Part One: Materials and Instructions
Section 2: What can the matter be?
1 George Berkeley (1685–1753), philosopher, Bishop of Cloyne.
2 Writing here of her childhood home town of Oakland, California.
Section 3: Taking sides
2 Years later when I read 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman I discovered that I had not been alone in my dilemma: ‘Wrong but romantic’ they characterised the Cavaliers, ‘right but repulsive’ the Roundheads.
3 In How to be Topp (1954) by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle.
4 Samuel Johnson (1709–84), man of letters.
Section 4: Nothing → something → everything
1 In a series of paradoxes, the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno described various impossibilities of motion. For example, most famously: in a race, a tortoise is given a head start over a hare. At some point in time the hare will reach the place where the tortoise began, but by that time the tortoise will have moved some distance ahead. And by the time the hare reaches that further point, the tortoise will again have moved on. Th e tortoise’s lead has been severely reduced, but no matter at what time the hare gets to where the tortoise has been, the tortoise will be some small, if reducingly small, distance ahead. It would appear that it is impossible that the hare will ever overtake the tortoise. Th e resolution of the paradox is in the understanding that an infinite sum of reducing elements is not itself always infinite. Many infinite series are finite when added together. Any student of mathematics knows that the sum that stretches to infinity 1+½+¼+⅛ … is not infinity as the ancient Greeks supposed, but 2. How to integrate together infinite sequences that contain infinitely small elements is at the heart of calculus. In War and Peace Tolstoy devotes a chapter to calculus in order to illustrate poetically how the motion of history is the integral of the anonymous individuated lives of the world’s population, not the force of will of a single man, even if that man is Napoleon.
2 Tyranny was the worst of the regimes, and democracy the next to worst.
3 Quantum mechanics tells us that reality is woven out of many packages – called quanta – of some smallest possible amount of energy.
4 In 1927 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg propounded his famous ‘Uncertainty Principle’. It shows that a complete classical description of reality as Newton envisioned it is impossible. Reality can be known only uncertainly, not precisely.
5 String theory is not very constraining. It presents an array of some 10500 different initial conditions.
6 The universe is, nevertheless, infinite, regardless of whether the so-called visible universe is the size of a grapefruit or billions of light years across.
Section 5: What is science?
1 And there is a further mystery. If the physical world can be reduced to mathematical equations, ‘What is it,’ in Stephen Hawking’s memorable phrase, ‘that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’
2 Ironically, there is vast anecdotal evidence for aliens, but as yet no scientific evidence. John Mack, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, has said that taking aliens seriously does not mean the anecdotal evidence needs to be considered literally, but since it must be evidence of something, and there being so much of it, it should be taken seriously. By opening up our consciousnesses we may, he says, see the cosmos ‘filled with beings, creatures, spirits, gods … that have through the millennia been intimately involved with human existence’.
3 A vinyl LP recording of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto was sent on two separate Voyager space programmes as a gift to potential alien interceptors. Just a few decades later, the gesture already looks parochial.
4 The theoretical physicist John Wheeler (1911–2008) once questioned the belief in immutable laws, and speculated that in the future we might discover that the laws themselves are flexible and evolving, a conjecture that in recent times has been elaborated by the cosmologist Lee Smolin.
5 And turn first to physics and biology if you want to make a human being.
6 Freddy is a physicist, his father a vicar.
Section 6: What is the universe?
1 Mashing together quantum mechanics and general relativity suggests that perhaps even space and time come in smallest amounts. The smallest interval of space is a cube with side-length 10–33 cm, and the smallest interval of time – the time it takes light to travel across such a cube – is 10–44 seconds. Quantities of space and time smaller than these amounts are meaningless.
2 This may seem hard to believe. But historically, scientists who refused to believe in the physical reality even of their own inventions and discoveries have often come unstuck. Einstein was one of its architects, yet he refused to believe in the physical reality of quantum mechanics, the most finely tested of all physical theories. For a time he did not believe in the physical reality of Black Holes, first discovered as a mathematical solution to the equations that describe the general theory of relativity; equations he had laboured over for ten years. About Black Holes he changed his mind. Even after he discovered the chromosome, Thomas Morgan continued to doubt the material existence of genes. Until well into the twentieth century the physical reality of the atom was questioned. Edwin Hubble didn’t believe in an expanding universe, and yet his observations were the first evidence of such a theory.
3 I am reminded of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. ‘The universe must go through a calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes its existence … In infinity, at some moment or other, every possible combination must once have been realised; not only this, but it must also have been realised an infinite number of times.’ Even if our lives are not actually lived out repeatedly and eternally, we should live as if that were the case.
