The Delegate's Tale

David Lodge, in his campus novel Small World, compares the academic  conference to a Chaucerian pilgrimage:

The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it  allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of  travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement

I warm to the analogy, having used Chaucer for a different purpose in The  Ancestor’s Tale. Here I choose six conferences out of hundreds, as  representative stations along my scientific pilgrim’s way.

Lodge’s cynical view was not contradicted by a memorable conference during the time I was writing The Selfish Gene, sponsored by the Boehringer pharmaceutical company in a splendidly over-the-top German castle. The subject was ‘The creative process in science and medicine’, and it was certainly the poshest conference I have ever attended. The main guest list comprised scientists and philosophers of immense distinction, many of them Nobel Prize winners. Each of these illustrious figures was allowed to bring along a couple of junior colleagues – squires to their knights, as it were. My old maestro Niko Tinbergen was one of the ‘knights’, and he took Desmond Morris and me as his squires. Other knights (some of them knights in the literal sense) were Sir Peter Medawar (immunologist, essayist and legendary polymath), his ‘philosophical guru’ Sir Karl Popper, Sir Hans Krebs (the world’s most famous biochemist), the great French molecular biologist Jacques Monod and several other household names in science, each with their juniors in attendance. There were only about thirty of us in all. I felt immensely fortunate to be present, and hardly dared say a word.

We sat around a large polished table (I don’t think it was actually round, which  is a pity for my ‘knights’ conceit), with our names proud in front of us  (incidentally, why, at such events, does the name so often face its owner, who  presumably knows who he is, rather than out into the room towards those who  might make use of it?). Strewn around the table were notepads and pencils,  bottles of mineral water, sweets (ugh) and cigarettes galore. These last were  more than usually unfortunate because Karl Popper had a famous distaste for  cigarette smoke. On one occasion at a different conference he had risen from the  floor to make a special request that nobody should be allowed to smoke. Nowadays such a plea would not be necessary: it would go without saying. But  those days were different, and it was a symptom of the regard in which the great  philosopher was held that the chairman acceded to his request. Or almost. What  he said was: ‘In deference to Sir Karl and out of respect for him, please would  any delegate who wishes to smoke leave the hall and smoke outside.’ Sir Karl rose again: ‘No, zat would not be good enough. When zey come back in, I could  smell it on zeir bress.’ 

So you can imagine the consternation raised by the tobacco largesse scattered over the conference table in our opulent Schloss. Every time the hand of a smoker strayed tablewards, a flunkey would come bustling over to clutch a sleeve and whisper, ‘No please, not to smoke, Sir Karl cannot stand it . . . bitte schön.’ But, as far as I remember, the cigarettes remained on the table in full view, to tempt the unfortunate addicts for the duration.

The conference was structured loosely around a series of invited presentations, followed by questions from around the table and extended discussion. Every morning at breakfast, with German thoroughness, each of us was handed a massive pile of paper, a complete word-for-word transcript of everything that had been uttered the previous day: every last um and er and infelicitous restarting or recycling of a sentence. I pitied the red-eyed night shift of typists slaving through the small hours to produce this torrent of verbiage. But there was a problem: how to tie each pearl to its oyster – who had said what, in other words. The chairman of each session was briefed to make us preface each intervention with our name. Peter Medawar, who chaired the opening session, also asked the first question and identified himself to the tape recorder with characteristic aplomb: ‘This is Medawar, shamelessly abusing the privileges of the chair.’ But most people, in the cut and thrust of discussion, forgot to say their names, so an alternative solution was deemed necessary. It proved to be even more distracting than the cigarettes. On a rotating stool, perched high on top of the massive, polished table, sat a young woman in a short skirt. Every time one of the delegates started to speak she would swivel, like a gun turret on a battleship, to locate him and write down in a notebook his name and first sentence. These notes were then used by the night typists to attribute each laboriously rendered paragraph.

It was fascinating for a young scientist to eavesdrop as the giants of his profession unmasked their creative processes. Hans Krebs’s recipe for how to win a Nobel Prize was too modest to be credible: it amounted to ‘Go into the lab every day at 9 a.m., work all day until 5 p.m., then go home; and repeat the process for forty years.’ I’ve already quoted Jacques Monod’s engaging revelation that he was in the habit of imagining himself an electron deciding what to do next. I did something similar when I asked myself, following my scientific hero Bill Hamilton, what I would do if I were a gene, trying to get copies of myself passed on to future generations.

