My literary agent John Brockman, with his wife and partner Katinka Matson,
conceived
the idea of editing a book of essays as a rite-of-passage gift for their son Max.
Richard-Dawkins-The-Devil-s-Chaplain
Well, I'm not sure I'd go with Mao Tse Tung into Hyde Park, but I would unhesitatingly go into the jungle with Travers, Angus and Maisie, and no adult companions at all.
No gun, just quick-witted young people with clear eyes, fast reflexes and most of a lifetime (albeit a short one) of African know-how.
I don't know what to do if I meet an elephant.
They do.
I'm terrified of puff adders, mambas and scorpions.
They take them in their stride.
At the same time, dependable and strong as they are, they still bubble with the innocence and charm of youth.
This is still Swallows and Amazons, still an idyll, the sort of childhood that for most of us exists only in dreams and idealized misrememberings, 'the land of lost content'.
Yet it is firmly in the real world.
These innocents have seen favourite lions brutally killed, have
*Travers, Angus and Maisie were aged 16, 14 and 12 when they finished the book.
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rapped out reports of such tragedies in the dispassionate argot of the radio link, have assisted at the subsequent postmortems.
This accomplished book is entirely the work of its young authors, but it isn't hard to guess the source of their ability to do it - their imagina- tion, their enterprise, their unorthodoxy, their adventurous spirit. My wife and I first met Kate Nicholls, their mother, in 1992 when she was living in the Cotswolds, pregnant with Oakley, commuting to study in Oxford libraries. A successful actress, she had become disillusioned with the stage and developed, in her late thirties, a passion (passion is the story of her life) for the science of evolution. Kate doesn't do anything by halves and, for her, an interest in evolution meant deep immersion in libraries, digging up the original research literature. With only minimal guidance from me in what became a series of informal tutorials, her reading transformed her into something of a scholarly authority on Darwinian theory. Her eventual decision to pull up roots and head for Botswana, where Darwinism can be daily witnessed in practice, seemed entirely in character: a natural, if unconventional, extension of the same scholarly quest. Her children, one can't help feeling, have a pretty fortunate inheritance, as well as an almost unique environment in which to realize it.
They also have to thank their mother for their education, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of their life. Quite soon after arriving in Botswana, Kate decided to teach them herself. A brave decision, I think I would have counselled against it. But I would have been wrong. Although all their schooling is done in camp, they keep proper terms, have challenging homework assignments and work towards inter- nationally accredited exams. Kate gets good results by standard educational certifications, while at the same time tending, indeed enhancing, the natural sense of wonder that normal children too often lose during their teens. I don't think any reader of these pages could fail to judge her unorthodox School in the Bush a brilliant success. * The proof lies in the book, for, to repeat, the children, and they alone, wrote it. All three authors show themselves to be excellent writers: sensitive, literate, articulate, intelligent and creative.
Kate's choice of Botswana rather than anywhere else in Africa was for- tuitous. It eventually led to her meeting Pieter Kat. And of course the lions - wild lions, living and dying in the world for which the natural selection of their ancestors had prepared them. Pieter is the ideal step-
? Further testimony to the success of Kate's bush school is that Travers and Angus have both been accepted by the (first-class) universities of their choice, UC Santa Barbara and Stanford, respectively.
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? father for her children, and these young scientists have in turn become an indispensable part of the lion research and conservation project.
It wasn't till last year that my family and I finally visited the camp. The experience was unforgettable, and I can testify to the picture painted in The Lion Children. It really is just like that: more wonderful than mad, but a bit of both. My daughter Juliet went out ahead, part of a large invasion of young visitors who soon picked up the enthusiasm of the resident family. On Juliet's first full day in Africa, Travers took her out in a Land Rover, tracking radio-collared lions. When we received Juliet's letter home, brimming with excitement at such an initiation, I relayed the story to her grandmother, who interrupted me with panic in her voice: 'Plus, of course, at least two armed African rangers? ' I had to confess that Travers really had been Juliet's only companion, that he had been driving the Land Rover all by himself, and that as far as I knew the camp boasted neither African rangers nor arms. I don't mind admitting that, though I concealed it from my mother, I was pretty anxious about the story myself. But that was before I had seen Travers in the bush. Or, indeed, Angus or Maisie.
We arrived a month after Juliet, and our fears were soon put to rest. I had been to Africa before, indeed was born there. But I have never felt so close to the wild. Or so close to lions or any large wild animals. And there was the marvellous camaraderie of life in camp; laughter and argument in the dining tent, everybody shouting at once. I think of sleeping and waking amid the sounds of the African night, the untiring 'Work harder' of the Cape Turtle Dove, the insolently robust barking of the baboons, the distant - and sometimes not so distant - roaring of the prides. I think of Juliet's sixteenth birthday party timed for the full moon: a surreal scene of candlelit table standing proud and alone on open ground, miles from camp and indeed from anywhere else; of the catch in the throat as we watched the huge moon rising exactly on cue, first reflected in the shallow Jackal Pan and later picking out the spectral shapes of marauding hyenas - which had us hastily bundling the sleeping Oakley into the safety of the Land Rover. I think of our last night and a dozen lions, gnawing and growling on a recently killed zebra only just outside the camp. The atavistic emotions that this primitive night scene aroused - for, whatever our upbringing, our genes are African - haunt me still.
