Nicholas Humphrey, School Professor at the London School of Economics

and Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, New
York, is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the
evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His books include
Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps
of Faith. He has been the recipient of several honours, including the Martin
Luther King Memorial Prize and the British Psychological Society's book
award.
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
For Ada and Samuel
This is a volume of essays, lectures, journal entries, newspaper articles that I
have written in response to opportunity, when something happened that set
me thinking on new lines-a surprise turn in my life, a serendipitous
discovery, a left-field thought, a provocation or an invitation that could not be
refused. The themes are various and the lines do not all converge. Still, these
chapters do have this in common: they all concern the uneasy relation
between minds and bodies, and they all take issue with received ideas.

In 1983 Oxford University Press published a previous volume of my

essays, under the title Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development
of Mind. I wrote in the Preface: `The theme that runs through this collection
is a concern with why human beings are as they are ... The answers that most
interest me are historical and evolutionary. Human beings are as they are
because their history has been (so we may guess) as it has been.'

Twenty years-and four hooks-later, my interests are still centred in

evolutionary psychology: a field which had yet to be named, but which has
emerged as the most fertile field of all psychology. I have continued to be
fascinated by the perennial issues: consciousness, justice, social
understanding, spirituality. I hope I have better answers to some of the
philosophical issues that puzzled me then. Some political and social problems
have disappeared from view, others remain as pressing as ever, new ones
have emerged.

My grandfather, A. V. Hill, in the Preface to his own collected writings

(The Ethical Dilemma of Science, 1960), quoted Samuel Johnson: `Read over
your compositions and where ever you meet with a passage which you think
is particularly fine, strike it out.' I cannot claim to have followed this advice
to the letter. I am happy to be the author of most of what is in here (and, for
those parts for which I am not, I can still offer good excuses). But I have
taken the chance to strike out certain passages that I now reckon redundant,
outdated, or wrong.
 My constant companion in this work has been my wife, Ayla. My constant
distraction has been the two rascals to whom this book is dedicated, Ada and
Samuel. Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, Arlen Mack and Judy
Friedlander at the New School, and Max Steuer at the LSE have been good
friends and critics at every stage. Shelley Cox, of Oxford University Press,
and Angela Blackburn have been editors beyond compare.
1. On Taking Another Look 1

SELVES

2. One Self: A Meditation on the Unity of Consciousness 7

3. What Is Your Substance, Whereof Are You Made? 15

4. Speaking for Our Selves: An Assessment of Multiple Personality

Disorder 19

5. Love Knots 49

6. Varieties of Altruism-and the Common Ground Between Them 52

FEELINGS

7. The Uses of Consciousness 65

8. Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear for My Possessing 86

9. How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem 90

10. The Privatization of Sensation 115

DISCOVERIES

11. Mind in Nature 129

12. Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind 132

13. Scientific Shakespeare 162

14. The Deformed Transformed 165

 PRETENCES

15. Tall Stories from Little Acorns Grow 203

16. Behold the Man: Human Nature and Supernatural Belief 206

17. Hello, Aquarius! 232

18. Bugs and Beasts Before the Law 235

19. Great Expectations: The Evolutionary Psychology of Faith Healing and

the Placebo Effect 255

SEDUCTIONS

20. What Shall We Tell the Children? 289

21. The Number of the Beast 318

22. Arms and the Man 320

23. Death in Tripoli 327

24. Follow My Leader 330

Notes 340

Index 363
`How often have I said to you,' Sherlock Holmes observed to Dr Watson,
`that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth?" And how often do we need to be reminded
that this is a maxim that is quite generally ignored by human beings?

Here is an immediate test to prove the point. Figure 1 shows a photograph

of a strange object, created some years ago in the laboratory of Professor
Richard Gregory.2 What do you see this as being a picture of? What
explanation does your mind construct for the data arriving at your eyes?

Fig. 1

You see it, presumably, as a picture of the so-called 'impossible triangle':

that is, as a picture of a solid triangular object whose parts work perfectly in
isolation from one another but whose whole refuses to add up-an object that
could not possibly exist in ordinary three-dimensional space.

Yet the fact is that the object in the picture does exist in ordinary space.
The picture is based on an unretouched photograph of a real object, taken
from life, with no kind of optical trickery involved. Indeed, if you were to
have been positioned where the camera was at the moment the shutter
clicked, you would have seen the real object exactly as you are seeing it on
the page.
 What, then, should he your attitude to this apparent paradox? Should you
perhaps (with an open mind, trusting your personal experience) believe what
you unquestionably see, accept that what you always thought could not exist
actually does exist, and abandon your long-standing assumptions about the
structure of the `normal' world? Or, taking heed of Holmes's dictum, would
you do better instead to make a principled stand against impossibility and go
in search of the improbable?

The answer, of course, is that you should do the second. For the fact is that
Gregory, far from creating some kind of paranormal object that defies the
rules of 3-D space, has merely created a perfectly normal object that defies
the rules of human expectation. The true shape of Gregory's `improbable
triangle' is revealed from another camera position in Figure 2.

Fig. 2

It is, as it turns out, a most unusual object (there may be only a couple of
such objects in existence in the universe). And it has been photographed for
Figure 1 from a most unusual point of view (to get this first picture, the
camera has had to be placed at the one-and-only position from which the
object looks like this). But there it is. And now that you have seen the true
solution, presumably you will no longer be taken in.

If only it were so! You look at Figure 2. And now you look back at Figure
1. What do you see this time around? Almost certainly, you still see exactly
what you saw before: the impossibility rather than the improbability! Even
when prompted in the right direction, you happily, almost casually, continue
to `make sense' of the data in a nonsensical way. Your mind, it seems, cannot
help choosing the attractively simple-even if mad-interpretation over the
unattractively complicatedeven if sane-one. Logic and common sense are
being made to play second fiddle to a perceptual ideal of wholeness and
completion.

There are many examples in the wider world of human politics and culture
where something similar happens: that is to say, where common sense gets
overridden by some kind of seductively simple explanatory principle-ethical,
political, religious, or even scientific. For, if there is one thing that human
beings are amazingly prone to (perhaps we might say good at), it is in
emulating the camera operator who took the photograph of Figure 1 and
manoeuvring themselves into just the one ideological position from which an
impossible, even absurd, explanation of the `facts of life' happens to look
attractively simple and robust.

This special position may be called, for example, Christianity, or Marxism,

or Nationalism, or Psychoanalysis-maybe even some forms of science, or
scientism. It may be an ideological position that appeals only to some of the
human population some of the time or one that appeals to all of the
population all of the time. But whichever it is, to those people who, in
relation to a particular problem, are currently emplaced in this position, this
will almost certainly seem to be the only reasonable place there is to be.
`Here I stand,' in the words of Martin Luther; `I can do no other.' And the
absolute rightness of the stance will seem to be confirmed by the very fact
that it permits the welcome solution to the problem that it does.

Yet the telltale sign of what is happening will always be that the solution
works only from this one position, and that if the observer were able to shift
perspective, even slightly, the gaps in the explanation would appear. Of
course, the trick-for those who want to keep faith and save appearances-is not
to shift position, or to pull rapidly back if ever tempted.

The lesson is that when would-be gurus offer us final answers to any of
life's puzzles, a way of looking at things that brings everything together, the
last word on `how things are', we should be watchful. By all means, let us
say: `Thank you, it makes a pretty picture.' But we should always be prepared
to take another look.
I am looking at my baby son as he thrashes around in his crib, two arms
flailing, hands grasping randomly, legs kicking the air, head and eyes turning
this way and that, a smile followed by a grimace crossing his face ... And I'm
wondering: what is it like to be him? What is he feeling now? What kind of
experience is he having of himself?

Then a strong image comes to me. I am standing now, not at the rail of a
crib, but in a concert hall at the rail of the gallery, watching as the orchestra
assembles. The players are arriving, section by section-strings, percussion,
woodwind-taking their separate places on the stage. They pay little if any
attention to each other. Each adjusts his chair, smoothes his clothes, arranges
the score on the rack in front of him. One by one they start to tune their
instruments. The cellist draws his bow darkly across the strings, cocks his
head as if savouring the resonance, and slightly twists the screw. The harpist
leans into the body of her harp, runs her fingers trippingly along a scale,
relaxes and looks satisfied. The oboist pipes a few liquid notes, stops, fiddles
with the reed and tries again. The tympanist beats a brief rally on his drum.
Each is, for the moment, entirely in his own world, playing only to and for
himself, oblivious to anything but his own action and his own sound. The
noise from the stage is a medley of single notes and snatches of melody, out
of time, out of harmony. Who would believe that all these independent voices
will soon be working in concert under one conductor to create a single
symphony.

Now, back in the nursery, I seem to be seeing another kind of orchestra

assembling. It is as if, with this baby, all the separate agencies of which he is
composed still have to settle into place and do their tuning up: nerves need
tightening and balancing, sense organs calibrating, pipes clearing, airways
opening, a whole range of tricks and minor routines have to be practised and
made right. The subsystems that will one day be a system have as yet hardly
begun to acknowledge one another, let alone to work together for one
common purpose. And as for the conductor who one day will be leading all
these parts in concert into life's Magnificat: he is still nowhere to be seen.

I return to my question: what kind of experience is this baby having of

himself? But, as I ask it, I realize I do not like the answer that suggests itself.
If there is no conductor inside him yet, perhaps there is in fact no self yet, and
if no self perhaps no experience either-perhaps nothing at all.

If I close my eyes and try to think like a hard-headed philosophical sceptic,

I can almost persuade myself it could be so. I must agree that, in theory, there
could be no kind of consciousness within this little body, no inner life,
nobody at home to have an inner life. But then, as I open my eyes and look at
him again, any such scepticism melts. Someone in there is surely looking
back at me, someone is smiling, someone seems to know my face, someone
is reaching out his tiny hand . . . Philosophers think one way, but fathers think
another. I can hardly doubt sensations are registering inside this boy, willed
actions initiating, memories coming to the surface. However disorganized his
life may be, he is surely not totally unconscious.

Yet I realize I cannot leave it there. If these experiences are occurring in

the baby boy, they presumably have to belong to an experiencer. Every
experience has to have a corresponding subject whose experience it is. The
point was well made by the philosopher Gottlob Frege, a hundred years ago:
it would be absurd, he wrote, to suppose `that a pain, a mood, a wish should
rove about the world without a bearer, independently. An experience is
impossible without an experient. The inner world presupposes the person
whose inner world it is."

But if that is the case, I wonder what to make of it. For it seems to imply
that those `someones' that I recognize inside this boy-the someone who is
looking, the someone who is acting, the someone who is remembering-must
all be genuine subjects of experience (subjects; note the plural). If indeed he
does not yet possess a single Self-that Self with a capital S which will later
mould the whole system into one - then perhaps he must in fact possess a set
of relatively independent sub-selves, each of which must be counted a
separate centre of subjectivity, a separate experiencer. Not yet being one
person, perhaps he is in fact many.

But, isn't this idea bizarre? A lot of independent experiencers? Or-to be

clear about what this has to mean-a lot of independent consciousnesses? And
all within one body? I confess I find it hard to see how it would work. I try to
imagine what it would be like for me to be fractionated in this way and I
simply cannot make sense of the idea.

Now, I agree that I myself have many kinds of `lesser self' inside me: I can,
if I try, distinguish a part of me that is seeing, a part that is smelling, a part
raising my arm, a part recalling what day it is, and so on. These are certainly
different types of mental activity, involving different categories of subjective
experience, and I am sure they can properly be said to involve different
dimensions of my Self.

I can even agree that these parts of me are a relatively loose confederation
that do not all have to be present at one time. Parts of my mind can and do
sometimes wander, get lost, and return. When I have come round from a deep
sleep, for example, I think it is even true that I have found myself having to
gather myself together-which is to say my selves togetherpiecemeal.

Marcel Proust, in A la recherche du temps perdu, provides a nice

description of just this peculiar experience: `When I used to wake up in the
middle of the night,' he writes,

not knowing where I was, I could not even he sure at first who I was; I had
only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in
the depths of an animal's consciousness ... But then ... out of a blurred
glimpse of oil-lamps, of shirts with turned-down collars, III would gradually
piece together the original components of my ego.'

So it is true, if I think about this further, that the idea of someone's

consciousness being dispersed in different places is not completely unfamiliar
to me. And yet I can see that this kind of example will hardly do to help me
understand the baby. For what distinguishes my case from the baby's is
precisely that these `parts of me' that separate and recombine do not, while
separate, exist as distinct and self-sufficient subjects of experience. When I
come together on waking, it is surely not a matter of my bringing together
various sub-selves that are already separately conscious. Rather, these sub-
selves only come hack into existence as and when I plug them back, as it
were, into the main me.

As I stand at the crib watching my baby boy, trying to find the right way
in, I now realize I am up against an imaginative barrier. I will not say that,
merely because I can't imagine it, it could make no sense at all to suppose
that this baby has got all those separate conscious selves within him. But I
will say I do not know what to say next.

Yet, I am beginning to think there is the germ of some real insight here.
Perhaps the reason why I cannot imagine the baby's case is tied into that very
phrase, `I can't imagine . . . '. Indeed, as soon as I try to imagine the baby as
split into several different selves, I make him back into one again by virtue of
imagining it. I imagine each set of experiences as my experiences-but, just to
the extent that they are all mine, they are no longer separate.

And doesn't this throw direct light on what may be the essential difference
between my case and the baby's? For doesn't it suggest that it is all a matter
of how a person's experiences are owned-to whom they belong ?

With me it seems quite clear that every experience that any of my sub-
selves has is mine. And, to paraphrase Frege, in my case it would certainly
make no sense to suppose that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove about my
inner world without the bearer in every case being me! But maybe with the
baby every experience that any of his sub-selves has is not yet his. And
maybe in his case it does make perfect sense to suppose that a pain, a mood, a
wish should rove about inside his inner world without the bearer in every
case being him.

How so? What kind of concept of `belonging' can this be, such that I can
seriously suggest that, while my experiences belong to me, the baby's do not
belong to him? I think I know the answer intuitively; yet I need to work it
through.
 Let me return to the image of the orchestra. In their case, I certainly want
to say that the players who arrive on stage as isolated individuals come to
belong to a single orchestra. As an example of `belonging', this seems as clear
as any. But, if there is indeed something that binds the players to belong
together, what kind of something is this?

The obvious answer would seem to be the one I have hinted at already: that
there is a `conductor'. After each player settles in and has his period of free
play, a dominant authority mounts the stage, lifts his baton, and proceeds to
take overall control. Yet, now I am beginning to realize that this image of the
conductor as `chief self' is not the one I want-nor, in fact, was it a good or
helpful image to begin with.

Ask any orchestral player, and he'll tell you: although it may perhaps look
to an outsider as if the conductor is totally in charge, in reality he often has a
quite minor-even a purely decorative-role. Sure, he can provide a common
reference point to assist the players with the timing and punctuation of their
playing. And he can certainly influence the overall style and interpretation of
a work. But that is not what gets the players to belong together. What truly
binds them into one organic unit and creates the flow between them is
something much deeper and more magical, namely, the very act of making
music: that they are together creatinga single work of art.

Doesn't this suggest a criterion for `belonging' that should be much more
widely applicable: that parts come to belong to a whole just in so far as they
are participants in a common project?

Try the definition where you like: what makes the parts of an oak tree
belong together-the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common
interest in the tree's survival. What makes the parts of a complex machine
like an aeroplane belong to the aeroplane-the wings, the jet engines, the
radar? They participate in the common enterprise of flying.

Then, here's the question: what makes the parts of a person belong
together-if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will
and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common
project of creating that person's life.

This, then, is the definition I was looking for. And, as I try it, I
immediately see how it works in my own case. I may indeed be made up of
many separate sub-selves, but these selves have come to belong together as
the one Self that I am because they are engaged in one and the same
enterprise: the enterprise of steering me-body and soul-through the physical
and social world. Within this larger enterprise each of my selves may indeed
he doing its own thing: providing me with sensory information, with
intelligence, with past knowledge, goals, judgements, initiatives, and so on.
But the point-the wonderful point-is that each self doing its own thing shares
a final common path with all the other selves doing their own things. And it
is for this reason that these selves are all mine, and for this reason that their
experiences are all my experiences. In short, my selves have become co-
conscious through collaboration.

But the baby? Look at him again. There he is, thrashing about. The
difference between him and me is precisely that he has as yet no common
project to unite the selves within him. Look at him. See how he has hardly
started to do anything for himself as a whole: how he is still completely
helpless, needy, dependent-reliant on the projects of other people for his
survival. Of course, his selves are beginning to get into shape and function on
their own. But they do not yet share a final com mon path. And it is for that
reason his selves are not yet all of them his, and for that reason their
experiences are not yet his experiences. His selves are not co-conscious
because there is as yet no co-laboration.

