Manning: The teeter-top, yes. And him saying "this top
turns upside down when the revs drop to a
certain level",
and he says "the reason for that is
impossible to explain
in words, but I can express it
mathematically very easily".
But you can't explain it in words!
Now I think the mathematicians do maybe
have a problem there
but they ought to try, there's no
question. I remember, and probably you
remember, too
we were always told, when writing
up experiments to use the passive voice.
Dawkins: Oh my god, yes. That is so pernicious.
Manning: Journals all had that, you know,
"four rats were taken"
Dawkins: Yes, yes,
"It was decided..."
Manning: "It was decided that..." Without
using the first person.
I'm not terribly proud of my spell as
editor of Animal Behavior. But I did -
that was one thing that I tried to
abolish. The other thing was,
Introduction, Methods, 
Results, Discussion...
And that pattern would sometimes
follow through
even when you had, shall we say a series,
of four
sets of experiments 
where set 1
raised a question which led into set two,
which led into
three, which led into four. And 
naturally the way to do that is to begin with
one, and then say "this raises a further
question, let's go on and..."
Instead of which people would write
papers that would have Methods one,
Methods two, Methods three, Methods four, Results one, Results two,
to Results three results four. That is
literally
what they would do, having been 
dragooned
into this pattern
of doing things.
Niko, by the way, would never do that. I
mean, that absolute model, which I used to send
to authors was the
egg shell removal
paper on black-headed gulls where each
problem was solved
and lead into the next one, which led
into the next one, and so on.
Manning: I completely agree. What a
straitjacket
a lot of young scientists were given. I
think I was helped, well first of all
I, like you, had Niko there, but also the
first
scientist I really had to read
seriously in my subject was Darwin!
I happened to be... 
It's, okay, I love
Victorian writers, Victorian novelists,
and his prolix style
I found immediately attractive. And of course
he does, just that you say -
Dawkins: Yes, of course.
Manning: He gives a narrative of how his ideas evolved.
Yeah. Who was it that
said: "many
scientific papers
are a complete falsification of the truth"?
Dawkins: Peter Medawar.
Manning: Yes, Peter Medawar, that's 
right. Because they do go,
things, they don't go in the way in
which you mind works. 
Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: And, everybody knows you
write the introduction,
it's the last thing you write! How do you know what you're going to introduce until...?
Dawkins: Yes.
Yes, that's right.
Manning. Until you've done it?
So it is phony, and, I like to think that's
breaking down now, I think it is.
Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: And a course,
you're the best person to say this to:
the standard
of popular scientific writing
is enormously improved now.
I mean the last 10-20 years I think I've
seen some wonderful
accessible science writing.
Dawkins: That's true. And
also text books have improved. When you
think back to - did you have Grove and Newell
when you were...?
Manning: Yes! Oh, I loved Grove and Newell.
Dawkins: Well, you didn't really.
Manning: No! [laughing]
Dawkins: Something about teaching
science, teaching biology, as though it
was a branch of
Latin grammar was what it was amount to.
Old sort of schoolmasters
covered with chalk, this is how I imagine them. Nowadays we got these wonderful
text books with colored pictures in
blue boxes and things.
Manning: Extraordinary. 
Dawkins: Yeah.
J.Z. Young, that's right, Grove and Newel,
Parker and Haswell,
B.E.P.S: Borradaile, Eastham, Potts and Saunders. And then J.Z. Young's "Life of
the Vertebrates" came out, do you remember? Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: That was a breath of fresh air.
Dawkins: Absolutely. 
Manning: And then "The Life of Mammals", and so on. It described
the whole, you know, the animal is a
living creature really, whereas -
Dawkins: Yeah.
Manning: Grove and Newell really, you know was... Nonetheless, I can see
Grove and Newell's dissection of the earthworm,
which I learned at school.
And I loved it, I did. I so, had such a
thirst for biology at that time.