At the very end of the conference, one of the invited guests, a Japanese physicist who had uttered not a word throughout, timidly asked if he might finally say something. He explained that he would lose face if he went back to Japan and confessed that he hadn’t spoken. It would have been technically enough if he had stopped there, but he went on to say something rather interesting. Most 3 physicists, he pointed out, are obsessed with symmetries of various kinds. Japanese aesthetics, on the other hand, favour asymmetry, and perhaps this gives Japanese physics a different perspective. I immediately thought of Pamela Asquith, a young Canadian anthropologist friend doing a study in what might be called meta-primatology – the comparative study of primatologists. Her thesis was that Japanese primatologists brought a different cultural perspective to their monkeys, to complement the western angle. A comparable point has been argued for female primatologists, of whom there are numbers disproportionate to other sciences.

PBM

Of all the Nobel Prize-winners I was in awe especially of Sir Peter Medawar, who had long been a hero of mine, as much for his writing style as for his science. Badly disabled by a stroke at a disquietingly young age, he was assiduously cared for by his wife, Jean (the knot of his tie seemed softer and looser than a man would produce). The slight slur in his speech scarcely hindered his wit and erudition. Only once did I glimpse a chink in the armour of valiant bonhomie. I was hurrying along a corridor, nearly late for one of the lectures, and I passed the Medawars, also rushing as fast as Peter could, which was not very. Jean, in an urgent hiss, called me back (‘Richard, Richard’) and appealed for help in getting him through the door into the conference room. As I did so, I was moved by her solicitude for him and by his evident anxiety not to be late, a guard-dropping moment that belied the outward patrician nonchalance.

On another occasion he mentioned that he and my father had been exact contemporaries as schoolboy biologists at Marlborough College. ‘Your father and I were united in our detestation of one A. G. Lowndes.’ Lowndes had been their much loved and legendarily successful biology teacher, and I reminded Sir Peter that he had written an affectionate obituary of his erstwhile mentor. ‘Oh well, I felt that when the old bugger croaked I ought to do my bit for him.’

At some point around that time I was invited by Redmond O’Hanlon, who was on the editorial staff of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), to review one of Peter’s books. I submitted a rave notice, one of the most enthusiastic book reviews I have ever written (alongside some stinkers whose style, now that I think about it, owes inspiration to Medawar himself). My only slightly negative sentence was a judgement that I set down in order to repudiate it: ‘Some have described Medawar as a “loose cannon on deck” but I would vigorously contest this charge . . .’ I was never sent a proof to correct, and when the issue came out I was horrified to find that they had cut all my most glowing praise and printed the review under the headline ‘Shots from a loose cannon’. I stormed round to Redmond’s office above his wife Belinda’s famous Annabelinda dress shop in Oxford. Surrounded by what seemed to be an overflow collection of stuffed reptiles, shrivelled monkey hands, fetish objects and other bizarre memorabilia 4 from his travels, he listened to my prolonged tirade in silence, then left the room without a word. He returned carrying an object which he solemnly, and still without a word, presented to me. It was a double-barrelled shotgun. I shall never know whether it was loaded (Redmond’s eccentric adventurism is such that it is possible) but in any case the gesture paradoxically disarmed me. I don’t think Redmond was actually responsible for the mischievous sub-editing, and Peter was magnanimous when I wrote to tell him of the episode.

Double Dutch 

In 1977 I was invited to present a lecture at the International Ethological Conference held at Bielefeld in West Germany. At that stage of my career, it was quite an honour to be invited (as opposed to volunteering) to give a lecture at this flagship conference of my then field of animal behaviour, and I took great trouble over my speech, which I called ‘Replicator selection and the extended phenotype’. Subsequently published in the journal Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, it was the first time I introduced the idea, and the phrase, ‘extended phenotype’, which was to become the title of my second book.