Even as I watch, however, I can see things changing. I realize the baby boy
is beginning to come together. Already there are hints of small collaborative
projects getting under way: his eyes and his hands working together, his face
and his voice, his mouth and his tummy. As time goes by, some of these
miniprojects will succeed; others will be abandoned. But inexorably over
days and weeks and months he will become one coordinated, centrally
conscious human being. And, as I anticipate this happening, I begin to
understand how in fact he may be going to achieve this miracle of
unification. It will not be, as I might have thought earlier, through the power
of a supervisory Self who emerges from nowhere and takes control, but
through the power inherent in all his sub-selves for, literally, their own self-
organization.

Then, stand with me again at the rail of the orchestra, watching those
instrumental players tuning up. The conductor has not come yet, and maybe
he is not ever going to come. But it hardly matters: for the truth is, it is of the
nature of these players to play. See, one or two of them are already beginning
to strike up, to experiment with half-formed melodies, to hear how they
sound for themselves, and-remarkably-to find and recreate their sound in the
group sound that is beginning to arise around them. See how several little
alliances are forming, the strings are coming into register, and the same is
happening with the oboes and the clarinets . See, now, how they are joining
together across different sections, how larger structures are emerging.

Perhaps I can offer a better picture still. Imagine, at the back of the stage,
above the orchestra, a lone dancer. He is the image of Nijinsky in The Rite of
Spring. His movements are being shaped by the sounds of the instruments,
his body absorbing and translating everything he hears. At first his dance
seems graceless and chaotic. His body cannot make one dance of thirty
different tunes. Yet, something is changing. See how each of the instrumental
players is watching the dancerlooking to find how, within the chaos of those
body movements, the dancer is dancing to his tune. And each player, it
seems, now wants the dancer to be his, to have the dancer give form to his
sound. But see how, in order to achieve this, each must take account of all the
other influences to which the dancer is responding-how each must
accommodate to and join in harmony with the entire group. See, then, how, at
last, this group of players is becoming one orchestra reflected in the one body
of the dancer-and how the music they are making and the dance that he is
dancing have indeed become a single work of art.

And my boy, Samuel? His body has already begun to dance to the sounds
of his own selves. Soon enough, as these selves come together in creating
him, he too will become a single, self-made human being.
 Shakespeare, Sonnet LIII

This is a poem, it has been said, of `abundant flattery'. But not displeasing, I
imagine, to the young Earl of Southampton to whom it was probably
addressed. Shakespeare had earlier compared him to a summer's day. Now,
for good measure, he tells him he combines the promise of spring and the
bounty of autumn. He is not only the most beautiful of men-the very picture
of Adonis with whom the goddess Venus fell in lovebut the equal of Helen,
the most beautiful of women, too. What is he made of? Spring, autumn,
Adonis, Helen ... What a piece of work he must have been!

Yes, what a piece of work. We read the poem, at first encounter, as if

Shakespeare meant it as a straightforward tribute to his friend. But there is
not much in Shakespeare's sonnets which is straightforward, and scarcely a
line which is simply what it seems.
 He is clever, Shakespeare. And he expects us to be clever too. In the very
first phrases he hints at a more subtle interpretation of the poem. `What is
your substance, whereof are you made, / that millions of strange shadows on
you tend?' Substance and shadow. The reference is to a famous parable by
Plato, the story of `The Cave'.

Imagine, Plato suggests in The Republic, that we are in a cave with a great
fire burning behind us, whose light casts on the wall our shadows and the
shadows of everything else around us. We are chained there facing the wall,
unable to look round. We see those dancing shadows, we see life passing in
outline before our eyes, but we have no knowledge of the solid reality that
lies behind. And so-like a child whose only experience of the world comes
through watching a television screen-we come to believe that the shadows
themselves are the real thing.

The problem for all of us, Plato implies, is to recognize that beneath the
surface of appearances there may exist another level of reality. We see a thing
now in this light, now in that. We hear a poem read with this emphasis or
that. But every example that reaches our senses is at best an ephemeral and
patchy copy, a shadow-and one shadow only-of the transcendental reality
behind. Everything and everyone `has, every one, one shade', and none can
reveal all aspects of itself at once.

Except, it seems, for Shakespeare's friend: a being who, contrary both to

philosophy and natural law, can `every shadow lend'. A man seen
simultaneously by the light of a hundred fires. A poem read in a hundred
ways. A shocking new form of a man. As if, among the cut-out portraits, the
flat silhouettes which line our shadow-theatre wall, we were to come across a
Cubist painting-a portrait by Picasso or by Braque.

Early last century the Cubist painters attempted quite delib erately to
overcome the limitations of a single point of view. They took, say, a familiar
object-a guitar-broke it apart and portrayed it on the canvas as if it were being
seen from several different sides. Calculatedly lending to the object `every
shadow', they hoped that the essence, the inner substance of the object, would
shine through. They took a human face and did the same.
 But theirs was only the most literal-perhaps the most brutal-attempt to
break the chains of Plato's cave. If the Cubists knew the problem, Leonardo
da Vinci knew it too. If the Cubists solved it by superimposing different
points of view, so in another sense did Leonardo. If a hundred shadows tend
upon Braque's Lady with Guitar, surely a thousand tend upon the Mona Lisa.

`Hers is the head upon which "all the ends of the world are come"'-the
words are the critic Walter Pater's.

All the thoughts and experience of the world are etched and moulded there:
the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with
its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world,
the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like
the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the
grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen days about
her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda,
was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary.'

Leonardo, in making a portrait of a Florentine merchant's wife, has given

us a picture of someone with the power to represent all ways of existing to all
men. Now Shakespeare, in writing to an Elizabethan youth, tells us of just
such another one.

And tells us, in other poems, that he is in love with him. Alas, poor
Shakespeare! To love, and to ask for love, from such a complicated being-or
rather such a complicated nest of different beings is as foolish as to try to
play a simple serenade on Braque's guitar.

Such charismatic prodigies-the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare's friend, or, in our

own time, Nijinsky, Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe-may have an almost
magical attraction. But the spell they exert is the spell that Stanislavski called
`stage charm'. By face, by manner, by voice and personality they hint at every
possible existence; but never do they finally confirm or deny a single one of
them. All things to all people, but never at last the capacity to be any
particular thing to anyone.

Such men-such women too, of course-are dangerous. So dangerous that

Plato himself in describing his ideal Republic recommended that we ban
them from the city gates. And if Shakespeare knew Plato's story of the cave,
he also very likely knew of Plato's warning. `If any such man,' Plato writes,
`who has the skill to transform himself into all sorts of characters and
represent all sorts of things, shall come to us to show us his art, we shall
anoint him with myrrh and set a garland of wool upon his head ... and send
him away to another city.'2

Shakespeare, in the other sonnets, chides, rails, complains against his

friend. But at no time has he the courage to send the man away.

Yet Shakespeare knew-none better-the trouble he was in. The poem in its
deeper meaning is no poem of `abundant flattery'. It's a lament.
 Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented.

Shakespeare, Richard II, V. v. 31-2

In the early 1960s, when the laws of England allowed nudity on stage only if
the actor did not move, a tent at the Midsummer Fair in Cambridge offered an
interesting display. `The one and only Chamaeleon Lady,' the poster read,
`becomes Great Women in History.' The inside of the tent was dark.
`Florence Nightingale!' the showman bellowed, and the lights came up on a
naked woman, motionless as marble, holding up a lamp. The audience
cheered. The lights went down. There was a moment's shuffling on the stage.
`Joan of Arc!' and here she was, lit from a different angle, leaning on a
sword. `Good Queen Bess!' and now she had on a red wig and was carrying
an orb and sceptre . . . `But it's the same person,' said a know-all schoolboy.

Imagine now, thirty years later, a commercial for an IBM computer. A

poster on a tent announces, `The one and only IBM PC becomes Great
Information Processors of History'. The tent is dark. `WordStar!' shouts the
showman, and the lights come up on a desktop computer, displaying a
characteristic menu of commands. The lights go down. There is the sound of
changing disks. `Paintbrush!' and here is the computer displaying a different
menu. `Now, what you've all been waiting for, Lotus 123!' . . . `But it's just a
different program,' says the schoolboy.

Somewhere between these two scenarios lies the phenomenon of multiple

personality in human beings. And somewhere between these two over-easy
assessments of it lie we. One of us (NH) is a theoretical psychologist, the
other (DCD) is a philosopher, both with a longstanding interest in the nature
of personhood and of the self. We have had the opportunity during the past
year to meet several `multiples', to talk with their therapists, and to savour the
world from which they come. We give here an outsider's inside view.

We had been at the conference on Multiple Personality Disorder for two full
days before someone made the inevitable joke: `The problem with those who
don't believe in MPD is they've got Single Personality Disorder.' In the
mirror-world that we had entered, almost no one laughed.

The occasion was the Fifth International Conference on Multiple

Personality/Dissociative States in Chicago in October 1988, attended by
upwards of five hundred psychotherapists and a large but unquantifiable
number of former patients.

The Movement or the Cause (as it was called) of MPD has been
undergoing an exponential growth: 200 cases of multiplicity reported up till
1980, 1,000 known to be in treatment by 1984, 4,000 now. Women
outnumber men by at least four to one, and there is reason to believe that the
vast majorityperhaps 95 per cent-have been sexually or physically abused as
children. We heard it said there are currently more than 25,000 multiples in
North America.'

The accolade of `official diagnosis' was granted in 1980, with an entry in

the clinician's handbook, DSM-111:2

Multiple Personality. 1. The existence within an individual of two or more

distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time. 2. The
personality that is dominant at any particular time determines the individual's
behavior. 3. Each individual personality is complex and integrated with its
own unique behavior patterns and social relationships.

Typically there is said to exist a `host' personality, and several alternative

personalities or `alters'. Usually, though not always, these personalities call
themselves by different names. They may talk with different accents, dress by
choice in different clothes, frequent different locales.

None of the personalities is emotionally well rounded. The host is often

emotionally flat, and different alters express exaggerated moods: Anger,
Nurturance, Childishness, Sexiness. Because of their different affective
competence, it falls to different alters to handle different social situations.
Thus one may come out for love-making, another for playing with the kids,
another for picking a fight, and so on.
 The host personality is on stage most of the time, but the alters cut in and
displace the host when for one reason or another the host cannot cope. The
host is usually amnesic for those episodes when an alter is in charge; hence
the host is likely to have blank spots or missing time. Although general
knowledge is shared between them, particular memories are not.

The life experience of each alter is formed primarily by the episodes when
she or he is in control. Over time, and many episodes, this experience is
aggregated into a discordant view of who he or she is-and hence a separate
sense of self.

The number of alters varies greatly between patients, from just one (dual
personality) to several dozen. In the early literature most patients were
reported to have two or three, but there has been a steady increase, with a
recent survey suggesting the median number is eleven. When the family has
grown this large, one or more of the alters is likely to claim to be of different
gender.

Such at least is how we first heard multiplicity described to us. It was not,
however, until we were exposed to particular case histories, that we ourselves
began to have any feeling for the human texture of the syndrome or for the
analysis being put on it by MPD professionals. Each case must be, of course,
unique. But it is clear that common themes are beginning to emerge, and that,
based on their pooled experience, therapists are beginning to think in terms of
a `typical case history'.3 The case that follows, although in part a
reconstruction, is true to type (and life).

Mary, in her early thirties, has been suffering from depression, confusional
states, and lapses of memory. During the last few years she has been in and
out of the hospital, where she has been diagnosed variously as schizophrenic,
borderline, and manic depressive. Failing to respond to any kind of drug
treatment, she has also been suspected of malingering. She ends up
eventually in the hands of Dr R, who specializes in treating dissociative
disorders. More trusting of him than of previous doctors, Mary comes out
with the following telltale information.
 Mary's father died when she was two years old, and her mother almost
immediately remarried. Her stepfather, she says, was kind to her, although
`he sometimes went too far'. Through childhood she suffered from sick
headaches. She had a poor appetite and she remembers frequently being
punished for not finishing her food. Her teenage years were stormy, with
dramatic swings in mood. She vaguely recalls being suspended from her high
school for a misdemeanour, but her memory for her school years is patchy. In
describing them she occasionally resorts-without notice-to the third person
('She did this ... That happened to her'), or sometimes the first person plural
('We [Mary] went to Grandma's'). She is well informed in many areas, is
artistically creative, and can play the guitar; but when asked where she learnt
it, she says she does not know and deflects attention to something else. She
agrees that she is `absent-minded'-`but aren't we all?': for example, she might
find there are clothes in her closet that she can't remember buying, or she
might find she has sent her niece two birthday cards. She claims to have
strong moral values; but other people, she admits, call her a hypocrite and
liar. She keeps a diary-'to keep up', she says, `with where we're at'.

Dr R (who already has four multiples in treatment) is begin ping to

recognize a pattern. When, some months into treatment, he sees Mary's diary
and observes that the handwriting varies from one entry to the next, as if
written by several different people, he decides (in his own words) `to go for
gold'. With Mary's agreement, he suggests they should undertake an
exploratory session of hypnosis. He puts her into a light trance and requests
that the `part of Mary that hasn't yet come forward' should make herself
known. A sea-change occurs in the woman in front of him. Mary, until then a
model of decorum, throws him a flirtatious smile. `Hi, Doctor,' she says, `I'm
Sally. . . Mary's a wimp. She thinks she knows it all, but I can tell you ...'

But Sally does not tell him much, at least not yet. In subsequent sessions
(conducted now without hypnosis) Sally comes and goes, almost as if she
were playing games with Dr R. She allows him glimpses of what she calls the
`happy hours', and hints at having a separate and exotic history unknown to
Mary. But then with a toss of the head she slips away-leaving Mary,
apparently no party to the foregoing conversation, to explain where she has
been.
 Now Dr R starts seeing his patient twice a week, for sessions that are
several hours in length. In the course of the next year he uncovers the
existence not just of Sally but of a whole family of alter personalities, each
with their own characteristic style. `Sally' is coquettish, `Hatey' is angry,
`Peggy' is young and malleable. Each has a story to tell about the times when
she is `out in front'; and each has her own set of special memories. While
each of the alters claims to know most of what goes on in Mary's life, Mary
herself denies anything but hearsay knowledge of their roles.

To begin with, the change-over from one personality to another is

unpredictable and apparently spontaneous. The only clue that a switch is
imminent is a sudden look of vacancy, marked perhaps by Mary's rubbing her
brow, or covering her eyes with her hand (as if in momentary pain). But as
their confidence grows, it becomes easier for Dr R to summon different alters
`on demand'.

Dr R's goal for Mary now becomes that of `integration'-a fusing of the
different personalities into one self. To achieve this he has not only to
acquaint the different alters with each other, but also to probe the origins of
the disorder. Thus he presses slowly for more information about the
circumstances that led to Mary's `splitting'. Piecing together the evidence
from every side, he arrives at-or is forced to-a version of events that he has
already partly guessed. This is the story that Mary and the others eventually
agree upon:

When Mary was four years old, her stepfather started to take her into his
bed. He gave her the pet name Sandra, and told her that `Daddy-love' was to
be Sandra's and his little secret. He caressed her and asked for her caresses.
He ejaculated against her tummy. He did it in her bottom and her mouth.
Sometimes Mary tried to please him. Sometimes she lay still like a doll.
Sometimes she was sick and cried that she could take no more. One time she
said that she would tellbut the man hit her and said that both of them would
go to prison. Eventually, when the pain, dirt, and disgrace became too much
to bear, Mary simply `left it all behind': while the man abused her, she
dissociated and took off to another world. She left-and left Sandra in her
place.
 What happened next is, Dr R insists, no more than speculation. But he
pictures the development as follows. During the next few crucial years-those
years when a child typically puts down roots into the fabric of human society,
and develops a unitary sense of'!' and `Me'-Mary was able to function quite
effectively. Protected from all knowledge of the horror, she had a
comprehensible history, comprehensible feelings, and comprehensible
relationships with members of her family. The `Mary-person' that she was
becoming was one person with one story.

Mary's gain was, however, Sandra's loss. For Sandra knew. And this
knowledge, in the early years, was crippling. Try as she might, there was no
single story that she could tell that would embrace her contradictory
experiences; no one `Sandra-person' for her to become. So Sandra, in a state
of inchoateness, retreated to the shadows, while Mary-except for `Daddy-
love'-stayed out front.

