Douglas
introduced
me to my wife, Lalla.
Richard-Dawkins-The-Devil-s-Chaplain
Seealso http://www.
secularhumanism.
org/library/fi/murphy_19_2.
html http://www.
nobeliefs.
com/speeches.
htm
TIME TO STAND UP
159
? THE INFECTED MIND
Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to accept them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death- deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
The resilience of this form of hereditary delusion is as astonishing as its lack of realism. It seems that control of the plane which crashed near Pittsburgh was probably wrestled out of the hands of the terrorists by a group of brave passengers. The wife of one of these valiant and heroic men, after she took the telephone call in which he announced their intention, said that God had placed her husband on the plane as His instrument to prevent the plane crashing on the White House. I have the greatest sympathy for this poor woman in her tragic loss, but just think about it! As my (also understandably overwrought) American correspondent who sent me this piece of news said:
Couldn't God have just given the hijackers a heart attack or something instead of killing all those nice people on the plane? I guess he didn't give a flying fuck about the Trade Center, didn't bother to come up with a plan for them. [I apologize for my friend's intemperate language but, in the circumstances, who can blame her? ]
Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God's goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?
The United States is the most religiose country in Christendom, and its born-again leader is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on Earth. Both sides believe that the Bronze Age God of Battles is on their side. Both take risks with the world's future in unshakeable, fundamentalist faith that God will grant them the victory. J. C. Squire's famous verse on the First World War spontaneously comes to mind:
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout 'Gott strafe England' and 'God save the King! ' God this, God that, and God the other thing - 'Good God! ' said God, 'I've got my work cut out! '
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people
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? rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the wilfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different after September 11th. 'All is changed, changed utterly. '
TIME TO STAND UP
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
One of the signs of growing older is that one ceases to be invited to be best man at weddings, or godfather at christenings. I have just begun to be called upon to write obituaries, speak eulogies and organize funerals. Jonathan Miller, on reaching the same landmark age, wrote a sad article, as an atheist, about atheist funerals. They are more than usually cheerless affairs, in his view. A funeral is the one occasion when he feels that religion actually has something to offer: not, of course, the delusion of an afterlife (as he would see it), but the hymns, the rituals, the vestments, the seventeenth-century words.
Loving the cadences of the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer as I do, I surprise myself by the strength of my disagreement with Dr Miller. All funerals are sad, but secular funerals, properly organized, are hugely preferable on all counts. I have long noticed that even religious funerals are memorable mostly for their nonreligious content: the memoirs, the poems, the music. After listening to a well-crafted speech by someone who knew and loved the deceased, my feeling has been: 'Oh, it was so moving hearing so-and-so's tribute; if only there could have been more like that, and fewer of those empty, hollow prayers. ' Secular funerals, by scrapping the prayers altogether, give more time for a beautiful memorial: a balance of tributes, music that evokes memories, poetry that may be alternately sad and uplifting, perhaps readings from the dead person's works, even some affectionate humour.
It is hard to think of the novelist Douglas Adams without affectionate humour, and it was much in evidence at his memorial service in the Church of St Martin in the Fields, in London. I was one of those who spoke, and my eulogy (4. 2) is reprinted here, as the second piece in this section. But earlier - indeed, I finished it the day after he died - I wrote a lament (4. 1) in The Guardian. The tone of these two pieces, one shocked and sad, the other affectionately celebratory, is so different that it seemed right to include both.
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In the case of my revered colleague the evolutionary biologist W. D.
Hamilton, it fell to me to organize his memorial service in the Chapel of New
College, Oxford. I also spoke a eulogy, and it is reproduced as the third
item (4. 3) in this section. In this service, the music was provided by New
College's wonderful choir. Two of the anthems had been sung at Darwin's
funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of them specially composed for Darwin:
a setting by Frederick Bridge of 'Happy is the man that findeth wisdom,
and the man that getteth understanding' (Proverbs 3:13). I like to think that
Bill, that dear, gentle, wise man, would have been pleased. At my
suggestion the score has been reprinted in the posthumous volume of Bill's
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collected papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, where it is certainly the
only copy in print.
I met John Diamond only once, shortly before he died. I knew of him as
a newspaper columnist and author of a courageous book, C: Because 96
cowards get cancer too, recounting his battle with a horrific form of throat cancer. When I met him at a cocktail party, he could not speak at all, and carried on lively and cheerful conversations by writing in a notebook. He was working on a second book, Snake Oil (4. 4), taking the lid off the 'alternative' medicine which, while he was dying, was almost daily thrust his way by quacks or their well-meaning dupes. He died before he could complete the book, and I was honoured to be invited to write the Foreword for its posthumous publication.
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? Lament for Douglas
This is not an obituary, there'll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
A sunny Saturday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to email as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen. What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other cliche, the words swelling before my eyes. It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is the right - or rather the wrong - Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. 'Man, man, man, man oh man,' the message concludes.
Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologized for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.
One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife - at his fortieth birthday party. He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
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Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter - I think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. As soon as I finished it I turned back to page one and read it straight through again - the only time I have ever done that, and
I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I didn't know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, for you can't understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don't know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on
all technical problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an email to Douglas. He would reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staffers of professional help lines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent email exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affec- tionately sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity are as comic in the world's silicon valleys as anywhere else.