The International Ethological Conference is held every two years in a different country and I attended eight of them: in The Hague, Zurich, Rennes, Edinburgh, Parma, Oxford, Washington and Bielefeld. In An Appetite for Wonder I mentioned the 1965 conference in Zurich, where I presented my doctoral research for the first time and was rescued from a technical debacle by the Austrian ethologist Wolfgang Schleidt. The conferences were inaugurated long before my time, as rather cosily small gatherings dominated by the flamboyantly handsome Konrad Lorenz and his more quietly thoughtful and also handsome colleague Niko Tinbergen. Speeches were prolonged by the fact that these two grand old men of the subject – not really old then but already grand – took turns to translate for the benefit of the audience, both ways between German and English. By the time I started attending, the conferences had become much larger, German speeches were diminishing in frequency, and there was no longer enough time for the translations.

Language problems hadn’t gone away, however. At another one of these biennial conferences, in Rennes, an elderly delegate from the Netherlands advertised his lecture in the programme as being in German. I am sorry to say that consequently, as he rose to speak, the majority of the Anglo-American contingent in the audience shuffled shamefacedly to the exit. I remained in my seat out of embarrassed politeness. This priceless Dutchman waited at the lectern, smiling patiently, until the last ignominious monoglot had slid out. Then his smile broadened into a contented beam as he announced (the Dutch are perhaps the most linguistically gifted of Europeans) that he had changed his mind and would now deliver his lecture in English. His audience then became yet more depleted.

The leading French delegate to that conference took a straw poll, the evening before her big speech, on how many would understand her if she obeyed orders from her French masters and spoke in French. Embarrassingly few put up their hands and consequently she decided to speak in English. Her change of mind 5 was well advertised in advance and she drew a good audience for an excellent lecture.

At that same Rennes conference, a colleague from Cambridge jabbered his lecture much too fast. At the end, a questioner stood up and furiously berated him in equally rapid-fire Dutch. Unschooled in the language as I was, I was one of many who got the point. We native English speakers must not abuse the privilege we enjoy: through various accidents of history, our lingua anglica has emerged as the new lingua franca. I suspect that this clever Dutchman had actually understood my Cambridge friend perfectly well, and was complaining not on his own behalf but for the benefit of others – probably not Dutch – who would have struggled to understand high-speed Cambridge English. I have done the same kind of thing, with respect not to language but to difficult scientific matters which, I had reason to fear, might not have been understood by some students in the audience. In other words, like (I suspect) my dear mentor Mike Cullen2, I have sometimes pretended not to understand a point of science in order to force a speaker to be clearer. In any case, I was humbled by this Dutchman’s public-spiritedness, to the extent that when I returned to Oxford I resumed my interrupted (since school) study of German, under the tutelage of the wonderful Uta Delius – only to be told, by a disgracefully insular colleague, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that. It’ll only encourage them.’ (Those colleagues and friends who can – with affection and not much difficulty I suspect – guess his identity will hear the words in his distinctive intonation.)

For my plenary talk at the Bielefeld conference I hope I spoke slowly and clearly enough to be understood by all. At any rate, the only negative comment from a polyglot Dutchman was a furious attack on the colour of my tie. Admittedly it was a lurid purple, conspicuously – and to his quivering sensibilities jarringly – out of harmony with the rest of my attire.

I never nowadays commit such a sartorial solecism, by the way. The only ties I ever wear are hand-painted by my multi-talented wife, Lalla, all to her own animal designs. The subjects include penguins, zebras, impalas, chameleons, scarlet ibis, armadillos, leaf insects, clouded leopards and . . . warthogs. This last tie, I have to admit, has been subjected to severe criticism in high places, signally falling short of royal approval. I wore it on the occasion I was invited to one of the Queen’s weekly lunches in Buckingham Palace among a bewilderingly eclectic mixture of about a dozen guests: those present included (around the table) the Director of the National Gallery, the Australian rugby captain, whose ‘build and carriage’ were exactly as you might imagine, a poised ballerina, Britain’s most prominent Muslim`3, and (under it) at least six corgis. Her Majesty was charm itself, but my warthog tie did not amuse. ‘Why do you have such ugly animals on your tie?’ Though I say it myself, my reply wasn’t bad for the spur of the moment: ‘Ma’m4, if the animals are ugly, how much greater is the artistry to produce such a beautiful tie?’ I actually think it israther admirable that the Queen does not limit her conversation to meaningless politesse, but respects her guests enough to tell them what she really thinks. As for warthogs, my aesthetic agrees with hers: they are ugly. But there’s a sprightly insouciance about the way they run with their tails pointing vertically upwards: not exactly charm, certainly not beauty, but an air of jaunty high spirits that makes me glad they are around. And it is a splendid tie. As I like to think the Queen would have thought on reflection.