But I can't begin to do justice to this world which has been the setting for such an extraordinary childhood. I was only there for a week, and I am no doubt jaded with maturity. Read the book and experience, through watchful young eyes, all Africa - and her prodigies.
AFRICA AND GOLDEN JOYS
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? 6. 4
Heroes and Ancestors1
Earliest memories can build a private Eden, a lost garden to which there is no return. The name Mbagathi conjured myths in my mind. Early in the war my father was called from the colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi) to join the army in Kenya. My mother disobeyed instruc- tions to stay behind in Nyasaland and drove with him, along rutted dust roads and over unmarked and fortunately unpoliced borders, to Kenya, where I was later born and lived till I was two. My earliest memory is of the two whitewashed thatched huts which my parents built for us in a garden, near the small Mbagathi river with its footbridge where I once fell into the water. I have always dreamed of returning to the site of this unwitting baptism, not because there was anything remarkable about the place, but because my memory is void before it.
That garden with the two whitewashed huts was my infant Eden and the Mbagathi my personal river. But on a larger timescale Africa is Eden to us all, the ancestral garden whose Darwinian memories have been carved into our DNA over millions of years until our recent worldwide 'Out of Africa' diaspora. It was at least partly the search for roots, our species' ancestors and my own childhood garden, that took me back to Kenya in December 1994.
My wife Lalla happened to sit next to Richard Leakey at a lunch to
1
launch his The Origin of Humankind" and by the end of the meal he
had invited her (and me) to spend Christmas with his family in Kenya. Could there be a better beginning to a search for roots than a visit to the Leakey family on their home ground? We accepted gratefully. On the way we spent a few days with an old colleague, the economic ecologist Dr Michael Norton-Griffiths, and his wife Annie, in their house at Langata, near Nairobi. This paradise of bougainvillea and lush green gardens was marred only by the evident necessity for the Kenya equivalent of the burglar alarm - the armed askari, hired to patrol the garden at night by every householder who can afford the luxury.
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? I didn't know where to start in quest of my lost Mbagathi. I knew only that it was somewhere near greater Nairobi. That the city had expanded since 1943 was only too obvious. For all I could tell, my childhood garden might languish under a car park or an international hotel. At a neighbour's carol-singing party I cultivated the greyest and most wrinkled guests, seeking an old brain in which the name of Mrs Walter, the philanthropic owner of our garden, or of Grazebrooks, her house, might have lodged. Though intrigued at my quest, none could help. Then I discovered that the stream below the Norton-Griffiths' garden was named the Mbagathi River. There was a steep red soil track down the hill and I made a ritual pilgrimage. At the foot of the hill, not 200 yards from where we were living, was a small footbridge and I stood and sentimentally watched the villagers returning home from work over the Mbagathi River.
I don't know, and probably never shall, if this was 'my' bridge, but it probably was my Jordan, for rivers outlive human works. I never discovered my garden and I doubt if it survives. Human memory is frail, our traditions as erratic as Chinese whispers and largely false, written records crumble and in any case writing is only millennia old. If we want to follow our roots back through the millions of years we need more persistent race memories. Two exist, fossils and DNA - hardware and software. The fact that our species now has a hard history is partly to the credit of one family, the Leakeys: the late Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, their son Richard and his wife Meave. It was to Richard and Meave's holiday house at Lamu that we were going for Christmas.
The engagingly filthy town of Lamu, one of the strongholds of Islam bordering the Indian Ocean, lies on a sandy island close to the mangrove fringes of the coast. The imposing waterfront recalls Evelyn Waugh's Matodi in the first chapter of Black Mischief. Open stone drains, grey with suds, line streets too narrow for wheeled traffic, and heavily laden donkeys purposefully trot their unsupervised errands across the town. Skeletal cats sleep in patches of sun. Black-veiled women like crows walk obsequiously past men seated on doorsteps, talking the heat and the flies away. Every four hours the muezzins (nowadays they are recorded on cassette tapes concealed in the minarets) caterwaul for custom. Nothing disturbs the Marabou storks at their one-legged vigil round the abattoir.
The Leakeys are white Kenyans, not English, and they built their house in the Swahili style (this is native Swahili country, unlike most of
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Kenya, where the Swahili language is an introduced lingua franca spread by the Arab slave trade). It is a large, white, thankfully cool cathedral of a house, with an arched veranda, tiles and rush matting on the floor, no glass in the windows, no hot water in the pipes and no need for either. The whole upstairs floor, reached by irregularly cut out- side steps, is a single flat area furnished only with rush mats, cushions and mattresses, completely open to the warm night winds and the bats diving past Orion. Above this airy space, raised high on stilts, is the unique Swahili roof, thatched with reeds on a lofty superstructure of palm logs, intricately lashed together with thongs.
Richard Leakey is a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliche, 'a big man in every sense of the word'. Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgements of any. He lost both legs in a near fatal air crash in 1993, at the end of his rampantly successful years crusading against poachers. As Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service he transformed the previously demoralized rangers into a crack fighting army with modern weapons to match those of the poachers and, more importantly, with an esprit de corps and a will to hit back at them. In 1989 he persuaded President Moi to light a bonfire of more than 2000 seized tusks, a uniquely Leakeyan masterstroke of public relations which did much to destroy the ivory trade and save the elephant. But jealousies were aroused by his international prestige which helped raise funds for his department, money which other officials coveted. Hardest to forgive, he conspic- uously proved it possible to run a big department in Kenya efficiently and without corruption. Leakey had to go, and he did. Coincidentally, his plane had unexplained engine failure, and now he swings along on two artificial legs (with a spare pair specially made for swimming with flippers). He again races his sailing boat with his wife and daughters for crew, he lost no time in regaining his pilot's licence, and his spirit will not be crushed.