Yet if Mary could split, then so could Sandra. And such, it seems, is what
occurred. Unable to make it all make sense, Sandra made sense from the
pieces-not consciously and deliberately, of course, but with the cunning of
unconscious design: she parcelled out the different aspects of her abuse
experience, and assigned each aspect to a different self (grafting, as it were,
each set of memories as a side-branch to the existing stock she shared with
Mary). Thus her experience of liking to please Daddy gave rise to what
became the Sally-self. Her experience of the pain and anger gave rise to
Hatey. And her experience of playing at being a doll gave rise to Peggy.

Now these descendants of the original Sandra could, with relative safety,
come out into the open. And before long, opportunities arose for them to try
their new-found strength in settings other than that of the original abuse.
When Mary lost her temper with her mother, Hatey could chip in to do the
screaming. When Mary was kissed by a boy in the playground, Sally could
kiss him back. Everyone could do what they were `good at'-and Mary's own
life was made that much simpler. This pattern of what might he termed `the
division of emotional labour' or `self-replacement therapy' proved not only to
be viable, but to be rewarding all around.
 Subsequently this became the habitual way of life. Over time, each
member of the family progressively built up her own separate store of
memories, competencies, idiosyncrasies, and social styles. But they were
living in a branching house of cards. During her teenage years, Mary's
varying moods and waywardness could be passed off as `adolescent
rebelliousness'. But in her late twenties, her true fragility began to show-and
she lapsed into confusion and depression.

Although we have told this story in what amounts to cartoon form, we have
no doubts that cases like Mary's are authentic. Or, rather, we should say we
have no doubts that there are real people and real doctors to whom this case
history could very well apply. Yet-like many others who have taken a
sceptical position about MPD-we ourselves have reservations about what
such a case history in fact amounts to.

How could anyone know for sure the events were as described? Is there
independent confirmation that Mary was abused? Does her story match with
what other people say about her? How do we know the whole thing is not just
an hysterical invention? To what extent did the doctor lead her on? What
transpired during the sessions of hypnosis? And, anyway, what does it all
really mean? What should we make of Dr R's interpretation? Is it really
possible for a single human being to have several different `selves'?

The last problem-that of providing a philosophically and scientifically

acceptable theory of MPD-is the one we have a special interest in addressing.
You might think, however, we ought to start with a discussion of the `factual
evidence': for why discuss the theoretical basis of something that has not yet
been proven to exist? Our answer is that unless and until MPD can be shown
to be theoretically possible-that is, to be neither a logical nor a scientific
contradiction-any discussion of the evidence is likely to be compromised by a
priori disbelief.

As Hume remarked in his essay `Of Miracles': `it is a general maxim

worthy of our attention ... that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle
unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more
miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.'4 In the history of
science there have been many occasions in which seemingly miraculous
phenomena were not and perhaps could not be taken seriously until some
form of theoretical permission for them had been devised (the claims of
acupuncture, for example, were assumed by Western scientists to make no
sense-and hence to be false-until the discovery of endogenous opiates paved
the way for a scientific explanation). We shall, we hope, be in a better
position to assess the testimony concerning MPD-that is, to be both critical
and generous-if we can first make a case that the phenomenon is not only
possible but even (in certain circumstances) plausible.

Many people who find it convenient or compelling to talk about the `self'
would prefer not to be asked the emperor'snew-clothes question: just what,
exactly, is a `self'? When confronted by an issue that seems embarrassingly
metaphysical, it is tempting to temporize and wave one's hands: `It's not a
thing, exactly, but more a sort of, well, a concept or an organizing principle
or.. .'This will not do. And yet what will?

Two extreme views can be and have been taken. Ask a layman what he
thinks a self is, and his unreflecting answer will probably be that a person's
self is indeed some kind of real thing: a ghostly supervisor who lives inside
his head, the thinker of his thoughts, the repository of his memories, the
holder of his values, his conscious inner `I'. Although he might be unlikely
these days to use the term `soul', it would be very much the age-old
conception of the soul that he would have in mind. A self (or soul) is an
existent entity with executive powers over the body and its own enduring
qualities. Let's call this realist picture of the self, the idea of a `proper-self'.

Contrast it, however, with the revisionist picture of the self which has
become popular among certain psychoanalysts and philosophers of mind. On
this view, selves are not things at all, but instead are explanatory fictions.
Nobody really has a soullike agency inside them: we just find it useful to
imagine the existence of this conscious inner `I' when we try to account for
their behaviour (and, in our own case, our private stream of consciousness).
We might say indeed that the self is rather like the `centre of narrative
gravity' of a set of biographical events and tendencies; but, as with a centre of
physical gravity, there's really no such thing (with mass or shape or colour).`
Let's call this non-realist picture of the self, the idea of a `fictiveself'.

Now maybe (one might think) it is just a matter of the level of description:
the plain man's proper-self corresponds to the intrinsic reality, while the
philosopher's fictive-selves correspond to people's (necessarily inadequate)
attempts to grasp that intrinsic reality. So, for example, there is indeed a
proper-Nicholas-Humphrey-self that actually resides inside one of the authors
of this essay, and alongside it there are the various fictive-Humphrey-selves
that he and his acquaintances have reconstructed: Humphrey as seen by
Humphrey, Humphrey as seen by Dennett, Humphrey as seen by Humphrey's
mother, and so on.

This suggestion, however, would miss the point of the revisionist critique.
The revisionist case is that, to repeat, there really is no proper-self: none of
the fictive-Humphreyselves-including Humphrey's own first-hand version-
corresponds to anything that actually exists in Humphrey's head.

At first sight this may not seem reasonable. Granted that whatever is inside
the head might be difficult to observe, and granted also that it might be a
mistake to talk about a 'ghostly supervisor', nonetheless there surely has to be
some kind of a supervisor in there: a supervisory brain program, a central
controller, or whatever. How else could anybody function-as most people
clearly do function-as a purposeful and relatively well-integrated agent?

The answer that is emerging from both biology and Artificial Intelligence
is that complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly
`purposeful and integrated' way simply by having lots of subsystems doing
their own thing without any central supervision. Indeed, most systems on
earth that appear to have central controllers (and are usefully described as
having them) do not. The behaviour of a termite colony provides a wonderful
example of this. The colony as a whole builds elaborate mounds, gets to
know its territory, organizes foraging expeditions, sends out raiding parties
against other colonies, and so on. The group cohesion and coordination is so
remarkable that hard-headed observers have been led to postulate the
existence of a colony's `group soul' (see Marais's `soul of the white ant'). Yet
in fact all this group wisdom results from nothing other than myriads of
individual termites, specialized as several different castes, going about their
individual business-influenced by each other, but quite uninfluenced by any
master plan.`'

Then is the argument between the realists and the revisionists being won
hands down by the revisionists? No, not completely. Something (some
thing?) is missing here. But the question of what the `missing something' is,
is being hotly debated by cognitive scientists in terms that have become
increasingly abstruse. Fortunately we can avoid-maybe even leapfrog-much
of the technical discussion by the use of an illustrative metaphor (reminiscent
of Plato's Republic, but put to quite a different use).

Consider the United States of America. At the fictive level there is surely
nothing wrong with personifying the USA and talking about it (rather like the
termite colony) as if it had an inner self. The USA has memories, feelings,
likes and dislikes, hopes, talents, and so on. It hates Communism, is haunted
by the memory of Vietnam, is scientifically creative, socially clumsy,
somewhat given to self-righteousness, rather sentimental. But does that mean
(here is the revisionist speaking) there is one central agency inside the USA
which embodies all those qualities? Of course not. There is, as it happens, a
specific area of the country where much of it comes together. But go to
Washington and ask to speak to Mr American Self, and you'd find there was
nobody home: instead, you'd find a lot of different agencies (the Defense
Department, the Treasury, the courts, the Library of Congress, the National
Science Foundation, and so on) operating in relative independence of each
other.

To be sure (and now it is the realist speaking), there is no such thing as Mr

American Self, but as a matter of fact there is in every country on earth a
Head of State: a President, Queen, Chancellor, or some such figurehead. The
Head of State may actually be non-executive; certainly he does not himself
enact all the subsidiary roles (the US President does not bear arms, sit in the
courts, play baseball, or travel to the Moon). But nevertheless he is expected
at the very least to take an active interest in all these national pursuits. The
President is meant to appreciate better than anyone the `State of the Union'.
He is meant to represent different parts of the nation to each other, and to
inculcate a common value system. Moreover-and this is most important-he is
the `spokesman' when it comes to dealing with other nation states.

That is not to say that a nation, lacking such a figurehead, would cease to
function day-to-day. But it is to say that in the longer term it may function
much better if it does have one. Indeed, a good case can be made that nations,
unlike termite colonies, require this kind of figurehead as a condition of their
political survival-especially given the complexity of international affairs.

The drift of this analogy is obvious. In short, a human being too may need
an inner figurehead-especially given the complexities of human social life.
Consider, for example, the living body known as Daniel Dennett. If we were
to look around inside his brain for a Chief Executive module, with all the
various mental properties we attribute to Dennett himself, we would be
disappointed. Nonetheless, were we to interact with Dennett on a social
plane, both we and he would soon find it essential to recognize someone-
some figurehead-as his spokesman and indeed his leader. Thus we come back
full circle, though a little lower down, to the idea of a proper-self: not a
ghostly supervisor, but something more like a `Head of Mind' with a real, if
limited, causal role to play in representing the person to himself and to the
world.'

If this is accepted (as we think it should be), we can turn to the vexed
question of selfdevelopment or self-establishment. Here the Head of State
analogy may seem at first less helpful. For one thing, in the USA at least, the
President is democratically elected by the population. For another, the
candidates for the presidency are pre-formed entities, already waiting in the
wings.

Yet is this really so? It could equally be argued that the presidential
candidates, rather than being pre-formed, are actually brought into being-
through a narrative dialectical process-by the very population to which they
offer their ser vices as President. Thus the population (or the news media)
first try out various fictive versions of what they think their `ideal President'
should be, and then the candidates adapt themselves as best they can to fill
the bill. To the extent that there is more than one dominant fiction about
`what it means to be American', different candidates mould themselves in
different ways. But in the end only one can be elected-and he will of course
claim to speak for the whole nation.

In very much a parallel way, we suggest, a human being first creates-

unconsciously-one or more ideal fictive-selves and then elects the best
supported of these into office as her Head of Mind. A significant difference
in the human case, however, is that there is likely to he considerably more
outside influence. Parents, friends, and even enemies may all contribute to
the image of `what it means to be me', as well as-and maybe over and above-
the internal news media. Daddy, for example, might lean on the growing
child to impose an invasive fictiveself.

Thus a human being does not start out as single or as multiple; she starts
out without any Head of Mind at all. In the normal course of development,
she slowly gets acquainted with the various possibilities of selfhood that
`make sense', partly through her own observation, partly through outside
influence. In most cases a majority view emerges, strongly favouring one
version of `the real me', and it is that version which is installed as her elected
Head of Mind. But in some cases the competing fictive-selves are so equally
balanced, or different constituencies within her are so unwilling to accept the
result of the election, that constitutional chaos reignsand there are snap
elections (or coups d'etat) all the time.

Could a model inspired by (underlying, rendering honest) this analogy

account for the memory black-spots, differences in style, and other
symptomatology of MPD? Certainly the analogy provides a wealth of detail
suggesting so. Once in office, a new Head of State typically downplays
certain 'unfortunate' aspects of his nation's history (especially those
associated with the rival Head of State who immediately preceded him).
Moreover, he himself, by standing for particular national values, affects the
course of future history by encouraging the expression of those values by the
population (and so, by a kind of feedback, confirming his own role).

Let's go back to the case of Mary. As a result of her experience of abuse,

she (the whole, disorganized, conglomeration of parts) came to have several
alternative pictures of the real Mary, each championed by different
constituencies within her. So incompatible were these pictures, yet so strong
were the electoral forces, that there could be no lasting agreement on who
should represent her. For a time the Mary constituency got its way,
overriding the Sandra constituency. But later the Sandra forces subdivided, to
yield Sally, Hatey, Peggy; and when the opportunities arose, these reformed
forces began to win electoral battles. She became thus constitutionally
unstable, with no permanent solution to the question of `who I really am'.
Each new (temporarily elected) Head of Mind emphasized different aspects
of her experience and blocked off others; and each brought out exaggerated
character traits.

We have talked here in metaphors. But translations into the terms of

current cognitive science would not be difficult to formulate. First, what
sense can be given to the notion of a `Head of Mind'? The analogy with a
spokesman may not be far off the literal truth. The language-producing
systems of the brain have to get their instructions from somewhere, and the
very demands of pragmatics and grammar would conspire to confer
something like Head of Mind authority on whatever subsystem currently
controls their input. E. M. Forster once remarked, `How can I tell what I
think until I see what I say?' The four `I's' in this sentence are meant to refer
to the same thing. But this grammatical tradition may depend-and may
always have depended-on the fact that the thought expressed in Forster's
question is quite literally self-confirming: what `I' (my self) thinks is what `I'
(my language apparatus) says.

There can, however, be no guarantee that either the speaker or anyone else
who hears him over an extended period will settle on there being just a single
`I'. Suppose, at different times, different subsystems within the brain produce
`clusters' of speech that simply cannot easily be interpreted as the output of a
single self. Then-as a Bible scholar may discover when working on the
authorship of what is putatively a singleauthored text-it may turn out that the
clusters make best sense when attributed to different selves.

How about the selective amnesia shown by different Heads of Mind? To

readers who have even a passing knowledge of computer information
processing, the idea of mutually inaccessible `directories' of stored
information will already be familiar. In cognitive psychology, new
discoveries about statedependent learning and other evidence of
modularization in the brain have led people to recognize that failure of access
between different subsystems is the norm rather than the exception. Indeed,
the old Cartesian picture of the mind `transparent to itself' now appears to be
rarely if ever achievable (or even desirable) in practice. In this context, the
out-of- touchness of different selves no longer looks so startling.

What could be the basis for the different `value systems' associated with
rival Heads of Mind? At another level of analysis, psychopharmacological
evidence suggests that the characteristic emotional style of different
personalities could correspond to the brain-wide activation or inhibition of
neural pathways that rely on different neurotransmitter chemicals. Thus the
phlegmatic style of Mary's host personality could be associated with low
norepinephrine levels, the shift to the carnal style of Sally with high
norepinephrine, and the out-of-control Hatey with low dopamine.

Even the idea of an `election' of the current Head of Mind is not

implausible. Events very like elections take place in the brain all the time,
whenever coherent patterns of activity compete for control of the same
network. Consider what happens, for example, when the visual system
receives two conflicting images at the two eyes. First there is an attempt at
fusion; but if this proves to be unstable, `binocular rivalry' results, with the
input from one eye completely taking over while the other is suppressed.
Thus we already have, at the level of visual neurophysiology, clear evidence
of the mind's general preference for single-mindedness over completeness.

These ideas about the nature of selves are by no means altogether new. C. S.
Peirce, for instance, expressed a similar vision in 1905:

A person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is `saying

to himself', that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in
the flow of time."

From within the psychoanalytic tradition, Heinz Kohut wrote:

I feel that a formulation which puts the self into the centre of the personality
as the initiator of all actions and as the recipient of all impressions exacts too
high a price ... If we instead put our trust in empirical observation .. we will
see different selves, each of them a lasting psychological configuration, ...
fighting for ascendancy, one blocking out the other, forming compromises
with each other, and acting inconsistently with each other at the same time. In
general, we will witness what appears to be an uneasy victory of one self over
all others.9

Robert Jay Lifton has defined the self as the `inclusive symbol of one's own
organism'; and in his discussions of what he calls `proteanism' (an' endemic
form of multiplicity in modern human beings) and `doubling' (as in the
double life led by Nazi doctors), he has stressed the struggle that all human
beings have to keep their rival self-symbols-in symbiotic harmony.''

These ideas have, however, been formulated without reference to the

newly gathered evidence on MPD. Moreover, the emphasis of almost all the
earlier work has been on the underlying continuity of human psychic
structure: a single stream of consciousness manifesting itself in now this, now
that configuration. Nothing in the writings of Kohut or of Lifton would have
prepared us for the radical discontinuity of consciousness that-if it really
exists-is manifest in the case of a multiple like Mary.

Which brings us to the question that has been left hanging all along: does
`real MPD' exist? We hope that, in the light of the preceding discussion, we
shall be able to come closer to an answer.

What would it mean for MPD to be `real'? We suggest that, if the model
we have outlined is anything like right, it would mean at least the following:

1. The subject will have, at different times, different `spokespersons',

corresponding to separate Heads of Mind. Both objectively and
subjectively, this will be tantamount to having different `selves'
because the access each such spokesman will have to the memories,
attitudes, and thoughts of other spokespersons will he, in general, as
indirect and intermittent as the access one human being can have to
 the mind of another.