Returning to earlier, purple-tie days and my Dutch critic, the idea of the extended phenotype itself escaped his anger – for which I was thankful, because he possessed a notoriously sharp intellect with a tongue to match. Though a distinguished elder of our shared field and author of an important theory of human origins, he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. One of Evelyn Waugh’s minor characters, ‘Uncle Peregrine’, was a ‘bore of international repute whose dreaded presence could empty the room in any centre of civilization’. I’m sorry to say that my neckwear critic had a similar reputation (the mere mention of his name would clear whole corridors in the world of ethology) coupled with a finely honed persecution complex. There was a (not totally implausible) rumour that he was paid a full professor’s salary by the University of Amsterdam, on the strict condition that he never set foot in Amsterdam. He came to live in Oxford.

I’m afraid he was the butt of other unkind jokes in the Netherlands. He once submitted to a Dutch journal a paper, in English, which contained a typo: ‘Man is a ridicolous species.’ He meant ‘nidicolous’, defined as a species whose young are heavily dependent on their parents (like thrush nestlings), as opposed to ‘nidifugous’ (like chickens or lambs, whose young leave the nest on their own sturdy legs and are much more appealing to us). The distinguished editors of the journal surely knew full well what the author meant, but they pleaded – in a later mock-apologetic erratum – that he had been unreachable in the African jungle and they had had to make a quick decision, trusting in the laws of probability: ‘ridiculous’ occurs much more frequently in English than ‘nidicolous’ and both involve a one-letter mutation from the misprint. So the published version reads: ‘Man is a ridiculous species.’ Perhaps that persecution complex was not entirely without justification. Nowadays, a spellchecking computer would have done the job for them, and almost certainly reached the same decision.

Cold water, hot blood

I next pick out a 1978 conference in Washington DC, because an incident there has become part of the folklore of the so-called ‘sociobiology controversy’ and, unlike most regalers of the tale, I was an eye-witness. The conference was convened by my old Berkeley friend the ethologist George Barlow, and the anthropologist James Silverberg, to discuss the sociobiology revolution and how to carry it forward. Edward O. Wilson, author of Sociobiology itself, was the star speaker, and I was also invited because The Selfish Gene was acquiring a following at the same time. There was much overlap between Wilson’s magisterial opus and my slighter volume, although neither book influenced the 7 other. One important difference is that John Maynard Smith’s powerful theory of evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) plays a prominent role in The Selfish Gene but is mysteriously absent from Sociobiology. I regard this as the most serious shortcoming of Wilson’s great book, although it was overlooked by critics at the time – and, as noted in the previous chapter, my contribution to the Washington conference was accordingly devoted to the topic. Maybe those critics were distracted by the fusillade of silly political attacks on Wilson’s final chapter about humans – attacks from which The Selfish Gene suffered some (not very damaging) collateral damage. The whole sorry history is well and fairly treated by the sociologist Ullica Segerstråle in her Defenders of the Truth.

At the Washington conference I was in the audience for a panel discussion when a motley rabble of students and leftist fellow travellers rushed the platform, and one of them threw a glassful of water at Edward Wilson, who was using crutches at the time, having injured himself training for the Boston Marathon. Some journalists have described a ‘pitcher’ of ‘iced water’ being ‘poured’ on his head. This may have happened too, but what I saw in the confusion was water being thrown sideways from a glass in Wilson’s general direction, fended off by David Barash, flaring his Bernard Shaw (or W. G. Grace) style beard towards the attacker in a classic primate agonistic display. Barash was the author of a readable student textbook of sociobiology who has grown, through his later books, into a sage and humanely prophetic voice in our field. The assailants were chanting slogans obviously inspired by the Harvard Marxist cabal led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould, so it was good that Gould himself was on the platform with Wilson and Barash, and in a position to quote Lenin’s condemnation of ‘an infantile disorder’. In the same vein the chairman of the session, plainly upset, stood up and made an angrily passionate speech, concluding: ‘I am a Marxist and I wish personally to apologize to Professor Wilson.’ Ed Wilson himself took it with his customary good humour. I expect he knew, as we all did, that among all the hubbub he had inadvertently scored a quiet victory that day.

Northern nightingale 

In 1989 Michael Ruse, founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, convened a conference on ‘The border zone between evolutionary science and philosophy’. This conference was remarkable not so much for its theme as for its location: Melbu, a village on one of the islands off the coast of northern Norway. More than the beauty of the place and the night sun, what was memorable was the – what shall I call it? – the sociology of the conference venue. Once a prosperous centre of the fishing industry, Melbu had fallen on hard times. In response to this change in its fortunes, a consortium of citizens led by the dentist got together to found a community centre, which would bring money into the village by building and operating a conference venue. The most unusual feature of this enterprise was that it was run entirely by volunteers, freely giving their time, money and resources out of what appeared to be pure, 8 altruistic public-spiritedness. I may be exaggerating a little but the conversations among us delegates from abroad, at meals and on midnight walks, dwelt more on our wonderment at the idealism of the townspeople than on the official topic of the conference itself.

Two pleasant vignettes mark Melbu in memory. In a gigantic cylindrical fishmeal store – no longer needed for its original purpose because of the decline in the industry but still faintly smelling of it – we had a grand gala dinner. Come the appropriate hour, we gathered outside and stood in a long line – not just the conferees but, as it seemed, most of the inhabitants of the village who were, indeed, nearly all volunteers for the enterprise. We stood, and we stood. And we stood. Finally, a Norwegian biologist colleague left the line to investigate the delay. He returned in high humour with the perfect explanation: ‘The cook is drunk!’ This was so very Melbu, and so exactly like the plot of ‘Gourmet Night’ at Fawlty Towers, our mounting impatience dissolved in good-natured laughter. Our spirits were still high when we finally entered the giant drum to be greeted by a spectacular vision of thousands of candles all around the perimeter. The meal itself was fine.

‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales awake.’ The first night of the conference, in the community centre, I was at the buffet dinner when I was suddenly struck dumb by one of the most beautiful voices I had ever heard, singing in the next room. Mesmerized, I left the dining room and gravitated towards the music as if lured by a Rhinemaiden. A lovely soprano, accompanied by a string quintet of obviously professional quality, was singing in German to a nostalgic, probably Viennese, waltz tune. I was entranced, and made enquiries. The string players were indeed professionals, who came from Germany every year to Melbu to play, pro bono, for love of the place and its idealism. The sweet soprano was not German but Norwegian: Betty Pettersen, Melbu doctor and one of the consortium who had joined forces with the dentist to found the centre. We became friends during the course of the conference, and I was sorry to lose touch as the years passed.

But there was a sequel. In September 2014 I was invited to the Blenheim Palace Literary Festival in Woodstock, near Oxford. Blenheim Palace is the magnificent Vanbrugh-designed residence of the Dukes of Marlborough (the Churchill family, and indeed Sir Winston was born there). It’s a beautiful location for a literary event, and I usually go to the festival to promote each of my new books. This time, for An Appetite for Wonder, the format would be different: the interview was to be punctuated by music, chosen by me – as in the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs (on which I once appeared as castaway) – to illustrate scenes from my life. The big difference in the Blenheim Palace version was that the music would be live, played by the Orchestra of St John’s under their Director John Lubbock, with a soprano, a contralto and a pianist.

Among the fifteen pieces I chose, I really wanted the haunting Viennese waltz time song, to remind me of Betty and the Spirit of Melbu. I knew neither its name, nor that of the composer. The tune itself, however, was firmly lodged in my head, one of my morning shower repertoire. So I played it on my EWI (electronic wind instrument) into my computer microphone, and emailed the melody to half a dozen musicians in the hope that one of them would recognize it. And one – only one – did: Ann Mackay, a dear friend of Lalla’s and mine who, by a lively coincidence, had been engaged as the soprano soloist for my Blenheim concert. She knew the song well, had often performed it and possessed the sheet music: Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume (Vienna, city of my dreams’) by Rudolf Sieczynski. It all worked out to perfection: Annie sang it beautifully in the long, sparkling Orangery of Blenheim Palace, and stirred sweet memories of my Melbu nightingale.