4 Smolin does not hold with eternal inflation. He has proposed an alternative model of how universes are created. He calls it cosmological natural selection: ‘Universes reproduce by the creation of new universes within black holes. Our universe is thus a descendant of another universe, born in one of its black holes, and every black hole in this universe is the seed of a new universe.’ In Smolin’s model our universe is typical of other universes of the same generation, whereas in eternal inflation our universe is a rare anomaly.
5 The physical world is a hologram according to a theory first propounded in 1993. The world as it appears to us is a projection of a deeper reality that exists in more dimensions, just as Plato suspected. There is a self that exists in a higher-dimensional reality and moves as a shadow elsewhere, that elsewhere being what we call here.
Section 7: Evidence for the existence of an external world
1 Sometimes mathematical belief turns mystical. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was obsessed with the number of planets in the solar system. He tried to create a model of the solar system that related the number of planets and their orbits to the set of Platonic geometrical forms. But his information was incomplete. He could not know that more planets were yet to be discovered. In the 1920s, the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington was fascinated by the unchanging numbers – the gravitational constant, the speed of light and the charge on the electron – that appear in the laws of physics, and speculated how they might relate to each other. He believed that they are evidence of some deep unification of nature. The ratio of the gravitational force between an electron and a proton is 1040. The size of the observable universe divided by the radius of an electron is also 1040. Eddington calculated the number of particles in the visible universe as ‘precisely:’ 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044, 717,914,527,116,709,366,231,435,076,185,631,031,296 protons, ‘and the same number of electrons’. Named the Eddington number, it is close to 1080 (1040x2). The recurrence of the number 1040 led the physicist Paul Dirac to wonder: ‘Might it not be that all the present events correspond to properties of this large number [1040], and, more generally, that the whole history of the universe corresponds to properties of the whole sequence of natural numbers …? There is thus a possibility that the ancient dream of philosophers to connect all Nature with the properties of whole numbers will some day be realised.’ Here in mathematics scientists and occultists meet: the world becomes some kind of code to be broken.
2 Even the simplest-looking mathematical theorems may have to wait centuries for proof. In 1637 the amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat claimed that he had a proof to show that there are no integer solutions to the equation xn+yn=zn for any n larger than 2. He made the claim in the margin of his copy of Aristotle’s Arithmetica, adding that there was not space enough in the margin to give the details. No such proof has come to light and it seems likely that it was either flawed or did not exist. Andrew Wiles’s proof of 1995 was seven years in the making and ran to a hundred pages. It was two years before other mathematicians felt confident enough in his workings to verify it. There are mathematical objects that are used in calculations even though they cannot be expressed. So where are they? Graham’s number is the largest ever used in a mathematical calculation, but no one knows what the number is, how many digits it has or even what its first digit is; but it is known that it ends with a 7. The number was first described by a former circus performer named Ron Graham.
3 Georg Cantor’s proof that there is an infinite nest of infinities, each bigger than the last, is a similarly mind-melting concept. The infinity of decimal numbers, for example, is larger than the infinity of counting numbers. Further, there are always larger infinities than any particular infinity. The proof is so counterintuitive it made the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein furious, and still raises the blood pressure of philosophers and mathematicians. It raises the question, if the universe is infinite, what kind of infinite? Aristotle did not believe that infinity could be a quality of the earthly world down below. If he had, he might well have got to the principle of inertia two thousand years ahead of Newton. (For Aristotle things only moved if pushed; for Newton things remain in motion forever unless there is friction – the principle of inertia.) But Aristotle effectively ruled out the concept of inertia in order to exclude infinity. The Israeli mathematician Doron Zeilberger believes that there is a biggest number, and if you add 1 to it you return to 1. He belongs to a group of mathematical believers called ultrafinitists. He doesn’t believe that the countable numbers extend to infinity. Cantor suffered a series of breakdowns from his forties until his death aged seventy-three. Gödel became mentally unstable in later life. He feared that he was being poisoned, and would only eat food that had been prepared by his wife. His wife became ill and was hospitalised. Gödel died of starvation.
Section 8: Evidence against the existence of an external world
1 Reality from our human perspective, that is. The ‘realer’ reality to a reductionist is the one quantum mechanics describes.
2 Much of what is now possible in the material world would have seemed like magic in the past. Our machines are becoming more and more mysterious to us. There is no one alive today who understands the workings of all the machines that are now in the world. Our understanding of the world is held collectively. Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Section 9: On time
1 Any isolated system evolves towards equilibrium, i.e. becomes as disordered as it can be. However, as Lee Smolin has observed, the universe itself is nowhere in equilibrium. The universe appears to be evolving forever into novelty. See here.