2. Each self, when present, will claim to have conscious control over the
subject's behaviour. That is, this self will consider the subject's
current actions to be her actions, experiences to be her experiences,
memories to be her memories, and so on. (At times the self out front
may be conscious of the existence of other selves-she may even hear
them talking in the background-but she will not be conscious with
them).

3. Each self will be convinced-as it were by `her own rhetoric'-about her

own integrity and personal importance.

4. This self-rhetoric will be convincing not only to the subject but also
(other things being equal) to other people with whom she interacts.

5. Different selves will be interestingly different. That is, each will

adopt a distinctive style of presentationwhich very likely will be
associated with differences in physiology.

To which we would add-not necessarily as a criterion of `real multiplicity' but

none the less as an important factual issuethat:

6. The `splitting' into separate selves will generally have occurred before
the patient entered therapy.

Now, what are the facts about MPD? The first thing to say is that in no
case do we know that all these criteria have been met. What we have to go on
instead is a plethora of isolated stories, autobiographical accounts, clinical
reports, police records, and just a few scientific studies. Out of those the
following answers form.

Does the phenomenon exist?

There can be no doubt that what might be called a `candidate phenomenon'

exists. There are literally thousands of people living today who, in the course
of clinical investigation, have presented themselves as having several
independent selves (or `spokespersons' for their minds). Such cases have been
described in reputable scientific journals, recorded on film, shown on
television, cross-examined in law courts. We ourselves have met with several
of them and have even argued with these separate selves about why we
should believe the stories that they tell us. Sceptics may still choose to doubt
what the phenomenon amounts to, but they should no longer doubt that it
occurs.

Do multiples themselves believe in what they are saying?

Certainly they seem to do so. In the clinic, at least, different selves stoutly
insist on their own integrity, and resist any suggestion that they might be
`play-acting' (a suggestion which, admittedly, most therapists avoid). The
impression they make is not of someone who is acting, but rather of a
troubled individual who is doing her best-in what can only be described as
difficult circumstances-to make sense of what she takes to he the facts of her
experience.

As persuasive as anything is the apparently genuine puzzlement that

patients show when confronted by facts they can't make sense of. Thus one
woman told us of how, when-as frequently happened-she came home and
found her neat living room all messed up, she suspected that other people
must be playing tricks on her. A young man described how he found himself
being laughed at by his friends for having been seen around gay bars: he tried
over several months to grow a beard to prove his manhood, but as soon as the
stubble began to sprout, someone-he did not know who-shaved it off. A
woman discovered that money was being mysteriously drawn from her bank
account, and told the police that she was being impersonated. We have heard
of a case of a highly sceptical patient who refused to accept her therapist's
diagnosis until they both learned that one of her alters was seeing another
therapist.

That is not to say that such stories would always stand up to critical
examination: examination, that is, by the standards of `normal human life'.
But this, it seems, is quite as much a problem for the patient as for anyone
else. These people clearly know as well as anybody that there is something
wrong with them and that their lives don't seem to run as smoothly as other
people's. In fact it would be astonishing (and grounds for our suspicion) if
they did not: for, to coin a phrase, they were not born yesterday, and they are
generally too intelligent not to recognise that in some respects their
experience is bizarre. We met a woman, Gina, with a male alter, Bruce, and
asked Bruce the obvious `normal' question: when he goes to the bathroom,
does he choose the Ladies or the Gents? He confessed that he goes to the
Ladies-because `something went wrong with my anatomy' and `I turned out
to be a male living in a woman's body'.

For several years a multiple newsletter-S4OS (Speaking for Our Selves)-

circulated, in which patients shared with each other their experiences and
strategies. In September 1987, S4OS claimed 691 subscribers.''

Do they succeed in persuading other people to believe in them?

We have no doubt that the therapist who diagnoses MPD is fully convinced
that he is dealing with several different selves. But, from our standpoint, a
more crucial issue is whether other people who are not already au fait with
the diagnosis accept this way of looking at things. According to our analysis
(or indeed any other we can think of), selves have a public as well as a
private role to play: indeed, they exist primarily to handle social interactions.
It would therefore be odd, to say the least, if some or all of a patient's selves
were to be kept entirely secret from the world.

On this point the evidence is surprisingly patchy. True enough, in many

cases the patient herself will-in the context of the therapeutic situation-tell
stories of her encounters in the outside world. But what we need is evidence
from a third source: a neutral source that is in no way linked to the context in
which splitting is `expected' (as might still be the case with another doctor, or
another patient or even a television journalist). We need to know whether the
picture of her multiple life that the therapist and patient have worked out
together jibes with what other people have independently observed.

Prima facie, it sounds like the kind of evidence it would be easy to obtain-
by asking family, friends, workmates, or whomever. There is the problem, of
course, that certain lines of enquiry are ruled out on ethical grounds, or
because their pursuit would jeopardize the patient's ongoing therapy, or
would simply involve an unjustifiable amount of time. Nonetheless it is
disappointing to discover how few such enquiries have been made.

Many multiple patients are married and have families; many have regular
employment. Yet, again and again it seems that no one on the outside has in
fact noticed anything peculiar-at least not so peculiar. Maybe, as several
therapists explained to us, their patients are surprisingly good at 'covering up'
(secrecy, beginning in childhood, is part and parcel of the syndrome-and in
any case the patient has probably learned to avoid putting herself or others on
the spot). Maybe other people have detected something odd and dismissed it
as nothing more than inconstancy or unreliability (after all, everyone has
changing moods, most people are forgetful, and many people lie). Gina told
us of how she started to make love to a man she met at an office party but
grew bored with him and left-leaving `one of the kids' (another alter) cringing
in her place. The man, she said, was quite upset. But no one has heard his
side of the story.

To be sure, in many cases, perhaps even most, there is some form of post-
diagnostic confirmation from outside: the husband who, when the diagnosis
is explained to him, exclaims `Now it all makes sense!', or the boyfriend who
volunteers to the therapist tales of what it is like to be `jerked around' by the
tag-team alters of his partner. One patient's husband admitted to mixed
emotions about the impending cure or integration of his wife: `I'll miss the
little ones!'

The problem with such retrospective evidence is, however, that the
informant may simply be acceding to what might be termed a `diagnosis of
convenience'. It is probably the general rule that once multiplicity has been
recognized in therapy, and the alters have been `given permission' to come
out, there are gains to be had all round from adopting the patient's preferred
style of presentation. When we ourselves were introduced to a patient who
switched three times in the course of half an hour, we were chastened to
discover how easily we ourselves fell in with addressing her as if she were
now a man, now a woman, now a child-a combination of good manners on
our part and an anxiety not to drive the alter personality away (as Peter Pan
said, `Every time someone says "I don't believe in fairies", there is a fairy
somewhere who falls down dead').

Any interaction with a patient involves cooperation and respect, which

shade imperceptibly into collusion. The alternative might he surreptitious
observation in extra-clinical situations, but this would be as hard to justify as
to execute. The result is that one is limited to encounters that-in our limited
experience-have an inevitable seance-like quality to them.

Therapists with whom we have talked are defensive on this issue. We have
to say, however, that, so far as we can gather, evidence for the external social
reality of MPD is weak.

Are there `real' differences between the different selves?

One therapist confided to us that, in his view, it was not uncommon for the
different selves belonging to a single patient to be more or less identical-the
only thing distinguishing them being their selective memories. More usually,
however, the selves are described as being manifestly different in both mental
and bodily character. The question is: do such differences go beyond the
range of `normal' acting out?

At the anecdotal level, the evidence is tantalizing. For example, a

psychopharmacologist (whom we have reason to consider as hard-headed as
they come) told us of how he discovered to his astonishment that a male
patient, whose host personality could be sedated with 5mg of valium, had an
alter personality who was apparently quite impervious to the drug: the alter
remained as lively as ever when given a 50mg intravenous dose (sufficient in
most people to produce anaesthesia).

Any would-be objective investigator of MPD is soon struck by the

systematic elusiveness of the phenomena. Wellcontrolled scientific studies
are few (and for obvious reasons difficult to do). Nonetheless, what data there
are all go to show that multiple patients-in the context of the clinic-may
indeed undergo profound psychophysiological changes when they change
personality state. There is preliminary evidence, for example, of changes in
handedness, voice patterns, evoked-response brain activity, and cerebral
blood flow. When samples of the different handwritings of a multiple are
mixed with samples by different hands, police handwriting experts have been
unable to identify them. There are data to suggest differences in allergic
reactions and thyroid function ing. Drug studies have shown differences in
responsiveness to alcohol and tranquillizers. Tests of memory have indicated
genuine cross-personality amnesia for newly acquired information (while,
interestingly enough, newly acquired motor skills are carried over).''

When and how did the multiplicity come into being?

The assumption made by most people in the MPD Movement-and which we

so far have gone along with-is that the splitting into several selves (with all
the sequelae we have been discussing) originates in early childhood." The
therapist therefore brings to light a pre-existing syndrome, and in no way is
he (or she, for many therapists are women) responsible for creating MPD.
But an alternative possibility of course exists, namely that the phenomenon-
however genuine at the time that it is described-has been brought into being
(and perhaps is being maintained) by the therapist himself.

We have hinted already at how little evidence there is that multiplicity has
existed before the start of treatment. A lack of evidence that something exists
is not evidence that it does not, and several papers at the Chicago meeting
reported recently discovered cases of what seems to have been incipient
multiplicity in children. Nonetheless, the suspicion must surely arise that
MPD is an `iatrogenic' condition (that is, generated by the doctor).

Folie a deux between doctor and patient would be, in the annals of
psychiatry, nothing new. 14 It is now generally recognized that the outbreak
of `hysterical symptoms' in female patients at the end of the nineteenth
century (including paralysis, anaesthesia, and so on) was brought about by
the overenthusiastic attention of doctors (such as Charcot) who succeeded in
creating the symptoms they were looking for. In this regard, hypnosis, in
particular, has always been a dangerous tool. The fact that in the diagnosis of
multiplicity hypnosis is frequently (although not always) employed, the
closeness of the therapist-patient relationship, and the intense interest shown
by therapists in the `drama' of MPD are clearly grounds for legitimate
concern.

This concern is in fact one that senior members of the MPD Movement
openly share. At the Chicago conference, a full day was given to discussing
the problem of iatrogenesis. Speaker after speaker weighed in to warn their
fellow therapists against `fishing' for multiplicity, misuse of hypnosis,
'fascination' by the alter personalities, the `Pygmalion effect', uncontrolled
`countertransference', and what was bravely called `major league malpractice'
(that is, sexual intimacy with patients). Although the message was that there
is no need to invent the syndrome since you'll recognize the real thing when
you see it, it is clear that those who have been in the business for some time
understand only too well how easy it is to be misleading and misled.

A patient presents herself with a history of, let's call it, 'general muddle'.
She is worried by odd juxtapositions and gaps in her life, by signs that she
has sometimes behaved in ways that seem strange to her; she is worried she's
going mad. Under hypnosis the therapist suggests that it is not her, but some
other part of her that is the cause of trouble. And lo, some other part of her
emerges. But since this is some other part, she requires-and hence acquires-
another name. And since a person with a different name must be a different
person, she requires-and hence acquires-another character. Easy; especially
easy if the patient is the kind of person who is highly suggestible and readily
dissociates, as is typical of those who have been subjected to abuse.

Could something like this possibly be the background to almost every case
of MPD? We defer to the best and most experienced therapists in saying that
it could not. In some cases there seems to be no question that the alternate
personality makes its debut in therapy as if already formed. We have seen a
videotape of one case where, in the first and only session of hypnosis, a
pathetic young woman, Bonny, underwent a remarkable transformation into a
character, calling herself `Death', who shouted murderous threats against both
Bonny and the hypnotist. Bonny had previously made frequent suicide
attempts, of which she denied any knowledge. Bonny subsequently tried to
kill another patient on the hospital ward and was discovered by a nurse
lapping her victim's blood. It would be difficult to write off Bonny/Death as
the invention of an overeager therapist.

On the general run of cases, we can only withhold judgement, not just
because we do not know the facts, but also because we are not sure a
`judgemental' judgement is in order. Certainly we do not want to align
ourselves with those who would jump to the conclusion that if MPD arises in
the clinic rather than in a childhood situation it cannot be `real'. The parallel
with hysteria is worth pursuing. As Charcot himself demonstrated only too
convincingly, a woman who feels no pain when a pin is stuck into her arm
feels no pain-and calling her lack of reaction a `hysterical symptom' does not
make it any the less remarkable. Likewise a woman who at the age of thirty is
now living the life of several different selves is now living the life of several
different selves-and any doubts we might have about how she came to be that
way should not blind us to the fact that such is now the way she is.

According to the model we proposed, no one starts off as either multiple or

single. In every case there has to be some sort of external influence that tips
the balance this way or that (or back again). Childhood may indeed be the
most vulnerable phase; but it may also very well be that in certain people a
state of incipient multiplicity persists much longer, not coming to fruition
until later life.

The following story is instructive. A patient, Frances, who is now

completely integrated, was telling us about the family of selves she used to
live with-among whom she counted Rachel, Esther, Daniel, Sarah, and
Rebecca. We were curious as to why a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant should
have taken on these Hebrew names, and asked her where the names had come
from. `That's simple,' she said. `Dad used to play Nazis and Jews with me;
but he wanted me to be an innocent victim, so every time he raped me he
gave me a new Jewish name.'

Here, it seems, that (as with Mary) the abuser at the time of the abuse
explicitly, even if unwittingly, suggested the personality structure of MPD.
But suppose that Frances had not had the `help' of her father in reaching this
`solution'. Suppose she had remained in a state of self-confusion, muddling
through her first thirty years until a sympathetic therapist provided her with a
way out (and a way forward). Would Frances have been less of a multiple
than she turned out to be? In our view, No.

There must be of course a world of difference between an abuser's and a

therapist's intentions in suggesting that a person contains several separate
selves. Nonetheless, the consequences for the structure of the patient/victim's
mind would not be so dissimilar. `Patrogenic' and `iatrogenic' multiplicity
could be-and in our view would be-equally real.

Forty years ago, two early commentators, W. S. Taylor and M. F. Martin,

wrote:

Apparently most ready to accept multiple personality are (a) persons who are
very naive and (b) persons who have worked with cases or near cases."

The same is still largely true today. Indeed, the medical world remains in
general hostile to-even contemptuous of-MPD. Why?

We have pointed to several of the reasons. The phenomenon is considered

by many people to be scientifically or philosophically absurd. We think that
is a mistake. It is considered to be unsupported by objective evidence. We
think that is untrue. It is considered to be an iatrogenic folly. We think that,
even where that's so, the syndrome is a real one nonetheless.

But there is another reason, which we cannot brush aside: and that is the
cliquish-almost cultish-character of those who currently espouse the cause of
MPD. In a world where those who are not for MPD are against it, it is
perhaps not sur prising that `believers' have tended to close ranks. Maybe it is
not surprising either that at meetings like the one we attended in Chicago
there is a certain amount of well-meaning exaggeration and one-upmanship.
We were, however, not prepared for what-if it occurred in a church-would
amount to 'bearing witness'.

`How many multiples have you got?' one therapist asks another over
breakfast in Chicago, `I'm on my fifth."Oh, I'm just a novice-two, so far.'
`You know Dr Q-she's got fifteen in treatment; and I gather she's a multiple
herself.' At lunch: `I've got a patient whose eyes change colour.' `I've got one
whose different personalities speak six different languages, none of which
they could possibly have learned.' `My patient Myra had her fallopian tubes
tied, but when she switched to Katey she got pregnant.' At supper: `Her
parents got her to breed babies for human sacrifice; she was a surrogate
mother three times before her eighteenth birthday.' `At three years old, Peter
was made to kill his baby brother and eat his flesh.' `There's a lot of it about:
they reckon that a quarter of our patients have been victims of satanic rituals.'

To be fair, this kind of gossip belies the deeper seriousness of the majority
of therapists who deal with MPD. But that it occurs at all, and is seemingly so
little challenged, could well explain why people outside the Movement want
to keep their distance. Not to put too fine a point on it, there is everywhere
the sense that both therapists and patients are participators in a Mystery to
which ordinary standards of objectivity do not apply. Multiplicity is seen as a
semi-inspired, semi-heroic condition: and almost every claim relating either
to the patients' abilities or to the extent of their childhood suffering is listened
to in sympathetic awe. Some therapists clearly consider it a privilege to he
close to such extraordinary human beings (and the more of them in treatment,
the more status the therapist acquires).

We were struck by the fact that some of the very specialists who have
conducted the scientific investigations we mentioned earlier are sympathetic
also to wild claims. We frankly cannot accept the truth of many of the
circulating stories, and in particular we were unimpressed by this year's
favourite, namely, all the talk of the `satanic cult' origins of many cases of
MPD.