He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer's block ('I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by') when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would literally lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone, and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.
He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. The moral of this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box,
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? manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about trans- mitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. 'But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there? '
Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computer has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. I officially received a happy piece of news yesterday, which would have delighted him. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to it is too late.
The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those cliches. We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall, upright, ever- green. It is the wrong time of year, but we'll give it our best shot. Off to the arboretum.
The tree is planted, and this article completed, all within 24 hours of his death. Was it cathartic? No, but it was worth a try.
LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS
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? Eulogy for Douglas Adams
Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, London, 17 September 2001
I believe it falls to me to say something about Douglas's love of science. * He once asked my advice. He was contemplating going back to univer- sity to read science, I think specifically my own subject of Zoology. I advised against it. He already knew plenty of science. It rings through almost every line he wrote and through the best jokes he made. As a single example, think of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Douglas thought like a scientist, but was much funnier. It is fair to say that he was a hero to scientists. And technologists, especially in the computer industry.
His unjustified humility in the presence of scientists came out
touchingly in a magnificent impromptu speech at a Cambridge confer-
98
ence which I attended in 1998. He was invited as a kind of honorary
scientist - a thing that happened to him quite often. Thank goodness somebody switched on a tape recorder, and so we have the whole of this splendid extempore tour de force. It certainly ought to be published somewhere. I'm going to read a few disconnected paragraphs. He was a wonderful comedian as well as a brilliant comic writer, and you can hear his voice in every line:
This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. . . in a room full of such luminaries, I thought, 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say? ' So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! . . . I thought that what I'd do is stand up and have a debate with myself. . . and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.
Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of
'Others, of course, spoke of different aspects of his life. 168
? go . . . I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first two or three weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages - she was rebooting!
I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud o f - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!
These inspired switches of subject are so characteristic of his style - and so endearing.
I remember once, a long time ago, needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to include 'this' but not include 'that'. If you think about it, a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try and compare.
Douglas laughed at himself, and at his own jokes. It was one of many ingredients of his charm.
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas- covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.
This next paragraph is one of Douglas's set-pieces which will be familiar to some people here. I heard it more than once, and I thought it was more brilliant every time.
. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it! ' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Douglas introduced me to my wife, Lalla. They had worked together, years ago, on Dr Who, and it was she who pointed out to me that he had a wonderful childlike capacity to go straight for the wood, and never mind the trees.
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given - and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. . .
I am happy to say that Douglas's acquaintance with a particular modern book on evolution, which he chanced upon in his early thirties, seems to have been something of a Damascus experience for him:
It all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. "
I once interviewed Douglas on television, for a programme I was making on my own love affair with science. I ended up by asking him, 'What is it about science that really gets your blood running? ' And here is what he said, again impromptu, and all the more passionate for that.
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strange-
ness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can
arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is
the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of
how that might have happened - it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to
spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as
100 I am concerned.
That last sentence of course has a tragic ring for us now. It has been our privilege to know a man whose capacity to make the best of a full lifespan was as great as was his charm and his humour and his sheer intelligence. If ever a man understood what a magnificent place the world is, it was Douglas. And if ever a man left it a better place for his existence, it was Douglas. It would have been nice if he'd given us the full 70 or 80 years. But by God we got our money's worth from the 49!
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? ""If" (5 -"<<,#
Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton
Delivered at the Memorial Service in New College Chapel, Oxford, 1 July 2000
Those of us who wish we had met Charles Darwin can console our- selves: we may have met the nearest equivalent that the late twentieth century had to offer. Yet so quiet, so absurdly modest was he that I dare say some members of this college were somewhat bemused to read his obituaries - and discover quite what it was they had harboured among them all this time. The obituaries were astonishingly unanimous. I'm going to read a sentence or two from them, and I would add that this is not a biased sample of obituaries. I am going to quote from 100 per cent of the obituaries that have so far come to my notice [my emphases]:
Bill Hamilton, who has died aged 63 after weeks in intensive care following a biological expedition to the Congo, was the primary theoretical innovator in modern Darwinian biology, responsible for the shape of the subject today. [Alan Grafen in The Guardian. ]
. . . the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation. [Matt Ridley in the Telegraph. ]
. . . one of the towering figures of modem biology . . . [Natalie Angier in the New York Times. ]
. . . one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin. Certainly, where social theory based on natural selection is concerned, he was easily our deepest and most original thinker. [Robert Trivers in Nature. ]
. . . one of the foremost evolutionary theorists of the twentieth century . . . [David Haig, Naomi Pierce and E. O. Wilson in Science. ]
A good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin. [That was my offering, in The Independent, reprinted in Oxford Today. ]
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
. . . one of the leaders of what has been called 'the second Darwinian revolution'. [John Maynard Smith in The Times. Maynard Smith had earlier called him, in language too informal to be repeated in The Times obituary, 'The only bloody genius we've got'. ]
[Finally, Olivia Judson in The Economist]: All his life, Bill Hamilton played with dynamite. As a boy, he nearly died when a bomb he was building exploded too soon, removing the tips of several fingers and lodging shrapnel in his lung. As
an adult, his dynamite was more judiciously placed. He blew up established notions, and erected in their stead an edifice of ideas stranger, more original and more profound than that of any other biologist since Darwin.