Dawkins: Yes,
even Grove and Newell didn't put you off! 
Manning: Even Grove and Newell didn't put me off.
No, completely. I think its extremely
important. And I think that what you a
number of other authors
have done is to produce wonderfully
accessible
modern science at the cutting edge,
and also made it very challenging, too. I
mean your books have been challenging,
of course they have, because - but-
it's the clarity, the use of good
metaphors.
I think it's been wonderful, and I
struggle, and I don't know whether you do this, but I do try about every six months I tried to read
and a popular book on cosmology. There
are many of them now. At the moment I'm
going through Lee Smollin,
Dawkins: Oh yes.
Manning: He's a very interesting guy.
and this is called "The Trouble with Physics"
Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: It's all about,
he's against string theory, and so on. And, I do struggle with this!
I mean it's good, but, nonetheless,
these guys are giving us an insight into
how physicists are thinking. So to return to your earlier point:
I think this is particle physicists
introducing us to particle physics as a
human endeavor, you know?
Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: It's very important, I think.
I think we want to see science as part
of culture.
Dawkins: Precisely, yes.
Manning: Anyway, you
have been at the forefront of
introducing
evolutionary ideas to the public and
well you haven't been backward in
leading with your chin in a
number of cases.
Dawkins: [laughter]
Manning: So I don't doubt that you have,
your, inbox
must be fairly interesting at times.
Dawkins: Well, yes. It's alright. I think
there's a certain tendency for people to
react to this leading with the chin. I
don't really lead with my chin
but people think I do, and so I
do get a sort of
hostile reaction to what people think I
say whether I
do or not. Your television
programs, like the one on Geology for
example,
presumably you didn't receive
much hostile response to that, or
did you get any response from
creationist about that?
Manning: No I didn't.
Well, I did get responses, I got
a fair number of tracks coming through
the mail once or twice,
and some letters talking about, you know,
there are no intermediate
fossils and all this sort of stuff. But you raise a
very interesting point there, because
I've been struck by,
if you go to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth", 1785,
there he, his famous
you know, summing up at the end, "we see no
vestige of a beginning
no prospect of an end" - I would have expected
that coming when it did to have roused
a huge furore.
It did a arouse some criticism from
from divines, and I suppose from
probably people in the other branches of
Science as it then was,
but a course not tiny fraction
of the furore that Darwin caused.
And I remember you
in one of your essays writing
that you found it puzzling that some
aspects of truth
such as, for instance, the physical
laws of the universe
are accepted completely.
Dawkins: Yeah, yeah.
Manning: Nobody questions
the four great forces, and so on
and so forth,
and you found it puzzling that
Darwin's, which is all
equally is just a truth, why it causes
such problems.
But I think I know why that is. And
I'm sure you
understand this.
Knowing about the structure
of the atom and
quarks and leptons and so on and so forth, 
doesn't -
its remarkable, but it doesn't really
change the way we feel about ourselves.
Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: Whereas, Darwin of course did. For many people
it still remains a very challenging
thought that we are just one end
product of a process of natural
selection.
I don't know about you but my
feelings are: I don't think this will
ever go away, actually. I suspect -
Dawkins: Yeah.
Every, no matter how much people like yourself
try to explain, and gradually how the
aspects of evolutionary
theory get more and more filled
up, I don't think it'll ever go away, that.
Dawkins: There are various aspects of it, though, aren't there? In Victorian times, part of it was
a reluctance to accept cousinship with
chimpanzees and
monkeys. "Nobody's going to tell me I
descended from a monkey" and that's a,
sort of feeling that monkeys are sort of, I don't know, dirty, and comical and,
so on. And that was part of it. But I think more
profoundly its
providing - what Darwin did was to provide
an explanation which is ultimately
mechanistic
for those things which we had thought
we had, like a soul,
eternal life,
something that would go on after after
our death,
something that made us particularly
human, there are all sorts of ways in
which Darwin
cuts away at human pretension.