However, an astronomer who believes in astrology would not for that

reason be untrustworthy as an astronomical observer, and it would be wrong
to find the phenomenon of multiplicity guilty by association. The climate in
which the discussion is currently occurring is regrettable but probably
unavoidable, not because all the true believers are gullible and all the
opponents narrow-minded, but because those who have worked with cases
know they have seen something so remarkable as to defy conventional
description, and, in the absence of an accepted conceptual framework for
description, they are driven by a sense of fidelity to their own experience to
making hyperbolic claims.

We draw, for the time being, the following conclusions.

1. While the unitary solution to the problem of human selfhood is for

most people socially and psychologically desirable, it may not
always be attainable.

2. The possibility of developing multiple selves is inherent in every

human being. Multiplicity is not only biologically and
psychologically plausible, but in some cases it may be the best-even
the only-available way of coping with a person's life experience.

3. Childhood trauma (usually, though not necessarily, sexual) is

especially likely to push a person towards incipient multiplicity. It is
possible that the child may progress from there to becoming a full-
fledged multiple of his or her own accord; but in general it seems
more likely that external pressure-or sanction-is required.

4. The diagnosis of MPD has become, within a particular psychiatric

lobby, a diagnostic fad. Although the existence of the clinical
syndrome is now beyond dis pute, there is as yet no certainty as to
how much of the multiplicity currently being reported has existed
prior to therapeutic intervention.

5. Whatever the particular history, the end result would appear to be in

many cases a person who is genuinely split. That is, the grounds for
assigning several selves to such a human being can be as good as-
indeed, the same as-those for assigning a single self to a normal
human being.

It remains the case that even in North America, the diagnosis of MPD has
become common only recently, and elsewhere in the world it is still seldom
made at all. We must surely assume that the predisposing factors have always
been widely present in the human population. So where has all the
multiplicity been hiding?
 To end with further questions, and not answer them, may be the best way
of conveying where we ourselves have got to. Here are some (almost
random) puzzles that occur to us about the wider cultural significance of the
phenomenon.

In many parts of the world the initiation of children into adult society has,
in the past, involved cruel rites, including sexual and physical abuse
(sodomy, mutilation, and other forms of battering). Is the effect (maybe even
the intention) of such rites to create adults with a tendency to MPD? Are
there contexts where an ability to split might be (or have been thought to he)
a positive advantage-for example, when it comes to coping with physical or
social hardship? Do multiples make better warriors?

In contemporary America, many hundreds of people claim to have been

abducted by aliens from UFOs. The abduction experience is not recognized
as such at first, and is described instead as `missing time' for which the
person has no memories. Under hypnosis, however, the subject typically
recalls having been kidnapped by humanoid creatures who did harmful things
to her or him-typically involving some kind of sexrelated surgical operation
(for example, sharp objects being thrust into the vagina). Are these people
recounting a mythic version of an actual childhood experience? During the
period described as missing time, was another personality in charge-a
personality for whom the experience of abuse was all too real?

Plato banned actors from his Republic on the grounds that they were
capable of `transforming themselves into all sorts of characters'-a bad
example, he thought, for solid citizens. Actors commonly talk about `losing'
themselves in their roles. How many of the best actors have been abused as
children? For how many is acting a culturally sanctioned way of letting their
multiplicity come out?

The therapists we talked to were struck by the `charisma' of their patients.

Charisma is often associated with a lack of personal boundaries, as if the
subject is inviting everyone to share some part of him. How often have
beguiling demagogues been multiples? Do we have here another explanation
for the myth of `the wound and the bow'?
 Queen Elizabeth I, at the age of two, went through the experience of
having her father, Henry VIII, cut off her mother's head. Elizabeth in later life
was notoriously changeable, loving and vindictive. Was Elizabeth a multiple?
Joan of Arc had trances, and cross-dressed as a boy. Was she?
Before St Valentine's day comes round again, it may be a good idea to brush
up on a few facts about the saint. After all, you never know when the
conversation over the candlelit dinner table may start to drag-and a flash of
erudition may be just the ticket.

Now here's a fact. St Valentine, it seems, was not one saint, but two: one
was a Roman priest, the other was bishop of Terni. They both lived in the
fifth century AD, were both martyrs, died on the same day, and were buried
in the same street of ancient Rome. Indeed, they were so much alike that no
one can be sure they were not actually one and the same persona `doublet', as
the Dictionary of Saints explains.'

`A "doublet", sweetheart?' `Well, yes, that's presumably why it's our

special day. Two people becoming one. Me and you united for ever. When
you die, I die. Just like St Valentine and St Valentine.'

The had news comes when I search further. `There is,' the Dictionary says,
`nothing in either [sic] Valentine legend to account for the custom of
choosing a partner of the opposite sex and sending "valentines" on 14
February.' Really? The Encyclopaedia Britannica confirms it: `The
association of the lovers' festival with St Valentine is purely accidental, and
seems to arise from the fact that the feast of the saint falls in early spring.'2

Do they mean to tell us it could equally well have been St Colman's day
(18 February) or St Polycarp's day (23 February)? Try sending your loved
one a `Colman'; try saying, `Will you be my Polycarp?' Valentine, on the
other hand, has the right music to it-it rhymes with thine, mine, and entwine.
Valentine it clearly has to be.

But if the saint(s) were not responsible, who was? Encyclopaedias have
their uses: `VALENTINIAN I: Roman emperor ... The great blot on his
memory was his cruelty, which at times was frightful.' `VALENTINIAN II:
Son of the above ... murdered in Gaul.' `VALENTINIAN III: He was
selfindulgent, incompetent, and vindictive.'

Oh dear. But who's this next? VALENTINUS and the VALENTIANS:

`Valentinus (2nd century) was the most prominent leader of the Gnostic
movement ... The lofty spirituality of the Gnostics degenerated over and over
again into a distinctly sensual attitude. The chief sacrament of the
Valentinians seems to have been that of the bridal chamber.'

Now, this is more like it. To become a Valentinian the initiate had to
undergo a mystic marriage with the angel of death, the emissary of the great
white mother goddess (who was represented as a sow). The priest said: `Let
the seed of light descend into thy bridal chamber; receive the bridegroom and
give place to him, and open thine arms to embrace him ... We must now
become as one.'

So perhaps Valentine is all to do with two people merging into one. On

which subject I was anyway intending to quote John Donne:

The poem was written to celebrate a Valentine's Day marriage. But was
Donne in reality some kind of secret Valen tinian Gnostic? He knew, it
seems, about the death aspect of the marriage:
He knew that love-making involved a symbolic resurrection:

Perhaps, too, he knew about the thirty concentric heavens (aeons) of Gnostic
cosmology:

Why `Phoenixes'? Well, maybe because the mother goddess of the

Gnostics originated in Phoenicia. But here is the real clincher. Valentinus, it
turns out, was a candidate for the bishopric of Rome, but failed to be
appointed. So Donne has wrapped it up in code with a play on the words `not
a Bishop' and `Bishop's knot':

Whether I shall get a footnote in the next collected works, I do not know.
But I like to think that my honey-bunch will be suitably impressed.
Altruistic behaviour, where it occurs in nature, is commonly assumed to
belong to one or other of two generically different types. Either it is an
example of `kinselected altruism' such as occurs between blood relatives-a
worker bee risking her life to help her sister, for example, or a human father
giving protection to his child. Or it is an example of `reciprocal altruism' such
as occurs between non-relatives who have entered into a pact to exchange
favours-one male monkey supporting another unrelated male in a fight over a
female, for example, or one bat who has food to spare offering it to another
unrelated individual who is hungry.

The first kind of altruism was given a theoretical explanation by William

Hamilton, who showed how a gene that predisposes its carrier to help a close
relative can prosper in the population, provided the genetic relationship
between the two individuals is such that the cost to the giver is more than
made up for by the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the degree of
relatedness.' The second kind was given an explanation by Robert Trivers,
who showed how a gene that predisposes its carrier to help a like-minded
friend can also prosper, provided the social relationship between the
individuals is such that the costs to the giver are more than made up for by
the benefits that can be expected to be received later in exchange.2

These two kinds of textbook altruism-the free gift of help to a relative, or

the exchange of help between friends-have for twenty years now been
considered biologically, conceptually, and even morally distinct. In fact, so
different are they supposed to he, that it has been claimed-on both sides-that
only one of them should be counted genuinely `altruistic'. Hamilton, for
instance, in a recent review of the development of his own ideas has written:

My quest for biological altruism had carefully excluded anything I saw as

possibly reciprocatory because it seemed that although behaviours of this
category could mount a semblance of altruism, a donor always expected a
benefit itself, at least in the long term: it was a semblance only. I still believe
the reciprocal altruism that Trivers explained to me was misnamed.3

Trivers, by contrast, in the opening lines of his original paper on

reciprocation defined altruistic behaviour as behaviour occurring specifically
between individuals who are `not closely related', and he played down
altruistic acts within the family on the grounds that the altruist might `merely
be contributing to the survival of his own genes'. Models like Hamilton's,
according to Trivers, were `designed to take the altruism out of altruism'.4

Evidently the fathers of the two theories never doubted that the difference
between them was a deep and important one. And, even with the moral
question put aside, most later commentators have tended to agree. Although
there is still some disagreement about the terms to use, almost everybody
now accepts that there really are two very different things being talked about
here: so that whenever we come across an example of helping behaviour in
nature we can and ought to assign it firmly to one category or the other.

There have, however, been one or two dissenting voices. Stephen

Rothstein, for example, in a little-known paper titled `Reciprocal Altruism
and Kin Selection Are Not Clearly Separable Phenomena', argued that-for
reasons I shall develop further in a moment-many examples of reciprocal
altruism must actually involve some degree of kin selection.' He was building
on an earlier idea of Richard Dawkins's that two individuals who both carry
copies of the same gene for altruism might be able to recognize one another
by the very fact that they both tend to behave altruistically towards someone
else-which in principle would allow them to promote their own genetic
interests as altruists by selectively aiding each other (this being a special
variant of what Dawkins called the `green beard effect').' Dawkins wrote of
this merely as a hypothetical possibility. But Rothstein realized that in many
cases of reciprocal altruism it may in effect be close to the reality, since
reciprocal altruists do in fact make a point of choosing other reciprocal
altruists as trading partners.

Clearly, if Rothstein is right, reciprocal altruism may actually shade into

kin selection. In which case the distinction between the two cannot be
anything like so absolute as we have been led to believe. But suppose, now,
there were to be further arguments in the same vein. Suppose it could be
argued that kin selection also shades into reciprocal altruism. In that case we
might want to challenge the reality of the distinction altogether, and might
even wonder whether it would not be best to start the theoretical discussion
over again. It is the purpose of the present essay to propose just such a radical
rethink. For I believe Rothstein's paper did indeed tell only half the story, and
that, when the other side is included too, it becomes clear that we can no
longer continue looking at the landscape of altruism in the way we have
grown used to. Rothstein asked us to recognize that altruistic behaviour
towards friends must in many cases end up benefiting shared genes: but, I
shall now argue, it is just as important we should recognize that altruistic
behaviour towards kin must in many cases end up bringing a return of
benefits to the altruist himself.

The arguments-Rothstein's and this new one of my ownare mirror images

of each other, and, at the risk of being pedantic, I shall lay them out one after
the other so as to show the structural similarities. But I shall begin with the
new argument about how kinselected altruism must often involve a degree of
reciprocation, before giving my version of Rothstein's original argument
about how reciprocal altruism involves a degree of kin selection.

Let us begin then by taking a new look at the case of kinselected altruism:
the case where we are dealing with an individual who has a gene that
predisposes him to give help to a relative. Hamilton's famous point here was
that every time this individual helps his relative he is benefiting any copy of
the altruistic gene that the relative himself may happen to be carrying. So
that, provided the cost, C, to the altruist is sufficiently small, and the benefit
to the recipient, B, is sufficiently large, and there is in fact a sufficient degree
of relationship between the two of them, r-provided, to be precise, that C <
Br-the altruistic act will have provided a net gain in fitness to the gene.
Which is why, in many circumstances, the gene is likely to evolve.

Hamilton's point is, of course, both valid and important. Nonetheless, I

would now suggest that there has always been something nearly as important
being ignored by any such simple analysis: namely, that every time the
kinselected altruist helps his relative he is also helping keep alive another
individual, who, assuming he does have a copy of the altruistic gene, can be
counted on to behave the same way towards his relatives-among whom is the
original altruist himself. Hence the kin altruist, by helping his relative, is in
effect increasing the pool of extant individuals from whom he himself may
one day receive help.

Suppose, for example, that I have a gene that predisposes me to save my

brother from drowning. Hamilton pointed out that in performing this altruistic
act I have benefited any copy of my gene that is carried by my brother. But
the new point is that I have in addition ensured the continued survival of
someone who when the occasion arises is quite likely to save me from
drowning. Therefore the pay-off to my fitness as a kin altruist will very likely
come not only indirectly through the benefit to any copy of the altruism gene
carried by my relative, but also directly through the benefit to my own gene.

It is true, as Hamilton would no doubt have wished to stress, that if I

actually go so far as to commit suicide in order to save my brother, I will then
miss out on any future return of benefits directly to myself. The same must in
effect be true if I am already so old that I cannot expect to live for long or to
have any more children in the future. In such cases, the return of benefits to
me will only be able to come as a proxy benefit to one or other of my
surviving descendants. Thus if I save a brother much younger than myself
from drowning, it may be not me myself but, for example, my son (his
nephew) who stands to benefit from his survival. But even here there is still
going to be the chance of a significant return to my own direct line of genes.

The chances of either the altruist himself or any of his descendants getting
this return of benefits is, of course, bound to depend on whether the relative
who has been helped stays around long enough in the vicinity to be in a
position to do his own bit of helping if and when the need arises. But this is
likely to be much less of a problem than it might seem to be, since the very
fact that the relative has received the earlier help is bound to increase his
loyalty to the place and context in which it happened, and thus increase the
chances that he will stay close to the altruist and/or his descendants. The fact
that my brother, for example, has been saved by me from drowning is hound
to encourage him to maintain close contact with me and my family in future
years.

Let's be clear that it is not necessary to suppose that any kind of reciprocal-
altruism-like `bargain' is being struck in such cases. With these cases of kin
altruism, the original helpful act can unquestionably be justified on
Hamiltonian grounds alone, even if it never does bring any return to the
altruist himself. The altruist certainly need not have any `expectation' of
getting anything in return, and the recipient need not feel under any `moral
compunction' to return the favour. Nonetheless, my point is that it will often
so happen that the altruist will get the return.

Indeed, maybe it will so often so happen that a major part of the cost of the
original altruistic act will as a matter of fact get repaid directly to the altruist.
In which case it means that Hamilton's equation setting out the conditions
under which this kind of altruism can be expected to evolve-his C < Brhas
always been unduly pessimistic. For, in reality, the true net cost, C, of the
original altruistic act will often work out in the long run to be much lower
than at first it seems.

Now let us turn to the other side of the picture and take a closer look-as
Rothstein did-at the case of the reciprocal altruist: the case where we are
dealing with an individual who has a gene that predisposes him to help not a
relative but rather a friend whom he trusts to pay him back. Trivers's famous
point here was that every time this individual helps his friend he is adding to
the stock of favours that are owed him. Hence, provided the cost of giving
help to the friend in need is in general less than the benefit of receiving it
when the altruist is in need himself, the exchange will have provided a net
gain in fitness to the gene. Which is why, in many circumstances, this gene is
likely to evolve.

Trivers's point, again, is true and important. But-and this was precisely
Rothstein's argument-there has again been an important factor ignored by this
analysis: namely, that every time the reciprocal altruist helps his friend he is
also, so long as he has chosen wisely, increasing the chances of survival of
another individual who is himself carrying the gene for reciprocal altruism.
That is to say, he is increasing the chances of survival of another individual
who, by carrying this gene, is in this respect a relative.

Suppose, for example, that I have a gene that predisposes me to save

someone from drowning whom I think of as my friend. Trivers would say
that in performing this altruistic act, I have behaved in a way likely to provide
the friend with an incentive to return the favour to me in the future. But the
new point is that I have also behaved in a way likely to bring immediate
benefit to the gene that both my friend and I are carrying that has predisposed
us to he friends to start with. Therefore the pay-off to my fitness as a
reciprocal altruist is coming not only directly through the future benefit to my
own gene, but also indirectly through the immediate benefit to his copy of it.

It is true, as Trivers himself would wish to stress, that if my friend were to

happen to be a member of another species, a dog, say, rather than a human,
this aspect of the pay-off would be wasted, since the dog's gene for reciprocal
altruism is not part of my own species' gene pool and-even if it is functionally
equivalent-it is presumably not transferable. Such crossspecies friendships, in
so far as they do occur in nature, must clearly be considered an exception to
the point that is now being made. But this does nothing to weaken the
argument as it relates to the much more common case of within-species
friendships.