Admittedly, the largest gap in the theory left by Darwin had already been plugged by R. A. Fisher and the other 'neo-Darwinian' masters of the 1930s and 40s. But their 'Modern Synthesis' left a number of important problems unsolved - in many cases even unrecognized - and most of these were not cleared up until after 1960. It is certainly fair to say that Hamilton was the dominant thinker of this second wave of neo-Darwinism, although to describe him as a solver of problems somehow doesn't do justice to his positively creative imagination.
He frequently would bury, in throwaway lines, ideas that lesser theorists would have given their eye teeth to have originated. Bill and I were once talking termites at coffee time in the Department of Zoology. We were especially wondering what evolutionary pressure had driven
the termites to become so extremely social, and Hamilton started praising 'Stephen Bartz's Theory'. 'But Bill,' I protested, 'That isn't Bartz's theory. It's your theory. You published it seven years earlier. ' Gloomily, he denied it. So I ran to the library, found the relevant volume of the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, and shoved under his nose his own, buried paragraph. He read it, then conceded, in
his most Eeyorish voice that, yes, it did appear to be his own theory after all. 'But Bartz expressed it better. '* As a final footnote to this story, among the people whom Bartz acknowledged in his paper, 'for helpful advice and criticism', was - W. D. Hamilton!
Similarly, Bill published his theory of the sex ratio of honeybees, not in a Note to Nature devoted to the topic, as a normally ambitious scientist would have done, but buried in a review of somebody else's book. This book review, by the way, carried the unmistakeably Hamiltonian title, 'Gamblers since Life Began: Barnacles, Aphids, Elms'.
*This is true and I have no wish, by quoting this story, to disparage Stephen Bartz's contribution. Bill Hamilton knew, better than most, that to sketch an idea on the back of an envelope is not the same as to develop it into a full model.
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? The two towering achievements for which Hamilton is best known were the genetic theory of kinship, and the parasite theory of sex. But, alongside these two major obsessions, he also found time to answer, or play a major role in the cooperative answering of, a whole set of other important questions left over from the neo-Darwinian synthesis. These questions include:
Why do we grow old, and die of old age?
Why do population sex ratios sometimes depart from the normally expected 50/50? In the course of this short paper, he was one of the first to introduce the Theory of Games to evolutionary biology, a develop- ment that was of course to prove so endlessly fruitful in John Maynard Smith's hands.
Can active spite, as opposed to ordinary selfishness, be favoured by natural selection?
Why do so many animals flock, school or herd together when at risk from predators? This paper had another very characteristic title: Geometry for the Selfish Herd.
Why do animals and plants go to such lengths to disperse their progeny far and wide, even when the places they are dispersing to are inferior to the place where they already live? This work was done jointly with Robert May.
In a fundamentally selfish Darwinian world, how can cooperation evolve between unrelated individuals? This work was done jointly with the social scientist Robert Axelrod.
Why do autumn leaves turn so conspicuously red or brown? In a typically audacious - yet compelling - piece of theorizing, Hamilton suspected that the bright colour is a warning given by the tree, a warn- ing to insects not to lay their eggs on this tree, a warning backed up by toxins just as a wasp's yellow and black stripes are backed up by a sting.
This extraordinary idea is typical of that youthful inventiveness which seemed, if anything, to increase as he grew older. It was really quite recently that he proposed a. proper theory for how the hitherto rather ridiculed theory of 'Gaia' could actually be made workable in a true Darwinian model. At his burial on the edge of Wytham Wood this March, his devoted companion Luisa Bozzi spoke some beautiful words over the open grave, in which she made allusion to the astonishing central idea of this paper - that clouds are actually adaptations, made by micro-organisms for their own dispersal. She quoted Bill's remarkable article 'No stone unturned: A bug-hunter's life and death', in which he expressed a wish, when he died, to be laid out on the forest floor in the
101 Amazon jungle and interred by burying beetles as food for their larvae.
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Later, in their children, reared with care by the horned parents out of fist-sized balls moulded from my flesh, I will escape. No worm for me, or sordid fly: rearranged and multiple, I will at last buzz from the soil like bees out of a nest - indeed, buzz louder than bees, almost like a swarm of motor bikes. I shall be borne, beetle by flying beetle, out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars.
Luisa read this, then added her own elegy, inspired by his cloud theory:
Bill, now your body is lying in the Wytham woods, but from here you will reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but in billions of spores of fungi and algae. Brought by the wind higher up into the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds, and wandering across the oceans, will fall down and fly up again and again, till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon. *
Hamilton was garlanded eventually with honours, but in a way this only underlined how slow the world was to recognize him. He won many prizes, including the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize. Yet his disturbingly candid autobiography reveals a young man tormented by self-doubt and loneliness. Not only did he doubt himself. He was led to doubt even whether the questions that obsessively drove him were of any interest to anybody else at all. Not surprisingly, this even occasionally led him to doubt his sanity.
The experience gave him a lifelong sympathy for underdogs, which may have motivated his recent championing of an unfashionable, not to say reviled, theory of the origin of human AIDS. As you may know, it was this that was to take him on his fateful journey to Africa this year.