If Richard Leakey is a hero, he is matched in elephant lore by that legendary and redoubtable couple Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton. Iain and I had been students of the great naturalist, Niko Tinbergen, at Oxford, as had Mike Norton-Griffiths. It was a long time since we had met, and the Douglas-Hamiltons invited Lalla and me to Lake Naivasha for the final part of our holiday. Son of a dynasty of warlike Scottish lairds and more recently ace aviators, daughter of equally swashbuckling Italian-French adventurers in Africa, Iain and Oria met romantically, lived dangerously,
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? raised their baby daughters to play fearlessly among wild elephants, fought the ivory trade with words and the poachers with guns.
Oria's parents, explorers and elephant hunters in the 1930s, built Sirocco, the 'pink palace', a stunning monument to art deco stylishness on the shores of Lake Naivasha, where they settled to farm 3000 acres. They are now buried side by side in the garden, near the avenue of cypresses that they planted to remind themselves of Naples, framing Longonot in place of Vesuvius. When they died the place fell into disrepair for ten years until a determined Oria, against all economic advice, returned. The farm now thrives again, though no longer 3000 acres, and Sirocco itself is restored, and is as it must have been. Iain flies his tiny plane home every weekend from Nairobi, where he runs his newly formed charity, 'Save the Elephants'. The family were all at Sirocco for Christmas and we were to join them for New Year.
Our arrival was unforgettable. Music thumped through the open
doors (Vangelis's score for the film 1492 - 1 later chose it for Desert Island
Discs). After a characteristic Italian and African lunch for 20 guests, we
looked out over the terrace at the small paddock where, 25 years before,
uninvited and unexpected, Iain had landed his plane to the terrified
incredulity of Oria's parents and their guests at a similarly grand
luncheon party. At dawn the morning after this sensational entrance
into her life, Oria had without hesitation taken off with Iain for the
shores of Lake Manyara, where the young man had begun his now
famous study of wild elephants, and they have been together ever since.
Their story is told in their two books, the Arcadian Among the Elephants 142
and the more sombre Battle for the Elephants.
On the veranda, staring towards Mount Longonot, is the skull of
Boadicea, giant matriarch of Manyara, mother or grandmother of so
many of Iain's elephants, victim of the poaching holocaust, her skull
devotedly strapped into the back seat of Iain's plane and flown to its
final rest overlooking a peaceful garden. There are no elephants in the
Naivasha area, so we were spared the notorious Douglas-Hamilton treat-
ment whereby guests are taken out and scared witless. The following
43
passage, from the book The Tree where Man was Born,' by the American
travel writer Peter Matthiessen, is entirely typical:
'I don't think she's going to charge us', lain whispered. But the moment the herd was safely past, Ophelia swung up onto the bank, and she had dispensed with threat display. There were no flared ears, no blaring, only an oncoming cow elephant, trunk held high, less than twenty yards away.
As I started to run, I recall cursing myself for having been there in the first 237
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place; my one chance was that the elephant would seize my friend instead of me. In hopelessness, or perhaps some instinct not to turn my back on a charging animal, I faced around again almost before I had set out, and was rewarded with one of the great sights of a lifetime. Douglas-Hamilton, unwilling to drop his apparatus, and knowing that flight was useless anyway, and doubtless cross that Ophelia had failed to act as he predicted, was making a last stand. As the elephant loomed over us, filling the coarse heat of noon with her dusty bulk, he flared his arms and waved his glittering contraption in her face, at the same time bellowing, 'Bugger off! ' Taken aback, the dazzled Ophelia flared her ears and blared, but she had sidestepped, losing the initiative, and now, thrown off course, she swung away toward the river, trumpeting angrily over her shoulder.
From high on the bank came a great peal of laughter from Oria. lain and I trudged up to lunch; there was very damned little to say.
The only flaw in our Naivasha holiday was an ugly rumour that a leopard had been snared on a neighbouring farm and was painfully dragging the snare somewhere in the area. Grown quiet with anger, Iain took down his gun (for a wounded leopard can be dangerous), called for the best Masai tracker on the farm, and we set off in an ancient Land Rover.
The plan was to find the leopard by tracking and by questioning witnesses, lure it into a trap, nurse it back to health and release it again on the farm. Knowing no Swahili, I could gauge the progress of Iain's cross-examinations only by facial expressions, tones of voice and Iain's occasional summaries for my benefit. We eventually found a young man who had seen the leopard, though he denied it at first. Iain whispered to me that such initial denials - baffling to my naive straight- forwardness - were ritual and normal. Eventually, without for a moment acknowledging that he had changed his story, the youth would lead us to the scene. Sure enough he did, and there the Masai tracker spotted leopard hairs and a possible spoor. He bounded, doubled up, through the papyrus reeds, followed by Iain and me. Just when I thought we were hopelessly lost, we re-emerged at our starting point. The trail had gone cold.