It needs to be said that, even with the within-species friendships, the copy
of the gene for reciprocal altruism that can be assumed to be carried by each
of the friends need not necessarily be the same gene by virtue of descent from
a common ancestor-as it would be with true blood relatives. But there is no
reason whatever why this should matter to natural selection. Indeed, for all
that natural selection cares, one or other of the friends might actually be a
first-generation reciprocal altruist who has acquired the gene by random
mutation. All that matters is that the genes of the two friends have equivalent
effects at the level of behaviour-and to suppose that only genes shared by
common descent can count as being `related' would, I think, be to fall into the
conceit that philosophers have sometimes called `origins chauvinism'.

Let's be clear again that it is not necessary to suppose that the probability
of a kinselection-like genetic pay-off in the case of friends has to be any part
of their explicit motivation. The individual's act of reciprocal altruism can
unquestionably be justified in the way that Trivers did originally, in terms of
its expected return, without reference to any other possible effects on the
fitness of the gene. Nonetheless, my point-and Rothstein's-is that in reality
the indirect effect will often be there.

So much so that, again, as in the case of kin selection, it means that the
standard model for how reciprocal altruism might evolve by natural selection
may have seriously underestimated what there is going for it. In particular,
the existence of an indirect benefit to the reciprocal altruism gene means that
even if-because of bad luck or bad management-a particular altruistic act
yields no return to the altruist, the effort put into it need still not have been
entirely wasted. Trivers and his followers have tended to regard any such
unrequited act of altruism as a disaster, and have therefore emphasized
`cheaterdetection' as one of the primary concerns of social life. Yet the
present analysis suggests that the system may in reality prove considerably
more tolerant and more forgiving.

So, where does this leave us? We have clearly arrived at a rather different
picture of the possibilities for altruism from the one that Hamilton and
Trivers handed down. Instead of there being two fundamentally different
types of altruistic behaviour, sustained by different forms of selection, we
have discovered that each type typically has features of the other one. Kin
altruism, even if primarily motivated by disinterested concern for the welfare
of a relative, is often being selected partly because of the way it redounds to
the altruist's own personal advantage. Reciprocal altruism, even if primarily
motivated by the expectation of future personal reward, is often being
selected partly because of the way it promotes the welfare of a gene-sharing
friend.

In this case, there may be a further lesson to he learned. For if there is so

much overlap between the two types of altruism, why should we continue to
think in terms of two types at all? Might it not make more sense to suppose
that at bottom all examples of altruism have a common formal structure-and a
common basis at the level of the gene?
 To be brief, I would suggest that the most revealing way of looking at the
landscape of altruism is indeed to see it not as islands of kin altruism and
reciprocal altruism, but as a continuum of possibilities that all have their roots
in just one genetic trait: namely, a trait that is nothing else than a trait for
behaving altruistically to others who share this trait. Or, to put this more
expansively, a trait for being helpful to those who can be expected to be
helpful to those who can he expected to be helpful to those ... The
recursiveness here is real and sig nificant. It reflects precisely what happens
when kin selection and reciprocation get combined. And it must add
considerably to the chances of the trait becoming an evolutionary success.

The fact that all cases of altruism might be based on this one trait,
however, should not lead us to expect that all cases should look alike in
practice. For it is important to appreciate that the trait, as defined above, is
only a semi-abstract formal disposition that still has to be realized at the level
of behaviour. In particular, it still has to be decided how the possessor of the
trait is going to be able to recognize who else counts as `another individual
who shares this trait'-who else counts, if you like, as `one of us'-and hence
who precisely should be the target of his or her own altruism.

The possibilities are various-and encompass both types of classical

altruism we met with earlier. If, say, the target were to be identified solely on
the basis of evidence of blood relationship ('There's a good chance she's one
of us because she's my half-sister'), it would amount to an example of
classical kin altruism. If, on the other hand, the target were to be identified
solely on the basis of evidence of willingness to participate in friendly
exchanges with oneself ('She's proved herself one of us by returning all the
favours I've offered her'), it would amount to an example of classical
reciprocal altruism.

But these would only be the two extremes, and in between would lie a
range of other variations on the basic theme. There might be, for instance, a
particular strain of altruists who identify their targets on the basis of evidence
of altruistic behaviour directed to a third party ('She must be one of us
because she's being so generous to them'). Another strain might identify them
on the basis of the fact that they are already the targets of other altruists'
behaviour ('She must be one of us because others of us are treating her as one
of theirs'). And in a population where the altruistic trait has already evolved
nearly to the point of fixation, it could even be that most altruists would
identify their targets simply on the basis that they have not yet shown
evidence of not being altru istically inclined ('Let's assume she's one of us
until it turns out otherwise').

Not all these varieties of altruism would be evolutionarily stable under all
conditions, and the two classical varieties probably do represent the two
strategies that are evolutionarily safest. Nonetheless, others would prove
adaptive, at least in the short term. And the best policy of all for any
individual altruist would presumably be to mix and match different criteria
for choosing targets, according to conditions.

We should therefore expect, in theory, to find altruism occurring in nature

at many levels and in many different forms. This is a satisfying conclusion
because-as must be obvious to anyone who can think in terms of more than
the two original categories-in practice it is just what we do find. Frans de
Waal in his compelling book, Good Natured, has detailed how wide-ranging
and rich are the cooperative and succouring behaviours that are to be
observed among nonhuman animals'-going far beyond what would seem to
have been `justified' by Hamilton's and Trivers's models. The same is more
true still for human beings.

`The loveliest fairy in the world', Charles Kingsley wrote in The Water-
Babies, `is Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby.'8 And she is also, as it happens, one
of the most versatile and most successful.
In the picture (Fig. 3) is Denis Diderot-the eighteenthcentury French
philosopher, novelist, aesthetician, social historian, political theorist, and
editor of the Encyclopaedia. It's hard to see how he had time, but alongside
everything else, Diderot wrote a treatise called the Elements of Physiology-a
patchwork of thoughts about animal and human nature, embryology,
psychology and evolution. And tucked into this surprising work is this
remark: `If the union of a soul to a machine is impossible, let someone prove
it to me. If it is possible, let someone tell me what would be the effects of this
union."

Now, replace the word `soul' with `consciousness', and Diderot's two
thought-questions become what are still the central issues in the science of
mind. Could a machine be conscious? If it were conscious, what difference
would it make?

The context for those questions is not hard to guess. Diderot was appalled
by and simultaneously fascinated by the dualistic philosophy of Rene
Descartes. `A tolerably clever man', Diderot wrote,

began his book with these words: `Man, like all animals, is composed of two
distinct substances, the soul and the body.' . . . I nearly shut the book. 0!
ridiculous writer, if I once admit these two distinct substances, you have
nothing more to teach me. For you do not know what it is that you call soul,
less still how they are united, nor how they act reciprocally on one another.'

Ridiculous it may have been. But fifty years later, the young Charles
Darwin was still caught up with the idea: `The soul,' he wrote in one of his
early notebooks, 'by the consent of all is super-added.';
Fig. 3. Denis Diderot (1713-84)

This is one issue that the philosophy of mind has now done something to
resolve. First has come the realization that there is no need to believe that
consciousness is in fact something distinct from the activity of the physical
brain. Rather, consciousness should be regarded as a `surface feature' of the
brain, an emergent property that arises out of the combined action of its parts.
Second-and in some ways equally important-has come the realization that the
human brain itself is a machine. So the question now is not could a machine
be conscious or have a soul: clearly it could-I am such a machine, and so are
you. Rather, the question is what kind of machine could be conscious. How
much more and how much less would a conscious machine have to resemble
the human brain-nerve cells, chemicals, and all? The dispute has become one
between those who argue that it's simply a matter of having the appropriate
`computer programs', and those who say it's a matter of the `hardware', too.

So-called `functionalists', such as Daniel Dennett, argue that if a machine

has whatever it takes at the level of the functional architecture for it to behave
in all those ways that human beings do, then any such machine must by
definition be conscious. But the `non-functionalists' (or, as they are
sometimes called, 'mysterians'), such as David Chalmers, argue that the
mysterious quality of consciousness would still be missing.

This is an interesting dispute (see Chapter 9). And yet I'd say it clearly
jumps the gun. It is all very well to discuss whether a machine which fulfils
in every respect our expectations of how a conscious being ought to behave
would actually be conscious. But the major question is still unresolved: what
exactly are our expectations, and how might we account for them? In short,
what do we think consciousness produces? If a machine could be united to a
soul, what effects-if anywould it have?

When Diderot asked this crucial question, I think it is obvious he was

asking rhetorically for the answer `None'. A machine, he was prepared to
imagine, might have a soul-and yet for all practical purposes it would be
indistinguishable from a machine without one: `What difference,' he went on
to ask, `between a sensitive and living pocket watch and a watch of gold, of
iron, of silver and of copper? If a soul were joined to the latter, what would it
produce therein?" Presumably, as a time-keeper-and that, after all, is what a
watch does bestthe watch would be just the same watch it was before: the
soul would be no use to it, it wouldn't show.
 I would not necessarily want to pin on to Diderot the authorship of the idea
of the functional impotence of souls. But whenever it came, and whether or
not Diderot got there, the realization that human consciousness itself might
actually he useless was something of a breakthrough. I remember my own
surprise and pleasure with this `naughty' idea, when I first came across it in
the writings of the behaviourist psychologists. There was J. B. Watson, in
1928, arguing that the science of psychology need make no reference to
consciousness: `The behaviourist sweeps aside all mediaeval conceptions. He
drops from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation,
perception, image, desire, and even thinking and emotion.'s

And there, as philosophical back-up, was Wittgenstein, arguing that

concepts referring to internal states of mind have no place in the `language
game'. If nothing else, it was an idea to tease one's schoolfriends with. `How
do I know that what I experience as the colour red, isn't what you experience
as green? How do I know that you experience anything at all? You might be
an unconscious zombie.'

A naughty idea is, however, all that it amounts to: an idea which has had a
good run, and now can surely be dismissed. I shall give two reasons for
dismissing it. One is a kind of Panglossian argument, to the effect that
whatever exists as a consequence of evolution must have a function. The
other is simply an appeal to common sense. But before I give either, let me
say what I am not dismissing: I am not dismissing the idea that consciousness
is a second-order and in some ways inessential process. In certain respects the
behaviourists may have been right.

Diderot gives a nice example of unconscious behaviour:

A musician is at the clavecin; he is chatting with his neighbour, the

conversation interests him, he forgets that he is playing a piece of concerted
music with others; however, his eyes, his ear, his fingers are not the less in
accord with them because of it; not a false note, not a misplaced harmony,
not a rest forgotten, not the least fault in time, taste or measure. The
conversation ceases, our musician returns to his part, loses his head and does
not know where he has got to; the man is troubled, the animal is disconcerted.
If the distraction of the man had continued for a few more minutes, the
animal would have played the piece to the end, without the man having been
aware of it.7

So the musician, if Diderot is right, sees without being aware of seeing,

hears without being aware of hearing. Experimental psychologists have
studied similar examples under controlled laboratory conditions and have
confirmed that the phenomenon is just as Diderot described: while
consciousness takes off in one direction, behaviour may sometimes go in
quite another. Indeed, consciousness may be absent altogether. A sleep-
walker, for example, may carry out elaborate actions and may even hold a
simple conversation without waking up. Stranger things still can happen after
brain injury. A person with damage to the visual cortex may lack all visual
sensation, be consciously quite blind, and nonetheless be capable of
`guessing' what he would be seeing i f he could see." I have met such a case:
a young man who maintained that he could see nothing at all to the left of his
nose, and yet could drive a car through busy traffic without knowing how he
did it.

So, that is what I am not dismissing: the possibility that the brain can carry
on at least part of its job without consciousness being present. But what I am
dismissing is the possibility that when consciousness is present it isn't making
any difference. And let me now give the two reasons.

First, the evolutionary one. When Diderot posed his question, he knew
nothing about Darwinian evolution.

He believed in evolution, all right-evolution of the most radical kind: `The

vegetable kingdom might well be and have been the first source of the animal
kingdom, and have had its own source in the mineral kingdom; and the latter
have originated from universal heterogeneous matter." What is more, Diderot
had his own theory of selection, based on the idea of `contradiction':
`Contradictory beings are those whose organization does not conform with
the rest of the universe. Blind nature, which produces them, exterminates
them; she lets only those exist which can co-exist tolerably with the general
order.'' °
 Surprising stuff, seeing that it was written in the late eighteenth century.
But note that, compared to the theory Darwin came up with eighty years later,
there is something missing. Diderot's is a theory of extinction. According to
him, the condition for a biological trait surviving is just that it should not
contradict the general order, that it should not get in the way. Darwin's
theory, on the other hand, is a theory of adaptation. According to him, the
condition for something's surviving and spreading through the population is
much stricter: it is not enough that the trait should simply be non-
contradictory or neutral, it must-if it is to become in any way a general traitbe
positively beneficial in promoting reproduction.

This may seem a small difference of emphasis, but it is crucial. For it

means that when Diderot asked-of consciousness or anything else in nature-
'What difference does it make?', he could reasonably answer: `None'. But
when a modern Darwinian biologist asks it, he cannot. The Darwinian's
answer has to be that it has evolved because and only because it is serving
some kind of useful biological function.

You may wonder, however: can we still expect consciousness to have a

function even if we go along with the idea that it is in fact a `mere surface
feature' of the brain? But let's not be misled by the word `mere'. We might
say that the colours of a peacock's tail are a mere surface feature of the
pigments, or that the insulating properties of fur are a mere surface feature of
a hairy skin. But it is of course precisely on such surface features that natural
selection acts: it is the colour or the warmth that matters to the animal's
survival.

Philosophers have sometimes drawn a parallel between consciousness as a

surface feature of the brain and wetness as a surface feature of water.
Suppose we found an animal made entirely out of water. Its wetness would
surely be the first thing for which an evolutionary biologist would seek to
find a function.

Nonetheless, we do clearly have a problem: and this is to escape from a

definition of consciousness that renders it selfevidently useless and irrelevant.
Here philosophy of mind has, I think, been less than helpful. Too often we
have been offered definitions of consciousness that effectively hamstring the
enquiry before it has begun: for example, that consciousness consists in
private states of mind of which the subject alone is aware, which can neither
be confirmed nor contradicted, and so on. Wittgenstein's words, at the end of
his Tractatus, have haunted philosophical discussion: `Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent.'"

All I can say is that neither biologically nor psychologically does this feel
right. Such definitions, at their limit (and they are meant of course to impose
limits), would suggest that statements about consciousness can have no
information content-technically, that they can do nothing to reduce any-one's
uncertainty about what's going on. I find this counterintuitive and wholly
unconvincing. Which brings me to my second reason for dismissing the idea
that consciousness is no use to human beings, which is that it is contrary to
common sense.

Suppose I am a dentist, and I am uncertain whether the patient in the chair

is feeling pain. I ask him, `Does it hurt?', and he says, `Yes. I'm not the kind
of guy to show it, but it does feel awful'. Am Ito believe that such an answer-
as a description of a conscious state-contains no information? Common sense
tells me that when a person describes his states of mind, either to me or to
himself (not something he need be able to do, but something which as a
matter of fact he often can do), he is making a revealing self-report. If he
says, for example, `I'm in pain', or `I'm in love', or `I'm having a green
sensation', or `I'm looking forward to my supper', I reckon I actually know
more about him; but more important, that through being conscious he knows
more about himself.

Still, the question remains: what sort of information is this? What is it

about? And the difficulty seems to be that whatever it is about is, at least in
the first place, private and subjectivesomething going on inside the subject
which no one else can have direct access to. I think this difficulty has been
greatly overplayed. There is, I'd suggest, an obvious answer to the question of
what conscious descriptions are about: namely, that they are descriptions of
what is happening inside the subject's brain. For sure, such information is
`private'. But it is private for the good reason that it happens to he his brain,
hidden within his skull, and that he is naturally in a position to observe it in
which the rest of us are not. Privacy is no doubt an issue of great biological
and social significance, but I do not see that it is philosophically all that
remarkable.

The suggestion that consciousness is a `description of the brain' may

nonetheless seem rather odd. Suppose someone says, for example, `I'm not
feeling myself today', that certainly doesn't sound like a description of a brain
state. True enough, it does not sound like one; and no doubt I'd have trouble
in persuading most people that it was so. Few people, if any, naturally make
any connection between mind states and brain states. For one thing, almost
no one except a brain scientist is likely to be interested in brains as such (and
most people in the world probably don't even know they've got a brain). For
another, there is clearly a huge gulf between brain states, as they are in fact
described by brain scientists, and mind states as described by conscious
human beings, a gulf which is practically-and, some would argue,
logicallyunbridgeable.