2 Nor is there any that detects space.
3 There may be as many as 80,000 human beings in solitary confinement in the United States, a figure that is difficult to assess precisely, but has increased over time. In 2012 two men in Louisiana became the first humans in recorded American history to spend forty years in solitary. Each spends twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four in a cell that measures six feet by nine.
4 People used to slip through time. Do they still? Sometime in the 1880s Miss Moberley and Miss Jourdain were walking about the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles: turning a corner, they found themselves in the court of Louis XVI. Kairos is an ancient Greek word for the sensation of falling through time and finding yourself in eternity.
5 Because temperature is a measure of the average motion of atoms, it has been suggested that the unity of the world at the Big Bang makes the idea of temperature meaningless at that moment.
6 At his death it was recorded that he ascended into the sky.
Section 10: On things
1 At school I was taught that a mirror reverses my handedness: left becomes right, and right left. This cannot be. I am the same person, my left hand is still my left hand even in the mirror. It only appears that I am looking at myself. I am standing just behind myself, a slice of myself a photon thick. I only appear to be looking back.
2 He was the first to prove by measurement the existence of electromagnetic waves. The phenomenon had been described theoretically by William Clerk Maxwell.
3 As infrared radiation the photon will eventually escape the earth once more. At some point it will meet some obstacle – perhaps a mote of dust – deep in space, and so its eternal life continues.
4 Mistletoe and oaks are culturally tied, but in fact mistletoe rarely grows on oak trees.
Part Two: Animating the Doll
Section 1: Matter → meat
1 The chance of throwing 1,024 marbles, randomly one at a time, into a box divided into two, so that all of them land in the same half of the box, is 1 to 10290 against. (There are 1080 elementary particles in the universe.) The chance is not zero, but ‘unlikely’ hardly seems to cover it. Any event that is unlikely to happen in the lifetime of the universe we might call functionally miraculous. It is functionally miraculous that life emerged in the universe.
2 Or belief.
3 Science used to hold to a principle called Occam’s razor: the faith that between differing but equally powerful scientific descriptions the more parsimonious one is the truer (because more elegant, just as mathematicians talk of inelegant proofs, and labour to find more beautiful ones for the sake of beauty rather than of advancing knowledge). In order to protect the Copernican idea of mankind’s lack of privilege, modern cosmological theories have thrown Occam’s razor out of the window.
4 Quoted in (clearly a popular title) What is Life?, by Ed Regis.
5 Like DNA, a nucleic acid essential for life as we know it.
Section 2: Making babies
1 The uncontrolled growth of a single cell is the cancer that kills that same being.
2 Similarly, what tells nerves to fire is a mystery.
3 Bacteria is, for example, necessary to produce vitamin K.
4 ‘Oceanic feeling’ was a term first coined by the French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944).
Section 3: On consciousness
1 Koans are statements or questions, meant – if considered deeply and long enough – to startle the student into an understanding that separation (in whatever form) is an illusion. The most famous example is the question, What is the sound of one hand clapping? My friend S is currently contemplating the koan, How do you stop the sound of a temple bell?
2 The brain dead are mentally dead, not physically dead. A brain-dead pregnant patient was kept alive for 107 days so that her foetus could develop fully.
3 Between waking and sleeping.
4 Between sleeping and waking. During both hypnogogic and hypnopompic states the right-hand brain becomes dominant. It has been suggested that these states may explain alien-abduction stories.
6 With the discovery of the DNA molecule, biology had indeed begun to turn itself into a testable science like physics, rather than a mostly descriptive one like botany.
Section 4: On the self
1 Best known for his research into parapsychology.
2 ‘Nothing in Excess’ was inscribed at the other end.
Section 5: Meat → mind
1 The universe, too, is seen as some kind of computer, with the laws of nature as its software. Universes are simulated on computers, in a sort of hit-or-miss process, by theoretical physicists and mathematicians hoping to alight on one that looks like this one.
2 Aether was the name given to the medium through which light travels. What aether could be made from was a seemingly insoluble problem for centuries. Then Einstein posited that light does not move relative to anything, and that must include relative to aether too. In effect, his special theory of relativity ruled aether out of existence. How light can be a wave but not a wave in anything became a problem for philosophers: physicists moved on to address other problems about the nature of light. Vitalism, as has already been noted, effectively disappeared with the discovery of DNA.
3 There are many combinatorial explosions of different kinds in science. It is very hard to predict from an amino-acid sequence how a protein will fold. There are twenty different kinds of amino acid. To make a protein, say, two hundred amino acids long there are 20020 possible proteins that need to be examined. For the sake of comparison, 20020 is close to 10260. There are ‘only’ 1080 elementary particles in the whole of the visible universe. Even if we could predict how a protein folds as it is made, then there is the problem of working out how proteins interact with other proteins. Perhaps not surprisingly, most medicines are fairly simple molecules compared to the proteins they are designed to interact with.