By similarly roundabout verbal skirmishings we tracked down a more recent witness who led us to another clearing in the papyrus, and Iain decided that here was the best site for a trap. He telephoned the Kenya Wildlife Service and they came, within the day, with a large iron cage filling the back of a Land Rover. Its door was designed to clang shut when the bait of meat was tugged. At dead of night we lurched and bumped through the papyrus and hippo dung, camouflaged the trap
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? with foliage, laid a trail of raw meat to its entrance, baited it with half a sheep and went to bed.
The next day, Lalla and I were due to return to Nairobi and we left with the trap still baited, having attracted nothing more substantial than a marsh mongoose. Iain flew us in his little plane, hopping over steaming volcanic hills and down lake-filled valleys, over zebras and (almost) under giraffes, scattering the dust and the goats of the Masai villages, skirting the Ngong hills to Nairobi. At Wilson Airport, we chanced to run into Meave Leakey. She has now largely taken over the running of the fossil-hunting work from Richard, and she offered to introduce us to our ancestors in the vaults of the Kenya National Museum. This rare privilege was arranged for next day, the morning of our departure for London.
The great archaeologist Schliemann 'gazed upon the face of Agamemnon'. Well, good, the mask of a Bronze Age chieftain is a fine thing to behold. But as Meave Leakey's guest I have gazed upon the face of KNM-ER 1470 (Homo habilis), who lived and died 20,000 centuries before the Bronze Age began . . .
Each fossil is accompanied by a meticulously accurate cast which you are allowed to hold and turn over as you look at the priceless original. The Leakeys told us that their team was opening up a new site at Lake Turkana, with fossils 4 million years old, older than any hominids so far discovered. In the week that I write this, Meave and her colleagues have published in Nature the first harvest of this ancient stratum: a newly discovered species, Australopithecus anamensis, represented by a lower jaw and various other fragments. The newfindssuggest that our ancestors were already walking upright 4 million years ago, surprisingly (to some) close to our split from the lineage of chimpanzees. *
The leopard, Iain later told us, never came to the trap. He had feared that it would not, for the evidence of the second witness suggested that, fatally hobbled by the snare, it was already near death from starvation. For me, the most memorable part of that leopard-tracking day was my conversation with the two black rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service who brought the trap. I was deeply impressed by the efficiency, humanity and dedication of these men. They were not allowed to let me photograph
? Even older fossils have been discovered since this was first written.
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their operation, and they seemed a little reserved until I mentioned the name of Dr Leakey, their former leader, now in the political wilderness. Their eyes immediately lit up. 'Oh, you know Richard Leakey? What a wonderful man, a magnificent man! ' I asked them how the Kenya Wildlife Service was faring nowadays. 'Oh well, we soldier on. We do our best. But it is not the same. What a magnificent man! '
We went to Africa to find the past. We found heroes and inspiration for the future, too.
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? A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER
This last section, its title borrowed from W. B. Yeats, has a single item: an open letter to my daughter, written when she was ten. For most of her childhood, I unhappily saw her only for short periods at a time, and it was not easy to talk about the important things of life. I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think. When she reached the age of ten, I thought about writing her a long letter. But to send it out of the blue seemed oddly formal and forbidding.
Then an opportunity fortuitously arose.
My literary agent John Brockman, with his wife and partner Katinka Matson, conceived the idea of editing a book of essays as a rite-of-passage gift for their son Max. They invited clients and friends to contribute essays of advice or inspiration for a young person starting life. The invitation spurred me into writing, as an open letter, the advice to my daughter which I had previously been shy to give. The book itself, How Things Are, changed its mission halfway through its compilation. It remained dedicated to Max, but the subtitle became A Science Tool-kit for the Mind and later contributors were not asked to write specifically for a young person.
Eight years down the road, the legal onset of Juliet's adulthood happened to fall during the preparation of this collection, and the book is dedicated to her as an eighteenth birthday present, with a father's love.
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? Dear Juliet
Good and Bad Reasons for Believing144
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is 'evidence'. Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling . . . ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The 'evening star' looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling . . . ) is called an observation.
Often evidence isn't just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person! ) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have
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measles he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see . . . Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots? ), his hands (is your forehead hot? ), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, 'I diagnose that the child has measles. ' Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called 'tradition', 'authority' and 'revelation'.
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they'd been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by 'tradition'. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, 'We Hindus believe so and so. ' 'We Muslims believe such and such. ' 'We Christians believe something else. '
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!
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Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the 'Queen of Heaven'. The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus's time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to. *
? The fatwah against Salman Rushdie was prominently in the news at the time.
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When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like 'authority'. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called 'revelation'. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been 'revealed' to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling 'revelation'. It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, 'Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen? ' Now suppose I answered: 'I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead. ' You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside 'feeling' on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings,
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so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you'd never be confident of things like 'My wife loves me'. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that some- body loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favours and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a 'hunch' about an idea that just 'feels' right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spend- ing some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of . . . other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We 'swim' through a 'sea of people'. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You 246
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each speak the language that fits you to 'swim about' in your own separate 'people sea'. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at 'swimming about in their people sea', children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional infor- mation just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children. ) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German.
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Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this?
*Travers, Angus and Maisie were aged 16, 14 and 12 when they finished the book.
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rapped out reports of such tragedies in the dispassionate argot of the radio link, have assisted at the subsequent postmortems.
