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?'"
