WEBVTT

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Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen

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It’s a very interesting, and unusual,

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and weird experience for me

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to be talking in my home town. Which is…

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Now, amongst the books

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that Constance mentioned 
when she was introducing me,

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide, 
Dirk Gently and so on,

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it was not my favourite book.

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And my favourite book

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is what I’m here to talk about tonight.

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It's funny how, how often…

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Virtually every author I know,

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their own favourite book is the one
that sold the least.

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It’s somehow the runt of the litter,

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it’s the one you’ve always
just loved the most.

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And I want to tell you about
how this came about.

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Sometime in about the mid 1980s,

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the phone rang.

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And the voice said,

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“We want you to go to Madagascar.

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We want you to look for 
a very rare form of lemur,

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called the Aye-aye.

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The plane leaves in two weeks,

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we would like you to be on it.”

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Now I—assuming they’ve got
the wrong number—said “yes!”

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before they could discover their mistake.

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But in fact it turned out 
that they decided,

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“Well, here is somebody who 
doesn’t know anything about lemurs,

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anything about the Aye-aye, 
anything about Madagascar,

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let’s send him.”

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So I started to try 
and find out something about it,

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and it turns out it’s very interesting.

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Lemurs used to be 
the dominant primate in all the world.

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And they were very, 
very gentle, pleasant creatures.

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They were a little bit 
like sort of cat size,

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and they used to hang around in the trees

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having a nice time.

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And then, Gondwanaland split up.

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It always sounds like 
some sort of 70’s rock group

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going their own way 
for reasons of musical differences.

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But as you probably remember

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Gondwanaland was that 
vast continental landmass

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that consisted of what then became

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South America, Africa, India

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Southeast Asia, Australasia

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—uh, no—Australia, Australia and not

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—and this will turn out 
to be significant later—

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not New Zealand

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which turns out to be just a lot of gunk

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that came out from under the ocean.

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And as I say,

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lemurs were the dominant primate
around the world

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and when all these landmasses split up,

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and Madagascar was one of them,

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Madagascar kind of sailed off

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into the middle of what then
suddenly became the Indian Ocean.

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And took with it a representative sample

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of the livestock of the period,

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which included a lot of lemurs.

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And they basically sort of sat there

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for millions and millions of years

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in glorious isolation.

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While, in the rest of the world,

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a new creature emerged.

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A new creature arrived

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that was much more intelligent 
than the lemurs

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—according to it—

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much more competitive,

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much more aggressive,

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and incredibly interested

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in all of things you could do with twigs.

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Twigs were absolutely wonderful.

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So much you can do with twigs

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you can dig in the ground 
for things with twigs,

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you can burrow under 
the bark of trees for grubs,

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you can hit each other with twigs.

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If there had been copies of 
TwigUser Magazine around on those days,

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these creatures would 
have been lining up for it.

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And these creatures

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—which, as you have probably guessed, 
are called the monkeys—

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because they were more competitive 
and more aggressive,

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and they lived in the 
same habitat as the lemurs,

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they successfully supplanted the lemurs

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everywhere in the world 
other than Madagascar.

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Because Madagascar was right out 
in the middle of the Indian Ocean

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and they couldn’t get there.

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They couldn’t get there until
about 1500 years ago,

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when due to startling 
advances in twig technology

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they were able to get there in boats,

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and eventually planes.

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And suddenly the lemurs,
that have had this place for themselves

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for millions and millions 
and millions of years,

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were suddenly facing 
their old enemy: the monkey.

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So, this is Madagascar,

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and it turns out that 
the rarest of the lemurs

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—and when I say the rarest of the lemurs,

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at this particular point in the mid 80’s

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they were thought to be 
the rarest of the lemurs;

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we’ve now discovered and even rarer lemur 
called the Golden Bamboo Lemur,

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which went straight to the number one
of endangered lemurs—

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but the Aye-aye is a very 
very peculiar animal.

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It looks like an agglomeration

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of all sorts of other different animals.

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So, for instance, 
it has a sort of fox's ears,

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and it has a little sort
of bitty rabbit’s teeth,

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and it has a kind of 
ostrich feather as a tail,

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and it has very weird eyes,

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actually it has Marty Feldman’s eyes.

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The kind of sort of looking 
slightly beyond you

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into a sort of other dimension 
just over your left shoulder.

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But it also has one very very
very peculiar characteristic,

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which is its middle finger on both hands
is skeletally thin and very very long.

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And it turns out there is
only one other animal

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in the entire world that has this feature.

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And this is called

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—I love zoologists; 
they have such vivid imaginations—

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it’s called the Long-Fingered Possum.

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And this is a creature 
that lives in New Guinea,

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and in fact it's its fourth finger 
that is skeletally thin and elongated.

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And this is the thing that tells us

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that there is no relationship 
between these animals,

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it’s pure convergent evolution,

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because the common factor 
between Madagascar and the Aye-aye,

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and New Guinea and 
the Long-Fingered Possum

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is that in both habitats 
there are no woodpeckers.

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And you see, the thing is

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—life is very very opportunistic,

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and it will take advantage of any 
food source it finds around the place.

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And if there are no woodpeckers looking 
under the bark of trees for grubs,

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then, in this case, it will be the mammals

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that grow the skeletally thin long finger 
to burrow under the bark of the tree,

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and get to this source of food 
which is the grubs under the bark.

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So, the Aye-aye is this 
very very very strange creature.

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And at this time it was thought there 
were only about fifteen of them left.

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And they lived actually 
not on Madagascar itself,

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but on a tiny little rainforest island

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just off the coast of Madagascar, 
called Nosy Mangabe,

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and it’s just off 
the northwest tip of Madagascar.

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And now to get there, what you have to do,

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is you have to fly in a 747 to Madagascar.

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And then in a terrible 
old jalopy of an airplane

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from Madagascar up to the northwest port.

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And from there you have to go 
in a kind of decreasingly excellent

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series of carts and trucks and so on,

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to a little port where 
there was going to be a boat

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that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe.

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So we arrived there, 
and arrived at the port,

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and we were looking around for the boat
that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe,

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and we couldn’t see it.

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And we kept on asking people

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–you know–“where is this boat?”,

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and they would say 
“It’s there! It’s there!”,

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and we couldn’t see 
what they were pointing at

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because there was this terrible 
rotting old hulk in the way.

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Well as you guessed,

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this is the terrible rotting old hulk

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that we had to go to Nosy Mangabe in.

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And it didn’t fulfill what to my mind 
was the sort of basic criteria of a boat,

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in that it was basically full of ocean.

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And it seemed to me 
that the whole point of a boat

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was to keep the ocean on the outside.

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Anyway, so we crossed to Nosy Mangabe.

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And it’s this tiny little, very very 
beautiful little rainforest island.

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And we hit a major problem

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which of course is that 
this animal not only lives in trees

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—nobody has seen it for 
years and years and years—

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lives in trees but 
also it's a nocturnal animal.

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And the quality of batteries 
in Madagascar was very very poor.

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So, we spent night after night
after night,

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traipsing through the rainforest,

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in what can only be described as: 
the rain.

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Getting rather ratty,

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and basically we’ve just spent
night after night

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sort of huddled under tarpaulins,

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looking at us, saying “stop raining.”

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And every now and then we would sort of,

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“gah, I’ve been trying 
to find this damn animal.”

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Actually, this is wonderful,

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we found this hut that used 
to be this sort of game warden’s

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—not game warden—a ranger’s hut.

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And it’s a tiny little hut.

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And it was actually full of wild life.

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What happened, you see,

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is you would open the door,

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and you'd hear all this noise…

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and you turn on the light 
and it would all stop.

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And you would see these little 
giant spiders around the wall,

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each with a sort of 
half-eaten bug in their mouth!

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And say, “yes?”

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And you turn the light out and…

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So this is our shelter, you know,

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we were having a great time.

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And eventually…

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But one night, one night,

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we were all sort of—as I said—
huddled under our tarpaulins,

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and I sort of got out, 
and wandered around,

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and suddenly, suddenly, 
I looked up and on a branch

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at about that high above my head

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this creature came out.

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This creature came out along the branch,

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looked down on me,

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and I looked at it, and as it looked to me

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—it obviously didn’t at all like 
to look at what it saw—

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it turned around and went away again.

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Whole encounter about ten seconds.

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And that’s what we’d come for.

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I had actually seen, and we saw

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—we all just managed to get a quick 
photograph of it when it appeared—

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but I suddenly realised 
we’d seen an Aye-aye.

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Now, I was absolutely 
transfixed by that moment,

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for reasons that I couldn’t entirely 
explain to myself immediately.

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Because a month earlier
I’d never even heard of this animal

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and now here I was, staring at it,

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thinking that something 
extraordinary happening here.

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So I began to sort of 
think about it a little bit,

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and the thought I put together was this.

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In traveling here, 
in traveling on a 747 to Tananarive,

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which is the capital of Madagascar,

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and this terrible old jalopy
of an airplane

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that took us out to the northwest corner,

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and then in the decreasingly excellent
series of carts and trucks,

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and then in the rotting old hulk
that took us to the rainforest

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where we basically walked through
the rainforest night after night,

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it was as if we were taking 
a kind of time journey

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—a time travel journey—

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back through the history
of twig technology.

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And what this encounter had been,

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what this encounter had been was:

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I was a monkey looking at a lemur.

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And you suddenly think,

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there is a huge amount of history

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to this moment that we don’t think

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—we don’t realise—we carry around with us.

00:14:03.749 --> 00:14:09.175
Our roots in this planet go back 
an awfully awfully awfully long way,

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and we don’t tend to 
think about that very much.

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And it takes a confrontation like this

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suddenly to realise how sort of
broad and deep your family goes.

00:14:21.383 --> 00:14:24.181
So I thought, 
well this is terribly interesting.

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And I talked to the guy who had been
kind of my guide out there,

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who was a zoologist 
who had been sent along

00:14:32.173 --> 00:14:35.193
to make sure I didn’t sort of 
fall out of the trees and so on.

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And his name was Mark Carwardine,
and I said to him,

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“I would love it if we could …,

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do you fancy the idea of 
sort of going around the world

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and looking for other rare 
and endangered species of animals,

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maybe doing a book about this?”

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He said, 
“well, that’s what I do for a living!”

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“So yeah, OK.”

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And so we did.

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Now, there was a pause at that moment

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because I had a couple of novels
I’d just contracted to write.

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So I wrote Dirk Gently’s
Holistic Detective Agency

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and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul,

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and then it was time to go.

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And the first place we went,

00:15:15.820 --> 00:15:21.523
we went to look for a particular animal
which is the Komodo Dragon Lizard.

00:15:23.514 --> 00:15:26.068
Now you know what 
lizards are like, don’t you?

00:15:26.405 --> 00:15:27.543
I mean they’re sort of…

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The Komodo Dragon Lizard 
is a little bit bigger than that.

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The biggest one we saw actually
it was about 13 feet long,

00:15:44.542 --> 00:15:46.275
and its head came out to about here

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fucking huge 
I think is the technical term.

00:15:54.945 --> 00:15:57.717
It’s thought they're the origin
of the chinese dragon myth

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—because they are well huge, 
giant giant lizards,

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they’re scaly, they’re man eaters,

00:16:05.361 --> 00:16:06.862
literally they are man eaters,

00:16:06.958 --> 00:16:08.754
and they don’t actually breathe fire,

00:16:08.754 --> 00:16:12.086
but they do have the worst breath
of any creature known to man.

00:16:14.078 --> 00:16:18.212
And they live on this island
called Komodo.

00:16:19.146 --> 00:16:22.198
Now, it’s not enough—it turns out—

00:16:22.419 --> 00:16:30.674
that this island has fifteen hundred, 
fifteen hundred man-eating dragons on it.

00:16:33.344 --> 00:16:37.112
It turns our that actually that 
the most endangered animal on the island

00:16:37.462 --> 00:16:39.619
is anything other than the dragons.

00:16:45.536 --> 00:16:47.761
In fact—as I said—they’re man eaters.

00:16:47.761 --> 00:16:50.268
They don’t actually eat you
sort of straight out,

00:16:50.268 --> 00:16:52.834
they don’t sort of lunge at you
and just gobble you up.

00:16:52.834 --> 00:16:54.037
They sort of sneak around

00:16:54.037 --> 00:16:56.149
and they come 
and give you a bit of a bite.

00:16:57.221 --> 00:16:59.872
Because their saliva is so virulent

00:17:00.231 --> 00:17:01.854
that your wound would not heal

00:17:02.089 --> 00:17:04.679
and after a while you will die.

00:17:05.056 --> 00:17:07.171
And so one of the dragons
will get to eat you

00:17:07.171 --> 00:17:09.664
—it doesn’t matter if it’s
the same one that bit you—

00:17:09.664 --> 00:17:10.953
they just have a strategy

00:17:10.953 --> 00:17:14.648
of having as many dead and dying
creatures lying around the island

00:17:14.648 --> 00:17:17.567
as they can manage 
and that kind of keeps them going.

00:17:20.983 --> 00:17:23.728
But it turns out it’s not enough
that the island

00:17:23.728 --> 00:17:26.544
has fifteen hundred 
man-eating dragons on it.

00:17:26.544 --> 00:17:28.789
Just to make it a little bit 
more interesting,

00:17:28.789 --> 00:17:32.322
it also has more poisonous snakes on it

00:17:32.361 --> 00:17:33.641
—per square meter of land—

00:17:33.831 --> 00:17:36.414
than any equivalent 
area of land anywhere on earth.

00:17:37.331 --> 00:17:39.448
So, we approached Komodo

00:17:39.741 --> 00:17:41.979
—I have to say—slightly nervously,

00:17:42.411 --> 00:17:44.350
and in a slightly roundabout way.

00:17:45.105 --> 00:17:47.317
In fact we approached 
in such a roundabout way

00:17:47.317 --> 00:17:49.424
that we went by Melbourne in Australia.