This accomplished book is entirely the work of its young authors, but it isn't hard to guess the source of their ability to do it - their imagina- tion, their enterprise, their unorthodoxy, their adventurous spirit. My wife and I first met Kate Nicholls, their mother, in 1992 when she was living in the Cotswolds, pregnant with Oakley, commuting to study in Oxford libraries. A successful actress, she had become disillusioned with the stage and developed, in her late thirties, a passion (passion is the story of her life) for the science of evolution. Kate doesn't do anything by halves and, for her, an interest in evolution meant deep immersion in libraries, digging up the original research literature. With only minimal guidance from me in what became a series of informal tutorials, her reading transformed her into something of a scholarly authority on Darwinian theory. Her eventual decision to pull up roots and head for Botswana, where Darwinism can be daily witnessed in practice, seemed entirely in character: a natural, if unconventional, extension of the same scholarly quest. Her children, one can't help feeling, have a pretty fortunate inheritance, as well as an almost unique environment in which to realize it.
They also have to thank their mother for their education, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of their life. Quite soon after arriving in Botswana, Kate decided to teach them herself. A brave decision, I think I would have counselled against it. But I would have been wrong. Although all their schooling is done in camp, they keep proper terms, have challenging homework assignments and work towards inter- nationally accredited exams. Kate gets good results by standard educational certifications, while at the same time tending, indeed enhancing, the natural sense of wonder that normal children too often lose during their teens. I don't think any reader of these pages could fail to judge her unorthodox School in the Bush a brilliant success. * The proof lies in the book, for, to repeat, the children, and they alone, wrote it. All three authors show themselves to be excellent writers: sensitive, literate, articulate, intelligent and creative.
Kate's choice of Botswana rather than anywhere else in Africa was for- tuitous. It eventually led to her meeting Pieter Kat. And of course the lions - wild lions, living and dying in the world for which the natural selection of their ancestors had prepared them. Pieter is the ideal step-
? Further testimony to the success of Kate's bush school is that Travers and Angus have both been accepted by the (first-class) universities of their choice, UC Santa Barbara and Stanford, respectively.
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? father for her children, and these young scientists have in turn become an indispensable part of the lion research and conservation project.
It wasn't till last year that my family and I finally visited the camp. The experience was unforgettable, and I can testify to the picture painted in The Lion Children. It really is just like that: more wonderful than mad, but a bit of both. My daughter Juliet went out ahead, part of a large invasion of young visitors who soon picked up the enthusiasm of the resident family. On Juliet's first full day in Africa, Travers took her out in a Land Rover, tracking radio-collared lions. When we received Juliet's letter home, brimming with excitement at such an initiation, I relayed the story to her grandmother, who interrupted me with panic in her voice: 'Plus, of course, at least two armed African rangers? ' I had to confess that Travers really had been Juliet's only companion, that he had been driving the Land Rover all by himself, and that as far as I knew the camp boasted neither African rangers nor arms. I don't mind admitting that, though I concealed it from my mother, I was pretty anxious about the story myself. But that was before I had seen Travers in the bush. Or, indeed, Angus or Maisie.
We arrived a month after Juliet, and our fears were soon put to rest. I had been to Africa before, indeed was born there. But I have never felt so close to the wild. Or so close to lions or any large wild animals. And there was the marvellous camaraderie of life in camp; laughter and argument in the dining tent, everybody shouting at once. I think of sleeping and waking amid the sounds of the African night, the untiring 'Work harder' of the Cape Turtle Dove, the insolently robust barking of the baboons, the distant - and sometimes not so distant - roaring of the prides. I think of Juliet's sixteenth birthday party timed for the full moon: a surreal scene of candlelit table standing proud and alone on open ground, miles from camp and indeed from anywhere else; of the catch in the throat as we watched the huge moon rising exactly on cue, first reflected in the shallow Jackal Pan and later picking out the spectral shapes of marauding hyenas - which had us hastily bundling the sleeping Oakley into the safety of the Land Rover. I think of our last night and a dozen lions, gnawing and growling on a recently killed zebra only just outside the camp. The atavistic emotions that this primitive night scene aroused - for, whatever our upbringing, our genes are African - haunt me still.
But I can't begin to do justice to this world which has been the setting for such an extraordinary childhood. I was only there for a week, and I am no doubt jaded with maturity. Read the book and experience, through watchful young eyes, all Africa - and her prodigies.
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? 6. 4
Heroes and Ancestors1
Earliest memories can build a private Eden, a lost garden to which there is no return. The name Mbagathi conjured myths in my mind. Early in the war my father was called from the colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi) to join the army in Kenya. My mother disobeyed instruc- tions to stay behind in Nyasaland and drove with him, along rutted dust roads and over unmarked and fortunately unpoliced borders, to Kenya, where I was later born and lived till I was two. My earliest memory is of the two whitewashed thatched huts which my parents built for us in a garden, near the small Mbagathi river with its footbridge where I once fell into the water. I have always dreamed of returning to the site of this unwitting baptism, not because there was anything remarkable about the place, but because my memory is void before it.
That garden with the two whitewashed huts was my infant Eden and the Mbagathi my personal river. But on a larger timescale Africa is Eden to us all, the ancestral garden whose Darwinian memories have been carved into our DNA over millions of years until our recent worldwide 'Out of Africa' diaspora. It was at least partly the search for roots, our species' ancestors and my own childhood garden, that took me back to Kenya in December 1994.
