fiction? How much is that
related to our close association to
chimpanzees?
Well last year the
chimp genome, chimp DNA was
sequenced and as all of us know I’m
sure, about 98% of it is in common
with ourselves.
That means less
than you might think; 50% of the
human genome is common with
bananas so it’s not quite as a
dramatic as one imagines, but it’s
quite a striking statement.
We’ve learned more in the last
few months about it. All kinds of
odd things have happened, the
immune genes have separated and
evolved at great speed. One of the
unexpected truths about being
human rather than being a chimp is
that we are in many, many ways a
diminished chimpanzee; we don’t
have hair, our muscles are much
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 9
less
efficient
than
chimpanzee
muscles which is why it is never a
good idea to wrestle with even a
small chimpanzee.
One of the biggest gene
families as it’s called in the human
genome are codes for scent and smell
receptors, they’re nearly all rusted
away in ourselves, they’re working
fine
in
chimpanzees
and
the
chimpanzees have been invaded by
lots of extra bits of DNA which we
haven’t got.
So we have got less genetic
information than chimpanzees have
which is a bit of a surprise. I’m not
quite sure how to explain it; whether
you could make a plot out of it I don’t
know but one thing which is very
clear is that one chromosome has
changed at a rate quite different from
all the others.
This is a graph of the average
change
in
proportionate
terms
between humans and chimps from
1%, 1½%, 2% and so on, on the left
and various chromosomes and we
have 22 chromosome pairs plus the X
and the Y. The women have two Xs;
the men of course have an X and a Y.
You
can
see
nearly
all
the
chromosomes,
the
non-sex
chromosomes have changed about
1% to 1½%; the X chromosome has
changed less than that in humans
compared to chimps and the Y has
changed much more, about twice as
much.
In fact what that tells us
actually is that women are closer to
chimpanzees than men are because
men have this chromosome that has
actually diverged at great speed.
The white chromosome, the
sexual
male
chromosome,
has
evolved very quickly. Why that is we
don’t know. There are some other
suggestions as to the importance of
sex in human evolution. What you
can do nowadays is not just look at
the structure of DNA, which in the
end turns out to be rather boring,
but actually look at which genes are
working at what particular time;
what’s switched on and what’s
switched off and when you do that,
you get a rather remarkable finding.
Here
we’ve
got
various
tissues, brain, heart, kidney, liver
and testes in chimpanzees; in
humans C and H and the length of
the line simply shows the differences
in activity of chimpanzee brain
versus human brain, chimpanzee
heart versus human heart and so
on. You can see there’s a line that
separates chimps and us between
the different tissues; it’s much
bigger for the testes than for the
brain, which is a bit surprising, but it
suggests
that
at
least
some
evolution goes on much more within
the scrotum than within the skull
and again what that tells us is really
rather hard to tell.
It’s pretty clear that human
and chimpanzees have evolved
away from a common ancestor and
it’s also clear that the way they’ve
evolved is exactly the same as the
way that dogs and cats have
separated from each other or
fruitflies
and
houseflies.
As
biological organisms, we’re nothing
special, nothing special at all. So
maybe all this trying to bring biology
into the arts, into literature is
actually quite a sensible thing to do.
I actually think that it isn’t and
in the last ten minutes of my talk,
I’ll suggest to why.
Of course we evolved and you
can make evolutionary trees based
on DNA, family trees, which show
that that’s the case.
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 10
Here’s a family tree which puts
humans, the red lines, into the DNA
context of various other creatures,
chimpanzees,
orang-utans
and
gorillas and you can see we sit
exactly as you would imagine, close
to the chimpanzees and gorillas,
further away from orang-utans. The
length of each line tells you how
different each individual to whom that
line reaches is from all the others.
If you look at that, there’s one
very striking contrast between us and
all the rest and that is that we are the
most boring of all primates; in fact
we are the most boring of all
mammals
because
we
haven’t
changed, at least in our physical
structure, our DNA, scarcely at all
since we began. There is far less
difference between the population of
France let’s say and the population of
Papua New Guinea than there is
between two groups of chimpanzees
living maybe three hundred miles
apart in Central Africa. There’s been
massive physical changes among the
chimpanzees as you can and the
bonobos are closely related to them.