Unlike other major prize winners, Bill really needed the money. He was the despair of his financial advisers. He was interested in money only for the good that it could do, usually to others. He was hopeless at accruing the stuff, and he gave away much of what he had. It was entirely characteristic of his financial astuteness that he left a will that was generous but - unwitnessed. Equally characteristic that he bought a house in Michigan at the top of the market, and later sold it at the bottom of the market. Not only did Bill's investment fail to keep up with inflation. He actually made a substantial loss, and could not afford to buy a house in Oxford. Fortunately, the university had a nice house in its gift in Wytham village, and, with Dick Southwood, as ever, quietly
*At the memorial service, Luisa read both these passages herself. The second passage is carved on a bench beside his grave, erected by his sister Dr Mary Bliss in his memory.
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? taking care of him behind the scenes, Bill and his wife Christine and their family found a place where they could thrive.
Every day he cycled into Oxford from Wytham, at enormous speed. So unbecoming was this speed to his great shock of grey hair, it may have accounted for his numerous cycle accidents. Motorists didn't believe that a man of his apparent age could possibly cycle so fast, and they miscalculated, with unfortunate results. I have been unable to document the widely repeated story that on one occasion he shot into a car, landed on the back seat and said, 'Please drive me to the hospital. ' But I have found reliable confirmation of the story that his startup grant from the Royal Society, a cheque for ? 15,000, blew out of his bicycle basket at high speed.
I first met Bill Hamilton when he visited Oxford from London in about 1969 to give a lecture to the Biomathematics Group, and I went along to get my first glimpse of my intellectual hero. I won't say it was a let-down, but he was not, to say the least, a charismatic speaker. There was a blackboard that completely covered one wall. And Bill made the most of it. By the end of the seminar, there wasn't a square inch of wall that was not smothered in equations. Since the blackboard went all the way down to the floor, he had to get on his hands and knees in order to write down there, and this made his murmuring voice even more inaudible. Finally, he stood up and surveyed his handiwork with a slight smile. After a long pause, he pointed to a particular equation (aficionados
102
may like to know that it was the now famous 'Price Equation' said: T really like that one. '
) and
I think all his friends have their own stories to illustrate his shy and idiosyncratic charm, and these will doubtless grow into legends over time. Here's one that I have vouched for, as I was the witness myself. He appeared for lunch in New College one day, wearing a large paperclip attached to his glasses. This seemed eccentric, even for Bill, so I asked him: 'Bill, why are you wearing a paperclip on your glasses? ' He looked solemnly at me. 'Do you really want to know? ' he said in his most mournful tone, though I could see his mouth twitching with the effort of suppressing a smile. 'Yes,' I said enthusiastically, T really really want to know. ' 'Well,' he said, T find that my glasses sit heavily on my nose when I am reading. So I use the clip to fasten them to a lock of my hair, which takes some of the weight. ' Then as I laughed, he laughed too, and I can still see that wonderful smile as his face lit up with laughing at himself.
On another occasion, he came to a dinner party at our house. Most of the guests were standing around drinking before dinner, but Bill had
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
disappeared into the next room and was investigating my bookshelves. We gradually became aware of a sort of low murmuring sound coming from the next room. 'Help. ' 'Er, Help . . . I think. Er, yes, Help! Help. ' We finally realized that, in his own uniquely understated way, Bill was saying the equivalent of 'HEEEELLLLP! ! ! ! ! ! ' So we rushed in there, to find him, like Inspector Clouseau with the billiard cues, struggling desperately to balance books which were falling all around him as the shelves collapsed in his arms.
Any other scientist of his distinction would expect to be offered a first-class air fare and a generous honorarium before agreeing to go and give a lecture abroad. Bill was invited to a conference in Russia. Characteristically, he forgot to notice that they weren't offering any air fare at all, let alone an honorarium, and he ended up not only paying for his own ticket but obliged to bribe his own way out of the country. Worse, his taxi didn't have enough petrol in its tank to get him to Moscow airport, so Bill had to help the taxi driver as he siphoned petrol out of his cousin's car. As for the conference itself, it turned out when Bill got there that there was no venue for it. Instead, the delegates went for walks in the woods.
TIME TO STAND UP
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? THE INFECTED MIND
Parenthetically, religion is unusual among divisive labels in being spectacularly unnecessary. If religious beliefs had any evidence going for them, we might have to accept them in spite of their concomitant unpleasantness. But there is no such evidence. To label people as death- deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.
The resilience of this form of hereditary delusion is as astonishing as its lack of realism. It seems that control of the plane which crashed near Pittsburgh was probably wrestled out of the hands of the terrorists by a group of brave passengers. The wife of one of these valiant and heroic men, after she took the telephone call in which he announced their intention, said that God had placed her husband on the plane as His instrument to prevent the plane crashing on the White House. I have the greatest sympathy for this poor woman in her tragic loss, but just think about it! As my (also understandably overwrought) American correspondent who sent me this piece of news said:
Couldn't God have just given the hijackers a heart attack or something instead of killing all those nice people on the plane? I guess he didn't give a flying fuck about the Trade Center, didn't bother to come up with a plan for them. [I apologize for my friend's intemperate language but, in the circumstances, who can blame her? ]
Is there no catastrophe terrible enough to shake the faith of people, on both sides, in God's goodness and power? No glimmering realization that he might not be there at all: that we just might be on our own, needing to cope with the real world like grown-ups?