00:17:51.454 --> 00:17:53.150
And the reason we went by Melbourne

00:17:53.150 --> 00:17:55.406
was somebody who
we wanted to go and see there,

00:17:55.406 --> 00:17:57.940
a man called Dr. Struan Sutherland.

00:17:58.921 --> 00:18:01.839
Actually I want to read you
a little bit about him,

00:18:02.052 --> 00:18:08.034
he was a great expert in snake venom.

00:18:10.626 --> 00:18:12.942
I should apologise 
before I read this, actually,

00:18:12.962 --> 00:18:16.463
for the fact that 
my australian accent isn’t very good.

00:18:16.714 --> 00:18:17.858
But then, what the hell,

00:18:17.858 --> 00:18:20.628
you’re all americans 
you won’t know the difference anyway.

00:18:33.573 --> 00:18:35.168
There is in Melbourne a man

00:18:35.168 --> 00:18:37.346
who probably knows more
about poisonous snakes

00:18:37.346 --> 00:18:38.870
than anyone else on earth.

00:18:39.925 --> 00:18:41.798
His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland,

00:18:41.798 --> 00:18:43.514
and he has devoted his entire life

00:18:43.716 --> 00:18:45.431
to a study of venom.

00:18:46.211 --> 00:18:47.955
“And I’m bored at talking about it”,

00:18:47.955 --> 00:18:50.505
he said when we went along
to see him the next morning

00:18:50.505 --> 00:18:52.446
laden with tape recorders and notebooks.

00:18:52.446 --> 00:18:54.518
“Can’t stand all these 
poisonous creatures,

00:18:54.518 --> 00:18:56.869
all these snakes and 
insects and fish and things.

00:18:56.869 --> 00:18:58.496
Wretched things, biting everybody.

00:18:58.496 --> 00:19:01.310
And then people expect me 
to tell them what to do about it.

00:19:01.310 --> 00:19:04.275
I’ll tell them what to do.
Don’t get bitten in the first place.

00:19:04.275 --> 00:19:05.147
That’s the answer.

00:19:05.147 --> 00:19:07.390
I’ve had enough of 
telling people all the time.

00:19:07.390 --> 00:19:09.125
Hydroponics, now that’s interesting.

00:19:09.933 --> 00:19:12.058
Talk to you all you like 
about hydroponics.

00:19:12.058 --> 00:19:13.112
Fascinating stuff,

00:19:13.267 --> 00:19:15.064
growing plants artificially in water,

00:19:15.209 --> 00:19:16.494
very interesting technique.

00:19:16.524 --> 00:19:19.955
We’ll need to know all about it 
if we’re going to go to Mars and places.

00:19:19.955 --> 00:19:21.587
Where did you say you were going?”

00:19:21.587 --> 00:19:22.298
“Komodo.”

00:19:23.078 --> 00:19:25.243
“Well don’t get bitten, 
that’s all I can say.

00:19:28.830 --> 00:19:32.392
And don’t come running to me if you do 
because you won’t get here in time,

00:19:33.458 --> 00:19:35.655
and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate.

00:19:36.248 --> 00:19:39.414
Look at this office, full of 
poisonous animals all over the place.

00:19:39.414 --> 00:19:42.522
See this tank, it’s full of fire ants. 
Venomous little creatures.

00:19:42.522 --> 00:19:44.192
What are we going to do about them?

00:19:44.192 --> 00:19:47.404
Anyway, I got some little fairy cakes
in case you were hungry.

00:19:47.404 --> 00:19:48.987
Would you like some little cakes?

00:19:48.987 --> 00:19:50.617
I can’t remember where I put them.

00:19:50.628 --> 00:19:52.557
There’s some tea but it’s not very good.

00:19:52.557 --> 00:19:54.241
Anyway, sit down for heaven’s sake.

00:19:55.201 --> 00:19:56.703
So, you’re going to Komodo.

00:19:56.703 --> 00:19:58.725
Well, I don’t know why you want to do that

00:19:58.725 --> 00:20:00.437
but I suppose you have your reasons.

00:20:01.212 --> 00:20:03.891
There are fifteen different 
types of snake on Komodo,

00:20:03.891 --> 00:20:05.457
and half of them are poisonous.

00:20:06.354 --> 00:20:07.877
The only potentially deadly ones

00:20:08.017 --> 00:20:09.302
are the Russell’s Viper,

00:20:09.463 --> 00:20:11.986
the Bamboo Viper and the Indian Cobra.

00:20:13.190 --> 00:20:16.780
The Indian cobra is the fifteenth
deadliest snake in the world,

00:20:17.474 --> 00:20:20.425
and all the other fourteen
are here in Australia.

00:20:22.194 --> 00:20:24.239
That’s why it’s so hard 
for me to find time

00:20:24.239 --> 00:20:27.661
to get on with my hydroponics, 
with all these snakes all over the place.

00:20:28.264 --> 00:20:32.155
And spiders. The most poisonous spider 
is the Sydney funnel-web,

00:20:32.360 --> 00:20:35.650
we get about five hundred people
a year bitten by spiders.

00:20:36.106 --> 00:20:37.373
A lot of them used to die,

00:20:37.373 --> 00:20:41.233
so I had to develop an antidote to stop 
people bothering me with it all the time.

00:20:42.378 --> 00:20:46.336
Took us years. Then we developed
this snake bite detector kit.

00:20:47.521 --> 00:20:50.874
Not that you need a kit to tell you
when you’ve been bitten by a snake,

00:20:50.886 --> 00:20:53.743
you usually know, but the kit is 
something that will detect

00:20:53.743 --> 00:20:56.608
what type you’ve been bitten by
so you can treat it properly.

00:20:57.056 --> 00:21:00.456
Would you like to see a kit? I’ve got a
couple here in the venom fridge.

00:21:00.471 --> 00:21:03.111
Let’s have a look. Ah look, 
the cakes are in here too.

00:21:03.131 --> 00:21:05.998
Quick, have one while they’re still fresh.

00:21:05.998 --> 00:21:07.579
Fairy cakes, I baked ’em myself”

00:21:09.093 --> 00:21:11.850
He handed round the snake venom
detection kits

00:21:12.160 --> 00:21:15.744
and these home baked fairy cakes
and retreated back to his desk,

00:21:15.749 --> 00:21:17.709
where he beamed at us cheerfully

00:21:17.737 --> 00:21:19.739
from behind his curly beard and bow tie.

00:21:20.760 --> 00:21:23.239
We admired the kits 
which were small efficient boxes

00:21:23.239 --> 00:21:26.261
neatly packed with tiny bottles, 
a pipette, a syringe,

00:21:26.280 --> 00:21:28.296
and a complicated set of instructions

00:21:28.299 --> 00:21:31.554
that I wouldn’t want to have 
to read for the first time in a panic.

00:21:33.432 --> 00:21:36.979
And then we asked him how many of
the snakes he had been bitten by himself.

00:21:37.709 --> 00:21:38.900
“None of ’em,” he said.

00:21:39.047 --> 00:21:41.972
“Another area of expertise I’ve developed

00:21:41.972 --> 00:21:45.111
is that of getting other people 
to handle the dangerous animals.

00:21:48.384 --> 00:21:50.995
Won’t do it myself. 
Don’t want to get bitten, do I?

00:21:51.466 --> 00:21:53.427
You know what it says on my book jackets?

00:21:53.427 --> 00:21:55.480
‘Hobbies: gardening, with gloves;

00:21:56.300 --> 00:21:57.831
fishing, with boots;

00:21:58.168 --> 00:21:59.497
travelling, with care.’

00:21:59.768 --> 00:22:01.172
That’s the answer. What else?

00:22:01.172 --> 00:22:04.305
Well in addition to the boots 
wear thick baggy trousers.

00:22:04.585 --> 00:22:07.949
And preferably have half a dozen people
trampling along in front of you

00:22:08.115 --> 00:22:09.818
making as much noise as possible.

00:22:11.237 --> 00:22:14.022
The snakes pick up the vibrations 
and get out of your way.

00:22:14.022 --> 00:22:15.718
Unless it’s a Death Adder,

00:22:16.699 --> 00:22:18.426
otherwise known as the Deaf Adder,

00:22:20.339 --> 00:22:21.783
which just lies there.

00:22:22.874 --> 00:22:25.779
People can walk right past it
and over it and nothing happens.

00:22:25.779 --> 00:22:28.783
I’ve heard of twelve people in a line
walking over a Death Adder

00:22:28.783 --> 00:22:31.769
and the twelfth person 
accidentally trod on it and got bitten.

00:22:32.331 --> 00:22:34.657
Normally it’s quite safe 
to get twelfth in line.

00:22:34.970 --> 00:22:36.361
You’re not eating your cakes.

00:22:36.361 --> 00:22:37.664
Come on, get them down you,

00:22:37.664 --> 00:22:39.633
there’s plenty more in the venom fridge.”

00:22:42.669 --> 00:22:44.794
We asked, tentatively, if we could perhaps

00:22:44.948 --> 00:22:47.714
take a snake bite detector kit 
with us to Komodo.

00:22:48.026 --> 00:22:49.659
“Course you can, course you can.

00:22:49.659 --> 00:22:51.337
Take as many as you like.

00:22:51.337 --> 00:22:55.042
Won’t do you a blind bit of good because 
they’re only for Australian snakes.”

00:23:03.357 --> 00:23:07.679
“So what do we do if we get bitten by 
something deadly, then?” I asked.

00:23:08.934 --> 00:23:10.898
He blinked at me as if I were stupid.

00:23:12.858 --> 00:23:14.829
"Well what do you think you do?” he said.

00:23:14.829 --> 00:23:17.322
“You die of course. 
That’s what deadly means.”

00:23:24.828 --> 00:23:29.475
“But what about cutting open the wound 
and sucking out the poison?” I asked.

00:23:30.795 --> 00:23:32.655
“Rather you than me,” he said.

00:23:32.869 --> 00:23:34.698
“I wouldn’t want a mouthful of poison.

00:23:34.698 --> 00:23:36.339
Shouldn’t do you any harm, though,

00:23:36.339 --> 00:23:38.325
snake toxins are of high molecular weight

00:23:38.325 --> 00:23:40.844
so they wont penetrate 
the blood vessels in the mouth

00:23:40.844 --> 00:23:42.816
the way that alcohol or some drugs do.

00:23:42.897 --> 00:23:45.904
And then the poison gets destroyed
by the acids in your stomach.

00:23:46.112 --> 00:23:48.691
But it’s not necessarily going 
to do much good either.

00:23:48.691 --> 00:23:51.846
I mean, you’re not likely to be able
to get much of the poison out,

00:23:51.846 --> 00:23:54.819
but you’re probably going to make
the wound a lot worse trying.

00:23:54.819 --> 00:23:58.687
And in a place like Komodo it means you’d 
quickly have a seriously infected wound

00:23:58.687 --> 00:24:00.949
to contend with as well as
a leg full of poison.

00:24:00.980 --> 00:24:03.828
Septicaemia, gangrene, 
you name it, it’ll kill you.”

00:24:04.923 --> 00:24:07.190
“What about a tourniquet?” I asked.

00:24:07.467 --> 00:24:10.675
“Well, fine if you don’t mind having
your leg cut off afterwards.

00:24:11.342 --> 00:24:13.069
You’d have to because if you cut off

00:24:13.069 --> 00:24:15.471
the blood supply to it completely
it will just die.

00:24:15.890 --> 00:24:18.376
And if you can find anyone 
in that part of Indonesia

00:24:18.376 --> 00:24:20.100
who you’d trust to take your leg off

00:24:20.100 --> 00:24:21.694
then you’re a braver man than me.

00:24:23.207 --> 00:24:25.305
No, I’ll tell you, 
the only thing you can do

00:24:25.305 --> 00:24:27.584
is apply a pressure bandage 
direct to the wound

00:24:27.727 --> 00:24:30.450
and wrap the whole leg up tightly, 
but not too tightly.

00:24:30.824 --> 00:24:34.417
Slow the blood flow but don’t cut it off 
or you’ll lose the leg.

00:24:34.680 --> 00:24:37.603
Hold your leg, 
or whatever bit you’ve been bitten in,

00:24:37.840 --> 00:24:40.092
lower than your heart and your head.

00:24:40.485 --> 00:24:48.920
Keep very, very still, breathe slowly 
and get to a doctor immediately.

00:24:51.123 --> 00:24:53.414
If you’re on Komodo 
that means a couple of days,

00:24:53.419 --> 00:24:55.079
by which time you’ll be well dead.

00:24:56.627 --> 00:24:59.269
Now, the only answer, 
and I mean this quite seriously,

00:24:59.269 --> 00:25:01.395
is don’t get bitten.

00:25:02.718 --> 00:25:04.331
There’s no reason why you should.

00:25:04.332 --> 00:25:06.650
Any of the snakes there 
will get out of your way

00:25:06.650 --> 00:25:08.379
well before you even see them.

00:25:08.379 --> 00:25:11.533
You don’t really need to worry 
about the snakes if you’re careful.

00:25:11.767 --> 00:25:15.208
No, the things you really need to 
worry about are the marine creatures.”

00:25:15.208 --> 00:25:16.217
“What?”

00:25:18.465 --> 00:25:20.757
“Scorpion fish, stonefish, sea snakes.

00:25:20.757 --> 00:25:23.038
Much more poisonous than anything on land.

00:25:23.038 --> 00:25:25.909
Get stung by a stonefish 
and the pain alone will kill you.

00:25:26.742 --> 00:25:29.062
People drown themselves
just to stop the pain.”

00:25:36.436 --> 00:25:38.980
“Where are all these things?”

00:25:39.241 --> 00:25:40.917
“Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them.

00:25:40.919 --> 00:25:42.649
I wouldn’t go near it if I were you.

00:25:42.649 --> 00:25:44.482
Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.”

00:25:45.786 --> 00:25:47.338
“Is there anything you do like?”

00:25:47.338 --> 00:25:48.823
“Yeah", he said, "Hydroponics.”

00:25:54.198 --> 00:25:57.658
“No”, I said, “I mean are there any 
poisonous creatures

00:25:57.662 --> 00:25:59.088
you’re particularly fond of?”

00:25:59.524 --> 00:26:01.498
He looked out of the window for a moment.

00:26:01.505 --> 00:26:03.435
“There was,” he said, “but she left me.”

00:26:20.539 --> 00:26:24.564
Anyway, in fact my favourite 
of all the animals we went to see,

00:26:24.799 --> 00:26:27.805
my favourite, was an animal 
called the Kakapo.

00:26:29.933 --> 00:26:32.063
And the Kakapo is a kind of parrot.

00:26:33.828 --> 00:26:35.263
It lives in New Zealand.

00:26:36.307 --> 00:26:40.981
It’s a flightless parrot, 
it's forgotten how to fly.

00:26:43.592 --> 00:26:48.582
Sadly, it has also forgotten 
that it has forgotten how to fly.

00:26:55.660 --> 00:27:04.633
So a seriously worried Kakapo has been 
known to run up a tree and jump out of it.

00:27:10.226 --> 00:27:12.708
Opinion divides as to what next happens:

00:27:14.484 --> 00:27:18.103
some people said it has developed 
a kind of rudimentary parachuting ability,

00:27:19.978 --> 00:27:22.137
other people say 
it flies a bit like a brick.

00:27:24.955 --> 00:27:25.857
But the thing is

00:27:26.046 --> 00:27:28.365
—I might talk about a 
seriously worried Kakapo—

00:27:28.568 --> 00:27:31.807
the fact is you’re not likely to find 
a seriously worried Kakapo

00:27:31.973 --> 00:27:34.742
because Kakapos have not learned to worry.

00:27:36.617 --> 00:27:38.681
It seems an extraordinary thing to say

00:27:38.838 --> 00:27:42.189
because worrying is something 
we’re all so terribly good at,

00:27:42.962 --> 00:27:45.196
and which comes so 
absolutely naturally to us,

00:27:45.466 --> 00:27:47.585
we think it must be 
as natural as breathing.

00:27:47.948 --> 00:27:50.275
But it turns out that worrying

00:27:50.575 --> 00:27:53.834
is simply an acquired 
habit like anything else.

00:27:57.385 --> 00:28:01.399
It’s something you’re genetically 
disposed to do or not to do.

00:28:02.266 --> 00:28:06.253
And the thing is that the Kakapo
grew up in New Zealand

00:28:06.629 --> 00:28:14.470
which was, until man arrived, 
a country which had no predators.

00:28:14.665 --> 00:28:17.241
And it’s predators that, 
over a series of generations,

00:28:17.241 --> 00:28:19.847
will teach you to worry.

00:28:21.483 --> 00:28:26.140
And if you don’t have predators then the 
need to worry will never occur to you.

00:28:27.763 --> 00:28:31.341
Now I said earlier, that New Zealand
turns out to be

00:28:31.488 --> 00:28:34.137
just a load of gunk that 
came out from under the ocean.

00:28:34.551 --> 00:28:36.157
And this is why, when it emerged,

00:28:36.236 --> 00:28:39.406
it didn’t have any life on it at all
—maybe a few dead fish.

00:28:44.987 --> 00:28:48.559
So the only animals that 
inhabited New Zealand

00:28:48.624 --> 00:28:51.886
were the animals 
that could fly there, i.e. birds.

00:28:51.886 --> 00:28:54.154
There were also 
a couple of species of bats

00:28:54.164 --> 00:28:56.170
which are mammals, but you get the point.

00:28:56.170 --> 00:28:59.248
So it was only birds 
that lived on New Zealand.

00:28:59.555 --> 00:29:02.259
And, in an absence of predators,

00:29:02.679 --> 00:29:05.914
there was nothing 
for them to worry about.

00:29:06.560 --> 00:29:09.446
Now it’s very very peculiar for us
to try and understand this

00:29:09.577 --> 00:29:16.809
because we have never ever encountered 
an environment with no predators in it.

00:29:17.447 --> 00:29:18.514
Why not?

00:29:18.514 --> 00:29:20.306
Because we are predators and because,

00:29:20.306 --> 00:29:23.719
therefore, if we are in that environment
it is a predated environment.

00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:30.771
For the europeans who 
originally arrived in New Zealand,

00:29:34.741 --> 00:29:38.439
… sorry, that was 
an extraordinary thing to say.

00:29:38.649 --> 00:29:41.781
Of course there were 
the Māoris before them

00:29:41.933 --> 00:29:48.419
and before them the Morioris, 
the Māoris ate the Morioris

00:29:49.695 --> 00:29:52.538
and then the europeans came along.

00:29:54.359 --> 00:29:57.620
But before all of that happened—as I said—

00:29:57.781 --> 00:30:05.035
the island had no predators, and the 
birds basically led a worry-free life.

00:30:05.035 --> 00:30:08.605
Now you can actually see another example
of this if you go to the Galápagos,

00:30:08.605 --> 00:30:12.363
there is a type of animal, 
there is a bird on the Galápagos Islands

00:30:12.519 --> 00:30:13.992
called the Blue-footed Booby.

00:30:14.845 --> 00:30:18.228
And the Blue-footed Booby is so called
—I believe—for two reasons:

00:30:19.036 --> 00:30:21.586
one of which has to do 
with the colour of its feet,

00:30:22.756 --> 00:30:26.322
and the other has to do with this 
piece of behaviour I’m about to describe.

00:30:26.322 --> 00:30:29.276
Because, apparently you can 
walk up to a Blue-footed Booby

00:30:29.276 --> 00:30:31.885
—it will be sitting there on 
the beach or on a branch—

00:30:31.885 --> 00:30:35.911
and you can walk up and
you can sort of pick him up.

00:30:37.040 --> 00:30:38.860
And what the Booby will be thinking

00:30:39.780 --> 00:30:42.203
is that once you finish with him
you’ll put him back.

00:30:53.853 --> 00:30:55.039
And if you haven’t lived

00:30:55.042 --> 00:30:58.086
through generation after generation
of people trying to eat you,

00:30:58.320 --> 00:31:00.398
it’s very easy to come to that conclusion.

00:31:02.405 --> 00:31:04.626
So the Kakapo, as I say,

00:31:05.069 --> 00:31:08.560
had grown up in an environment 
without predators.

00:31:08.975 --> 00:31:10.991
And because they were all birds,

00:31:11.141 --> 00:31:16.563
and because nature has a way—as I say—
very opportunistic

00:31:16.912 --> 00:31:20.634
and life will flow into any niche 
where it’s possible to make a living,

00:31:21.729 --> 00:31:25.365
so—if I can be very naughty and 
anthropomorphise for a moment—

00:31:25.365 --> 00:31:27.333
it’s as if some of the birds figured out,

00:31:27.333 --> 00:31:31.556
“Well, this flying stuff 
is very very expensive.

00:31:31.790 --> 00:31:32.993
It takes a lot of energy,

00:31:32.993 --> 00:31:34.588
you have to eat a bit, fly a bit,

00:31:34.588 --> 00:31:35.628
eat a bit, fly a bit,

00:31:35.628 --> 00:31:37.824
because every time you 
eat something—you know—

00:31:37.824 --> 00:31:39.739
you weight down and it’s heavier to fly,

00:31:39.739 --> 00:31:41.276
so eat a bit, fly a bit—I mean—

00:31:41.276 --> 00:31:43.188
there are other ways of life available.”

00:31:43.188 --> 00:31:45.177
And so it’s as if some of the birds said,

00:31:45.177 --> 00:31:49.005
“Well, actually what we could do is we 
could settle in for a rather larger meal,

00:31:49.005 --> 00:31:50.583
and go for a waddle afterwards!”

00:31:56.485 --> 00:31:58.545
And so gradually over many 
many generations

00:31:58.546 --> 00:32:01.560
a lot of the birds lost 
the ability to fly,

00:32:01.710 --> 00:32:03.253
they took up life on the ground.

00:32:03.755 --> 00:32:06.625
The Kiwi, the most famous bird
—I guess—of New Zealand,

00:32:06.778 --> 00:32:13.169
and the Weka, and the old night parrot
—as it was called—the Kakapo.

00:32:13.968 --> 00:32:19.638
Which is this sort of big, fat, 
soft, fluffy, lugubrious bird.

00:32:21.236 --> 00:32:24.909
And because it has never learned to worry,

00:32:25.560 --> 00:32:27.737
when man arrived and brought with him

00:32:27.890 --> 00:32:33.218
his deadly menagerie of 
dogs, and cats, and stoats,

00:32:33.481 --> 00:32:37.181
and that most destructive of all animals

00:32:37.468 --> 00:32:40.529
–other than man—which is 
Rattus rattus, the ship’s rat.

00:32:42.308 --> 00:32:47.207
Suddenly, suddenly these birds 
were waddling for their lives.

00:32:48.505 --> 00:32:50.709
Except in fact they 
didn’t know how to do that

00:32:50.709 --> 00:32:53.845
because they were confronted 
with an animal which was a predator,

00:32:53.845 --> 00:32:55.187
they didn’t know what to do,

00:32:55.187 --> 00:32:57.185
they didn’t know what the social form was,

00:32:57.185 --> 00:33:00.049
they just waited for the other 
animal to make the next move,

00:33:00.049 --> 00:33:02.832
and of course—as usually—
a fairly swift and deadly one.

00:33:04.614 --> 00:33:10.368
So, suddenly from there 
being a population of

00:33:10.534 --> 00:33:12.918
—we don’t know exactly of how many—

00:33:12.918 --> 00:33:14.577
probably not as many as a million,

00:33:14.577 --> 00:33:16.785
but hundreds of thousands of these birds,

00:33:17.147 --> 00:33:22.286
their population plunged at an incredible
rate down into the low forties.

00:33:22.446 --> 00:33:26.574
Which is roughly where it is
at the moment.

00:33:27.790 --> 00:33:33.804
And, so there are groups of people 
who dedicated their entire lives

00:33:34.554 --> 00:33:37.770
to try to save these animals, 
trying to conserve them.

00:33:39.401 --> 00:33:41.951
And one of the problems 
they’ve come across

00:33:42.025 --> 00:33:45.079
is that it’s all very well 
just to protect them

00:33:45.160 --> 00:33:48.887
—from predators—which is 
very very very hard to do.

00:33:49.035 --> 00:33:51.780
But the next problem they come across

00:33:52.006 --> 00:33:55.757
is the mating habits of the Kakapo.

00:33:55.930 --> 00:33:58.668
Because it turns out that 
the mating habits of the Kakapo

00:33:58.668 --> 00:34:00.667
are incredibly long drawn-out,

00:34:01.167 --> 00:34:02.484
fantastically complicated,

00:34:02.596 --> 00:34:04.770
and almost entirely ineffective.

00:34:08.578 --> 00:34:11.723
Some people would tell you 
that the mating call of the male Kakapo

00:34:11.723 --> 00:34:14.870
actively repels the female Kakapo,

00:34:15.227 --> 00:34:16.660
which is the sort of behaviour

00:34:16.660 --> 00:34:19.200
you would otherwise only find 
really in discotheques.

00:34:26.312 --> 00:34:30.385
The people who’ve heard the 
mating call of the male Kakapo

00:34:31.304 --> 00:34:35.804
will tell you, you can hardly 
even hear it,

00:34:35.968 --> 00:34:40.810
it’s like a sort of …
I’ll tell you what they do.

00:34:42.188 --> 00:34:47.138
This animal every—for about a hundred 
nights of the year—

00:34:48.158 --> 00:34:49.992
it goes through its mating ritual.

00:34:49.992 --> 00:34:54.163
And what it does is it finds 
some great rocky outcrop

00:34:56.346 --> 00:34:59.573
looking out over the great 
rolling valleys of New Zealand,

00:34:59.974 --> 00:35:03.042
because acoustics are very important 
for what's about to happen.

00:35:06.810 --> 00:35:10.616
It carves out this kind 
of bowl that it sits in.

00:35:12.067 --> 00:35:13.001
And it sits there,

00:35:13.819 --> 00:35:18.571
and it puffs out this great sort 
of air-sacks around its chest.

00:35:19.596 --> 00:35:21.355
And it sits there

00:35:21.723 --> 00:35:25.531
—and these are reverberation chambers, 
this is a kind of reverberation chamber—

00:35:25.531 --> 00:35:29.565
and it sits there and for 
night after night after night

00:35:29.565 --> 00:35:31.140
for a hundred nights of the year,

00:35:31.140 --> 00:35:32.902
for eight hours of the night,

00:35:33.366 --> 00:35:37.292
it performs the opening bars 
of Dark Side of the Moon.

00:35:45.278 --> 00:35:50.907
Now, I see some grey hairs here 
so you’ll know the album I’m referring to.

00:35:52.927 --> 00:35:55.561
Which as you remember starts with

00:35:55.561 --> 00:35:59.254
this great sort of boom, boom, boom,

00:35:59.583 --> 00:36:01.738
it’s a heartbeat sound.

00:36:02.056 --> 00:36:05.404
And this is the noise, 
that the Kakapo makes.

00:36:05.591 --> 00:36:07.911
But it’s so, it’s so deep,

00:36:08.081 --> 00:36:11.465
that you more kind of feel it like a 
wobble in the pit of your stomach.

00:36:11.465 --> 00:36:14.669
You can only just sort of 
tune your hearing in to it.

00:36:15.035 --> 00:36:17.052
Now I never managed to get to hear it,

00:36:17.285 --> 00:36:23.202
but those who do, say they feel
it’s a very eerie sound

00:36:23.259 --> 00:36:26.546
because you don’t really hear it, 
you more kind of feel it.

00:36:26.703 --> 00:36:32.224
And, it’s bass sound.

00:36:32.696 --> 00:36:34.535
It’s very very deep bass sound,

00:36:34.881 --> 00:36:36.677
just below our level of our hearing.

00:36:36.685 --> 00:36:40.452
Now it turns out that bass sound 
has two important characteristics to it.

00:36:41.070 --> 00:36:46.539
One of which is that 
these great long waves,

00:36:46.905 --> 00:36:49.949
these great long sound waves 
travel great distances,

00:36:50.033 --> 00:36:53.844
and they fill these great valleys 
of the south island of New Zealand.

00:36:53.921 --> 00:36:57.382
And that’s good. That’s good.

00:36:58.333 --> 00:37:03.371
But there is another characteristic 
of bass sounds,

00:37:03.371 --> 00:37:04.858
which you may be familiar with,

00:37:04.858 --> 00:37:08.481
if you’ve got this kind of—you know—
the kind of stereo speakers you can get.

00:37:08.902 --> 00:37:12.372
Where you have two tiny little ones 
that give you your treble sound,

00:37:12.381 --> 00:37:16.106
and you have to put them 
very carefully in the room,

00:37:16.106 --> 00:37:18.469
because they’re going to 
define the stereo image.

00:37:19.298 --> 00:37:21.459
And then you have 
what’s known as a subwoofer

00:37:21.459 --> 00:37:25.247
which is the bass box, 
and that’s going to produce

00:37:25.247 --> 00:37:29.036
just the bass sound and you can 
put that anywhere in the room you like.

00:37:29.575 --> 00:37:31.691
You can put it behind the sofa 
if you like,

00:37:31.897 --> 00:37:34.083
because the other
characteristic of bass sound

00:37:34.083 --> 00:37:37.369
—and remember we’re talking about 
the mating call of the male Kakapo—

00:37:37.369 --> 00:37:39.737
is that you can’t tell 
where it’s coming from!

00:37:53.590 --> 00:37:55.269
So just imagine if you will,

00:37:57.012 --> 00:38:00.146
this male Kakapo sitting up here,

00:38:00.768 --> 00:38:05.545
making all this booming noise which,

00:38:05.884 --> 00:38:11.542
if there’s a female out there
—which there probably isn’t—

00:38:12.056 --> 00:38:15.530
and if she likes the sound of this booming
—which she probably doesn’t—

00:38:18.181 --> 00:38:21.389
then she can’t find the 
person who’s making it!

00:38:24.119 --> 00:38:25.265
But supposing she does,

00:38:25.265 --> 00:38:27.628
supposing she’s out there
—but she probably isn’t—

00:38:27.628 --> 00:38:30.342
she likes the sound of this booming
—she probably doesn’t—

00:38:30.342 --> 00:38:33.071
supposing that she can find him
—which she probably can’t—

00:38:33.797 --> 00:38:39.064
she will then only consent to mate 
if the Podocarp tree is in fruit!

00:38:47.019 --> 00:38:49.101
Now we’ve all had 
relationships like that …

00:39:01.483 --> 00:39:05.631
But supposing they get through
all those obstacles,

00:39:05.850 --> 00:39:07.847
supposing she manages to find him,

00:39:09.050 --> 00:39:13.393
she will then lay one egg 
every two or three years

00:39:13.559 --> 00:39:15.857
which will promptly get eaten 
by a stoat or rat.

00:39:17.605 --> 00:39:19.044
And you think, well so far

00:39:19.044 --> 00:39:21.642
—before trying to sort of 
save them and conserve them—

00:39:21.642 --> 00:39:24.700
how on earth has it managed
to survive for this long!

00:39:27.172 --> 00:39:32.617
And the answer is terribly interesting, 
which is this:

00:39:34.132 --> 00:39:37.380
it seems like absurd behaviour to us,

00:39:38.687 --> 00:39:43.297
but it’s only because its environment has 
changed in one particular and dramatic way

00:39:44.951 --> 00:39:47.005
that is completely invisible to us.

00:39:48.271 --> 00:39:53.597
And its behaviour is perfectly attuned 
to the environment it developed in,

00:39:54.127 --> 00:39:58.343
and completely out of tune with 
the environment it now finds itself in.

00:39:59.456 --> 00:40:03.888
Because in an environment 
when nothing is trying to predate you,

00:40:04.719 --> 00:40:07.464
you don’t want to reproduce too fast.

00:40:10.042 --> 00:40:13.319
And it turns out you can actually 
sort of graph this on a computer.

00:40:14.169 --> 00:40:18.333
That if you take a given 
reproduction rate,

00:40:19.225 --> 00:40:23.920
and you take the ability of 
any given environment

00:40:24.044 --> 00:40:26.466
to sustain any particular
level of population.

00:40:27.523 --> 00:40:30.526
And you start say with 
a fairly low reproduction rate,

00:40:30.893 --> 00:40:33.077
and you just plot it
over several generations

00:40:33.417 --> 00:40:36.392
and you find that the population 
goes up and up and up

00:40:36.392 --> 00:40:39.149
and then sort of steadies out 
and achieves a nice plateau.

00:40:39.149 --> 00:40:40.961
Tweak the reproduction rate up a bit,

00:40:41.223 --> 00:40:43.175
and it goes up a little bit higher,

00:40:43.347 --> 00:40:46.234
and then maybe settles down, 
and levels out.

00:40:46.659 --> 00:40:49.153
Tweak the reproduction rate 
a little bit higher yet,

00:40:49.153 --> 00:40:51.610
and it goes up, and it goes too high,

00:40:51.668 --> 00:40:53.621
and it drops down, it goes too low,

00:40:53.702 --> 00:40:57.120
goes up, too high, and settles 
into an oscillating sine wave.

00:40:58.284 --> 00:41:02.007
Tweak it a bit more, and it starts to 
oscillate between four different values.

00:41:02.186 --> 00:41:03.678
Tweak it more and more and more

00:41:03.678 --> 00:41:07.032
and you suddenly hit this terribly 
fashionable condition called chaos.

00:41:07.728 --> 00:41:16.091
Where the population of the animal just 
swings wildly from one year to another,

00:41:17.562 --> 00:41:19.266
and will just hit zero at one point

00:41:19.266 --> 00:41:21.719
just out of the sheer mathematics 
of the situation.

00:41:21.719 --> 00:41:24.507
And once you’ve hit zero, 
there is kind of no coming back.

00:41:26.795 --> 00:41:29.746
And so, because nature 
tends to be very parsimonious

00:41:30.615 --> 00:41:34.906
and is not going to expend
energy and resources

00:41:34.906 --> 00:41:36.986
on something for which there is no return.

00:41:37.206 --> 00:41:45.664
So the reproduction rate of an animal 
in an environment with no predators

00:41:46.002 --> 00:41:50.748
will tune itself to an 
appropriate level of reproduction.

00:41:51.081 --> 00:41:53.914
Now, if there is nothing trying
to eat you—particularly—

00:41:53.914 --> 00:41:56.138
then that reproduction rate 
will be very low.

00:41:56.803 --> 00:42:00.360
And that is the rate at which 
the Kakapo used to reproduce,

00:42:00.775 --> 00:42:04.066
and continues to reproduce 
despite the fact that it’s being predated,

00:42:04.084 --> 00:42:05.796
because it doesn’t know any better.

00:42:05.842 --> 00:42:09.672
Because nothing has managed to teach it
anything different along the way,

00:42:10.250 --> 00:42:13.190
because the change that occurred 
happened so suddenly,

00:42:13.432 --> 00:42:14.952
that there is no kind of slope,

00:42:15.200 --> 00:42:19.388
there is no slope of gradual
evolutionary pressure,

00:42:19.573 --> 00:42:21.998
which is the thing that tends
to bring about change.

00:42:22.003 --> 00:42:23.847
If you have a sudden dramatic change

00:42:24.023 --> 00:42:27.734
then there is no direction to go 
and you just have disaster.

00:42:27.888 --> 00:42:32.078
So, again if I can anthropomorphize
for a moment,

00:42:32.231 --> 00:42:39.375
what seems to have happened
is that the animal

00:42:39.538 --> 00:42:42.290
suddenly reaching a crisis 
in his population thinks,

00:42:42.306 --> 00:42:43.975
“Whoa, whoa! I better just do, do,

00:42:43.978 --> 00:42:46.619
what I do fantastically well, 
do what is my main thing,

00:42:46.619 --> 00:42:48.666
which is I reproduce 
really really slowly!”

00:42:50.064 --> 00:42:51.460
And its population goes down.

00:42:51.460 --> 00:42:53.276
“Well, I’d better really do what I do,

00:42:53.276 --> 00:42:55.682
and reproduce really really really 
really slowly!”

00:42:56.014 --> 00:43:03.431
And it seems absurd to us because 
we can see a larger picture than they can.

00:43:03.582 --> 00:43:10.565
But if that is the type of behaviour that 
you’ve evolved successfully to produce,

00:43:10.720 --> 00:43:14.203
then to do anything else would be 
against kakapo-nature,

00:43:14.339 --> 00:43:16.717
would be an inkakapo thing to do.

00:43:19.050 --> 00:43:25.800
And it has nothing to teach it any other 
than to just do what it’s always done,

00:43:25.978 --> 00:43:27.622
to follow its successful strategy,

00:43:28.275 --> 00:43:30.280
and because times have changed around it,

00:43:30.294 --> 00:43:34.461
it’s no longer a successful strategy, 
and the animal is in terrible trouble.

00:43:38.013 --> 00:43:39.918
There is another animal we went to find,

00:43:39.918 --> 00:43:42.979
it is in even worse trouble now.

00:43:44.416 --> 00:43:50.284
And this is the Baiji, 
the Yangtze River Dolphin,

00:43:50.720 --> 00:43:54.685
which is an almost blind river dolphin.

00:43:56.455 --> 00:43:57.875
The reason it’s almost blind,

00:43:57.875 --> 00:44:00.770
is that there is nothing to see
in the Yangtze River.

00:44:03.688 --> 00:44:07.352
Thousands and thousands 
of years of agriculture

00:44:07.501 --> 00:44:09.222
along the banks of the Yangtze River

00:44:09.253 --> 00:44:13.235
have washed so much mud 
and silt and so on into it,

00:44:13.578 --> 00:44:16.360
that the river has become 
completely turbid.

00:44:16.733 --> 00:44:19.068
Which is a word I didn’t even 
know the meaning of

00:44:19.075 --> 00:44:20.510
until I saw the Yangtze River,

00:44:20.675 --> 00:44:23.128
and basically 
you can’t see anything in it.

00:44:24.642 --> 00:44:29.340
So these animals, dolphins as I said,

00:44:29.388 --> 00:44:33.964
gradually they abandoned the use of sight.

00:44:34.281 --> 00:44:41.833
Now—as we all know—marine mammals also 
have this other faculty available to them,

00:44:42.333 --> 00:44:44.630
which they can develop, 
which is that of sound.

00:44:45.245 --> 00:44:50.858
And so what the Yangtze River Dolphins did
was over thousands of years,

00:44:51.419 --> 00:44:54.232
as their eye sight deteriorated,

00:44:54.232 --> 00:45:00.615
so their sonar abilities became 
more and more and more sophisticated,

00:45:00.615 --> 00:45:02.690
and more powerful and more complex.

00:45:02.690 --> 00:45:06.805
And it’s very interesting, you can 
actually watch—if you feel like it—

00:45:08.416 --> 00:45:10.862
the development of a Baiji foetus,

00:45:12.531 --> 00:45:17.320
and you’ll see that right at
—as you may or may not know—

00:45:17.388 --> 00:45:20.371
there is a certain amount
of truth in the idea

00:45:20.558 --> 00:45:25.699
that the development of the foetus 
recapitulates stages

00:45:25.810 --> 00:45:27.921
in the evolutionary development
of an animal.

00:45:27.921 --> 00:45:31.232
And you see, right at the beginning of 
the development of the foetus,

00:45:31.232 --> 00:45:33.334
its eyes are in the normal 
dolphin position,

00:45:33.334 --> 00:45:36.955
which are kind of relatively far down
on the side of the head.

00:45:37.299 --> 00:45:39.979
And gradually, 
as the generations have gone by,

00:45:40.131 --> 00:45:42.935
its eyes have kind of migrated 
up the side of the head,

00:45:42.935 --> 00:45:45.381
and you see this happening 
as the foetus develops.

00:45:45.381 --> 00:45:48.857
Because gradually, over the generations,

00:45:49.201 --> 00:45:51.988
its only light is coming 
directly from up above

00:45:52.136 --> 00:45:54.064
and there is no ambient light and then,

00:45:54.064 --> 00:45:57.762
as that too dies out, so 
the eyes gradually atrophied.

00:45:58.378 --> 00:46:04.565
And, instead, the sonar abilities 
take over.

00:46:05.124 --> 00:46:07.609
And these animals developed
incredibly sensitive,

00:46:07.609 --> 00:46:11.742
and incredibly precise abilities
to navigate themselves around

00:46:12.103 --> 00:46:13.642
in the water just using sonar.

00:46:15.109 --> 00:46:16.457
And all is well and good.

00:46:17.527 --> 00:46:21.101
Until the twentieth century 
when man invents the diesel engine.

00:46:23.290 --> 00:46:27.390
And suddenly all hell breaks loose 
beneath the surface of the Yangtze,

00:46:27.549 --> 00:46:29.809
because it’s suddenly full of noise.

00:46:31.436 --> 00:46:37.353
And so, suddenly these animals find 
themselves trapped by something that they

00:46:37.633 --> 00:46:39.824
—that nobody had any means of foreseeing—

00:46:39.850 --> 00:46:41.529
that the thing they now rely on

00:46:41.677 --> 00:46:43.239
has been completely overwhelmed

00:46:43.261 --> 00:46:47.080
by the noise pollution 
that we put in the oceans.

00:46:47.239 --> 00:46:50.812
So suddenly these animals

00:46:50.978 --> 00:46:53.290
that used to be so sophisticated

00:46:53.290 --> 00:46:55.275
in their ability to find
their way around,

00:46:55.275 --> 00:46:57.823
are sort of bumping into things, 
bumping into boats,

00:46:57.823 --> 00:46:59.312
bumping into ships’ propellers,

00:46:59.312 --> 00:47:02.825
finding themselves ensnared
in fishermen’s nets and so on,

00:47:02.984 --> 00:47:06.229
because we basically screwed up
the next of their faculties.

00:47:08.356 --> 00:47:10.379
And it’s a very curious feeling,

00:47:11.303 --> 00:47:18.490
I remember sort of sitting on a boat
on the Yangtze River and looking,

00:47:18.648 --> 00:47:19.961
well trying to look into

00:47:19.961 --> 00:47:23.634
—you couldn’t look into cause it’s turbid 
and you remember what turbid means—

00:47:23.634 --> 00:47:30.312
and realising that all this noise
down there means that …

00:47:30.741 --> 00:47:34.275
It’s very curious to think that

00:47:34.285 --> 00:47:36.565
there may have been a 
dolphin somewhere near me

00:47:36.565 --> 00:47:40.306
—I didn’t know, I mean by this stage,
this was ten years ago,

00:47:40.309 --> 00:47:41.846
there were only two hundred left

00:47:41.846 --> 00:47:44.793
in a structure of water of about
two hundred miles long,

00:47:44.803 --> 00:47:47.396
so you had no idea if 
there was one anywhere near you—

00:47:47.396 --> 00:47:51.187
but it’s curious because you
think if you and another person,

00:47:51.335 --> 00:47:55.241
another creature, 
are kind of in the same world,

00:47:55.241 --> 00:47:57.324
then you must be feeling roughly similar.

00:47:58.554 --> 00:48:00.995
But one of the things you begin to 
realise when you look at different animals

00:48:00.995 --> 00:48:05.541
is that because of their 
evolutionary history,

00:48:05.750 --> 00:48:09.344
and because of the forms
they have developed into,

00:48:09.932 --> 00:48:13.126
and the ways they have developed 
of perceiving the world,

00:48:13.271 --> 00:48:15.894
they may be inhabiting the same world

00:48:16.241 --> 00:48:18.387
but actually a completely 
different universe.

00:48:19.347 --> 00:48:22.369
But actually a completely different 
universe because you create

00:48:22.369 --> 00:48:28.126
your only own universe from what you do 
with the sensory data coming in.

00:48:28.200 --> 00:48:34.353
So, you realise that you’re here, 
and there is a dolphin there,

00:48:34.353 --> 00:48:38.022
and you’re comfortable, and the dolphin 
may be actually in a species of hell.

00:48:38.975 --> 00:48:41.330
But has no means of communicating that 
with you

00:48:41.400 --> 00:48:44.787
because we’ve kind of taken charge,

00:48:44.981 --> 00:48:48.230
and there is no way of kind of 
communicating with the management,

00:48:48.393 --> 00:48:50.139
that there’s a problem.

00:48:54.005 --> 00:48:59.883
So, I suddenly became very interested in 
what it must actually sound like

00:49:00.163 --> 00:49:02.095
in the Yangtze River.

00:49:03.290 --> 00:49:08.035
Now, we’ve gone to record some 
BBC Radio programmes while we were there,

00:49:08.107 --> 00:49:10.609
so as well as Mark Carwardine 
the zoologist,

00:49:10.832 --> 00:49:13.016
we also had a sound recordist 
from the BBC.

00:49:14.064 --> 00:49:14.900
So I said to him,

00:49:16.196 --> 00:49:18.807
“Could we actually drop 
a microphone into the Yangtze

00:49:18.807 --> 00:49:21.833
so that we can see what 
it actually sounds like in the river?”

00:49:22.997 --> 00:49:24.211
And he said,

00:49:25.141 --> 00:49:27.775
“Well I wish you'd said that 
before we left London.”

00:49:28.485 --> 00:49:29.399
And I said, “Why?”

00:49:29.399 --> 00:49:32.029
And he said, “Well, cause I just could 
have checked out

00:49:32.029 --> 00:49:33.945
a waterproof microphone but, you know,

00:49:33.987 --> 00:49:36.774
you didn’t mention anything 
about recording under water.”

00:49:37.909 --> 00:49:41.102
And I said, “No, I didn’t. 
Is there anything we could do about it?”

00:49:41.102 --> 00:49:45.264
And he said, “Well there is, there is
actually one technique

00:49:45.281 --> 00:49:49.443
they teach us at the BBC for recording 
under water in an emergency.

00:49:57.436 --> 00:49:59.457
Do either of you have condoms with you?”

00:50:01.890 --> 00:50:05.082
And we didn’t. Wasn’t that kind of trip.

00:50:08.843 --> 00:50:10.932
But we decided we’d better 
go and buy some.

00:50:12.154 --> 00:50:15.676
And so we went into the streets of 
Shanghai trying to buy some condoms,

00:50:16.281 --> 00:50:19.364
and I just want to read you 
a little passage about this.

00:50:26.597 --> 00:50:30.259
The Friendship Store seemed like 
a promising place to buy condoms,

00:50:31.482 --> 00:50:34.830
but we had a certain amount of 
difficulty in getting the idea across.

00:50:36.021 --> 00:50:39.918
We passed from one counter to another 
in the large open-plan department store,

00:50:40.069 --> 00:50:42.515
which consists of many 
different individual booths,

00:50:42.515 --> 00:50:45.108
stalls and counters, 
but no one was able to help us.

00:50:45.978 --> 00:50:49.653
We first started at the stalls which 
looked as if they sold medical supplies,

00:50:49.653 --> 00:50:50.561
but had no luck.

00:50:50.561 --> 00:50:52.865
By the time we had got to the stalls

00:50:52.926 --> 00:50:54.640
which sold bookends and chopsticks

00:50:54.702 --> 00:50:56.139
we knew we were on to a loser,

00:50:56.139 --> 00:50:59.216
but at least we found a young 
shop assistant who spoke English.

00:51:00.356 --> 00:51:03.011
We tried to explain to her 
what it was we wanted,

00:51:04.052 --> 00:51:07.071
but seemed to reach the limit 
of her vocabulary pretty quickly.

00:51:08.665 --> 00:51:11.954
So, I got out my notebook 
and drew a condom very carefully,

00:51:13.290 --> 00:51:15.498
including the little 
extra balloon on the end.

00:51:16.488 --> 00:51:18.830
She frowned at it, 
but still didn’t get the idea.

00:51:19.253 --> 00:51:21.206
She brought us a wooden spoon,

00:51:22.911 --> 00:51:26.960
a candle, a sort of paper knife and, 
surprisingly enough,

00:51:26.960 --> 00:51:29.628
a small porcelain model
of the Eiffel Tower

00:51:37.408 --> 00:51:39.865
and then at last lapsed 
into a posture of defeat.

00:51:41.235 --> 00:51:43.853
Some other girls from the stall 
gathered round to help,

00:51:43.853 --> 00:51:46.407
but they were also defeated 
by our picture.

00:51:46.741 --> 00:51:50.338
At last I plucked up the bravado 
to perform a delicate little mime,

00:52:03.343 --> 00:52:04.857
and at last the penny dropped.

00:52:08.014 --> 00:52:11.505
“Ah!” the first girl said, suddenly 
wreathed in smiles. “Ah yes!”

00:52:12.849 --> 00:52:15.454
They all beamed delightedly
at us as they got the idea.

00:52:16.142 --> 00:52:17.908
-“You do understand?” l asked.

00:52:17.908 --> 00:52:19.180
-“Yes! Yes, I understand.”

00:52:19.691 --> 00:52:20.554
-“Do you have any?”

00:52:20.906 --> 00:52:22.509
-“No,” she said. “Not have.”

00:52:22.774 --> 00:52:23.502
-“Oh.”

00:52:23.582 --> 00:52:24.564
-“But, but, but …”

00:52:24.687 --> 00:52:25.406
-“Yes?”

00:52:26.666 --> 00:52:28.503
-“I say you where you go, OK?”

00:52:29.567 --> 00:52:31.483
-“Thank you, thank you very much. Yes.”

00:52:31.927 --> 00:52:35.871
-“You go 616 Nanjing Road. OK. 
They have there.

00:52:36.060 --> 00:52:38.012
You ask ‘rubberover’. OK?”

00:52:38.307 --> 00:52:40.214
-“Rubberover?”

00:52:40.292 --> 00:52:43.072
-“Rubberover. You ask. 
They have. OK. Have nice day.”

00:52:48.031 --> 00:52:51.450
She giggled happily about this 
with her hand over her mouth.

00:52:52.638 --> 00:52:56.391
We thanked them again, profusely, 
and left with much waving and smiling.

00:52:56.391 --> 00:52:59.311
The news seemed to have spread 
very quickly around the store,

00:52:59.311 --> 00:53:01.429
and everybody waved at us.

00:53:02.615 --> 00:53:05.251
They seemed terribly pleased 
to have been asked.

00:53:07.551 --> 00:53:11.538
When we reached 616 Nanjing Road, 
which turned out to be another,

00:53:11.696 --> 00:53:14.057
smaller department store, and not a 
knocking shop

00:53:14.057 --> 00:53:15.702
as we had been half-suspecting,

00:53:15.867 --> 00:53:18.742
our pronunciation of ‘rubberover’ 
seemed to let us down

00:53:18.870 --> 00:53:21.374
and produce another wave 
of baffled incomprehension.

00:53:22.253 --> 00:53:25.963
This time I went straight for the mime 
that had served us so well before,

00:53:30.563 --> 00:53:33.283
and it seemed to do the trick at once.

00:53:34.103 --> 00:53:38.123
The shop assistant, a slightly more 
middle-aged lady with severe hair,

00:53:38.624 --> 00:53:40.655
marched straight to a cabinet of drawers,

00:53:40.655 --> 00:53:42.506
brought us back a packet and placed it

00:53:42.589 --> 00:53:45.408
triumphantly on the counter
in front of us.

00:53:45.908 --> 00:53:48.431
Success, we thought, opened the packet

00:53:48.733 --> 00:53:51.256
and found it to contain 
a bubble sheet of pills.

00:53:53.522 --> 00:53:56.727
“Right idea,” said Mark, 
with a sigh. “Wrong method.”

00:54:06.505 --> 00:54:08.173
We were quickly floundering again

00:54:08.173 --> 00:54:10.926
as we tried to explain to 
the now slightly affronted lady

00:54:10.926 --> 00:54:13.106
that it wasn’t precisely 
what we were after.

00:54:13.397 --> 00:54:17.335
By this time a crowd of about fifteen 
onlookers had gathered round us,

00:54:17.501 --> 00:54:19.449
some of whom, I was convinced,

00:54:19.605 --> 00:54:22.235
had followed us all the way
from the Friendship Store.

00:54:22.892 --> 00:54:25.415
One of the things that 
you quickly discover in China,

00:54:25.415 --> 00:54:27.348
is that we are all at the zoo.

00:54:27.956 --> 00:54:29.844
If you stand still for a moment,

00:54:30.029 --> 00:54:32.170
people will gather round and stare at you.

00:54:33.466 --> 00:54:36.839
The unnerving thing is that they 
don’t stare intently or inquisitively,

00:54:36.841 --> 00:54:39.470
they just stand there, 
often right in front of you,

00:54:39.626 --> 00:54:42.611
and watch you as blankly 
as if you were a dog food commercial.

00:54:48.610 --> 00:54:51.827
At last one young and 
pasty-faced man with glasses

00:54:51.827 --> 00:54:55.535
pushed through the crowd and said he 
spoke a little English and could he help?

00:54:56.483 --> 00:54:59.373
We thanked him and said, yes, 
we wanted to buy some condoms,

00:54:59.764 --> 00:55:03.611
some rubberovers, and we would be very 
grateful if he could explain that for us.

00:55:04.517 --> 00:55:06.096
He looked puzzled,

00:55:07.565 --> 00:55:10.617
picked up the rejected packet 
lying on the counter

00:55:10.811 --> 00:55:13.221
in front of the affronted 
shop assistant and said,

00:55:13.221 --> 00:55:15.288
“Not want rubberover. This better.”

00:55:18.594 --> 00:55:20.175
“No,” Mark said.

00:55:20.247 --> 00:55:23.371
“We definitely want rubberover, 
not pills.”

00:55:23.871 --> 00:55:25.805
“Why want rubberover? Pill better.”

00:55:29.180 --> 00:55:30.509
“You tell him,” said Mark.

00:55:34.942 --> 00:55:37.425
“It’s to record dolphins,” I said.

00:55:45.073 --> 00:55:47.488
“Or not the actual dolphins in fact.

00:55:47.488 --> 00:55:50.207
What we want to record is 
the noise in the Yangtze that …

00:55:50.207 --> 00:55:52.478
it’s to go over the microphone, 
you see, and …”

00:55:53.364 --> 00:55:55.514
“Oh, just tell him you want 
to fuck someone,”

00:55:55.566 --> 00:55:57.108
said the sound recordist.

00:55:57.465 --> 00:55:58.570
“And you can’t wait.”

00:56:06.698 --> 00:56:09.662
But by now the young man was edging
nervously away from us,

00:56:09.662 --> 00:56:12.489
suddenly realising that 
we were dangerously insane,

00:56:13.177 --> 00:56:15.418
and should simply be humoured 
and escaped from.

00:56:16.174 --> 00:56:18.542
He said something hurriedly 
to the shop assistant

00:56:18.542 --> 00:56:21.380
and backed away into the crowd.

00:56:21.562 --> 00:56:23.949
The shop assistant shrugged, 
scooped up the pills,

00:56:23.949 --> 00:56:26.940
opened another drawer 
and pulled out a packet of condoms.

00:56:28.351 --> 00:56:30.295
We bought nine, just to be safe.

00:56:41.761 --> 00:56:42.962
So a couple of days later

00:56:42.962 --> 00:56:45.149
we were standing 
on the banks of the Yangtze,

00:56:46.369 --> 00:56:49.028
on a very desperate drizzly grey day.

00:56:50.066 --> 00:56:53.001
And we put the microphone
in this little sort of pink thing,

00:56:55.617 --> 00:56:57.649
and dropped it into the water.

00:56:58.784 --> 00:57:02.620
And, I don’t usually do impressions

00:57:03.005 --> 00:57:05.872
but I’m going to do for you an impression

00:57:06.116 --> 00:57:10.864
of what it sounds like 
under the surface of the Yangtze River.

00:57:11.231 --> 00:57:12.578
And it’s something like this

00:57:16.240 --> 00:57:18.185
The Yangtze River ladies and gentleman.

00:57:23.192 --> 00:57:27.722
And, I suddenly realised 
what an appalling thing

00:57:27.730 --> 00:57:30.942
we’ve inflicted on these poor animals,

00:57:31.114 --> 00:57:36.807
that live in a world of super 
sensitive sound and hearing.

00:57:37.813 --> 00:57:43.375
And this was why these animals 
were now desperately endangered

00:57:43.667 --> 00:57:47.822
because having removed 
one way of life from them

00:57:47.822 --> 00:57:49.785
we were now removing a second.

00:57:52.417 --> 00:57:54.647
The problem is 
we’re about to remove a third,

00:57:55.034 --> 00:57:59.111
I said that when I was 
there it was ten years ago,

00:57:59.111 --> 00:58:00.939
there were two hundreds of these left,

00:58:00.939 --> 00:58:02.156
today there are twenty.

00:58:03.626 --> 00:58:10.802
And because the Chinese 
are building these giant dams

00:58:11.340 --> 00:58:14.453
to dam the Yangtze at one

00:58:14.973 --> 00:58:18.090
of the most beautiful and most
spectacular sites in all world,

00:58:18.110 --> 00:58:21.775
the Three Gorges, 
and they’re damming it there

00:58:21.854 --> 00:58:27.573
which means that the Yangtze Dolphin 
will at that point definitely go extinct.

00:58:30.308 --> 00:58:31.935
And it’s terribly sad.

00:58:33.264 --> 00:58:35.166
The peculiar thing about dams

00:58:37.228 --> 00:58:38.957
is that we keep on building them

00:58:39.206 --> 00:58:40.833
and none of them ever do any good.

00:58:41.315 --> 00:58:42.291
It’s not quite true,

00:58:42.573 --> 00:58:44.307
because unfortunately there are

00:58:44.456 --> 00:58:45.911
—in the history of dam-making—

00:58:45.911 --> 00:58:47.928
two that did work, one is the Hoover

00:58:48.309 --> 00:58:55.092
and the other is the one up in the 
pacific northwest, the Coulee Dam.

00:58:55.288 --> 00:58:58.360
And every other one doesn’t work.

00:58:59.715 --> 00:59:03.650
And for some reason we never 
manage to be able to quite stop us …

00:59:03.907 --> 00:59:05.814
we always think we just build one more.

00:59:05.848 --> 00:59:08.916
I think must have some sort 
of beaver genes deep in our …

00:59:11.080 --> 00:59:14.922
But the sad thing as I say is that 
the Yangtze River dolphin

00:59:15.137 --> 00:59:19.485
is definitely and without doubt 
bound for extinction.

00:59:21.120 --> 00:59:25.527
And, it’s very peculiar to me

00:59:27.560 --> 00:59:31.954
that we are living at the moment 
in an extraordinary age,

00:59:32.579 --> 00:59:34.328
an extraordinary renaissance,

00:59:38.297 --> 00:59:42.633
because we’ve got to the point

00:59:43.039 --> 00:59:45.774
when we suddenly understand
the value of information,

00:59:46.262 --> 00:59:47.404
as we never have before.

00:59:47.405 --> 00:59:49.645
We call the age we live in
that of information.

00:59:49.771 --> 00:59:51.941
And we’ve discovered that information is

00:59:52.318 --> 00:59:55.932
the most valuable resource we have.

00:59:59.120 --> 01:00:03.117
And as you’d know 
we’ve just spent billions of dollars

01:00:03.590 --> 01:00:07.036
—quite rightly—in trying to 
understand the human genome,

01:00:10.739 --> 01:00:14.858
and that’s just one species, 
that’s just us.

01:00:15.331 --> 01:00:16.888
And we’ve come to understand and

01:00:16.888 --> 01:00:19.424
realise how incredibly valuable
this information is.

01:00:21.984 --> 01:00:24.549
And we’ve never understood kind of

01:00:24.781 --> 01:00:26.471
how it all worked together before,

01:00:26.929 --> 01:00:29.509
because before we had …

01:00:29.732 --> 01:00:30.855
let me put it this way.

01:00:31.919 --> 01:00:33.592
In the past we’ve done science

01:00:34.915 --> 01:00:36.309
by taking things apart

01:00:36.548 --> 01:00:37.620
to see how they work.

01:00:38.742 --> 01:00:41.719
And it’s led to extraordinary discoveries,

01:00:42.034 --> 01:00:44.386
extraordinary degrees of understanding,

01:00:45.059 --> 01:00:48.479
but the problem with taking things apart 
to see how they work

01:00:48.949 --> 01:00:52.198
is even though it gets you
down to the sort of fundamental particles,

01:00:52.530 --> 01:00:56.005
the fundamental principles,
the fundamental forces at work,

01:00:57.409 --> 01:01:00.147
we still don’t really understand
how they work

01:01:00.280 --> 01:01:01.674
until we see them in motion.

01:01:02.517 --> 01:01:04.381
One of the things that came about

01:01:04.591 --> 01:01:08.045
as a result of understanding
these fundamental principles,

01:01:08.045 --> 01:01:10.756
is that we came to invent 
this thing called the computer.

01:01:10.756 --> 01:01:13.033
And the great thing 
about the computer is that,

01:01:13.033 --> 01:01:17.360
unlike every previous analytical tool

01:01:17.751 --> 01:01:18.813
—and there are a bit …

01:01:18.813 --> 01:01:21.331
it’s funny how many of these 
have to do with glass,

01:01:21.744 --> 01:01:27.813
when we first came across glass,
which is a form of sand,

01:01:28.502 --> 01:01:32.656
and we invented lenses,
and we looked up into the sky,

01:01:33.136 --> 01:01:36.596
And we discovered, from that, 
the fundamental…

01:01:36.596 --> 01:01:38.107
by studying the sky

01:01:38.114 --> 01:01:41.223
we began to discover fundamental 
things about gravity,

01:01:43.653 --> 01:01:48.176
and we also discovered that 
the universe seems to consist

01:01:48.275 --> 01:01:50.762
—terrifyingly enough—
almost entirely of nothing.

01:01:52.707 --> 01:01:57.349
The next thing we did with glass 
was we put them in microscopes,

01:01:57.843 --> 01:02:03.878
and we looked down into this very 
very very solid world around us,

01:02:04.676 --> 01:02:08.579
and we see the fundamental 
particles there, the atoms

01:02:08.787 --> 01:02:14.517
—made up of protons and neutrons 
with electrons spinning around them—

01:02:14.730 --> 01:02:16.961
and we also discover that 
they seem to consist

01:02:16.984 --> 01:02:20.352
frighteningly almost entirely of nothing.

01:02:20.931 --> 01:02:22.859
And that even when you do find something

01:02:22.859 --> 01:02:24.862
it turns out that it isn’t actually there,

01:02:24.862 --> 01:02:26.490
it isn’t actually a thing there,

01:02:26.490 --> 01:02:29.546
merely the possibility that 
there may be something there.

01:02:32.608 --> 01:02:34.585
It kind of doesn’t feel as real as this

01:02:37.746 --> 01:02:41.605
So the next thing 
we do with sand was silicon,

01:02:41.875 --> 01:02:44.101
as we create the computer.

01:02:44.900 --> 01:02:48.650
And this finally enables us 
to start putting things together

01:02:49.063 --> 01:02:50.162
to see how they work.

01:02:50.628 --> 01:02:55.087
And it allows us to see 
actual process at work,

01:02:55.356 --> 01:02:59.286
and we begin to see how very 
very simple things lead inexorably

01:02:59.516 --> 01:03:01.477
—by iteration after iteration—

01:03:01.918 --> 01:03:06.738
to enormously complex processes
emerging and blossoming.

01:03:07.007 --> 01:03:12.120
And to my mind one of the 
most extraordinary things of our age

01:03:12.487 --> 01:03:14.899
—I mean those of us who 
were around will remember,

01:03:14.899 --> 01:03:17.759
you know, seeing man walking
on the moon for the first time—

01:03:17.759 --> 01:03:22.699
but I think the most dramatic
and extraordinary thing

01:03:23.016 --> 01:03:24.691
that we have seen in our time

01:03:25.176 --> 01:03:27.206
is being able to see, on computer screens,

01:03:27.206 --> 01:03:34.026
the process by which enormously 
simple primitive things,

01:03:34.093 --> 01:03:38.188
processes, instructions, 
repeated many many times over,

01:03:38.535 --> 01:03:42.955
very very fast, and iterated over
generations of instructions,

01:03:43.022 --> 01:03:46.166
produce enormously complex results.

01:03:47.378 --> 01:03:50.953
So that we can suddenly start to create,

01:03:51.192 --> 01:03:55.344
just out of fundamentally 
simple primitive instructions,

01:03:55.623 --> 01:04:03.146
we can create the way in 
which wind behaves in a wind tunnel,

01:04:03.353 --> 01:04:04.475
a turbulence of wind,

01:04:04.687 --> 01:04:09.545
we can see how light might dance 
in an imaginary dinosaur’s eye.

01:04:11.376 --> 01:04:15.008
And we do it all out of 
fundamentally simple instructions.

01:04:15.531 --> 01:04:17.641
And as a result of that 
we have finally come

01:04:17.649 --> 01:04:24.729
to an understanding of the way 
in which life has actually emerged.

01:04:25.400 --> 01:04:28.405
Now, there are an awful lot of things 
we don’t know about life.

01:04:29.295 --> 01:04:31.309
But any life scientist will tell you that,

01:04:32.749 --> 01:04:35.422
although there is an awful lot 
we don’t know,

01:04:36.655 --> 01:04:39.734
there is no longer a deep mystery.

01:04:40.163 --> 01:04:41.731
There is no longer a deep mystery

01:04:41.731 --> 01:04:44.505
because we have actually seen 
with our own eyes

01:04:44.744 --> 01:04:48.675
the way in which simplicity 
gives rise to complexity.

01:04:49.574 --> 01:04:51.563
When I say there is no mystery

01:04:51.819 --> 01:04:53.461
it is rather as if you imagine

01:04:56.609 --> 01:04:59.802
taking a detective from the 19th century,

01:05:00.396 --> 01:05:03.698
teaming him up with a detective 
from the late 20th century,

01:05:04.909 --> 01:05:06.984
and giving them this problem to work on:

01:05:07.414 --> 01:05:09.892
that a suspect in a crime

01:05:09.935 --> 01:05:14.357
was seen one day to be 
walking down the street

01:05:14.578 --> 01:05:15.764
in the middle of London,

01:05:15.774 --> 01:05:16.549
and the next day

01:05:16.760 --> 01:05:18.494
was seen somewhere out in the desert

01:05:18.494 --> 01:05:19.929
in the middle of New Mexico.

01:05:20.007 --> 01:05:21.911
Now the 19th century detective will say,

01:05:21.911 --> 01:05:24.456
“Well, I haven’t the faintest idea.

01:05:24.776 --> 01:05:27.355
I mean it must be some species 
of magic has happened.”

01:05:28.455 --> 01:05:29.655
And he would have no idea

01:05:29.768 --> 01:05:32.148
about how to begin to solve

01:05:32.354 --> 01:05:33.755
what has happened here.

01:05:34.232 --> 01:05:35.709
For the 20th century detective,

01:05:35.960 --> 01:05:39.220
now he may never know whether the guy

01:05:39.220 --> 01:05:42.338
went on British Airways 
or United or American

01:05:42.338 --> 01:05:45.110
or where he hired his car from, 
or all that kind of stuff,

01:05:45.113 --> 01:05:47.353
he may never find those details,

01:05:47.570 --> 01:05:51.078
but there wont be any fundamental mystery 
about what has happened.

01:05:53.271 --> 01:05:57.714
So for us there is no longer 
a fundamental mystery about life.

01:05:59.014 --> 01:06:04.454
It is all the process of extraordinary
eruptions of information.

01:06:05.821 --> 01:06:07.451
And it's information that gives us

01:06:07.451 --> 01:06:12.357
this fantastically rich 
complex world in which we live.

01:06:12.357 --> 01:06:14.664
But at the same time 
that we’ve discovered that,

01:06:14.664 --> 01:06:17.961
we are destroying it at a rate

01:06:18.046 --> 01:06:20.045
that has no precedent in history,

01:06:20.290 --> 01:06:23.502
unless you go back to the point
that we’re hit by an asteroid.

01:06:26.470 --> 01:06:30.106
So there is a kind of terrible irony

01:06:30.376 --> 01:06:33.836
that at the point that 
we are best able to understand,

01:06:34.199 --> 01:06:39.415
and appreciate, and value 
the richness of life around us,

01:06:39.626 --> 01:06:43.548
we are destroying it at a higher rate
that it has even been destroyed before.

01:06:43.809 --> 01:06:49.529
And we are losing species 
after species after species,

01:06:49.529 --> 01:06:51.764
day after day, just because

01:06:51.764 --> 01:06:54.292
we’re burning the stuff down for firewood.

01:06:55.395 --> 01:06:58.728
And this is a kind of terrible 
indictment of our understanding.

01:06:59.198 --> 01:07:01.766
But, you see, we make another mistake,

01:07:02.132 --> 01:07:03.404
because we think somehow,

01:07:03.749 --> 01:07:06.851
this is all right in some 
fundamental kind of way,

01:07:07.866 --> 01:07:12.032
because we think that this is all
sort of “meant to happen.”