Almost none among humans.
So we are really the primate
that didn’t evolve, at least in the
mechanical sense.
Of course we
evolved in some sense; we have quite
a good evolutionary tree of fossils
and the like that show that over the
last five or six million years we have
indeed shifted away from the
common ancestor with chimpanzees
to ourselves, homosapians.
We’ve
also of course changed in other ways
too.
One of the striking things that
happens in the human line and
doesn’t happen in the chimp line, in
spite of all the hype about chimp
intelligence – take it from me,
jackdaws and crows do much better
at speaking and using tools than
chimpanzees do; parrots do better
yet – we got a toolkit, we started
using tools.
Not just modern
humans,
but
some
of
their
predecessors
used
tools,
the
Neanderthals of course were quite
powerful tool users, they lived in
Europe until more than a hundred
thousand years ago and they hung
around for many tens of thousands
of years and they used tools like this
which scarcely change during their
life
history;
they
were
conservatives.
They knew what
they liked; the Neanderthals were
arguably the last conservatives, I
won’t go on with cheap jokes about
Conservatives
being
the
last
Neanderthals because it wouldn’t
work any more.
When we get to modern
humans, you can actually see an
instant shift to something like that,
which
is
much,
much
more
complicated. A striking change in
technology that was accompanied
by an ecological shift which meant
that as soon as modern humans met
Neanderthals, they wiped them out
in exactly the same way as
unfortunately we’re wiping out all
the primates and all the large
mammals of the world today.
That had nothing at all to do
with biology because Neanderthals
and us are biologically almost
indistinguishable as you might have
seen on that previous family tree
but everything to do with the
uniquely human attribute which is in
the brain and not in the DNA.
Clearly our brain, our storytelling organ, has grown enormously
over the last three and a half million
years. On the right, through things
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 11
like
Australopithecus
and
homo
habitus back to archaic homosapians
which are just before us, to ourselves
and in fact our own brains are slightly
smaller than those of our immediate
ancestors but that’s only because
we’ve actually ourselves gone slightly
smaller.
Since your modern humans
began, there’s really been no change
in brain size at all but there’s been an
enormous change in human ecology
and
human
numbers.
What
ecologists can do and often do is to
try and work out, a friend of mine
once did, the relationship between
the abundance of different creatures
and how big they were; a challenging
scientific
programme
and
he
discovered
to
his
astonishment
perhaps that there were more mice
than there are blue whales.
Well
yeah, a bit boring, but in fact they all
sit on exactly the same line,
everything just sits there; body size
versus abundance, apart from one
mammal and who’s that, of course
it’s us. We’re about ten thousand
times more common than we would
be if we were simply another
mammal,
another
ecologically
constrained primate.
The natural population of the
world should not be six thousand
million, it should be about the size of
the population of Norwich; whether it
would be the population of Norwich, I
don’t know but if we were just
primates, that’s how common we
would be; we would be rather a rare
species.
Something has made us very,
very different from all the others.
Well nobody really knows, but one of
the standard claims is that what
made us so different was the origin of
language and once language had
begun,
once
story-telling
had
happened, which is what language is
all about, then evolution speeded up
in a new direction and with
enormous speed.
I have the dubious pleasure of
living in Camden Town and if I were
to get on the tube at Camden Town
in the morning and a Cromanian
man, an early modern human, was
to come and sit next to me, I
probably wouldn’t notice. He might
be covered in mud and grunting a
bit, this is Camden Town after all
and par for the course, because
physically he wouldn’t really be very
different from me at all.
However, put yourself in his
place; of course he would find the
situation entirely baffling, he’d be
travelling at speed under ground in
the dark with people making strange
chirping noises to each other and
rustling huge leaves in front of their
faces; he would be completely lost.
But there has been no physical
change between him and me. There
has been an intellectual change,
which is unique to the human line.