Yet is this really such a problem? Surely we are used to the idea that there
can be completely different ways of describing the same thing. Light, for
example, can be described either as particles or as waves, water can be
described either as an aggregation of H2O molecules or as a wet fluid,
Ronald Reagan can be described either as an ageing movie actor or as the
former President of the United States. The particular description we come up
with depends on what measuring techniques we use and what our interests
are. In that case, why should not the activity of the brain be described either
as the electrical activity of nerve cells or as a conscious state of mind,
depending on who is doing the describing? One thing is certain, and that is
that brain scientists have different techniques and different interests from
ordinary human beings.

I admit, however, I am guilty of some sleight of hand here. It is all very

well to suggest that consciousness is `a description' of the brain's activity by a
subject with appropriate techniques and interests; but what I have not done is
to locate this conscious subject anywhere. `To describe' is a transitive verb. It
requires a subject as well as an object, and they cannot in principle be one
and the same entity. A brain, surely, cannot describe its own activity, any
more than a bucket of water can describe itself as wet. In the case of the
water, it takes an observer outside the bucket to recognize the water's
wetness, and to do so he has to employ certain observational procedures-he
has to stick his hand into it, swish it around, watch how it flows. Who, then,
is the observer of the brain?

Oh dear. Are we stuck with an infinite regress? Do we need to postulate

another brain to describe the first one, and then another brain to describe that?
Diderot would have laughed:

If nature offers us a difficult knot to unravel, do not let us introduce in order

to untie it the hand of a Being who then at once becomes an even more
difficult knot to untie than the first one. Ask an Indian why the world stays
suspended in space, and he will tell you that it is carried on the back of an
elephant ... and the elephant on a tortoise. And what supports the tortoise? ...
Confess your ignorance and spare me your elephant and your tortoise.12

You can hardly expect me, halfway through this essay, to confess my
ignorance. And in fact I shall do just the opposite. The problem of self-
observation producing an infinite regress is, I think, phoney. No one would
say that a person cannot use his own eyes to observe his own feet. No one
would say, moreover, that he cannot use his own eyes, with the aid of a
mirror, to observe his own eyes. Then why should anyone say a person
cannot, at least in principle, use his own brain to observe his own brain? All
that is required is that nature should have given him the equivalent of an
inner mirror and an inner eye. And this, I think, is precisely what she has
done. Nature has, in short, given to human beings the remarkable gift of
selfreflexive insight. I propose to take this metaphor of `insight' seriously.
What is more, I even propose to draw a picture of it.

Imagine first the situation of an unconscious animal or a machine, which

does not possess this faculty of insight (Figure 4). It has a brain which
receives inputs from conventional sense organs and sends outputs to motor
systems, and in between runs a highly sophisticated computer and decision
maker. The animal may be highly intelligent and complexly motivated; it is
by no means a purely reflex mechanism. But nonetheless it has no picture of
what this brain-computer is doing or how it works. The animal is in effect an
unconscious Cartesian automaton.

But now imagine (Figure 5) that a new form of sense organ evolves, an
`inner eye', whose field of view is not the outside world but the brain itself, as
reflected via this loop. Like other sense organs, the inner eye provides a
picture of its information field-the brain-which is partial and selective. But
equally, like other sense organs, it has been designed by natural selection so
that this picture is a useful one-in current jargon, a `user-friendly' description,
designed to tell the subject as much as he requires to know in a form that he
is predisposed to understand. Thus it allows him, from a position of
extraordinary privilege, to see his own brain states as conscious states of
mind. Now every intelligent action is accompanied by the awareness of the
thought processes involved, every perception by an accompanying sensation,
every emotion by a conscious feeling.

Fig. 4
 Fig. 5

Suppose this is what consciousness amounts to. I have written of

consciousness as a surface feature of the brain and so I think it is, but you
will see now that I am suggesting it is a very special sort of surface feature.
For what consciousness actually is, is a feature not of the whole brain but of
this added selfreflective loop. Why this particular arrangement should have
what we might call the `transcendent', `other-worldly' qualities of
consciousness I do not know. But note that I have allowed here for one
curious feature: the output of the inner eye is part of its own input. A self-
referential system of this sort may well have strange and paradoxical
properties-not least that so-called `truth functions' go awry.'

Let me recapitulate. We have seen that the brain can do much of its work
without consciousness being present; it is fair to assume, therefore, that
consciousness is a second-order property of brains. We have seen that
Darwin's theory suggests that consciousness evolved by natural selection; it is
fair to assume therefore that consciousness helps its possessor to survive and
reproduce. We have seen that common sense coupled to a bit of self-analysis
suggests that consciousness is a source of information, and that this
information is very likely about brain states. So, if I may now make the point
that immediately follows, it is fair to assume that access to this kind of
second-order information about one's own brain states helps a person to
survive and reproduce.

This looks like progress; and we can relax somewhat. In fact the heavier
part of what I have to say is over. You ought, however, to he still feeling
thoroughly dissatisfied; and if you are not, you must have missed the point of
this whole essay. I set out to ask what difference consciousness makes, and
have concluded that through providing insight into the workings of the brain
it enhances the chances of biological survival. Fair enough. But the question
of course is: how?

The problem is this. We have an idea of what consciousness is doing,

namely, giving the subject a picture of his own brain activity, but we have no
idea yet about what biological good this does him in the wider context of his
daily life. It is rather as though we had discovered that fur keeps a rabbit
warm, but had no idea of why a rabbit should want to keep warm. Or, to
make a more relevant analogy, it is as though we had discovered that bats
have an elaborate system for gathering information about echoes, but had no
idea of why they should want such information.

The bat case provides a useful lesson. When Donald Griffin did his
pioneering work on echo-location in bats, he did not of course first discover
the echo-locating apparatus and then look for a function for it." He began
with the natural history of bats. He noted that bats live largely in the dark,
and that their whole lifestyle depends on their apparently mysterious capacity
to see without the use of eyes. Hence, when Griffin began his investigation of
bats' ears and face and brain, he knew exactly what he was looking for: a
mechanism within the bat which would allow it to `listen in the dark'-and
when he discovered such a mechanism there was of course no problem in
deciding what its function was.

This is precisely the tactic we should adopt with consciousness in human

beings. Having got this far, we should turn to natural history and ask: is there
anything about the specifically human lifestyle which suggests that people,
quite as much as bats, possess a mysterious capacity for understanding their
natural environment, for which consciousness could be providing the
mechanism?
 I shall cut short a long story. When the question is, `What would a natural
historian notice as being special about the human lifestyle?', I'd say the
answer must he this: human beings are extraordinarily sociable creatures. The
environment to which they are adapted is before all else the environment of
the family, the working group, the clan. Human interpersonal relationships
have a depth, a complexity and a biological importance that far exceed those
of any other animal. Indeed, without the ability to understand, predict, and
manipulate the behaviour of other members of his own species, a person
could hardly survive from day to day.

Now, this being so, it means that every individual has to be, in effect, a
`psychologist' just to stay alive, let alone to negotiate the maze of social
interactions on which his success at mating and breeding will ultimately rest.
Not a psychologist in the ordinary sense, but what I have called a `natural
psychologist'. Just as a blind bat develops quite naturally the ability to find its
way around a cave, so every human being must develop a set of natural skills
for penetrating the twilight world of interpersonal psychology-the world of
loves, hates, jealousies, a world where so little is revealed on the surface and
so much has to be surmised.

But this, when you think about, is rather mysterious. Because

psychological understanding is immensely difficult; and understanding at the
level that most people clearly have it would not, I suspect, be possible at all
unless each individual had access to some kind of `black-box' model of the
human mind-a way of imagining what might be happening inside another
person's head. In short, psychological understanding becomes possible
because and only because people naturally conceive of other people as beings
with minds. They attribute to them mental states-moods, thoughts, sensations,
and so on-and it is on just this basis that they claim to understand them.
`She's sad because she thinks he doesn't love her', `He's angry because he
suspects she's telling lies', and so on across the range of human interaction.

I shall not, of course, pretend that this is news. If it were, it clearly would
not be correct. But what we have to ask is where this ordinary, everyday,
taken-for-granted psychological model of other human beings originates.
How come that people latch on so quickly and apparently so effortlessly to
seeing other people in this way? They do so, I suggest, because that is first of
all the way each individual sees himself. And why is that first of all the way
he sees himself? Because nature has given him an inner eye.

So here at last is a worthy function for selfreflexive insight. What

consciousness does is to provide human beings with an extraordinarily
effective tool for doing natural psychology. Each person can look in his own
mind, observe and analyse his own past and present mental states, and on this
basis make inspired guesses about the minds of others.

Try it ... There is a painting by Ilya Repin that hangs in the Tretyakov
Gallery in Moscow, its title They did not expect him. In slow motion, this is
how I myself interpret the human content of the scene:

A man-still in his coat, dirty boots-enters a drawing room. The maid is

apprehensive. She could close the door; but she doesn't-she wants to see how
he's received. The grandmother stands, alarmed, as though she's seen a ghost.
The younger woman-eyes wideregisters delighted disbelief. The girl-taking
her cue from the grown-ups-is suddenly shy. Only the boy shows open
pleasure. Who is he? Perhaps the father of the family. They thought he'd been
taken away. And now he's walked in, as if from the dead. His mother can't
believe it; his wife didn't dare hope; the son was secretly confident that he'd
return. Where's he been? The maid's face shows a degree of disapproval; the
son's, excited pride. The man's eyes, tired and staring, tell of a nightmare
from which he himself is only beginning to emerge.
 Fig. 6. Ilya Repin, They Did Not Expect Him (1884). Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow.

The painting represents, as it happens, a Russian political prisoner, who

has been released from the Tsar's jails and has come back home. We may not
catch the final nuance-more information is needed. But try constructing or
interpreting a scene like that without reference to consciousness, to what we
know of human feelings-and the depth, its human depth, completely
disappears.

I give this example to illustrate just how clever we all are. Consider those
psychological concepts we've just `called to mind'-apprehension, disbelief,
disapproval, weariness, and so on. They are concepts of such subtlety that I
doubt that any of us could explain in words just what they mean. Yet in
dissecting this scene-or any other human situation-we wield them with
remarkable authority. We do so because we have first experienced their
meaning in ourselves.

It works. But I won't hide that there is a problem still of why it works.
Perhaps we do, as I just said, wield these mental concepts `with remarkable
authority'. Yet who or what gives us this authority to put ourselves in other
people's shoes? By what philosophical licence-if there is one-do we trespass
so nonchalantly upon the territory of `other minds'?

I am reminded of a story. There was dock strike in London, and enormous

lorries were going in and out across the picket lines with impressive notices,
`By the Authority of H. M. Government', `By the Permission of the Trades
Union Congress', `By the Authority of the Ministry of War'. Among them
appeared a tiny donkey cart, driven by a little old man in a bashed-in bowler
hat, and on the cart was the banner: 'By my own bloody authority'.`s

That is a good plain answer to the problem. And yet I will not pretend that
it will do. Tell a philosopher that ordinary people bridge this gap from self to
other `by their own bloody authority', and it will only confirm his worst
suspicions that the whole business of natural psychology is flawed. Back will
come Wittgenstein's objection that in the matter of mental states, one's own
authority is no authority at all:

Suppose that everyone has a box with something in it; we call this thing a
`beetle'. No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows
what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle ... 111t would he quite possible
for everyone to have something different in his box ... IT] he box might even
be empty.'

The problem, of course, is not entirely trivial. Strictly speaking, it is true

we can never be sure that any of our guesses about the inner life of other
people are correct. In a worstcase scenario, it is even possible that nature
might have played a dreadful trick on us and built every human being
according to a different plan. It is not just that the phenomenology of inner
experience might differ from one person to another; the whole functional
meaning of the experience might conceivably be different. Suppose, for
example, that when I feel pain I do my best to stop it, but that when you feel
pain you want more of it. In that case my own mental model-as a guide to
your behaviour-would be useless.

This worstcase scenario is, however, one which as biologists we can totally
discount. For the fact is-it is a biological fact, and philosophers ought
sometimes to pay more attention than they do to biology-that human beings
are all members of the same biological species: all descended within recent
history from common stock, all still having more than 99.9 per cent of their
genes in common, and all with brains which-at birth at least-could be
interchanged without anyone being much the wiser. It is no more likely that
two people will differ radically in the way their brains work than that they
will differ radically in the way their kidneys work. Indeed, in one way it is-if
I am right-even less likely. For while it is of no interest to a person to have
the same kind of kidney as another person, it is of interest to him to have the
same kind of mind: otherwise as a natural psychologist he would be in
trouble. Kidney transplants occur very rarely in nature, but something very
much like mind transplants occur all the time: you and I have just undergone
one with those people in the painting. If the possibility of, shall we call it,
`radical mental polymorphism' had ever actually arisen in the course of
human evolution, I think we can be sure that it would quickly have been
quashed.

So that is the first and simplest reason why this method of doing
psychology can work: the fact of the structural similarity of human brains.
But it is not the only reason, nor in my view the most interesting one.
Suppose that all human beings actually had identical brains, so that literally
everything a particular individual could know about his own brain would be
true of other people's: it could still be that his picture of his own brain would
be no help in reading other people's behaviour. Why? Because it might just
be the wrong kind of picture: it might be psychologically irrelevant. Suppose
that when an individual looks in on his brain he were to discover that the
mechanism for speech lies in his left hemisphere, or that his memories are
stored as changes in RNA molecules, or that when he sees a red light there's a
nerve cell that fires at 100 cycles per second. All of those things would very
likely be true of other people too, but how much use would be this kind of
inner picture as a basis for human understanding?

I want to go hack for a moment to my diagram of the inner eye (Figure 5).
When I described what I thought the inner eye does, I said that it provides a
picture of its information field that has been designed by natural selection to
be a useful one-a user-friendly description, designed to tell the subject as
much as he requires to know. But at that stage I was vague about what
exactly was implied by those crucial words, 'useful', `user-friendly', `requires
to know'. I had to be vague, because the nature of the `user' was still
undefined and his specific requirements still unknown. By now, however, we
have, I hope, moved on. Indeed, I'd suggest we now know exactly the nature
of the user. The user of the inner eye is a natural psychologist. His
requirement is that he should build up a model of the behaviour of other
human beings.

This is where the natural selection of the inner eye has almost certainly
been crucial. For we can assume that throughout a long history of evolution
all sorts of different ways of describing the brain's activity have in fact been
experi mented with-including quite possibly a straightforward physiological
description in terms of nerve cells, RNA, and so on. What has happened,
however, is that only those descriptions most suited to doing psychology
have been preserved. Thus the particular picture of our inner selves that
human beings do in fact now have-the picture we know as `us', and cannot
imagine being of any different kind-is neither a necessary description nor any
old description of the brain: it is the one that has proved most suited to our
needs as social beings.

That is why it works. Not only can we count on other people's brains being
very much like ours, we can count on the picture we each have of what it's
like to have a brain being tailor-made to explain the way that other people
actually behave. Consciousness is a socio-biological product-in the best sense
of socio and biological.
 So, at last, what difference does it make? It makes, I suspect, nothing less
than the difference between being a man and being a monkey: the difference
between we human beings who know what it is like to be ourselves and other
creatures who essentially have no idea. `One day,' Diderot wrote, `it will be
shown that consciousness is a characteristic of all beings.'" I am sorry to say I
think that he was wrong. I recognize, of course, that human beings are not the
only social animals on earth; and I recognize that there are many other
animals that require at least a primitive ability to do psychology. But how
many animals require anything like the level of psychological understanding
that we humans have? How many can he said to require, as a biological
necessity, a picture of what is happening inside their brains? And if they do
not require it, why ever should they have it? What would a frog, or even a
cow, lose if it were unable to look in on itself and observe its own mind at
work?

I have, I should say, discussed this matter with my dog, and perhaps I can
relay to you a version of how our conversation might have gone.

i)oc. Nick, you and your friends seem to be awfully interested in this thing
you call consciousness. You're always talking about it instead of going for
walks.

NICK. Yes, well it is interesting, don't you think so?

DOG. You ask me that! You're not even sure I've got it.

NICK. That's why it's interesting.

Doc. Rabbits! Seriously, though, do you think I've got it? What could I do to
convince you?

NICK. Try me.

Doc. Suppose I stood on my back legs, like a person? Would that convince
you?

NICK. No.
DOG. Suppose I did something cleverer. Suppose I beat you at chess.

NICK. You might be a chess-playing computer. I'm very fond of you, but
how do I know you're not just a furry soft automaton?

