Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Biologist and atheist known for popularizing evolutionary biology and arguing against religion; author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.
On the island
Eight records
It's where I work and where I live and so it has very pleasant associations for me to hear the choir of the college singing. And also when I was at school I was a choir boy as a treble and I think we didn't actually sing Fauré's Requiem, but we sang very similar kinds of music and so it will bring back my school days to me.
This takes me back to my childhood in Africa, when my father had an old wind up gramophone and a collection of Paul Robeson records, which I loved and still do.
Raphael Wallfisch, English Chamber Orchestra, Geoffrey Simon
This was the earliest piece of what you could call serious music that I suppose I heard. Again, my father had a record of it, played I think by Fritz Kreisler, which was very sort of swoopy with the violin. … And I still love it. It's one of my favourites.
This takes me back to my first job in Berkeley, California in the sixties.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
It conjures up for me visions of the English countryside. I think of clouds scudding across high chalk downland, and I feel I should be reminded of England by this record.
String Quintet in C major, D. 956: II. AdagioFavourite
Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Christopher van Kampen
I wanted some beautiful string music because my daughter Juliet, who is ten, is learning to play the violin and I could imagine her, as I'm on my desert island, getting better and better at the violin until she sounds something like this.
Having spent my early childhood in Africa, I had the opportunity to go back to Africa just very recently with my wife. And so there was a great sense for me of going back to my roots, back to my childhood. … We did feel a sense of going back to humanity's roots.
Tom Krause, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti
It's a great favourite of my wife's for one thing. It's hauntingly beautiful for another. You've just been talking about death. It is salutary to think about last things from time to time.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:11Theologians see you as public enemy number one when you've put God on a par with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. But you don't draw those analogies lightly, do you?
No, I think it's a very serious analogy. I think that Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy are childhood props. … I think that God is very much like that, except that people very frequently don't give up God when they should. When they become old enough to give up God, they persist.
Presenter asks
1:43Do you see God not just as an irrelevance, like the Tooth Fairy, ultimately, but as positively harmful?
Certainly can be positively harmful in various ways, obviously in causing wars, which has happened often enough in history, causing fatwas, causing people to do ill to one another because they're so utterly convinced that they know what is right … I think a less serious kind of evil is the way it tends to shut off inquiry.
Presenter asks
14:10Can you explain our appreciation of music like that, or our reaction to lovely poetry or art — things which arouse an emotional response in us?
The keepsakes
The book
PG Wodehouse
Well, I thought something that I could read over and over again because of the style rather than because of what I learned from it, and so it would be Jeeves' Omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
The luxury
Really because a computer is so many different things, you can program it to be one toy after another. It's not limited to being one thing. By its very nature, you reprogram it to be something else, and so it would be an infinitely versatile toy and source of amusement. There are lots so many things you can do on it.
The kind of understanding that we shall eventually come up with, if we do, will be of the form brains are very, very complicated things, and brains react to sounds and sights in very, very complicated ways. And it isn't fruitful to attempt a scientific explanation of in detail why one is moved by music or poetry.
Presenter asks
16:12Do you believe that we have a predisposition or that we are preprogrammed to like or to dislike music? When we are born, are we already what we're going to be? Is it all there?
No, it's certainly not all there. … There was probably nothing in the history of our species that led us to be favoured by natural selection if we liked music. … Music must be tapping into something that was already in the brain for some other reason.
Presenter asks
23:32You've talked about genes being selfish, about being bent on their own replication. Do you, for example, believe that cold viruses cause us to sneeze in order to increase their chances of replicating or finding another host?
It's a very interesting idea. There's a large literature on the idea of parasites more generally manipulating their hosts in order to get themselves passed on to other hosts. Now whether cold viruses really make us sneeze for their own good, I'm not sure. But undoubtedly there are various kinds of worms and other parasites that do make their hosts change their behaviour in such a way as to be more likely to pass the parasites on.
Presenter asks
27:14You hold your views with deep conviction and you've promoted them reasonably hard through your books and television programmes. But do you crave a wider audience still? How frustrated are you that your message isn't being heard and taken on board more widely?
Not exactly frustrated. I think my message is being heard and taken on board very nicely. … There is a certain frustration, I suppose, in lecturing to an audience of fifty or a hundred undergraduates and feeling that it would be nice to be lecturing to a larger audience, really because the scientific matter that I'm trying to get across … is so fascinating. … I sort of feel that it's terribly sad that a lot of people out there are going to their graves without ever knowing what is perfectly simple and commonplace and in lots of books that they could know.
“I want to sweep aside that kind of non-explanation so that we really have a good go at finding what the true explanations are.”
“What you believe is true you believe is true, and you believe it's true in 1995, 1985, 1975, whenever you happen to think about it.”
“If they choose to interpret it as undermining their religion, then I'm afraid that is their problem.”
“I'd much rather be classed as an enthusiastic scientist who's trying to open people's eyes to how much there is that we do already understand and can understand in the future, and I don't see it as a negative knocking down at all.”