I'm Richard Dawkins, University of Oxford.
And I gave the Christmas Lectures, Christmas 1991.
This is a heavy cannonball.
I'm going to stand here and I'm going to release it and
it's going to go over there and it's going to come roaring
back towards me.
And all my instincts are going to tell me to run for it.
But I have enough faith in the scientific method to know that
it's going to stop just about an inch short, or perhaps
less, of my head.
So here goes.
The title of the lectures was Growing Up in the Universe.
And I meant growing up in a number of different senses.
There's the child growing up and discovering for herself
what a wonderful place the universe is and what a thrill
it is to understand it.
Then there's humanity growing up in understanding, which is
the progress of science, the history of science.
Then there was growing up in the sense of evolution.
In the sense of our evolution from our bacterial, whatever
they were, beginnings through mammals and primates, to
become the species we are now when we really do have a large
measure of understanding, thanks to the development in
history of modern science.
DNA comes like an ever-flowing river down the generations.
The river of DNA that flows through us into the future is
a pure river that leaves us exactly as it finds us, with
one exception.
There are very occasional random
changes called mutations.
Because of these, there is genetic variation in the
population and that opens the way for natural selection.
A children's audience is quite a frightening audience,
because they're in some ways harder to please
than an adult audience.
One of the nice things about doing the Christmas Lectures
is that it's a key to open many doors.
And if you ring up almost anybody in the country and say
I'm doing the Christmas Lectures can you help me, they
instantly say yes.
And so you can get really quite complicated and
expensive apparatus and people from all over the
country will deliver.
We had a virtual reality company that sort of down
tools and spent an enormous amount of time and trouble
making a virtual reality version of this lecture
theatre, no doubt very advanced for its time, where a
child could come up and put on headphones and goggles and
would see a very vivid representation of a
three-dimensional world.
So you could fly around the Ri Lecture
Theatre in virtual reality.
And that was something which I couldn't have
done but for the Ri.
Because the Christmas Lectures have become so well respected
in the country, with their noble history going back to
Faraday, that you can get whatever you like.
Well, this idea reminds me of a brilliant passage from one
of my favourite works of fiction, The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
In fact, I'm so fond of this passage that I was wanting
somebody to read it out.
Would anybody like to volunteer?
We put in various jokes, and one was because I wanted to
have somebody read from one of Douglas Adams' books.
A very interesting idea, very wittily expressed, of the idea
that one might breed a species of animal which actually
wanted to be eaten and was capable of telling us so.
And that would remove at a stroke the moral objections to
eating meat.
And Douglas Adams had a very, very witty story, a science
fiction fantasy about such an animal.
And the obvious thing to do would be to ask a child to
come up and read this paragraph.
But then we thought, wouldn't it be fun to get
Douglas Adams himself?
Your name is?
Douglas.
Douglas what?
Adams.
Douglas Adams, what an amazing coincidence.
[APPLAUSE]
"A large dairy animal approached Zaphod
Beeblebrox's table.
A meaty bovine quadruped with watery eyes, small horns, and
an ingratiating smile on its lips.
'Good evening,' it lowed, and sat back heavily on its
haunches. 'I am the main Dish of the Day.
May I interest you in parts of my body?'"