01:07:12.715 --> 01:07:18.446
Now let me explain how 
we get into that kind of mindset,

01:07:18.868 --> 01:07:21.024
because it’s exactly 
the same kind of mindset

01:07:21.024 --> 01:07:22.654
that the Kakapo gets trapped in.

01:07:23.335 --> 01:07:26.214
Because, what has been

01:07:26.417 --> 01:07:28.777
a very successful strategy for the Kakapo

01:07:29.233 --> 01:07:30.913
over generation after generation

01:07:30.983 --> 01:07:32.746
for thousands and thousands of years,

01:07:32.746 --> 01:07:34.372
suddenly is the wrong strategy,

01:07:34.507 --> 01:07:35.942
and he has no means of knowing

01:07:35.942 --> 01:07:38.950
because he is just doing what 
has been successful up till then.

01:07:40.376 --> 01:07:43.400
And we have always been,
because we’re toolmakers,

01:07:43.673 --> 01:07:45.954
because we take from our environment

01:07:46.067 --> 01:07:48.336
the stuff that we need to do 
what we want to do

01:07:48.346 --> 01:07:50.511
and it’s always been 
very successful for us …

01:07:50.521 --> 01:07:52.912
I’ll tell you what’s happened.

01:07:53.187 --> 01:07:54.473
It’s as if we’ve actually

01:07:54.593 --> 01:07:56.405
kind of put the sort of “pause” button

01:07:56.405 --> 01:07:58.687
on our own process of evolution,

01:07:58.932 --> 01:08:02.768
because we have put a buffer around us,

01:08:03.006 --> 01:08:08.365
which consists of—you know—
medicine and education and buildings,

01:08:08.642 --> 01:08:10.792
and all these kinds of things
that protect us

01:08:10.834 --> 01:08:13.016
from the normal environmental pressures.

01:08:14.165 --> 01:08:18.547
And, it’s our ability to make tools
that enables us to do this.

01:08:18.790 --> 01:08:21.601
Now, generally speaking, 
what drives speciation,

01:08:21.900 --> 01:08:23.498
is that a small group of animals

01:08:23.593 --> 01:08:27.014
gets separated out from the main body

01:08:27.230 --> 01:08:30.967
by population pressure, some geographical
upheaval or whatever.

01:08:31.195 --> 01:08:35.728
So imagine, a small bunch 
suddenly finds itself stranded

01:08:35.839 --> 01:08:37.614
in a slightly colder environment.

01:08:38.017 --> 01:08:40.353
Then you know, over a 
small number of generations

01:08:40.354 --> 01:08:42.778
that those genes 
that favour a thicker coat

01:08:42.992 --> 01:08:44.230
will come to the fore

01:08:44.418 --> 01:08:46.451
and you come back a few generations later,

01:08:46.458 --> 01:08:48.176
and the animal’s got a thicker coat.

01:08:48.176 --> 01:08:51.736
Man, because we are able to make tools,

01:08:51.909 --> 01:08:55.030
we arrive in a new environment 
where it’s much colder,

01:08:55.103 --> 01:08:57.377
and we don’t have 
to wait for that process.

01:08:57.636 --> 01:08:58.815
Because we see an animal

01:08:58.815 --> 01:09:00.419
that’s already got a thicker coat

01:09:00.419 --> 01:09:02.069
and we say we’ll have it off him.

01:09:05.702 --> 01:09:08.279
And so we’ve kind of taken 
control of our environment,

01:09:08.283 --> 01:09:11.267
and that’s all very well,

01:09:11.497 --> 01:09:16.879
but we need to be able to
sort of rise above that process.

01:09:19.001 --> 01:09:21.805
We have to rise above that vision 
and see a higher vision

01:09:22.033 --> 01:09:26.108
—and understand the effect 
we’re actually having.

01:09:26.847 --> 01:09:31.916
Now imagine—if you will—an early man,

01:09:33.209 --> 01:09:36.510
and let’s just sort of see 
how this mindset comes about.

01:09:36.707 --> 01:09:40.581
He’s standing, surveying his world
at the end of the day.

01:09:42.737 --> 01:09:44.170
And he looks at it and thinks,

01:09:44.189 --> 01:09:46.784
“This is a very wonderful world 
that I find myself in.

01:09:46.784 --> 01:09:47.827
This is pretty good.

01:09:48.894 --> 01:09:52.427
I mean, look, here I am, 
behind me is the mountains,

01:09:52.658 --> 01:09:53.945
and the mountains are great

01:09:53.945 --> 01:09:55.866
because there are caves in the mountains

01:09:55.866 --> 01:09:57.018
where I can shelter,

01:09:57.322 --> 01:10:00.114
either from the weather or from bears

01:10:00.515 --> 01:10:02.620
that occasionally come 
and try to attack me.

01:10:02.620 --> 01:10:04.607
And I can shelter there, so that’s great.

01:10:04.617 --> 01:10:06.707
And in front of me there is the forest,

01:10:06.936 --> 01:10:09.481
and the forest is full of nuts 
and berries and trees,

01:10:09.481 --> 01:10:11.393
and they feed me, and they’re delicious

01:10:11.393 --> 01:10:12.890
and they sort of keep me going.

01:10:12.890 --> 01:10:14.804
And here’s a stream going through

01:10:14.834 --> 01:10:16.650
which has got fish running through it,

01:10:16.650 --> 01:10:19.265
and the water is delicious, 
and I drink the water,

01:10:19.490 --> 01:10:20.787
and everything’s fantastic.

01:10:20.799 --> 01:10:22.092
And there’s my cousin Ug.

01:10:22.825 --> 01:10:25.651
And Ug has caught a mammoth! Yay!!

01:10:26.260 --> 01:10:27.424
Ug has caught a mammoth!

01:10:27.424 --> 01:10:28.872
Mammoths are terrific!

01:10:29.142 --> 01:10:31.328
There’s nothing greater than a mammoth,

01:10:31.583 --> 01:10:32.553
because a mammoth,

01:10:32.613 --> 01:10:35.829
basically you can wrap yourself 
in the fur from the mammoth,

01:10:36.093 --> 01:10:38.784
you can eat the meat of the mammoth,

01:10:39.049 --> 01:10:42.326
and you can use the bones of the mammoth, 
to catch other mammoths!

01:10:44.958 --> 01:10:47.717
Now this world is a fantastically 
good world for me.”

01:10:50.015 --> 01:10:55.394
And, part of how we come to 
take command of our world,

01:10:55.454 --> 01:10:57.191
to take command of our environment,

01:10:57.404 --> 01:11:00.005
to make these tools that are
actually able to do this,

01:11:00.166 --> 01:11:02.710
is we ask ourselves questions
about it the whole time.

01:11:02.720 --> 01:11:05.153
So this man starts to 
ask himself questions.

01:11:05.396 --> 01:11:11.797
“This world,” he says, 
“well, who … so, so who made it?”

01:11:13.767 --> 01:11:17.324
Now, of course he thinks that,
because he makes things himself,

01:11:17.642 --> 01:11:21.434
so he’s looking for someone 
who will have made this world.

01:11:22.632 --> 01:11:25.808
He says, “So, who would 
have made this world?

01:11:25.847 --> 01:11:28.341
Well, it must be something
a little bit like me.

01:11:28.925 --> 01:11:31.615
Obviously much much bigger,

01:11:33.188 --> 01:11:36.942
and necessarily invisible,

01:11:40.127 --> 01:11:45.399
but he would have made it. 
Now, why did he make it?”

01:11:47.100 --> 01:11:49.905
Now, we always ask ourselves “why”

01:11:50.106 --> 01:11:52.026
because we look for intention around us,

01:11:52.803 --> 01:11:56.326
because we always do 
something with intention.

01:11:56.516 --> 01:12:01.009
You know, we boil an egg 
in order to eat it.

01:12:02.290 --> 01:12:05.867
So, we look at the rocks 
and we look at the trees,

01:12:06.247 --> 01:12:08.216
and we wonder what intention is here,

01:12:08.558 --> 01:12:10.389
even though it doesn’t have intention.

01:12:12.010 --> 01:12:17.759
So we think, what did this person 
who made this world intend it for.

01:12:18.082 --> 01:12:19.951
And this is the point where you think,

01:12:19.952 --> 01:12:22.440
“Well, it fits me very well.

01:12:24.523 --> 01:12:26.250
You know, the caves and the forests,

01:12:26.250 --> 01:12:28.925
and the stream, and the mammoths.

01:12:29.644 --> 01:12:31.573
He must have made it for me!

01:12:32.643 --> 01:12:35.538
I mean, there’s no other conclusion 
you can come to.”

01:12:35.544 --> 01:12:41.423
And it’s rather like a puddle 
waking up one morning

01:12:41.498 --> 01:12:43.225
—I know they don’t normally do this,

01:12:43.229 --> 01:12:45.330
but allow me, I’m a 
science fiction writer.

01:12:47.668 --> 01:12:50.826
A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks,

01:12:51.379 --> 01:12:54.666
“This is a very interesting 
world I find myself in.

01:12:55.790 --> 01:12:57.459
It fits me very neatly.

01:12:58.969 --> 01:13:01.555
In fact, it fits me so neatly,

01:13:02.024 --> 01:13:03.868
I mean, really precise, isn’t it?

01:13:11.450 --> 01:13:13.803
It must have been made to have me in it!”

01:13:15.144 --> 01:13:18.279
And the sun rises, and 
he’s continuing to narrate

01:13:18.661 --> 01:13:21.517
the story about this hole being
made to have him in it.

01:13:22.112 --> 01:13:24.406
And the sun rises, and 
gradually the puddle

01:13:24.618 --> 01:13:26.607
is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking,

01:13:27.065 --> 01:13:29.102
and by the time the puddle
ceases to exist,

01:13:29.153 --> 01:13:32.183
it’s still thinking, 
it’s still trapped in this idea,

01:13:32.437 --> 01:13:34.471
that the hole was there for it.

01:13:35.669 --> 01:13:38.197
And if we think that 
the world is here for us,

01:13:38.481 --> 01:13:41.108
we will continue to destroy it

01:13:41.113 --> 01:13:43.163
in the way that we’ve been destroying it,

01:13:43.164 --> 01:13:44.951
because we think we can do no harm.

01:13:46.957 --> 01:13:50.503
There’s an awful lot of speculation

01:13:50.706 --> 01:13:52.370
one way or another at the moment,

01:13:52.563 --> 01:13:55.146
about whether there’s life 
on other planets or not.

01:13:56.274 --> 01:13:58.463
Carl Sagan, as you know,

01:13:58.666 --> 01:14:01.494
was very keen on the idea
that there must be.

01:14:02.084 --> 01:14:03.349
The sheer numbers dictate,

01:14:03.349 --> 01:14:05.827
because there are billions 
and billions and billions

01:14:05.827 --> 01:14:07.599
—as he famously did not say, in fact—

01:14:08.364 --> 01:14:10.613
of worlds out there,

01:14:10.853 --> 01:14:11.905
so the chance must be

01:14:11.922 --> 01:14:16.024
that there’s other 
intelligent life out there.

01:14:16.463 --> 01:14:19.141
There are other voices at 
the moment you’ll hear saying,

01:14:19.141 --> 01:14:20.514
well actually if you look at

01:14:20.514 --> 01:14:25.326
the set of circumstances here on Earth,

01:14:25.620 --> 01:14:28.501
they are so extraordinarily specific

01:14:28.705 --> 01:14:31.652
that the chances of there being
something like this out there,

01:14:31.846 --> 01:14:33.640
are actually pretty remote.

01:14:34.650 --> 01:14:36.222
Now, in a way it doesn’t matter.

01:14:36.222 --> 01:14:38.867
Because think of this

01:14:38.887 --> 01:14:41.130
—I mean Carl Sagan, I think,
himself, said this.

01:14:41.130 --> 01:14:45.363
There are two possibilities: 
either there is life

01:14:45.596 --> 01:14:47.000
out there on other planets,

01:14:48.364 --> 01:14:50.677
or there is no life out
there on other planets.

01:14:52.097 --> 01:14:54.353
They are both utterly extraordinary ideas!

01:14:58.703 --> 01:15:05.667
But, there is a strong possibility

01:15:05.748 --> 01:15:08.386
that there isn’t anything 
out there remotely like us.

01:15:10.987 --> 01:15:14.949
And we are behaving as if this planet,

01:15:15.025 --> 01:15:18.990
this extraordinary, utterly, utterly 
extraordinary little ball of life,

01:15:20.522 --> 01:15:23.526
is something we can just screw 
about with any way we like.

01:15:25.472 --> 01:15:28.423
And maybe we can’t.

01:15:30.561 --> 01:15:33.571
Maybe we should be looking after it 
just a little bit better.

01:15:34.379 --> 01:15:36.688
Not for the world’s sake

01:15:37.899 --> 01:15:40.257
—we talk rather grandly about
“saving the world.”

01:15:40.467 --> 01:15:42.895
We don’t have to save the world
–the world’s fine!

01:15:43.231 --> 01:15:46.689
The world has been through 
five periods of mass extinction.

01:15:47.458 --> 01:15:52.225
Sixty-five million years ago when, 
as it seems, a comet hit the Earth

01:15:52.468 --> 01:15:55.843
at the same time that there 
were vast volcanic eruptions in India,

01:15:56.664 --> 01:15:58.221
which saw off the dinosaurs,

01:15:58.617 --> 01:16:01.501
and something like 90%
of the life on the planet at the time.

01:16:01.509 --> 01:16:04.906
Go back another, I think is 150 million
years earlier than that,

01:16:05.115 --> 01:16:08.240
to the Permian-Triassic 
boundary, another giant,

01:16:08.570 --> 01:16:10.520
giant, giant extinction.

01:16:10.804 --> 01:16:13.456
The world has been through it 
many many times before.