4 It is also possible to direct our conscious attention to many of these bodily functions.
5 Colours are names for different wavelengths of light, and as such can be reduced to numbers. Sound is interpreted out of pulses of air that can also be encoded mathematically. Images and sounds are baroque constructions made by the brain.
6 Many sensory, motor and cognitive functions are processed along more than one neural pathway. The information is processed in parallel across the brain and somehow integrated.
7 Perhaps I can imagine going to the gym, and save both time and money.
8 In the 1950s Stephen Kuffler discovered that there are certain retinal cells that measure the contrast between light and dark, not absolute levels of light. All these aspects of an object are processed separately and then integrated in the higher regions of the cortex into a single unified experience. How a single unified experience is achieved is not known. Some would say, nor is it known what a single unified experience could mean.
9 Some air-fresheners work by interfering with the nose’s ability to smell. The smell doesn’t go away, only the ability to smell it.
10 Umami was accepted as a separate kind of taste in 1985. It is the taste that gives meat stock its particular mouthwatering quality. In the late nineteenth century, the French chef Auguste Escoffier revolutionised cooking by combining foods of different tastes. His slow-cooked veal stock, the base of much of his cooking, was umami. Breast milk is as umami as meat stock.
11 The percentage rises to 98 per cent among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Section 8: On behaviour
1 In science, ‘black box’ is a term used for any kind of system whose internal workings are mysterious or hidden. By concentrating instead on the inputs and outputs of the system, often progress can still be made; indeed, progress that may allow the contents of the black box to be probed at some future time.
2 When Freud was a young man he spent time dissecting eels, looking for their testes. Perhaps if he had been born later, or biology had been more advanced in his own time, he would have chosen neuroscience over psychology.
3 In fact, it is rare for animals to kill their own en masse, and it is not generally true of bees, as Tolstoy thought; but it is true of a species of bee called Dawson’s bee (Amegilla dawson) that lives in the hot soil of the Australian outback, and that could not have been known to Tolstoy. The male bees become such frenzied killers that by the end of the mating season every male is dead. Females that get in the way perish too.
4 All fruit flies take an afternoon siesta. How they knew when to nap was a mystery.
5 The biologist Eric Kandel spent years teaching Aplysia. Knocking it on the head makes the snail forget, just as it does to humans.
6 A reward system is also effective, but implicates a different type of neuron.
7 Soon after the discovery that the gene from light-emitting organisms could be added to the genome of those without this ability, some scientists began to experiment seemingly for the fun of it: a tobacco plant that glowed in the dark, bacteria that flashed on and off like Christmas-tree lights, and most spectacularly, a fluorescent albino rabbit, named Alba.
Section 9: There is always something missing
1 (1040x3). Discoveries that would have pleased Dirac and Eddington. See footnote p.46.
2 For a moment it looked like evidence of aliens, but when it comes to it scientists don’t really believe in aliens, and even the possibility of their existence is a spur to search for some other plausible explanation. The possibility of human specialness and seeming evidence of the existence of God are similar spurs. It’s a good working strategy, but it doesn’t mean that any or all of these possibilities are ultimately excluded, just doubted for as long as doubt is possible.
3 On the other hand, the astronomer Percival Lowell (1855–1916) saw criss-crossing lines through his telescope that he believed were evidence of canals on mars. Later he could see the same lines on photographs. The photographs were even published, but no one else could see the lines he could see.
4 The days when we lived close to other Homo species are long gone. Might we now begin to look forward to days living alongside our successors?
5 What David Deutsch defines as ‘explicability at a higher level’.
6 See Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2011) by theoretical physicist Lisa Randall for a detailed exploration of the significance of scale in scientific theories.
Section 10: When the gene is no longer enough
1 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, published in 2002, the year he died.
2 In What Evolution is (2001).
3 In 1972, with Stephen Jay Gould, he proposed the punctuated theory of evolution: ‘that nothing substantial happens in terms of accruing adaptive evolutionary change unless and until physical events upset the ecological applecart, leading to patterns of extinction and evolution of species’.
4 Maverick genius, designer of the computational program Mathematica, author of A New Kind of Science (2002).
5 Cf: In 1973 the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Some biologists no longer agree.
6 The larynx drops in humans between the ages of three and four; before then, infants can breathe through the nose and swallow milk at the same time. Chimpanzees have the wrong architecture of the mouth and throat for speech. They can sign, but only if taught by humans. Language is innate in humans, but not in chimpanzees.
7 The sequel to Anita Loos’ novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was titled But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes. In the introduction, Loos wrote: ‘Recently … the question was put to me “… If you were to write such a book today, what would be your theme?” And without hesitation, I was forced to answer, Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen (a statement which brought the session abruptly to a close). But if that fact is true, as it very well seems to be, it, too, is based soundly on economics, the criminally senseless population explosion which a beneficent nature is trying to curb by more pleasant means than war.’
8 Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind (2011).
9 Writing in the Royal Opera House programme to the opera Anna Nicole (2011). Composed by Mark-Anthony Turnage, the opera is based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith, a model famous in part for her augmented breasts.
Section 11: On tools and human evolution
1 In the popular imagination the most famous image of human evolution is of a creature on all fours becoming increasingly upright and less hairy. This won’t do. It is much harder to be bent half over than it is either to be fully standing or on all fours. However we came to be standing creatures it cannot have been through these intermediary stages. Perhaps it was the act of an individual – then imitated – an effort of conscious will and physical possibility.
2 These days our brains are shrinking. Compared to 10,000 years ago, our brains are 9.5 per cent smaller. We are also physically weaker, our eyesight is poorer, and our bodies are 7 per cent smaller than they were 10,000 years ago.
3 There is evidence of flint-napping about 40,000 years ago. Even that ‘primitive’ process involves a number of distinct steps in its evolution.
Part Three: On Being Human
Section 1: On culture
1 Finger: from the Latin fingere, to shape, fashion or mould. Also the root of the word fiction, to make something up. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo’s pointing finger of God is a pun.
2 Raymond Tallis in Aping Mankind (2011).
3 But around 50,000 years ago the human population was reduced to a single group of people living in East Africa numbering no more than a few hundred. That this happened is not in doubt. Why it happened is the subject of much conjecture. Members of this small group left Africa and eventually became the seven billion of us who live on the earth today.
4 Rarely, a mould of the inside of a fossilised brain case will reveal some of the details of the external surface of the brain.
5 A kind of ox that became extinct in 1627. Modern cattle may be a sub-species.
6 Discovered, also by chance, in September 1940 by Marcel Ravidat, then eighteen years old.
7 Except at three separate sites, curious drawings of a figure with the limbs and torso of a man, pierced through with spear-like cuts.
8 Remains of ivory flutes found in caves at Geissenklösterle in Germany are at least 40,000 years old.
9 In his film about the Chauvet cave, Werner Herzog wondered if any smells had survived from the ice age. He brought in a perfumier to sniff out molecules of the past. The perfumier could detect nothing.
10 A lot has happened in the last 10,000 years. Of the numerous possible versions of human history that could be constructed, one might go like this: i By 7000 BC a fortified farming community at Jericho of some seventy-four acres. ii Traces of wine found on pottery at a Neolithic site (dating from around 5400 BC) in Iran are the earliest evidence of wine found so far. Traces of opium dating from 3,500 years ago have been detected on shards found in Cyprus. Less exotically, traces of cabbage have been identified on ancient British pots. (Perhaps things haven’t changed so much after all.) iii The oldest known piece of creative writing dates from the third millennium BC: The Epic of Gilgamesh, a summary of legends from Babylonia, a state in the south of Mesopotamia. It is the story of the King of Uruk, and mentions many of the first city-states around which civilisation evolved: Ur, Eridu, Lagash and Nippur. It also contains the first account of a great flood, and the first account of a dream. In the Bible we are told that Abraham, the father of the Hebrew and Arab nations (the Israelites were descended from his son Isaac, and the Ishmaelites from his son Ishmael), travelled from Ur of the Chaldees. Chaldea was a region of Babylonia. Excavation of these ancient cities show us that they were sizeable: Eridu was twenty-nine acres, Ur twenty-five acres and Uruk 173 acres. iv The reign of the Pharaohs began in 3100 BC. Weather is a recurring theme of early history. In recorded histories the fate of Egypt is often associated with times of drought and famine. The first settlement of Egypt was in the delta of the Nile, at a time when there were many more tributaries than there are today. The Egyptians’ name for their own land was Kemet, which means black earth. This black earth is the alluvial deposit from the annual, thought to be miraculous, flooding by the Nile of the delta plain. The surrounding land was called Deshret, or red land, from which we derive the word desert. Kemet, with its magical properties of fertility, will become the word alchemy, and thence chemistry. v The history of early Greek civilisation from 1600 BC to 1100 BC is called the Mycenaen period. Mycenae was a city about ninety kilometres south-west of Athens. It was in this period that Helen of Troy eloped with Paris, the consequence of which is the subject of Homer’s Iliad. Troy was named Ilion, hence Iliad, the story of Troy. Life expectancy at this