The United States is the most religiose country in Christendom, and its born-again leader is eyeball to eyeball with the most religiose people on Earth. Both sides believe that the Bronze Age God of Battles is on their side. Both take risks with the world's future in unshakeable, fundamentalist faith that God will grant them the victory. J. C. Squire's famous verse on the First World War spontaneously comes to mind:
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout 'Gott strafe England' and 'God save the King! ' God this, God that, and God the other thing - 'Good God! ' said God, 'I've got my work cut out! '
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people
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? rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) both. Only the wilfully blind could fail to implicate the divisive force of religion in most, if not all, of the violent enmities in the world today. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different after September 11th. 'All is changed, changed utterly. '
TIME TO STAND UP
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? THEY TOLD ME, HERACLITUS
One of the signs of growing older is that one ceases to be invited to be best man at weddings, or godfather at christenings. I have just begun to be called upon to write obituaries, speak eulogies and organize funerals. Jonathan Miller, on reaching the same landmark age, wrote a sad article, as an atheist, about atheist funerals. They are more than usually cheerless affairs, in his view. A funeral is the one occasion when he feels that religion actually has something to offer: not, of course, the delusion of an afterlife (as he would see it), but the hymns, the rituals, the vestments, the seventeenth-century words.
Loving the cadences of the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer as I do, I surprise myself by the strength of my disagreement with Dr Miller. All funerals are sad, but secular funerals, properly organized, are hugely preferable on all counts. I have long noticed that even religious funerals are memorable mostly for their nonreligious content: the memoirs, the poems, the music. After listening to a well-crafted speech by someone who knew and loved the deceased, my feeling has been: 'Oh, it was so moving hearing so-and-so's tribute; if only there could have been more like that, and fewer of those empty, hollow prayers. ' Secular funerals, by scrapping the prayers altogether, give more time for a beautiful memorial: a balance of tributes, music that evokes memories, poetry that may be alternately sad and uplifting, perhaps readings from the dead person's works, even some affectionate humour.
It is hard to think of the novelist Douglas Adams without affectionate humour, and it was much in evidence at his memorial service in the Church of St Martin in the Fields, in London. I was one of those who spoke, and my eulogy (4. 2) is reprinted here, as the second piece in this section. But earlier - indeed, I finished it the day after he died - I wrote a lament (4. 1) in The Guardian. The tone of these two pieces, one shocked and sad, the other affectionately celebratory, is so different that it seemed right to include both.
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In the case of my revered colleague the evolutionary biologist W. D.
Hamilton, it fell to me to organize his memorial service in the Chapel of New
College, Oxford. I also spoke a eulogy, and it is reproduced as the third
item (4. 3) in this section. In this service, the music was provided by New
College's wonderful choir. Two of the anthems had been sung at Darwin's
funeral in Westminster Abbey, one of them specially composed for Darwin:
a setting by Frederick Bridge of 'Happy is the man that findeth wisdom,
and the man that getteth understanding' (Proverbs 3:13). I like to think that
Bill, that dear, gentle, wise man, would have been pleased. At my
suggestion the score has been reprinted in the posthumous volume of Bill's
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collected papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, where it is certainly the
only copy in print.
I met John Diamond only once, shortly before he died. I knew of him as
a newspaper columnist and author of a courageous book, C: Because 96
cowards get cancer too, recounting his battle with a horrific form of throat cancer. When I met him at a cocktail party, he could not speak at all, and carried on lively and cheerful conversations by writing in a notebook. He was working on a second book, Snake Oil (4. 4), taking the lid off the 'alternative' medicine which, while he was dying, was almost daily thrust his way by quacks or their well-meaning dupes. He died before he could complete the book, and I was honoured to be invited to write the Foreword for its posthumous publication.
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? Lament for Douglas
This is not an obituary, there'll be time enough for them. It is not a tribute, not a considered assessment of a brilliant life, not a eulogy. It is a keening lament, written too soon to be balanced, too soon to be carefully thought through. Douglas, you cannot be dead.
A sunny Saturday morning in May, ten past seven, shuffle out of bed, log in to email as usual. The usual blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk, some expected, and my gaze absently follows them down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take, back up the screen. What did that heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other cliche, the words swelling before my eyes. It must be part of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams. This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be asleep. I open the message, from a well-known German software designer. It is no joke, I am fully awake. And it is the right - or rather the wrong - Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in the gym in Santa Barbara. 'Man, man, man, man oh man,' the message concludes.
Man indeed, what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven foot than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not stoop like some very tall men who feel uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be intimidating in a big man. He neither apologized for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of the joke against himself.
One of the great wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of literature and science, two of my great loves. And he introduced me to my wife - at his fortieth birthday party. He was exactly her age, they had worked together on Dr Who. Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit longer before shattering her day? He initiated our togetherness and was a recurrently important part of it. I must tell her now.