My wife Lalla happened to sit next to Richard Leakey at a lunch to
1
launch his The Origin of Humankind" and by the end of the meal he
had invited her (and me) to spend Christmas with his family in Kenya. Could there be a better beginning to a search for roots than a visit to the Leakey family on their home ground? We accepted gratefully. On the way we spent a few days with an old colleague, the economic ecologist Dr Michael Norton-Griffiths, and his wife Annie, in their house at Langata, near Nairobi. This paradise of bougainvillea and lush green gardens was marred only by the evident necessity for the Kenya equivalent of the burglar alarm - the armed askari, hired to patrol the garden at night by every householder who can afford the luxury.
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? I didn't know where to start in quest of my lost Mbagathi. I knew only that it was somewhere near greater Nairobi. That the city had expanded since 1943 was only too obvious. For all I could tell, my childhood garden might languish under a car park or an international hotel. At a neighbour's carol-singing party I cultivated the greyest and most wrinkled guests, seeking an old brain in which the name of Mrs Walter, the philanthropic owner of our garden, or of Grazebrooks, her house, might have lodged. Though intrigued at my quest, none could help. Then I discovered that the stream below the Norton-Griffiths' garden was named the Mbagathi River. There was a steep red soil track down the hill and I made a ritual pilgrimage. At the foot of the hill, not 200 yards from where we were living, was a small footbridge and I stood and sentimentally watched the villagers returning home from work over the Mbagathi River.
I don't know, and probably never shall, if this was 'my' bridge, but it probably was my Jordan, for rivers outlive human works. I never discovered my garden and I doubt if it survives. Human memory is frail, our traditions as erratic as Chinese whispers and largely false, written records crumble and in any case writing is only millennia old. If we want to follow our roots back through the millions of years we need more persistent race memories. Two exist, fossils and DNA - hardware and software. The fact that our species now has a hard history is partly to the credit of one family, the Leakeys: the late Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, their son Richard and his wife Meave. It was to Richard and Meave's holiday house at Lamu that we were going for Christmas.
The engagingly filthy town of Lamu, one of the strongholds of Islam bordering the Indian Ocean, lies on a sandy island close to the mangrove fringes of the coast. The imposing waterfront recalls Evelyn Waugh's Matodi in the first chapter of Black Mischief. Open stone drains, grey with suds, line streets too narrow for wheeled traffic, and heavily laden donkeys purposefully trot their unsupervised errands across the town. Skeletal cats sleep in patches of sun. Black-veiled women like crows walk obsequiously past men seated on doorsteps, talking the heat and the flies away. Every four hours the muezzins (nowadays they are recorded on cassette tapes concealed in the minarets) caterwaul for custom. Nothing disturbs the Marabou storks at their one-legged vigil round the abattoir.
The Leakeys are white Kenyans, not English, and they built their house in the Swahili style (this is native Swahili country, unlike most of
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Kenya, where the Swahili language is an introduced lingua franca spread by the Arab slave trade). It is a large, white, thankfully cool cathedral of a house, with an arched veranda, tiles and rush matting on the floor, no glass in the windows, no hot water in the pipes and no need for either. The whole upstairs floor, reached by irregularly cut out- side steps, is a single flat area furnished only with rush mats, cushions and mattresses, completely open to the warm night winds and the bats diving past Orion. Above this airy space, raised high on stilts, is the unique Swahili roof, thatched with reeds on a lofty superstructure of palm logs, intricately lashed together with thongs.
Richard Leakey is a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliche, 'a big man in every sense of the word'. Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgements of any. He lost both legs in a near fatal air crash in 1993, at the end of his rampantly successful years crusading against poachers. As Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service he transformed the previously demoralized rangers into a crack fighting army with modern weapons to match those of the poachers and, more importantly, with an esprit de corps and a will to hit back at them. In 1989 he persuaded President Moi to light a bonfire of more than 2000 seized tusks, a uniquely Leakeyan masterstroke of public relations which did much to destroy the ivory trade and save the elephant. But jealousies were aroused by his international prestige which helped raise funds for his department, money which other officials coveted. Hardest to forgive, he conspic- uously proved it possible to run a big department in Kenya efficiently and without corruption. Leakey had to go, and he did. Coincidentally, his plane had unexplained engine failure, and now he swings along on two artificial legs (with a spare pair specially made for swimming with flippers). He again races his sailing boat with his wife and daughters for crew, he lost no time in regaining his pilot's licence, and his spirit will not be crushed.
If Richard Leakey is a hero, he is matched in elephant lore by that legendary and redoubtable couple Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton. Iain and I had been students of the great naturalist, Niko Tinbergen, at Oxford, as had Mike Norton-Griffiths. It was a long time since we had met, and the Douglas-Hamiltons invited Lalla and me to Lake Naivasha for the final part of our holiday. Son of a dynasty of warlike Scottish lairds and more recently ace aviators, daughter of equally swashbuckling Italian-French adventurers in Africa, Iain and Oria met romantically, lived dangerously,
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? raised their baby daughters to play fearlessly among wild elephants, fought the ivory trade with words and the poachers with guns.