EWI son et psycho lumière

The EWI (pronounced ‘ee-wee’), by the way, is another story. In 2013 Lalla went on the popular BBC radio show Loose Ends to talk about an exhibition of her art that was being mounted at the National Theatre in London. The band Brasstronaut, which provided the musical interlude on the show, included Sam Davidson, a virtuoso on the electronic wind instrument. Lalla was intrigued and got talking to him. When she reported the conversation to me, as a sometime clarinettist I was even more intrigued. I had an email conversation with Sam, and stored away in my head the idea that some day, if the opportunity arose, I would love to try my hand at the EWI.

Meanwhile I happened to be approached by the London advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi. They had been commissioned to produce the opening tableau to get the ball rolling at the Cannes documentary film festival. They chose the theme of ‘Memes’ and wanted to feature me. I was to enter, stage left, and give a precisely scripted three-minute lecture on memes. I’d then walk off, giving way to a weird psychedelic film in which words and phrases from my lecture would be, as if by magic, incorporated together with spinning images of my face, loud booming music and strange light-show effects coming from all sides, my voice distorted and made vaguely musical with surreal echoes and harmonies – exploiting the whole whizz-bang repertoire of computer graphics and sound. Could this be what is known as postmodern? Who can tell?

It was all designed to seem like a conjuring trick, as if the computerized son et lumière had somehow picked up the words and phrases of my lecture and instantly magicked them, in fragments and distorted echoes, into the fabric of psychedelia. To the audience it would have sounded as though weird, dreamlike memories of my lecture had somehow been captured and instantly rearranged and regurgitated. Of course, in truth the Saatchi team had recorded me giving the word-for-word identical lecture weeks earlier, in an Oxford studio, and so had plenty of time to extract snatches from the recording to make their phantasmagoric film.

Anyway, the idea was that, as the sound and light show soared to its end, I should walk back on stage, this time carrying a clarinet and playing the refrain from the music that had just stopped thundering through the wraparound loudspeakers. ‘Er, it is true, isn’t it, that you play the clarinet?’ Well, I hadn’t touched a clarinet for fifty years, no longer possessed one, wasn’t at all sure my embouchure was up to it. But then Lalla reminded me of the EWI. I explained to them what it was. It was now Saatchi & Saatchi’s turn to be intrigued. Would I be prepared to learn to play the EWI in order to do the walk-on-and-play climax to their psychedelic extravagarama? How could I not? ‘Just try me.’ We both rose to the challenge; they bought me an EWI and I set about learning to play it.

The EWI is a long, straight thing shaped like a clarinet or oboe, with a mouthpiece at one end, a cable leading to a computer at the other, and woodwind-style keys in between. The mouthpiece contains an electronic sensor. Blow into it and a noise comes out of the computer: clarinet, violin, sousaphone, oboe, cello, saxophone, trumpet, bassoon – the mimicry of the real instrument is as good as software can make it, and that means very good indeed. If the computer is connected up to the massive speakers and boom-boxes of the theatre in Cannes, it sounds pretty impressive.

Electronic keyboard instruments purport to mimic real instruments too, but the added control you can exert when you blow into the mouthpiece of the EWI makes all the difference. You can transmit emotion in a way that you really can’t with a keyboard trying to mimic orchestral instruments (you can with a piano, but that’s because the keys are sensitive to how hard you hit them: hence the full name, pianoforte). The EWI is fingered pretty much like a clarinet or an oboe. This makes it much easier, startlingly easier, for a beginner to produce the sound of a cello, say, with a beautifully resonant vibrato, or a singing violin, without any of the agony we associate with those bowed instruments during the years of scraping, scratching apprenticeship. Tongue the EWI’s mouthpiece hard, and the software renders it as the characteristic ‘zing’ of bow hitting string. Tongue the mouthpiece when the software is set to trumpet mode and you get the ‘lippy’ attack of that instrument; or in tuba mode and you get a satisfying oompah. Tongue it in clarinet mode and you hear exactly what you would hear from a real clarinet. In any mode, blow steadily harder and then die away, to create a soulfully burgeoning crescendo and sighing diminuendo. For the finale of the Saatchi show I played it in trumpet mode, blaring and forthright. I actually made a mistake through stage fright, but managed to recover and the Saatchi team were kind enough to congratulate me on my impromptu ‘improvisation’. They tell me the YouTube video went viral.