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Douglas and I met because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter - I think it is the only time I have ever written one. I had adored The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Then I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. As soon as I finished it I turned back to page one and read it straight through again - the only time I have ever done that, and
I wrote to tell him so. He replied that he was a fan of my books, and he invited me to his house in London. I have seldom met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he would be funny. What I didn't know was how deeply read he was in science. I should have guessed, for you can't understand many of the jokes in Hitchhiker if you don't know a lot of advanced science. And in modern electronic technology he was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in private, and even in public at literary festivals and on the wireless or television. And he became my guru on
all technical problems. Rather than struggle with some ill-written and incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I would fire off an email to Douglas. He would reply, often within minutes, whether in London or Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the world. Unlike most staffers of professional help lines, Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew exactly why it was troubling me, and always had the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly explained. Our frequent email exchanges brimmed with literary and scientific jokes and affec- tionately sardonic little asides. His technophilia shone through, but so did his rich sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity are as comic in the world's silicon valleys as anywhere else.
He laughed at himself with equal good humour. At, for example, his epic bouts of writer's block ('I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by') when, according to legend, his publisher and book agent would literally lock him in a hotel room, with no telephone, and nothing to do but write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a biological theory too eccentric for my professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at my dismissal of it would always be more humorously self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he would have another go.
He laughed at his own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes became even funnier. He was gently able to poke fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at individuals but at their absurd ideas. The moral of this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn't understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box,
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? manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about trans- mitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. 'But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren't there? '
Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous trade in rhino horn), Apple Computer has lost its most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met. I officially received a happy piece of news yesterday, which would have delighted him. I wasn't allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed to it is too late.
The sun is shining, life must go on, seize the day and all those cliches. We shall plant a tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall, upright, ever- green. It is the wrong time of year, but we'll give it our best shot. Off to the arboretum.
The tree is planted, and this article completed, all within 24 hours of his death. Was it cathartic? No, but it was worth a try.
LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS
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? Eulogy for Douglas Adams
Church of Saint Martin in the Fields, London, 17 September 2001
I believe it falls to me to say something about Douglas's love of science. * He once asked my advice. He was contemplating going back to univer- sity to read science, I think specifically my own subject of Zoology. I advised against it. He already knew plenty of science. It rings through almost every line he wrote and through the best jokes he made. As a single example, think of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Douglas thought like a scientist, but was much funnier. It is fair to say that he was a hero to scientists. And technologists, especially in the computer industry.
His unjustified humility in the presence of scientists came out
touchingly in a magnificent impromptu speech at a Cambridge confer-
98
ence which I attended in 1998. He was invited as a kind of honorary
scientist - a thing that happened to him quite often. Thank goodness somebody switched on a tape recorder, and so we have the whole of this splendid extempore tour de force. It certainly ought to be published somewhere. I'm going to read a few disconnected paragraphs. He was a wonderful comedian as well as a brilliant comic writer, and you can hear his voice in every line:
This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. . . in a room full of such luminaries, I thought, 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say? ' So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! . . . I thought that what I'd do is stand up and have a debate with myself. . . and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.
Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of
'Others, of course, spoke of different aspects of his life. 168
? go . . . I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first two or three weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages - she was rebooting!
I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud o f - I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!
These inspired switches of subject are so characteristic of his style - and so endearing.
I remember once, a long time ago, needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to include 'this' but not include 'that'. If you think about it, a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try and compare.
Douglas laughed at himself, and at his own jokes. It was one of many ingredients of his charm.
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas- covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.
This next paragraph is one of Douglas's set-pieces which will be familiar to some people here. I heard it more than once, and I thought it was more brilliant every time.
. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it! ' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
Douglas introduced me to my wife, Lalla. They had worked together, years ago, on Dr Who, and it was she who pointed out to me that he had a wonderful childlike capacity to go straight for the wood, and never mind the trees.
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If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given - and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. . .
I am happy to say that Douglas's acquaintance with a particular modern book on evolution, which he chanced upon in his early thirties, seems to have been something of a Damascus experience for him:
It all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day. "
I once interviewed Douglas on television, for a programme I was making on my own love affair with science. I ended up by asking him, 'What is it about science that really gets your blood running? ' And here is what he said, again impromptu, and all the more passionate for that.
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strange-
ness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can
arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is
the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of
how that might have happened - it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to
spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as
100 I am concerned.
That last sentence of course has a tragic ring for us now. It has been our privilege to know a man whose capacity to make the best of a full lifespan was as great as was his charm and his humour and his sheer intelligence. If ever a man understood what a magnificent place the world is, it was Douglas. And if ever a man left it a better place for his existence, it was Douglas. It would have been nice if he'd given us the full 70 or 80 years. But by God we got our money's worth from the 49!