Oria's parents, explorers and elephant hunters in the 1930s, built Sirocco, the 'pink palace', a stunning monument to art deco stylishness on the shores of Lake Naivasha, where they settled to farm 3000 acres. They are now buried side by side in the garden, near the avenue of cypresses that they planted to remind themselves of Naples, framing Longonot in place of Vesuvius. When they died the place fell into disrepair for ten years until a determined Oria, against all economic advice, returned. The farm now thrives again, though no longer 3000 acres, and Sirocco itself is restored, and is as it must have been. Iain flies his tiny plane home every weekend from Nairobi, where he runs his newly formed charity, 'Save the Elephants'. The family were all at Sirocco for Christmas and we were to join them for New Year.
Our arrival was unforgettable. Music thumped through the open
doors (Vangelis's score for the film 1492 - 1 later chose it for Desert Island
Discs). After a characteristic Italian and African lunch for 20 guests, we
looked out over the terrace at the small paddock where, 25 years before,
uninvited and unexpected, Iain had landed his plane to the terrified
incredulity of Oria's parents and their guests at a similarly grand
luncheon party. At dawn the morning after this sensational entrance
into her life, Oria had without hesitation taken off with Iain for the
shores of Lake Manyara, where the young man had begun his now
famous study of wild elephants, and they have been together ever since.
Their story is told in their two books, the Arcadian Among the Elephants 142
and the more sombre Battle for the Elephants.
On the veranda, staring towards Mount Longonot, is the skull of
Boadicea, giant matriarch of Manyara, mother or grandmother of so
many of Iain's elephants, victim of the poaching holocaust, her skull
devotedly strapped into the back seat of Iain's plane and flown to its
final rest overlooking a peaceful garden. There are no elephants in the
Naivasha area, so we were spared the notorious Douglas-Hamilton treat-
ment whereby guests are taken out and scared witless. The following
43
passage, from the book The Tree where Man was Born,' by the American
travel writer Peter Matthiessen, is entirely typical:
'I don't think she's going to charge us', lain whispered. But the moment the herd was safely past, Ophelia swung up onto the bank, and she had dispensed with threat display. There were no flared ears, no blaring, only an oncoming cow elephant, trunk held high, less than twenty yards away.
As I started to run, I recall cursing myself for having been there in the first 237
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place; my one chance was that the elephant would seize my friend instead of me. In hopelessness, or perhaps some instinct not to turn my back on a charging animal, I faced around again almost before I had set out, and was rewarded with one of the great sights of a lifetime. Douglas-Hamilton, unwilling to drop his apparatus, and knowing that flight was useless anyway, and doubtless cross that Ophelia had failed to act as he predicted, was making a last stand. As the elephant loomed over us, filling the coarse heat of noon with her dusty bulk, he flared his arms and waved his glittering contraption in her face, at the same time bellowing, 'Bugger off! ' Taken aback, the dazzled Ophelia flared her ears and blared, but she had sidestepped, losing the initiative, and now, thrown off course, she swung away toward the river, trumpeting angrily over her shoulder.
From high on the bank came a great peal of laughter from Oria. lain and I trudged up to lunch; there was very damned little to say.
The only flaw in our Naivasha holiday was an ugly rumour that a leopard had been snared on a neighbouring farm and was painfully dragging the snare somewhere in the area. Grown quiet with anger, Iain took down his gun (for a wounded leopard can be dangerous), called for the best Masai tracker on the farm, and we set off in an ancient Land Rover.
The plan was to find the leopard by tracking and by questioning witnesses, lure it into a trap, nurse it back to health and release it again on the farm. Knowing no Swahili, I could gauge the progress of Iain's cross-examinations only by facial expressions, tones of voice and Iain's occasional summaries for my benefit. We eventually found a young man who had seen the leopard, though he denied it at first. Iain whispered to me that such initial denials - baffling to my naive straight- forwardness - were ritual and normal. Eventually, without for a moment acknowledging that he had changed his story, the youth would lead us to the scene. Sure enough he did, and there the Masai tracker spotted leopard hairs and a possible spoor. He bounded, doubled up, through the papyrus reeds, followed by Iain and me. Just when I thought we were hopelessly lost, we re-emerged at our starting point. The trail had gone cold.
By similarly roundabout verbal skirmishings we tracked down a more recent witness who led us to another clearing in the papyrus, and Iain decided that here was the best site for a trap. He telephoned the Kenya Wildlife Service and they came, within the day, with a large iron cage filling the back of a Land Rover. Its door was designed to clang shut when the bait of meat was tugged. At dead of night we lurched and bumped through the papyrus and hippo dung, camouflaged the trap
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? with foliage, laid a trail of raw meat to its entrance, baited it with half a sheep and went to bed.
The next day, Lalla and I were due to return to Nairobi and we left with the trap still baited, having attracted nothing more substantial than a marsh mongoose. Iain flew us in his little plane, hopping over steaming volcanic hills and down lake-filled valleys, over zebras and (almost) under giraffes, scattering the dust and the goats of the Masai villages, skirting the Ngong hills to Nairobi. At Wilson Airport, we chanced to run into Meave Leakey. She has now largely taken over the running of the fossil-hunting work from Richard, and she offered to introduce us to our ancestors in the vaults of the Kenya National Museum. This rare privilege was arranged for next day, the morning of our departure for London.
The great archaeologist Schliemann 'gazed upon the face of Agamemnon'. Well, good, the mask of a Bronze Age chieftain is a fine thing to behold. But as Meave Leakey's guest I have gazed upon the face of KNM-ER 1470 (Homo habilis), who lived and died 20,000 centuries before the Bronze Age began . . .