Astronauts and telescopes

In 2011 the astronomer and musician Garik Israelian convened a most remarkable gathering on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. This volcanic archipelago off the coast of Morocco is a major centre of astronomy because there are mountains high enough to penetrate most clouds, and important 11 observatories take advantage of this on both Tenerife and La Palma. Garik had the inspired idea of getting scientists together with astronauts and musicians to see what they had in common, and what they could learn from one another: hence the event’s name, ‘Starmus’. The musicians included Brian May, former lead guitarist with Queen, a supernormally nice man; the scientists included Nobel Prize-winners such as Jack Szostak and George Smoot; and among the astronauts were Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders (who, though an unbeliever, had been made by the NASA PR department to read aloud from the book of Genesis), Charlie Duke (who, disconcertingly, has become a born-again Christian), Jim Lovell (captain of the nearly doomed Apollo 13), Alexei Leonov (first man to walk in space), and Claude Nicollier (the Swiss astronaut who walked in space to repair the Hubble telescope).

Halfway through the conference, several of us were flown in a small plane to the neighbouring island of La Palma, to have a panel discussion inside the housing of the largest optical telescope in the world, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, with its 409-inch mirror. Lalla and I travelled with Neil Armstrong, and it was a pleasure to see how well deserved was his reputation for modesty and quiet courtesy. This was in no way belied by his very reasonable policy of never giving autographs to random strangers – instituted (as he explained to an eager autograph hunter on the journey) when he discovered that his signature – and even his fake signature – was being sold on eBay for tens of thousands of dollars.

The La Palma giant telescope was stunning. Instruments such as this, and the similar telescopes of the Keck Observatory on the big island of Hawaii, move me deeply, I think because they represent some of the highest achievements of our human species. And, as my friend Michael Shermer has recorded, I was especially moved by the Mount Wilson 100-inch telescope in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles, once the largest telescope in the world and the one with which Edwin Hubble first decoded the expanding universe. Before Mount Wilson, the title of largest telescope was held (for the longest time) by the Earl of Rosse’s 72-inch ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’ at Birr Castle in Ireland, to which I have an extra emotional attachment because of its association with Lalla’s family. I experienced the same swelling of the chest when I visited CERN and the Large Hadron Collider: again, the near-lachrymose pride in what humans can do when they cooperate, across nations and across language barriers.

The spirit of international cooperation was hovering over the whole Starmus conference. When Buzz Aldrin arrived late in the conference hall, Alexei Leonov was in the front row of the audience. Completely undeterred by the fact that somebody was trying to give a lecture, this jovial Khrushchev-lookalike stood up and bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘Buzz Aldrrreeen’. Arms outstretched, he strode towards the incoming Aldrin and enveloped him in a full Russian bear-hug. At dinner, Leonov showed himself to have artistic as well as 12 astronautical talent. Lalla and I were entranced to see him dash off on the back of the menu a rapid self-portrait for Garik Israelian’s little boy Arthur. We never did understand the significance of the tie, but it adds charm to the picture – as if added charm were needed, given the beaming abundance of the commodity as shown in the photograph of him bear hugging Jim Lovell, hero of the triskaidekaphobogenic5 Apollo 13.

Neil Armstrong sat with Lalla on the return flight from La Palma to Tenerife. They talked of many things, including the remarkable fact – vivid demonstration of Moore’s Law – that the total computer memory on board Apollo 11 (32 kilobytes) was a small fraction of the capacity of a Gameboy that Armstrong pointed out in the possession of a child in a neighbouring seat. Alas, that gracious and courageous gentleman was no longer present when Garik reprised the Starmus conference three years later. It was again a great experience, this time with a much larger audience and with Stephen Hawking as special guest.

Flashing back again to the 1970s and the gatherings of my earlier career such as the Washington conference on sociobiology, an element of nostalgia creeps in. In those days I was able to be simply a delegate, listening to talks with interest, approaching speakers afterwards to follow up points of interest, perhaps having dinner with them. Recent conferences, especially since publication of The God Delusion, have become a very different kind of experience. Although I am not a celebrity with lots of people recognizing me in the street (thank goodness), I seem to have become a minor celebrity in the secularist, sceptical, non-believing circles that convene the sorts of conferences to which I am now invited. The other major change is the arrival of the selfie. I don’t think I need to elaborate, except to say that the invention of the cellphone camera is a mixed blessing.

And you can take that as polite British understatement.

This is a chapter from Brief Candle in the Dark, the second volume of my autobiography, published (2015) by Penguin Random House in Britain and Harper Collins in America.