01:16:14.181 --> 01:16:15.601
And what tends to happen,

01:16:15.941 --> 01:16:18.679
what happens invariably
after each mass extinction,

01:16:19.042 --> 01:16:23.574
is that there’s a huge 
amount of space available,

01:16:23.808 --> 01:16:27.249
or new forms of life suddenly 
to emerge and flourish into.

01:16:27.783 --> 01:16:34.363
Just as the extinction of 
the dinosaurs made way for us.

01:16:35.058 --> 01:16:37.381
Without that extinction, 
we would not be here.

01:16:37.996 --> 01:16:39.154
So, the world is fine.

01:16:39.164 --> 01:16:40.788
We don’t have to save the world

01:16:41.010 --> 01:16:43.226
—the world is big enough 
to look after itself.

01:16:44.205 --> 01:16:45.988
What we have to be concerned about,

01:16:45.989 --> 01:16:49.390
is whether or not the world we live in,

01:16:49.599 --> 01:16:53.604
will be capable of sustaining us in it.

01:16:54.817 --> 01:16:56.494
That’s what we need to think about.

01:16:56.515 --> 01:16:58.576
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.

01:17:29.500 --> 01:17:31.280
And now if anybody has any questions,

01:17:31.291 --> 01:17:32.954
I’m very happy to take questions,

01:17:32.954 --> 01:17:37.432
and there are microphones down here 
at the front so I suggest you use them.

01:17:37.721 --> 01:17:39.244
Yeah, hi.

01:17:39.948 --> 01:17:41.423
Thank you. Wonderful talk.

01:17:41.844 --> 01:17:46.773
You say we should take care
to not destroy the planet.

01:17:47.017 --> 01:17:49.721
There is one suggestion
that has been made is that,

01:17:49.953 --> 01:17:52.023
the reason why we destroy the planet

01:17:52.240 --> 01:17:54.549
is that we don’t pay 
the true cost of things

01:17:54.611 --> 01:17:55.830
when we consume them.

01:17:56.848 --> 01:17:58.864
The price of gasoline has been falling

01:17:59.238 --> 01:18:02.814
in real dollars and the vehicles
get bigger and bigger,

01:18:03.054 --> 01:18:04.842
we have the Selfish Useless Vehicles

01:18:04.842 --> 01:18:06.495
—I think they’re called—the SUV’s.

01:18:12.073 --> 01:18:14.676
You know, I have to say as a brit,

01:18:15.701 --> 01:18:16.988
you know we sit and think,

01:18:16.988 --> 01:18:19.841
“the americans are complaining again
because their gas prices

01:18:19.841 --> 01:18:22.357
have reached now nearly 
a quarter of what we pay.”

01:18:24.955 --> 01:18:28.470
So, I just wonder whether you think

01:18:28.640 --> 01:18:33.598
that a good solution is that if 
we would pay the true cost of things,

01:18:33.856 --> 01:18:35.910
if we would pay the ten dollars a gallon

01:18:36.307 --> 01:18:39.745
or whatever it really costs in terms 
of the impact on the environment,

01:18:39.745 --> 01:18:41.903
that that might make a difference?

01:18:43.342 --> 01:18:48.998
Umm. It may be …, I …, it …

01:18:52.456 --> 01:18:56.216
There is a problem I’m very 
very conscious of here.

01:18:57.491 --> 01:19:04.453
Which is that, even though I’m talking 
from a conservationist point of view,

01:19:04.996 --> 01:19:08.316
very very strongly, you’d look back
over the history

01:19:08.570 --> 01:19:11.753
of what we and the conservation 
movement have said

01:19:11.753 --> 01:19:14.147
in the last ten years, 
and the previous ten years,

01:19:14.147 --> 01:19:15.646
and previous ten years of that.

01:19:15.656 --> 01:19:19.561
And most of what we’ve said 
we have to do about it,

01:19:20.239 --> 01:19:23.629
or the way to have gone about it, 
have actually turned out to be wrong.

01:19:24.045 --> 01:19:30.452
So, it’s very hard for me to pretend

01:19:30.710 --> 01:19:32.781
I can stand up and say we have to do this,

01:19:32.790 --> 01:19:34.199
and we have to do that.

01:19:34.601 --> 01:19:36.725
Because they may not be 
the right solution.

01:19:37.457 --> 01:19:40.824
I’m terribly aware of this as far as,

01:19:41.190 --> 01:19:43.472
I mean just going back again,

01:19:43.723 --> 01:19:49.016
I mean thinking about sort of protection
of animals in Africa, for instance.

01:19:49.683 --> 01:19:52.535
That time after time, we’ve gone
about it the wrong way.

01:19:53.476 --> 01:19:56.608
And, yeah, the conservation efforts

01:19:56.825 --> 01:20:00.821
of once every ten years 
will be as much as anything else,

01:20:01.051 --> 01:20:03.512
undoing the problems caused 
by the last ten years.

01:20:03.942 --> 01:20:08.926
So it is a question of constant
sort of self-education,

01:20:09.369 --> 01:20:11.138
trying to assimilate the information,

01:20:11.168 --> 01:20:14.533
trying to see what the consequence 
of what we’ve done so far has been,

01:20:15.967 --> 01:20:17.361
what we can learn from that.

01:20:17.361 --> 01:20:24.623
Now it may well be that if we say
we’re going to multiply the cost of gas

01:20:25.009 --> 01:20:31.008
by ten times or whatever, that may have 
effects that we would put into …

01:20:31.234 --> 01:20:35.751
they would be the lure of unintended 
consequences, which comes into play.

01:20:36.989 --> 01:20:41.619
I think the best thing we can do is 
continually inform ourselves,

01:20:41.967 --> 01:20:46.079
be as aware as possible of what 
is actually happening,

01:20:46.429 --> 01:20:51.169
how if that kind of feedback loop
saying now we’re going to make

01:20:51.398 --> 01:20:55.941
the true cost of the damage we’re causing 
be part of what you have to pay,

01:20:56.169 --> 01:20:59.604
then that may be very well 
be a very good answer;

01:20:59.953 --> 01:21:02.389
but I’m also worried that
it may not be the answer.

01:21:02.402 --> 01:21:05.599
Which is a complicated way of saying
“I don’t know.”

01:21:14.158 --> 01:21:16.828
Two questions. First. 
Do you know where your towel is?

01:21:18.461 --> 01:21:19.695
No.

01:21:20.544 --> 01:21:21.614
OK.

01:21:22.388 --> 01:21:23.756
That was always my problem.

01:21:25.021 --> 01:21:27.063
It’s very funny the thing 
about the towel because, …

01:21:28.360 --> 01:21:30.404
I’ll tell you where it came from.

01:21:30.892 --> 01:21:32.938
I was on a holiday with a bunch of people,

01:21:33.275 --> 01:21:35.300
and we were on a Villa in Corfu.

01:21:35.558 --> 01:21:38.001
And every day we would 
set out to the beach,

01:21:38.256 --> 01:21:40.699
and just as we were 
setting out for the beach

01:21:40.828 --> 01:21:42.433
there would a problem,

01:21:43.459 --> 01:21:47.480
and the problem would be 
that Douglas could not find his towel!

01:21:49.727 --> 01:21:52.664
Where was my towel? Was it under the bed?

01:21:52.664 --> 01:21:54.808
Was it on the end of bed? 
Was it in the bed?

01:21:54.814 --> 01:21:57.557
Was it the bathroom? 
Was it hanging on the line outside?

01:21:57.998 --> 01:21:59.713
Was it in the washing …? Was it …?

01:21:59.742 --> 01:22:02.948
I had no idea, day after day, 
where the fuck my towel was.

01:22:04.153 --> 01:22:06.047
And after a while I just began to think

01:22:06.047 --> 01:22:07.926
this must be symptomatic of somebody

01:22:08.000 --> 01:22:11.160
who is so sort of deeply chaotic.

01:22:11.916 --> 01:22:14.203
But I then …

01:22:14.605 --> 01:22:17.589
I don’t even know whether 
I even came up with it first,

01:22:17.977 --> 01:22:19.623
or somebody on the hold of it

01:22:19.971 --> 01:22:21.995
came with the idea that somebody

01:22:22.220 --> 01:22:24.170
who was rather more together than I,

01:22:24.347 --> 01:22:27.249
would be someone who would 
really know where their towel was.

01:22:27.269 --> 01:22:35.256
And so then, when I was writing 
the Hitchhiker, I sort of put …

01:22:35.557 --> 01:22:38.610
You very often put things in because 
you know what they mean.

01:22:39.116 --> 01:22:42.511
And it’s really kind of a flag to yourself

01:22:42.875 --> 01:22:46.966
that in the next draft through 
you would put something in

01:22:47.136 --> 01:22:50.157
that means to everybody else
what this thing means to you.

01:22:51.250 --> 01:22:53.247
You know. And then it kind of stays there,

01:22:53.268 --> 01:22:56.654
and it turns out that it does mean 
something to everybody else as well.

01:22:58.045 --> 01:22:59.569
Does that answer your question?

01:23:00.093 --> 01:23:04.941
OK. And also, do we behave like people 
descended from stick-using monkeys

01:23:05.415 --> 01:23:07.668
or people descended 
from telephone cleaners.

01:23:10.939 --> 01:23:13.856
I think we have both lots there
in our genes, I’m afraid.

01:23:21.864 --> 01:23:25.550
I’m absolutely going to kill myself 
if I get out of here without asking this.

01:23:25.556 --> 01:23:27.587
This question occurred to me
when my friend

01:23:27.587 --> 01:23:29.920
bodily forced me to pick up the first book

01:23:29.973 --> 01:23:32.825
n The Hitchhiker’s Guide and I read the 
very first sentences

01:23:32.831 --> 01:23:34.573
on the very first paragraph,

01:23:34.899 --> 01:23:38.330
“What on God’s green earth does 
this man have against digital watches!?”

01:23:45.734 --> 01:23:47.915
Well I have to admit
they’ve improved since

01:23:47.976 --> 01:23:52.420
I actually wrote that bit.

01:23:53.205 --> 01:23:55.955
But if you think about it,

01:23:56.451 --> 01:23:58.656
I mean the first digital 
watches which were …,

01:24:00.901 --> 01:24:06.233
you look at a regular watch with hands
and you got a pie chart.

01:24:07.310 --> 01:24:09.658
Remember the time when
we used to get very excited

01:24:09.658 --> 01:24:13.245
about pie charts being the 
thing that computer did for us?

01:24:13.440 --> 01:24:15.131
“Uhhh! Pie charts!”

01:24:19.019 --> 01:24:22.609
But at the same time when we were 
getting terribly excited about pie charts

01:24:22.609 --> 01:24:25.379
and what they could do for 
our understanding of the world,

01:24:25.379 --> 01:24:28.045
we were saying, 
“We don’t want pie charts on our wrists.

01:24:28.598 --> 01:24:30.182
That’s old fashioned technology.

01:24:30.521 --> 01:24:34.189
No what we want is not something you 
just glance at and see what the time is.

01:24:34.189 --> 01:24:36.049
We want something that you’ve got to go

01:24:36.049 --> 01:24:38.930
into a dark corner and 
put down your suitcase

01:24:39.151 --> 01:24:41.236
and press a button in order to read,

01:24:41.489 --> 01:24:43.740
‘Oh it’s 11:43, now what is …? uhm …?

01:24:43.915 --> 01:24:46.148
How long is that before twelve o’clock?’ ”

01:24:47.430 --> 01:24:49.211
And this was progress.

01:24:50.629 --> 01:24:54.357
But you see, I mean the great 
thing about human beings,

01:24:55.093 --> 01:24:57.059
I mean—while we make fun of it—

01:24:57.305 --> 01:25:01.246
is not only that we invent 
stuff that’s new,

01:25:01.547 --> 01:25:04.678
and better, and does things better.

01:25:04.950 --> 01:25:09.306
But even stuff that works perfectly well 
we can’t leave well enough alone,

01:25:09.702 --> 01:25:14.282
and it’s really the most sort of charming
and delightful aspect of human beings,

01:25:14.469 --> 01:25:17.653
that we keep on inventing things 
that we’ve already got right once.

01:25:17.653 --> 01:25:23.154
I mean like bathroom faucets, 
I mean it’s very very simple,

01:25:23.185 --> 01:25:26.431
you turn it on the water comes out, 
you turn it off the water stops.

01:25:26.431 --> 01:25:28.198
And we kind of got the hang of that.

01:25:28.207 --> 01:25:30.201
That works. But it’s amazing you go into,

01:25:30.597 --> 01:25:33.584
you know, a hotel lobby or an airport,

01:25:33.775 --> 01:25:35.680
and you approach the basin

01:25:35.934 --> 01:25:38.654
with a certain amount of 
sort of anxiety, you know.

01:25:45.221 --> 01:25:47.014
“What do I do? Do I turn something?

01:25:47.014 --> 01:25:48.989
Do I push something? Do I pull something?

01:25:48.989 --> 01:25:49.762
Do I knee it!?

01:25:53.042 --> 01:25:55.018
Do I just have to sort of be in near it?”

01:25:58.908 --> 01:26:01.202
And once the water started to flow

01:26:01.462 --> 01:26:04.009
because it has picked up some sort

01:26:04.017 --> 01:26:05.953
of brainwave energy from me or whatever.

01:26:06.622 --> 01:26:09.956
“So, now how do I stop it? 
Is it my job to stop it?

01:26:11.229 --> 01:26:12.730
Would it stop itself?”

01:26:13.562 --> 01:26:19.950
I mean, I think we’ve got
the faucet down OK.

01:26:20.586 --> 01:26:24.664
But, I just think it’s wonderful
we just sort of

01:26:24.923 --> 01:26:27.394
keep on inventing it even though it works,

01:26:27.611 --> 01:26:32.473
because it’s the way of getting ourselves
off local maximums isn’t it?

01:26:37.940 --> 01:26:40.885
I think that’s all I have 
to say there. Thanks.