Each fossil is accompanied by a meticulously accurate cast which you are allowed to hold and turn over as you look at the priceless original. The Leakeys told us that their team was opening up a new site at Lake Turkana, with fossils 4 million years old, older than any hominids so far discovered. In the week that I write this, Meave and her colleagues have published in Nature the first harvest of this ancient stratum: a newly discovered species, Australopithecus anamensis, represented by a lower jaw and various other fragments. The newfindssuggest that our ancestors were already walking upright 4 million years ago, surprisingly (to some) close to our split from the lineage of chimpanzees. *
The leopard, Iain later told us, never came to the trap. He had feared that it would not, for the evidence of the second witness suggested that, fatally hobbled by the snare, it was already near death from starvation. For me, the most memorable part of that leopard-tracking day was my conversation with the two black rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service who brought the trap. I was deeply impressed by the efficiency, humanity and dedication of these men. They were not allowed to let me photograph
? Even older fossils have been discovered since this was first written.
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their operation, and they seemed a little reserved until I mentioned the name of Dr Leakey, their former leader, now in the political wilderness. Their eyes immediately lit up. 'Oh, you know Richard Leakey? What a wonderful man, a magnificent man! ' I asked them how the Kenya Wildlife Service was faring nowadays. 'Oh well, we soldier on. We do our best. But it is not the same. What a magnificent man! '
We went to Africa to find the past. We found heroes and inspiration for the future, too.
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? A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER
This last section, its title borrowed from W. B. Yeats, has a single item: an open letter to my daughter, written when she was ten. For most of her childhood, I unhappily saw her only for short periods at a time, and it was not easy to talk about the important things of life. I had always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. Others, less close to her, showed no such scruples, which upset me, as I very much wanted her, as I want all children, to make up her own mind freely when she became old enough to do so. I would encourage her to think, without telling her what to think. When she reached the age of ten, I thought about writing her a long letter. But to send it out of the blue seemed oddly formal and forbidding.
Then an opportunity fortuitously arose.
My literary agent John Brockman, with his wife and partner Katinka Matson, conceived the idea of editing a book of essays as a rite-of-passage gift for their son Max. They invited clients and friends to contribute essays of advice or inspiration for a young person starting life. The invitation spurred me into writing, as an open letter, the advice to my daughter which I had previously been shy to give. The book itself, How Things Are, changed its mission halfway through its compilation. It remained dedicated to Max, but the subtitle became A Science Tool-kit for the Mind and later contributors were not asked to write specifically for a young person.
Eight years down the road, the legal onset of Juliet's adulthood happened to fall during the preparation of this collection, and the book is dedicated to her as an eighteenth birthday present, with a father's love.
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? Dear Juliet
Good and Bad Reasons for Believing144
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the Sun and very far away? And how do we know that the Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the Sun?
The answer to these questions is 'evidence'. Sometimes evidence means actually seeing (or hearing, feeling, smelling . . . ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from the Earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The 'evening star' looks like a bright twinkle in the sky but with a telescope you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling . . . ) is called an observation.
Often evidence isn't just observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the dead person! ) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots of other observations which may all point towards a particular suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realize that they all fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: if that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have
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measles he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: if she really has measles, I ought to see . . . Then he runs through his list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots? ), his hands (is your forehead hot? ), and his ears (does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, 'I diagnose that the child has measles. ' Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-rays, which help their eyes, hands and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called 'tradition', 'authority' and 'revelation'.
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about 50 children. These children were invited because they'd been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by 'tradition'. Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents, which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either. They said things like, 'We Hindus believe so and so. ' 'We Muslims believe such and such. ' 'We Christians believe something else. '
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make. I simply want to ask where their beliefs came from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over any number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!
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Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but this is only one of many branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as the Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different things from each other often go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily into Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about her much and, unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the 'Queen of Heaven'. The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not a very old one. The Bible says nothing about how or when she died; in fact the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus's time. At first it was just made up, in the same way as any story like Snow White was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as an official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented 600 years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the Pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are old men with beards called Ayatollahs. Lots of young Muslims are prepared to commit murder, purely because the Ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to. *
? The fatwah against Salman Rushdie was prominently in the news at the time.
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When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950 the Pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The Pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that Pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the Pope, you should believe everything he said, any more than you believe everything that lots of other people say. The present Pope has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow his authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases and wars, caused by overcrowding.
Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like 'authority'. But actually it is much better than authority because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.
The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called 'revelation'. If you had asked the Pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been 'revealed' to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling 'revelation'. It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?
Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, 'Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen? ' Now suppose I answered: 'I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have this funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead. ' You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside 'feeling' on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings,
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so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you'd never be confident of things like 'My wife loves me'. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that some- body loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favours and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.
Inside feelings are valuable in science too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a 'hunch' about an idea that just 'feels' right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spend- ing some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.
I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish are built to be good at surviving in fresh water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of . . . other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters, we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We 'swim' through a 'sea of people'. Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.
You speak English but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You 246
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each speak the language that fits you to 'swim about' in your own separate 'people sea'. Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way. In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at 'swimming about in their people sea', children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional infor- mation just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children. ) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.
It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.
Could this be what has happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this is because they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything.
Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers, Mormons or Holy Rollers, and all are utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German.
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Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in the Catholic Republic but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.
What can we do about all this?