time was thirty-five for men and thirty for women. vi The history of ancient Greece begins around 1100 BC. Some say ancient Greek history proper began with the first Olympic Games in 776 BC. vii In 1000 BC there were many communities along the western Atlantic coast of Europe peacefully trading with each other. It is surmised that trading first began because individual fishing communities met up with each other as they chased fish from feeding ground to feeding ground. There were stable fishing communities in this region for hundreds of years. It is to one of these seafaring tribes that Celtic history can be traced. viii There were Olmecs in Mexico from 1000 BC and Chavin in Peru from 900 BC. ix Greek history went through a period of five hundred years that is sometimes called the Greek dark ages. But by 600 BC Greek civilisation had become what Nietzsche described as ‘the most accomplished, most beautiful, most universally envied of mankind’. Some historians claim that Greek philosophy started on 28 May 585 BC. It was on this date that Thales of Miletus (c.624–c.546 BC), the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, correctly predicted a solar eclipse. Greek civilisation ended with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. Egypt as the land of the Pharaohs comes to an end at the same time. x Taoism was founded by Lao-tzu (b.604 BC), and expounded in the 5,000 characters that constitute the Tao Te Ching (The Way of Virtue), characters that are familiar to every generation of Chinese since. Confucius, or Kung Fu-tzu (551–479 BC), claimed that the Taoists disliked him. Certainly he was more practical, more socially applied. What are we to make of the fact that there have been no holy wars in China? xi Around 400 BC Celts found their way to the Mediterranean coast, drawn there by the allure of figs, grapes, oil and wine. What we know of these people from accounts written by the Greeks, and later the Romans, is that they liked drinking and were said to be somewhat flashy: they wore gold ornaments, of a kind we would now describe as bling. Even at the time, what the Greeks had to say about the Celts was a generalisation. The Celts were known as the barbarians of western Europe, partly because their vanquishers, the Greeks, wanted to elevate their own accomplishment in subduing a violent and brave race, while at the same time ensuring that it was understood that, as victors, they were braver and more civilised. There are populations today claiming to be Celtic in Ireland, the UK, France and Spain, and there are reasons to suppose that there is a connection between these peoples because of connections to be found in their spoken and written languages. The word Celt wasn’t revived until the eighteenth century. The mythology is essentially modern, yet there is a Celtic history that supports the mythology in telling ways. xii How did a small, apparently undistinguished, town in the middle of Italy take over the world? If the Greeks seem to have been essentially philosophical and ambivalent, the Romans were always looking back to a Golden Age even during their own golden age, and looked forward to what they saw as a future of inevitable degeneration. Their prophecy was largely fulfilled, of course – perhaps self-fulfilled. The degeneration of Roman civilisation is mirrored by a decline in Roman writing, which by the third and fourth centuries AD had become vacuous; though even here so much is a matter of taste. Ovid, whom we now think of as one of Rome’s greatest writers, was until fairly recently dismissed for his triviality. Rome’s heyday was in the second century AD. An empire of sixty million humans was spread out across an area some twenty times the size of Britain. The lands circled the Mediterranean, known affectionately to Romans as Mare nostrum, our sea. There was trade between Rome and India. Spices, muslin, jewels and ivory were exchanged for gold. By the time of Rome’s final decline the story shifts to that of its most significant outsider citizens, the Christians. xiii In India the period between the third and sixth centuries is known as the Golden Age, largely because of discoveries in astronomy, mathematics, religion and philosophy. xiv From the fifth to the tenth centuries: the so-called Dark Ages in Europe. xv Between AD 1000 and 1100 the population of China doubled because of expanded rice cultivation. xvi The first crusade 1095–99. The ninth crusade 1271–72. xvii In China in 1368 a peasant named Zu Yuanzhang overthrows the Mongols and founds the Ming dynasty. xviii In 1521 the Aztec empire falls. xix In Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the Renaissance. xx In the early twentieth century Britain rules a fifth of the world’s population, the largest empire in history. xxi In the mid to late twentieth century the world is dominated culturally and economically by the USA. xxii China?
11 Wittgenstein claimed that no one really understood what he was trying to say. In the 1920s, when logical positivism was at its most influential, he recited poetry at meetings of the Vienna Circle. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who wondered to what extent words mean things, Wittgenstein was garrulous. Paul Dirac said he was an ‘awful fellow … never stopped talking’. Dirac himself was famously laconic: ‘What would you say if I told you I was leaving?’ his wife once asked him. ‘I’d say goodbye,’ he said.
12 We may also be the first who are close to having the power to destroy all life on earth, or even the power to destroy the entire universe (which, were we to exercise such power, would, ironically, prove us to have been in a privileged position in the universe after all).