Humans have often been
described as the eloquent ape. It’s
noticeable that children for example
who are born profoundly deaf babble
in just the way as hearing children;
there is something in there that
makes them want to speak even if
they can’t learn to speak without
now a lot of special treatment. No
other primate is anything like that.
There is a story and it’s a
slightly over-simplified one, which
strikes it down to one particular
gene that separates us from our
chimpanzee relative; it’s a gene
called FOXP2 which is involved; it’s
damaged in a rather strange genetic
condition called William’s Syndrome
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 12
in which children are born who
appear to be normal in most respects
but never learn to speak. It’s called
verbal dyspraxia and with normal
groups of people if you scan their
brain when they’re speaking, the left
side of their brain lights up and that’s
the language area. With these kids
its haywire on both sides; when
they’re trying to speak, there’s just a
mess all over the place and they
never really manage language at all.
It transpires that that is due to
mutation in one particular gene which
has been studied in some detail; I
suppose you could even call it the
story-telling gene and it’s different in
us from other primates.
Here we’ve got a family tree
again putting us and chimpanzees,
gorillas and the like into the context
of this particular gene and there are
two kinds of changes in genetics;
those which alter the function of the
protein, which are small grey boxes
and those that have no effect and it’s
noticeable that there are two shifts
between humans and the rest. That
might be what gave us language and
it’s noticeable, remarkably in the last
few weeks it’s come out, that this
gene is much more active in the
brains of birds that can speak like
parrots and birds that can speak like
chickens.
What the hell that tells
you, I don’t know, but it’s clearly
trying to tell you something.
We now have transmission of
information, not just through genes,
but through stories, through words
and that’s a shift from body to mind
and it’s a unique talent. We have a
unique ability, which literature gives
us, to understand the past and
perhaps to predict the future in some
kind of rational way and it alters the
way we behave.
Let’s go
back to
those
murderous men. Here’s the murder
rate in England and Wales by age,
men in red, women in green; men
being particularly nasty in their
twenties and thirties and some
rather grumpy eighty year old men
there; women being much less
unpleasant in general.
That’s
universal, worldwide – there are the
figures from Detroit and it looks
exactly the same. So that’s biology,
the old white chromosome coming
out and turning us men into
complete bastards.
Looking at that a bit more
carefully, going back to the previous
slide and looking at the figures on
the left; murders per million per
year – 0 to 30 in Detroit, murders
per million per year – 0 to 1,200.
So the biology is there, but it’s
dwarfed
by
nurture,
by
the
environment, by society and of
course we in Europe and not just in
Britain have control of the murder
rate by seeing what the problem is,
rationalising how to do it and
banning guns; it’s been very simple.
No other primate of course could
even begin to think in those terms;
we are entirely unique in the way we
lead our lives and indeed no doubt
in the way we have related to each
other in many, many ways.
That’s a problem for evolution
because evolution is really no good
with dealing with things that are
unique because it’s a comparative
science; I have been comparing
humans with chimps. If you’ve got
something which is entirely stuck to
humans, then evolution can’t help
you.
Well there’s a joke which I’ve
used before, which I know Ian
Gibson has heard before, which my
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 13
father told me many years ago. He
didn’t realise it was about evolution
but it was; as you can probably
gather from my talk, English is not
my first language, I was born and
brought up in West Wales, in
Aberystwyth which was then a very
Welsh speaking town and still is as
long as there are English people in
the room of course.
The story goes that somebody
went into a Chinese restaurant in
Aberystwyth and was served a very
good Chinese meal by a clearly
Chinese waiter who spoke to him in
perfect Welsh.
The customer was
astonished by this, so he beckoned
over the owner and I’ll translate for
you he said “well it’s amazing, where
did you get this chap from; a
Chinaman who speaks perfect Welsh”
and the owner looked alarmed and
said “keep your voice down boyo, he
thinks he’s learned English”.