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? ""If" (5 -"<<,#
Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton
Delivered at the Memorial Service in New College Chapel, Oxford, 1 July 2000
Those of us who wish we had met Charles Darwin can console our- selves: we may have met the nearest equivalent that the late twentieth century had to offer. Yet so quiet, so absurdly modest was he that I dare say some members of this college were somewhat bemused to read his obituaries - and discover quite what it was they had harboured among them all this time. The obituaries were astonishingly unanimous. I'm going to read a sentence or two from them, and I would add that this is not a biased sample of obituaries. I am going to quote from 100 per cent of the obituaries that have so far come to my notice [my emphases]:
Bill Hamilton, who has died aged 63 after weeks in intensive care following a biological expedition to the Congo, was the primary theoretical innovator in modern Darwinian biology, responsible for the shape of the subject today. [Alan Grafen in The Guardian. ]
. . . the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation. [Matt Ridley in the Telegraph. ]
. . . one of the towering figures of modem biology . . . [Natalie Angier in the New York Times. ]
. . . one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin. Certainly, where social theory based on natural selection is concerned, he was easily our deepest and most original thinker. [Robert Trivers in Nature. ]
. . . one of the foremost evolutionary theorists of the twentieth century . . . [David Haig, Naomi Pierce and E. O. Wilson in Science. ]
A good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin. [That was my offering, in The Independent, reprinted in Oxford Today. ]
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. . . one of the leaders of what has been called 'the second Darwinian revolution'. [John Maynard Smith in The Times. Maynard Smith had earlier called him, in language too informal to be repeated in The Times obituary, 'The only bloody genius we've got'. ]
[Finally, Olivia Judson in The Economist]: All his life, Bill Hamilton played with dynamite. As a boy, he nearly died when a bomb he was building exploded too soon, removing the tips of several fingers and lodging shrapnel in his lung. As
an adult, his dynamite was more judiciously placed. He blew up established notions, and erected in their stead an edifice of ideas stranger, more original and more profound than that of any other biologist since Darwin.
Admittedly, the largest gap in the theory left by Darwin had already been plugged by R. A. Fisher and the other 'neo-Darwinian' masters of the 1930s and 40s. But their 'Modern Synthesis' left a number of important problems unsolved - in many cases even unrecognized - and most of these were not cleared up until after 1960. It is certainly fair to say that Hamilton was the dominant thinker of this second wave of neo-Darwinism, although to describe him as a solver of problems somehow doesn't do justice to his positively creative imagination.
He frequently would bury, in throwaway lines, ideas that lesser theorists would have given their eye teeth to have originated. Bill and I were once talking termites at coffee time in the Department of Zoology. We were especially wondering what evolutionary pressure had driven
the termites to become so extremely social, and Hamilton started praising 'Stephen Bartz's Theory'. 'But Bill,' I protested, 'That isn't Bartz's theory. It's your theory. You published it seven years earlier. ' Gloomily, he denied it. So I ran to the library, found the relevant volume of the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, and shoved under his nose his own, buried paragraph. He read it, then conceded, in
his most Eeyorish voice that, yes, it did appear to be his own theory after all. 'But Bartz expressed it better. '* As a final footnote to this story, among the people whom Bartz acknowledged in his paper, 'for helpful advice and criticism', was - W. D. Hamilton!
Similarly, Bill published his theory of the sex ratio of honeybees, not in a Note to Nature devoted to the topic, as a normally ambitious scientist would have done, but buried in a review of somebody else's book. This book review, by the way, carried the unmistakeably Hamiltonian title, 'Gamblers since Life Began: Barnacles, Aphids, Elms'.
*This is true and I have no wish, by quoting this story, to disparage Stephen Bartz's contribution. Bill Hamilton knew, better than most, that to sketch an idea on the back of an envelope is not the same as to develop it into a full model.
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? The two towering achievements for which Hamilton is best known were the genetic theory of kinship, and the parasite theory of sex. But, alongside these two major obsessions, he also found time to answer, or play a major role in the cooperative answering of, a whole set of other important questions left over from the neo-Darwinian synthesis. These questions include:
Why do we grow old, and die of old age?
Why do population sex ratios sometimes depart from the normally expected 50/50? In the course of this short paper, he was one of the first to introduce the Theory of Games to evolutionary biology, a develop- ment that was of course to prove so endlessly fruitful in John Maynard Smith's hands.
Can active spite, as opposed to ordinary selfishness, be favoured by natural selection?
Why do so many animals flock, school or herd together when at risk from predators? This paper had another very characteristic title: Geometry for the Selfish Herd.
Why do animals and plants go to such lengths to disperse their progeny far and wide, even when the places they are dispersing to are inferior to the place where they already live? This work was done jointly with Robert May.
In a fundamentally selfish Darwinian world, how can cooperation evolve between unrelated individuals? This work was done jointly with the social scientist Robert Axelrod.
Why do autumn leaves turn so conspicuously red or brown? In a typically audacious - yet compelling - piece of theorizing, Hamilton suspected that the bright colour is a warning given by the tree, a warn- ing to insects not to lay their eggs on this tree, a warning backed up by toxins just as a wasp's yellow and black stripes are backed up by a sting.
This extraordinary idea is typical of that youthful inventiveness which seemed, if anything, to increase as he grew older. It was really quite recently that he proposed a. proper theory for how the hitherto rather ridiculed theory of 'Gaia' could actually be made workable in a true Darwinian model. At his burial on the edge of Wytham Wood this March, his devoted companion Luisa Bozzi spoke some beautiful words over the open grave, in which she made allusion to the astonishing central idea of this paper - that clouds are actually adaptations, made by micro-organisms for their own dispersal. She quoted Bill's remarkable article 'No stone unturned: A bug-hunter's life and death', in which he expressed a wish, when he died, to be laid out on the forest floor in the
101 Amazon jungle and interred by burying beetles as food for their larvae.
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Later, in their children, reared with care by the horned parents out of fist-sized balls moulded from my flesh, I will escape. No worm for me, or sordid fly: rearranged and multiple, I will at last buzz from the soil like bees out of a nest - indeed, buzz louder than bees, almost like a swarm of motor bikes. I shall be borne, beetle by flying beetle, out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars.