13 By abstracting we make connections between things, and so prune the world down to a place we can negotiate and about which we can tell stories. The fly we see from this angle we recognise as the same fly seen moments later from a different angle. The risk is that sometimes, perhaps often, we are wrong; that it really is a different fly, or even something we have mistaken for a fly.
14 We might, say, take the bull as a mythic clue that threads across the world’s civilisations. i The story begins with Zeus, the king of the gods and ruler of Mount Olympus. Zeus had many offspring, including Perseus, Helen, Hercules, Hermes, Artemis and Persephone. By Mnemosyne he fathered the nine muses (Out of Power and Memory comes Art). By Europa, whom he had ravished in the form of a bull, he fathered Minos, the mythical king of Crete. The story goes that the god Poseidon sent Minos a pure-white bull that Minos was meant to offer in sacrifice, but Minos was so taken by the bull that he decided to keep it. As punishment, Poseidon caused Minos’s wife, Pasiphaë, to fall in love with the bull. The Minotaur was the issue, a wild creature half man and half bull. In an attempt to contain its violence, the man-bull was housed at the heart of a labyrinth, built for Minos by Daedalus and his son Icarus. To appease the Minotaur’s wrath, every seven years seven young Athenians of each sex were offered to the man-beast in sacrifice. Before the third cycle of sacrifice, Theseus, a young Athenian, Poseidon’s son, offered to kill the Minotaur, and though he did not doubt his own strength, he did wonder how he would escape the labyrinth once he had accomplished his task. Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, who had fallen in love with Theseus, gave him a ball of red woollen thread, or ‘clew’. Ariadne gave Theseus a clue and Theseus followed it. He secured the thread as he entered the maze, and unwound the clew as he found his way to the heart of the labyrinth, where he slew the Minotaur. He found his way out again by rewinding the thread of the clew. The Minotaur had become a myth even by the time of Homer. In the nineteenth book of the Odyssey Homer writes of a fertile island – a reference to Crete, probably – a place where there are countless people and ninety cities. In the Iliad it has grown to a hundred cities. We do not know when Homer lived, or whether he was a tradition rather than a single writer, but even the Trojan War that is the subject of the Iliad happened over a century after the Minoan civilisation had disappeared. Plato associates the lost Minoan culture (long lost to history even by his day, the fourth century BC) with the lost city state of Atlantis. Physical evidence of the Minoan culture was discovered only in the late nineteenth century. Until that time, it wasn’t known for certain that there had even been such a culture. All that changed in 1878 when, at Knossos on the island of Crete, the remains of the palace of Minos were discovered by a Cretan merchant named, appropriately enough, Minos Kalokairinos. The German excavator Heinrich Schliemann (1822–90), driven by a belief in the historical reality of places mentioned in Homer, continued to explore the site, but the full significance of the remains only became apparent after the site was acquired by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941). The many discoveries that were made there are recorded in his monumental four-volume work The Palace of Minos (1921–35). The Minotaur’s labyrinth has been placed at the north-west corner of the palace. Among the many important works of art discovered there are wall paintings of young men and women leaping bulls. It has been suggested that European culture began right here, in the Minoan culture that is thought to have flourished between 2700 and 1450 BC. Minoan art and pottery has also been found at ancient Egyptian sites, and Egyptian pottery at Minoan sites. As recently as 1987, fragments of Minoan wall paintings were found in Egypt that depict bull-leapers like those seen in the palace at Knossos. The finds cast some doubt on whether Minoan culture even comes from Crete, as has been supposed. It may have arisen in Egypt. It is possible that the Minotaur’s labyrinth refers to an Egyptian labyrinth sacred to the sun. Or that Minoan civilisation may have arisen somewhere else altogether. The rediscovery of this lost culture also retrieved a lost chapter in the history of world religion. Despite the later Greek mythology, the Minoans did not worship a bull god; so far as we can tell, their gods were all goddesses. There was a goddess of fertility, a goddess who protected cities, another who protected the household, another the underworld, and so on. The significance of the Minoan frescoes of bull leaping are as Greek to us today as they were to the Greeks, but it is clear that they portray a dangerous yet graceful and athletic interaction between youths and bulls. It is impossible not to imagine that some echo of this ancient ritual survives in the graceful bullfights found in Hispanic cultures today. What is missing in the Minoan culture is any sense of barbarism. The relationship between the bulls and the acrobatic Minoan youths seems to be one of harmonious enjoinment. ii In the caves at Chauvet, Lascaux and elsewhere are exquisite, detailed paintings of aurochs. In The Epic of Gilgamesh (from the third millennium BC) Gugalana is named as the Bull of Heaven. The horns represent the crescents of the moon. In Ancient Egypt the bull was worshipped as Apis. Many Egyptian rulers held the title ‘mighty bull’ and ‘bull of Horus’. The Egyptian word for bull was ka, which is phonetically identical to a word that describes the king’s divine double, a sort of bull doppelgänger or daemon. In the Marduk civilisation of the Indus Valley (around 1800 BC) we find the bull of Utu. In Hinduism Shiva’s mount is a bull named Nandi. In the book of Exodus Aaron’s Golden Calf was worshipped by the Hebrews. An ox traditionally (though there is no mention of it in the New Testament) witnesses the birth of Christ. In Greek mythology Dionysus is slain in the form of a bull and eaten by the Titans. Alexander the Great named his horse Bucephalus, literally ‘ox head’. In Rome the god Mithras is often depicted slaughtering a bull. In the first century AD Pliny the Elder wrote of a Celtic druidical ritual in which white bulls swathed in mistletoe were sacrificed. iii ‘It is a story about a Cock and a Bull – and the best of its kind that ever I heard!’ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy.