That actually illustrates the
question
of
uniqueness
and
comparison because of course to a
Chinese speaker, Welsh and English
are just dialects of the same
language; Indo-European and he’s
right. To us Cantonese and Mandarin
are dialects of Chinese but they’re
almost incomprehensible to speakers
of the different languages.
So
evolution is no good at all in
describing things which are uniquely
human.
Of course that’s what literature
is all about, describing things that are
uniquely human. You couldn’t have
‘Pride & Prejudice’ with chimps in it, it
would make less sense than a tea
party; it just wouldn’t work.
So
there’s a real limit, it seems to me in
using
science
to
understand
ourselves.
That really is where biological
explanation stops; when we come to
things which novelists are interested
in.
Darwin actually is rather
informative on this point. He had
several sons and after his father’s
death, one was asked about his
father’s literary tastes and some
complained that “it often astonished
us what trash our father would
tolerate in the way of novels; the
chief requisites were a pretty girl
and a good ending” and that’s my
recommendation to the assembled
multitude; a pretty girl and a good
ending will at least sell lots of books
which is more than any literary
Darwinist has ever done.
Thank you.
Q1: Yes I was very interested
to hear the thought that tall women
have more testosterone than small
women. Is that true?
Professor Steve Jones: It’s
said to be true. This Y book of
mine, which is a mixed blessing – I
spent a lot of time reading around
the scientific literature and there’s
one thing about scientific literature,
it’s boring that’s for sure but
generally speaking it’s true. Either
something is correct or it’s published
and found to be incorrect and then
corrected.
Now of course literature and
the arts isn’t like that, they are a
matter of opinions on one side and
the other and one isn’t better than
the other. What I find completely
astonishing about the testosterone
literature, it wasn’t like the rest of
the scientific literature; some people
would find for example that tall
women have got more testosterone
with five hundred females and then
somebody would do two thousand
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 14
females and not find it at all and you
would get that all time.
There was in fact a paper
somewhere which looked at the
strength
of
the
results
on
testosterone compared to whether
the author was male or female and if
they were male, they found much
more effective testosterone, so it did
strike me that something odd was
going on. I think you should take
your testosterone with a pinch of salt.
Q2: Does literature help in
bringing science to the community?
Professor Steve Jones: No, I
don’t actually think that literature has
ever had much of a role in bringing
science to the public. I don’t think it
needs to do that, it has more
interesting things to do. One of my
pet hates in fact is science fiction
because the two things to me just
don’t go together.
If you look at science fiction,
there was a fascinating moment in
1905, I think when the first piece of
modern science fiction was written
which was HG Wells ‘The Time
Machine’. Before HG Wells, all the
utopian fiction, which you might call
science fiction today, was the same
and what happened was society
changed; in Thomas Moore’s ‘Utopia’,
if I remember rightly, chamber pots
were made of gold and prisoners
were sent to hospital and the mad
were sent to prison and so on but
people stayed the same.
In ‘The Time Machine’ there
was a complete change.
Society
stayed the same, there was murder,
theft, war, but people changed and
the human race split into two, the
Eloi, sort of guardian UEA types living
on the surface on the top walkway as
it were and then the Morlocks were
these terrible swine from Leeds,
living right down in the basement
and down below the ground and
they split into two species. That
actually came directly from science,
that came from the eugenics
movement from Galton, who was
very concerned that the human race
was degrading and there was a
message in that book which was
that we much stop all these evil
people from breeding or they will
turn into kind of sub-human.
That’s the only real case I can
think of where a piece of literary
work has produced a scientific
message and unfortunately the
scientific message is entirely wrong.
Q3: I’m interested to what
extent the way a man behaves is
determined by the amount of
testosterone he’s got compared to
the stories he’s heard; that if you’ve
got your graph from Detroit and
your culture is that a man settles his
arguments with a gun, is that
murder rate there determined by
the films that people have watched
or by the amount of testosterone
they’ve got?
Professor Steve Jones:
I
would say almost certainly the films
people have watched. There’s no
evidence that I’m aware of, of
differences
in
testosterone;
Americans do have a bit more,
Japanese are low but those effects
would be tiny compared to the
society you live in. There wasn’t a
surge of testosterone in 1939 that
disappeared in 1945; it’s an entirely
social construct.
