By RICHARD DAWKINS - RICHARDDAWKINS.NET
Added: Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:56:10 UTC - An RDFRS Original

Note added: When I wrote this, I didn't know they were going to post an audio recording. I therefore take back many of the criticisms. But the general remarks about the menace of chairmen remains valid, so I haven't taken it down. And the 'squaring off for a fight' photograph remains unforgivable. Richard

Oh dear oh dear, what a sadly missed opportunity. The Guardian had this promising plan to set up conversations between pairs of scientists. They invited Stephen Hawking together with Brian Cox, and David Attenborough together with me.

I jumped at the invitation. Quite apart from my enormous admiration for Sir David, I love the idea of publicly recorded conversations between scientists. It is what we at RDFRS have been working on for some time, and will continue to work on. See, for example, my conversations with Lawrence Krauss, Steven Weinberg, PZ Myers, David Buss, and several others. Not interviews, conversations. Just two people talking to each other, drawing each other out, learning from each other, developing an argument together, moving together towards light and understanding.

The essence of the idea is that there must be no chairman. Nobody to butt in and de-rail the conversation just when it gets interesting. The trouble with chairmen is that they can’t quite believe the conversation will flow naturally without them. Perhaps they panic in advance that their performers will dry and need prompting. So they come armed with a list of topics or questions. And they are determined, come what may, to get to the bottom of their list of questions.

At worst, these questions are the standard, formulaic list that lazy journalists put repeatedly to one interviewee after another, beautifully satirised in Private Eye’s weekly ‘Spoons’ column. “What is your most interesting encounter with a spoon?” “When did you first become aware of spoons?” “Which spoon from history would you most like to eat from?” Real life equivalents of these lazy questions, are “When do you do your best work?” “Who would be your perfect dinner companion from history?” “Beethoven or Heavy Metal?”

Such questions are lazy because they don’t require any homework from the journalist. It is just the same old questions put to every subject. I suspect that the journalists even rationalise their laziness by pretending readers will be interested in the comparison between how different people answer the same questions.

But even if that provides some kind of excuse for laziness in the case of individual interviewees, how can it possibly be excused where they get two people together, ostensibly in conversation? That is not merely lazy, it is criminally unimaginative. Perhaps there was some excuse for it in the meeting between Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox. There are very particular reasons why Stephen Hawking cannot be involved in the give-and-take of a normal conversation. He would have had to have questions put to him in advance of the meeting, so perhaps the Guardian had no choice but to resort to the formulaic in order to create the illusion of a conversation.

But in the case of the ‘conversation’ between David Attenborough and me, there simply is no excuse. Not a crumb of an excuse, not a grain. I suppose I shouldn’t evaluate my half of the conversation, but I really think David and I did have some very interesting discussions. About, for example, the puzzle of how two completely different phenotypes with totally different ecologies – caterpillar and butterfly – are specified in the same genome, and the two evolve in parallel in the same bodies through the generations. But this, like several other promising conversations, was de-railed because the journalist was determined to get to the bottom of her list of previously prepared questions. Never mind a fascinating paradox of evolution, one that puzzled both of us and set us thinking together over a shared scientific problem. What really matters is “Who is your favourite fictional scientist?”

David and I both attempted to break away and actually have a conversation. I asked him about his forthcoming TV documentary on Precambrian and Cambrian fossils. That conversation was going well until it was de-railed by . . . well, if not quite “Do you do your best writing before breakfast?”, something equally irrelevant. And later, in another attempted break-out, David asked me about my forthcoming children’s book, The Magic of Reality. I was pleased, because I wanted to ask his opinion on the use of the word ‘magic’. He preferred The Wonder of Reality, so I made a joke about him ‘dissing’ my title, and we both roared with laughter.

It is no fault of the Guardian that friendly laughter doesn’t come over well in the printed word. But they had sent a photographer who took pictures of us in the garden before our formal ‘conversation’, and you’d think that, with a little goodwill, their choice of pictures might have conveyed something of the friendly bonhomie and laughter that prevailed throughout our meeting.

The photographer put us on a bench in David’s beautiful garden and we had a wonderful time. Not wishing to anticipate what we might say in the recorded conversation, we swapped stories about mutual friends and spent most of the time roaring with laughter, while the photographer took hundreds, if not literally thousands, of pictures. We must have been laughing or smiling together for the huge majority of those pictures. And which did they publish? Well, you can see one example in the electronic version of the article. We look as though we are squaring off for a fight, glaring with deep hostility into each other’s eyes, David looking like a furious bulldog, me looking like . . . well judge for yourself.

The same is true of the composite picture on the cover of the Guardian weekend magazine. Even Brian Cox, the photogenic and charismatic young star of popular physics, is made to look solemn and cheerless. The message is clear. Scientists are a grim lot, cold when not aggressive, with no sense of humour. In the case of David Attenborough, possibly the most widely loved and respected human being in Britain, that’s quite some feat. Good old Guardian.

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s the ‘conversation’ between David and me. It isn’t as bad as all that. Not too bad. But when you think what it could have been . . . It just makes me very sad. A wonderful opportunity missed.

Richard

TAGGED: BIOLOGY, EVOLUTION, RICHARD DAWKINS, SCIENCE, TV