Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science

Success, for an organism, means passing genes on to the distant future before inevitably dying in the comparatively near future.

Richard tells a lovely, if slightly macabre, story about his legs. After they were amputated in Cambridge he wanted, for sentimental reasons, to bury them in his beloved Kenya. He had to get permission to transport them, and bureaucracy insisted that this was possible only if he could produce a death certificate. He very reasonably argued that he w

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s ju

‘Concentrating only on the usefulness of science is a bit like celebrating music because it is good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.’

The simpler you make your god, the less qualified he is to explain the complexity of the world. And the more complex you make him, the more does he require an explanation in his own right.

Another of my ten difficult choices concerned the perceived need to provide ‘balance’, something that especially afflicts the BBC because of its charter. I quoted a favourite maxim, which I think I first heard from Alan Grafen: ‘When two opposing points of view are advocated with equal vigour, the truth doesn’t necessarily lie halfway between. It’s

Jews, who constitute less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, have won more than 20 per cent of all Nobel Prizes. This makes a poignant contrast with the derisorily low success rate of the world’s Muslims, who are orders of magnitude more numerous in the world. I thought – still do – the comparison revealing. Whether you think of Judaism and

Darwinian evolution uniquely solves the problem of life’s statistical improbability, because it works cumulatively and gradually. It really does broker a legitimate traverse from primordial simplicity to eventual complexity – and it is the only known theory capable of doing so. Human engineers can make complex things by design, but the whole point

‘However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead’