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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. To reproduce any part of this transcript in any form please contact RSA Lectures Office at [email protected] or +44(0)20 7451 6868 The views expressed are not necessarily those of the RSA or its Trustees. 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 Page 17