Luisa read this, then added her own elegy, inspired by his cloud theory:
Bill, now your body is lying in the Wytham woods, but from here you will reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but in billions of spores of fungi and algae. Brought by the wind higher up into the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds, and wandering across the oceans, will fall down and fly up again and again, till eventually a drop of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon. *
Hamilton was garlanded eventually with honours, but in a way this only underlined how slow the world was to recognize him. He won many prizes, including the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize. Yet his disturbingly candid autobiography reveals a young man tormented by self-doubt and loneliness. Not only did he doubt himself. He was led to doubt even whether the questions that obsessively drove him were of any interest to anybody else at all. Not surprisingly, this even occasionally led him to doubt his sanity.
The experience gave him a lifelong sympathy for underdogs, which may have motivated his recent championing of an unfashionable, not to say reviled, theory of the origin of human AIDS. As you may know, it was this that was to take him on his fateful journey to Africa this year.
Unlike other major prize winners, Bill really needed the money. He was the despair of his financial advisers. He was interested in money only for the good that it could do, usually to others. He was hopeless at accruing the stuff, and he gave away much of what he had. It was entirely characteristic of his financial astuteness that he left a will that was generous but - unwitnessed. Equally characteristic that he bought a house in Michigan at the top of the market, and later sold it at the bottom of the market. Not only did Bill's investment fail to keep up with inflation. He actually made a substantial loss, and could not afford to buy a house in Oxford. Fortunately, the university had a nice house in its gift in Wytham village, and, with Dick Southwood, as ever, quietly
*At the memorial service, Luisa read both these passages herself. The second passage is carved on a bench beside his grave, erected by his sister Dr Mary Bliss in his memory.
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? taking care of him behind the scenes, Bill and his wife Christine and their family found a place where they could thrive.
Every day he cycled into Oxford from Wytham, at enormous speed. So unbecoming was this speed to his great shock of grey hair, it may have accounted for his numerous cycle accidents. Motorists didn't believe that a man of his apparent age could possibly cycle so fast, and they miscalculated, with unfortunate results. I have been unable to document the widely repeated story that on one occasion he shot into a car, landed on the back seat and said, 'Please drive me to the hospital. ' But I have found reliable confirmation of the story that his startup grant from the Royal Society, a cheque for ? 15,000, blew out of his bicycle basket at high speed.
I first met Bill Hamilton when he visited Oxford from London in about 1969 to give a lecture to the Biomathematics Group, and I went along to get my first glimpse of my intellectual hero. I won't say it was a let-down, but he was not, to say the least, a charismatic speaker. There was a blackboard that completely covered one wall. And Bill made the most of it. By the end of the seminar, there wasn't a square inch of wall that was not smothered in equations. Since the blackboard went all the way down to the floor, he had to get on his hands and knees in order to write down there, and this made his murmuring voice even more inaudible. Finally, he stood up and surveyed his handiwork with a slight smile. After a long pause, he pointed to a particular equation (aficionados
102
may like to know that it was the now famous 'Price Equation' said: T really like that one. '
) and
I think all his friends have their own stories to illustrate his shy and idiosyncratic charm, and these will doubtless grow into legends over time. Here's one that I have vouched for, as I was the witness myself. He appeared for lunch in New College one day, wearing a large paperclip attached to his glasses. This seemed eccentric, even for Bill, so I asked him: 'Bill, why are you wearing a paperclip on your glasses? ' He looked solemnly at me. 'Do you really want to know? ' he said in his most mournful tone, though I could see his mouth twitching with the effort of suppressing a smile. 'Yes,' I said enthusiastically, T really really want to know. ' 'Well,' he said, T find that my glasses sit heavily on my nose when I am reading. So I use the clip to fasten them to a lock of my hair, which takes some of the weight. ' Then as I laughed, he laughed too, and I can still see that wonderful smile as his face lit up with laughing at himself.
On another occasion, he came to a dinner party at our house. Most of the guests were standing around drinking before dinner, but Bill had
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disappeared into the next room and was investigating my bookshelves. We gradually became aware of a sort of low murmuring sound coming from the next room. 'Help. ' 'Er, Help . . . I think. Er, yes, Help! Help. ' We finally realized that, in his own uniquely understated way, Bill was saying the equivalent of 'HEEEELLLLP! ! ! ! ! ! ' So we rushed in there, to find him, like Inspector Clouseau with the billiard cues, struggling desperately to balance books which were falling all around him as the shelves collapsed in his arms.
Any other scientist of his distinction would expect to be offered a first-class air fare and a generous honorarium before agreeing to go and give a lecture abroad. Bill was invited to a conference in Russia. Characteristically, he forgot to notice that they weren't offering any air fare at all, let alone an honorarium, and he ended up not only paying for his own ticket but obliged to bribe his own way out of the country. Worse, his taxi didn't have enough petrol in its tank to get him to Moscow airport, so Bill had to help the taxi driver as he siphoned petrol out of his cousin's car. As for the conference itself, it turned out when Bill got there that there was no venue for it. Instead, the delegates went for walks in the woods.