Section 2: On the relationship between human beings and nature
1 The name was suggested to Lovelock by his friend and neighbour the novelist William Golding one day when they found themselves walking together to the village post office.
2 I imagine a kind of New Yorker cartoon: two businessmen surveying the wasted earth, one saying to the other: ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a market correction.’
3 It was meant to eradicate a certain kind of beetle that was devastating sugarcane plantations. The beetles, however, live at the top of the cane, and the toads are not good at climbing. The toads spread widely across north-eastern Australia, and caused the decline of a number of native reptile species.
4 The population of Europe halved during the sixth to eighth centuries AD. The Black Death reduced the world population from 450 million to 350 million. The world’s population didn’t return to its 1340 level for two hundred years.
5 Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, contracted the disease in 1977, the last known natural case. Janet Parker, a smallpox researcher in England, was exposed to the virus in the laboratory where she worked, and died on 11 September 1978. After her death all laboratory holdings were destroyed, except for some still held in Russia and the United States. A 2010 WHO investigation found that no useful purpose is being served by keeping the virus active.
Section 3: On the relationship between human beings and other animals
1 The explorer Dr Livingstone experienced this state when he was about to be attacked by a lion. (The lion was shot by his bearer.) There is presumably a chemical explanation, but it is hard to imagine what an evolutionary explanation would look like.
2 (1910–76), biologist.
Section 4: On the relationship between human beings and other human beings
1 Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape (2010).
2 Darwin numbered among his valued advisers on variation his London barber Mr Willis – whom he quizzed about dog breeding while he had his hair cut – and his friend William Yarrell, a bookseller. He wrote their ideas down in his notebooks. He observed and recorded the development of his children. He had a gentle old horse called Tommy. He was a pigeon fancier. The years of travel on the Beagle meant far less to him than his years at home. At his home Down House he created a sand path that trailed about the gardens and that he planted with oak, lime and chestnut. He called it his thinking path. He walked it almost every day for forty years. He followed the bees around his garden from the violets to the primroses. It was here in his garden that he made his greatest leaps of imagination.
Section 5: On love
1 Their dissection of love could become minutely particular: Katapepaiderastekenai, to squander an estate through hopeless devotion to boys.
2 Wilson was heavily criticised for his early support of Hamilton. Now that Hamilton’s equation is more favourably regarded, Wilson finds himself heavily criticised again.
3 In 1140, in Weinsberg, Upper Bavaria.
Section 7: On the difficulty of being
1 In a Prime Minister we might desire a less cosmic perspective. ‘Nothing matters very much,’ Balfour (1848–1930) once said, ‘and few things matter at all.’ With such a philosophy, it is not surprising that in assessing his legacy the journalist Harold Begbie wrote that, ‘To look back upon his record is to see a desert, and a desert with no altar and with no monument, without even one tomb at which a friend might weep.’
2 In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady.
3 From The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey.
Section 9: On memory
1 An uncharacteristically forceful speech made by Fanny Price to Miss Crawford, who ‘untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say’.
2 On the other hand, the singer Daniel Bedingfield says he remembers the trauma of being pulled out of the womb.
Section 10: On faith, belief and truth
Section 11: On God
1 Outdoors in full sunlight, a million million photons fall on a pinhead every second. At night looking up at a faint star, a few hundred photons strike (or do they gently plop on to?) the retina each second.
2 String theorists ask esoteric questions like, how many spheres can be packed into a Calabi-Yau space? The answer is 317,206,375. The confirmation of the answer by two separate routes is support for string theory.
Section 13: On death
1 Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of 1969.
Section 14: On humility
1 The scientist differs from the religious believer in this: that she may pick up her belief in the scientific method when she arrives at the laboratory, and put it to one side again when she returns home.