Q4: Would you clone in there
Tony Blair or Karl Marx; why should
anybody want to clone anybody?
It’s got potential as a technology.
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 15
Professor
Steve
Jones:
There is a clone book which is a bit of
fiction, called ‘The Cloning of Joanna
May’ by Fay Weldon; it wasn’t a very
good book anyway.
If you clone somebody, what
would you be doing? You certainly
wouldn’t be cloning a copy of them,
you’d be cloning a baby and there’s
no clear evidence at all that that baby
would necessarily have any of the
ideas of their fellow clone.
I’m a great expert on cloning as
it happens because I’m the son of a
clone; my mother is an identical twin
and she was so identical, and this
probably explains an awful lot, that
occasionally when I used to come
home and her sister was visiting, I
couldn’t tell them apart. I was about
five and I’d go off screaming into the
garden and refuse to come in.
I
never admitted that before, that’s
probably why I did genetics.
There is a fascinating twin
book, a natural cloning book, which is
‘Pudding Head Wilson’ by Mark Twain
and that’s a great book. It’s Mark
Twain so it’s wonderful writing and
it’s got a fascinating bit of science in
it because it’s the first case in fiction
where fingerprints are used and it
turns out that Mark Twain not only
knew that fingerprints were unique
but that identical twins’ fingerprints
were different. Pudding Head Wilson
solves a crime by discovering that
what they thought was one person
was in fact two. Pudding Head Wilson
gets his name Pudding Head, stupid
for saying about a barking dog “I
wish I owned half that dog” and
somebody says “why”; he says
“because if I did I’d shoot my half”.
Q5: William Burrows said that
language was an extraterrestrial
disease which infected humans and it
appears from your lecture that
languages would have stopped us
evolving. Do you see any relation
there and if so, what’s the cure?
Professor
Steve
Jones:
That’s an interesting thought.
I
think language did stop us evolving.
It’s arguable that if it hadn’t been
for language, we probably wouldn’t
have spread as much as we have
that’s for sure, because that’s
known as technology; but if it hadn’t
been for language, it’s quite
conceivable that the peoples of
Africa and the people of Australia
who are somewhat distinct, would
have continued to separate from the
peoples of Europe into different
groups, perhaps even different
species is not out of the question.
If you look at bonobos, the
pygmy chimps, they were called
pygmy chimps because they’re small
chimps. If you stick bonobos and
chimps together, which is not a
good idea as they tend to kill each
other, they will not mate. So in
some
senses,
they’re
distinct
species.
So they have evolved.
Maybe language is what saved us
from our evolutionary fate.
Q6:
novel?
What’s
your
favorite
Professor
Steve
Jones:
Actually I very rarely read novels so
I like ‘War and Peace’, that’s a bit
embarrassing isn’t it? I’m reading
‘The Opium Eater’ again at the
moment, that isn’t a novel. I like
‘Swallows and Amazons’ by Arthur
Ransome, that’s my favourite.
Paul Crake: I’m Paul Crake
from the Royal Society of Arts; it’s
my pleasure to do the word from
our sponsors to end this evening
with.
Like most RSA lectures or
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
Page 16
lectures that we sponsor, a recording
has been made of this evening and if
you would like to re-visit it, there will
be a text available free of charge on
our website. That’s true of all of RSA
lectures.
We can help Steve Jones
achieve his target of selling half as
many books as ‘The Double Helix’ by
going over to Waterstones bookshop
after we’ve finished here where he’ll
be signing books and there’s also a
free glass of wine. Before we do go
though, I’d like to thank our friends
at Teachers’ TV and at New Writing
Worlds for what I hope is going to be
the start of a beautiful partnership
between the RSA and them and to
wish them every success for the rest
of the festival.
Finally, I’d like to ask you to
join me in formally thanking Professor
Steve Jones for another brilliant talk.
Thank you.
RSA/New Writing Worlds| 16 June 2006
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