DOG. Don't get personal.

NICK. I'm not getting personal. Just the opposite, in fact.

Doc (gloomily). I don't know why I started this conversation. You're just
trying to hurt my feelings.

NICK (startled). What's that you said?

DOG. Nothing. I'm just a soft automaton. It's all right for you. You don't have
to go around wishing you were conscious. You don't have to feel jealous of
other people all the time, in case they've got something that you haven't.
And don't pretend you don't know what it feels like.

NICK. Yes, I know what it feels like. The question is, do you?

And this, I think, remains the question. I need hardly say that dogs, as a
matter of fact, do not think (or talk) like this. Do any animals? Yes, there is
some evidence that the great apes do: chimpanzees are capable of self-
reference to their internal states, and can use what they know to interpret
what others may be thinking."Dogs, I suspect, are on the edge of italthough
the evidence is not too good. But for the vast majority of other less socially
sophisticated animals, not only is there no evidence that they have this kind
of conscious insight, there is every reason to think that it would he a waste of
time.

For human beings, however, so far from being a waste of time, it was the
crucial adaptation-the sine qua non of their advancement to the human state.
Imagine the biological benefits to the first of our ancestors who developed
the capacity to read the minds of others by reading their own-to picture, as if
from the inside, what other members of their social group were thinking
about and planning to do next. The way was open to a new deal in social
relationships, to sympathy, compassion, trust, deviousness, double-crossing,
belief and disbelief in others' motives . . . the very things that make us human.

The way was open to something else that makes us human (and which my
dog was quite right to pick up on): an abiding interest in the problem of what
consciousness is and why we have it-sufficient, it seems, to drive biologically
normal human beings to sit in a dim hall and listen to a lecture when they
could otherwise have been walking in the park.
 Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXXVII

I find this a disconcerting poem. Generous, tragic, but still a wet and slippery
poem. Like an oyster, it slips down live-it's inside me, part of me, before I've
had a chance to question it or chew it over. `Farewell, thou art too dear for
my possessing ... Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter: / in sleep a
king.' Exactly ... Yes ... But yes, exactly what? Why is the feeling in it so
familiar? Who is the poem written to, what is it about, where does the feeling
in it come from?

It would be a mistake, I think, to go for strictly factual answers-answers

based on what we know or guess of Shakespeare's life. None of us, hearing
the poem can hope to respond to it as Shakespeare: in the first instance,
anyway, we respond to it as us. And our response to this as to any other work
of art will not necessarily be any the less valid for our not knowing what the
artist really meant. When I look at a seashell, mother-of-pearl glinting in the
sun, I have no interest in the life story of the snail that made it. When I cup
the seashell to my ear, it is not the snail I hear, it is not even the echo of the
sea, it is simply the echo of myself.

To understand this poem, we do not need to know the facts of

Shakespeare's life. But Shakespeare being Shakespeare, there is little chance
we shall be allowed to remain ignorant for long. Suppose-just suppose-that
this poem had really reached us from the blue, washed up on a beach in an
old Elizabethan bottle. Suppose we knew nothing of its provenance, neither
who wrote it, to whom it was written, or when. Before we could say Dr
Rowse, a hundred Shakespeare scholars would have gathered round: a
hundred detectives to scrape away the barnacles, each to emerge with his
own-the only possible-historical interpretation. Shakespeare betrayed and
abandoned by his friend. Shakespeare rejected by the patron who had
supported him through the lean years of the plague. Marlowe, Shakespeare's
rival, dead in a pub brawl.

Oh yes? It is not just that I do not feel the need to know. It is that actually I
do not believe a word of it. Wrong poem, wrong bottle. Think about it. Just
listen to what it is that Shakespeare is saying: `For how do I hold thee but by
thy granting, / And for that riches where is my deserving? / The cause of this
fair gift in me is wanting.' Whatever else, it is surely not an honest
description of Shakespeare's relation to his lover, let alone his relation to a
rival playwright, or to whoever paid him for his poems. Conceivably
Shakespeare's parting from a lover or a patron might have provided the
occasion for the poem: such a parting might even-possibly-have provided a
trigger for those feelings. But there is a world of difference between the
trigger and the trap it springs. If Shakespeare meant this poem to be about his
real feelings for his friend, then he was fooling someone.

But perhaps the person he was fooling was himself. `The reason why it is
so difficult for a poet not to tell lies is that, in poetry, all facts and all beliefs
cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities." The poet W. H.
Auden may have been inclined to think there was something very special
about poets-about himself and Shakespeare. But the fact is we all tell lies, we
all live in a world of interesting possibilities: and never more than when we
assess our own relationships to others.

We fall in love, we fall out of love, we think ourselves honoured by

someone's friendship, we think ourselves betrayed by someone else's
infidelity. But much of the time we pay scant attention to the realities of who
we or they are. So we live out our loves, hopes, fears in fantasy, inventing the
connections which we cannot or will not see clearly, looking to our own
imagination for a possible label, a possible description of our feelings and our
situation. And our heads being full of halfhoped-for, half-remembered
possibilities, we give them, if nothing else, a poetical reality: airy nothings
for which we find in this relationship a local habitation and a name. `I love
you.' No, it is the idea of you I love. `I grieve for you.' No, it is my idea of
you I grieve for. It is not my relationship to you I am describing, it is my
relationship to the present embodiment of a host of earlier hopes and dreams.

So who, in imagination is Shakespeare saying farewell to? There is only

one person I can think of to whom the sentiments might possibly apply. Not a
lover, not a patron-or rather, both a lover and a patron and much more
besides: the partner of everybody's first `affair', the first to give herself to us
and the first to take herself away. I am talking, you will guess, of each of our
own mothers.

`For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, / And for that riches where is
my deserving?' `Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing, / Or
me to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking.' But `my bonds in thee are all
determinate'our attachment could only last so long. And I, who-mother's
darling-once thought himself a king, have now grown up to find myself
deserted. `No such matter' ... No such mater.

It is a relationship-and a parting-we all know. One which we all, as poets,

carry with us into adulthood, colouring every subsequent love and parting we
encounter. No wonder we find the poem so slippery: mysterious yet familiar.

We throw it back into the sea. It washes in again on the next tide.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Denis Diderot, commenting on what makes
a great natural philosopher, wrote:

They have watched the operations of nature so often and so closely that they
are able to guess what course she is likely to take, and that with a fair degree
of accuracy, even when they take it into their heads to provoke her with the
most outlandish experiments. So that the most important service they can
render to [others] ... is to pass on to them that spirit of divination by means of
which it is possible to smell out, so to speak, methods that are still to be
discovered, new experiments, unknown results.'

Whether Diderot would have claimed such a faculty in his own case is not
made clear. But I think there is no question we should claim it for him. For,
again and again, Diderot made astonishingly prescient comments about the
future course of natural science. Not least, this:

Just as in mathematics, all the properties of a curve turn out upon

examination to be all the same property, but seen from different aspects, so in
nature, when experimental science is more advanced, we shall come to see
that all phenomena, whether of weight, elasticity, attraction, magnetism or
electricity, are all merely aspects of a single state.2

Admittedly the grand unifying theory that Diderot looked forward to has
not yet been constructed. And contemporary physicists are still uncertain
whether such a theory of everything is possible even in principle. But, within
the narrower field that constitutes the study of mind and brain, cognitive
scientists are increasingly confident of its being possible to have a unifying
theory of these two things.

They-we-all assume that the human mind and brain are, as Diderot
anticipated, aspects of a single state: a single state, in fact, of the material
world, which could in principle be fully described in terms of its
microphysical components. We assume that each and every instance of a
human mental state is identical to a brain state, mental state, m = brain state,
b, meaning that the mental state and the brain state pick out the same thing at
this microphysical level. And usually we further assume that the nature of
this identity is such that each type of mental state is multiply realizable,
meaning that instances of this one type can be identical to instances of several
different types of brain states that happen to be functionally equivalent.

What's more, we have reason to be confident that these assumptions are

factually correct. For, as experimental science grows more advanced, we are
indeed coming to see that mind and brain are merely aspects of a single state.
In particular, brain-imaging studies, appearing almost daily in the scientific
journals, demonstrate in ever more detail how specific kinds of mental
activity (as reported by a mindful subject) are precisely correlated with
specific patterns of brain activity (as recorded by external instruments). This
bit of the brain lights up when a man is in pain, this when he conjures up a
visual image, this when he tries to remember which day of the week it is, and
so on.

No doubt many of us would say we have known all along that such
correspondences must in principle exist; so that our faith in mind-brain
identity hardly needs these technicolour demonstrations. Even so, it is, to say
the least, both satisfying and reassuring to see the statistical facts of the
identity being established, as it were, right before our eyes.

Yet it's one thing to see that mind and brain are aspects of a single state, but
quite another to see why they are. It's one thing to be convinced by the
statistics, but another to understand-as surely we all eventually want to-the
causal or logical principles involved. Even while we have all the evidence
required for inductive generalization, we may still have no basis for deductive
explanation.

Let's suppose, by analogy, that we were to come to see, through a series of

`atmospheric-imaging' experiments, that whenever there is a visible shaft of
lightning in the air there is a corresponding electrical discharge. We might
soon be confident that the lightning and the electrical discharge are aspects of
one and the same thing, and we should certainly be able to predict the
occurrence of lightning whenever there is the electrical discharge. Even so,
we might still have not a clue about what makes an electrical discharge
manifest also as lightning.

Likewise, we might one day have collected so much detailed information

about mind-brain correlations that we can predict which mental state will
supervene on any specific brain state. Even so, we might still have no idea as
to the reasons why this brain state yields this mental state, and hence no way
of deducing one from the other a priori.

But with lightning there could be-and of course historically there was-a
way to progress to the next stage. The physico-chemical causes that underlie
the identity could be discovered through further experimental research and
new theorizing. Now the question is whether the same strategy will work for
mind and brain.

When experimental science is even more advanced, shall we come to see

not only that mind and brain are merely aspects of a single state, but why
they have to be so? Indeed, shall we be able to see how an identity that might
otherwise appear to be mysteriously contingent is in fact transparently
necessary?

A few philosophers believe the answer must be No. Or, at any rate, they
believe we shall never achieve this level of understanding for every single
feature of the mind and brain. They would point out that not all identities are
in fact open to analysis in logical or causal terms, even in principle. Some
identities are metaphysically primitive, and have simply to be taken as
givens. And quite possibly some basic features of the mind are in this class.
David Chalmers, for example, takes this stance when he argues for a version
of epiphenomenal dualism in which consciousness just happens to be a
fundamental, nonderivative property of matter.3

But even supposing-as most people do-that all the interesting identities are
in fact analysable in principle, it might still be argued that not all of them will
be open to analysis by us human beings. Thus Colin McGinn believes that the
reason why a full understanding of the mind-brain identity will never be
achieved is not because the task is logically impossible, but because there are
certain kinds of understanding-and this is clearly one of them-which must for
ever lie beyond our intellectual reach: no matter how much more factual
knowledge we accumulate about mind and brain, we simply do not have what
it would take to come up with the right theory.4

The poet Goethe, much earlier, counselled against what he considered to

be the hubris of our believing that we humans can in fact solve every
problem. `In Nature,' he said,

there is an accessible element and an inaccessible ... Anyone who does not
appreciate this distinction may wrestle with the inaccessible for a lifetime
without ever coming near to the truth. He who does recognize it and is
sensible will keep to the accessible and by progress in every direction within
a field and consolidation, may even be able to wrest something from the
inaccessible along the way-though here he will in the end have to admit that
some things can only be grasped up to a certain point, and that Nature always
retains behind her something problematic which it is impossible to fathom
with our inadequate human faculties.`

It is not yet clear how far-if at all-such warnings should be taken seriously.
Diderot, for one, would have advised us to ignore them. Indeed Diderot, ever
the scientific modernist, regarded any claim by philosophers to have found
limits to our understanding, and thus to set up No-Go areas, as an invitation
to science (or experimental philosophy) to prove such rationalist philosophy
wrong.

Experimental philosophy knows neither what will come nor what will not
come out of its labours; but it works on without relaxing. The philosophy
based on reasoning, on the contrary, weighs possibilities, makes a
pronouncement and stops short. It boldly said: `light cannot he decomposed':
experimental philosophy heard, and held its tongue in its presence for whole
centuries; then suddenly it produced the prism, and said, `light can be
decomposed'."
 The hope now of cognitive scientists is, of course, that there is a prism
awaiting discovery that will do for the mind-brain identity what Newton's
prism did for light-a prism that will again send the philosophical doubters
packing.

I am with them in this hope. But I am also very sure we shall be making a
mistake if we ignore the philosophical warnings entirely. For there is no
question that the likes of McGinn and Goethe might have a point. Indeed, I'd
say they might have more than a point: they will actually become right by
default, unless and until we can set out the identity in a way that meets certain
minimum standards for explanatory possibility.

To be precise, we need to recognize that there can be no hope of scientific

progress so long as we continue to write down the identity in such a way that
the mind terms and the brain terms are patently incommensurable.' The
problem will be especially obvious if the dimensions do not match up.

I use the word `dimensions' here advisedly. When we do physics at school we

are taught that the `physical dimensions' of each side of an equation must be
the same. If one side has the dimensions of a volume, the other side must be a
volume, too, and it cannot be, for example, an acceleration; if one side has
the dimensions of power, the other side must be power, too, and it cannot be
momentum; and so on. As A. S. Ramsey put this in his classical Dynamics
textbook: `The consideration of dimensions is a useful check in dynamical
work, for each side of an equation must represent the same physical thing and
therefore must be of the same dimensions in mass [m I, space (s] and time It]
'.8

Indeed, so strong a constraint is this that, as Ramsey went on, `sometimes a

consideration of dimensions alone is suffi cient to determine the form of the
answer to a problem'. For example, suppose we want to know the form of the
equation that relates the energy contained in a lump of matter, E, to its mass,
M, and the velocity of light, C. Since E can only have the dimension ms2t-2,
M the dimension m and C the dimension st-', we can conclude without further
ado that the equation must have the form E = MC2. By the same token, if
anyone were to propose instead that E = MC;, we would know immediately
that something was wrong.

But what is true of these dynamical equations is of course just as true of all
other kinds of identity equations. We can be sure in advance that, if any
proposed identity is to have even a chance of being valid, both sides must
represent the same kind of thing. Indeed we can generalize this beyond
physical dimensions to say that both sides must have the same conceptual
dimensions, which is to say they must belong to the same generic class.

So, if it is suggested, for example, that Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens
are identical, Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens, we can believe it because both
sides of the equation are in fact people. Or, if it is suggested that Midsummer
Day and 21 June are identical, Midsummer Day = 21 June, we can believe it
because both sides are days of the year. But were someone to suggest that
Mark Twain and Midsummer Day are identical, Mark Twain = Midsummer
Day, we should know immediately this equation is a false one.

Now, to return to the mind-brain identity: when the proposal is that a certain
mental state is identical to a certain brain state, mental state, m = brain state,
b, the question is: do the dimensions of the two sides match?

The answer surely is, Yes, sometimes they do, or at any rate they can he
made to.

Provided cognitive science delivers on its promise, it should soon be

possible to characterize many mental states in computational or functional
terms, that is, in terms of rules connecting inputs to outputs. But brain states
too can relatively easily be described in these same terms. So it should then
be quite straightforward, in principle, to get the two sides of the equation to
line up.

Most of the states of interest to psychologists-states of remembering,

perceiving, wanting, talking, thinking, and so on-are in fact likely to be
amenable to this kind of functional analysis. So, although it is true there is
still a long way to go before we can claim much success in practice, at least
the research strategy is clear.
 We do an experiment, say, in which we get subjects to recall what day of
the week it is, and at the same time we record their brain activity by Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI). We discover that whenever a person thinks to
himself, `Today is Tuesday', a particular area of the brain lights up. We
postulate the identity: recalling that today is Tuesday = activity of neurons in
the calendula nucleus.

We then try, on the one hand, to provide a computational account of what

is involved in this act of recalling the day; and, on the other hand, we
examine the local brain activity and try to work out just what is being
computed. Hopefully, when the results are in, it all matches nicely. A clear
case of Mark Twain = Samuel Clemens.

But of course cases like this are notoriously the `easy' casesand they are not
the ones that most philosophers are really fussed about. The `hard' cases are
precisely those where it seems that this kind of functional analysis is not
likely to be possible. And this means especially those cases that involve
phenomenal consciousness: the subjective sensation of redness, the taste of
cheese, the pain of a headache, and so on. These are the mental states that
Isaac Newton dubbed sensory `phantasms',9 and which are now more
generally (although often less appropriately) spoken of as `qualia'.

The difficulty in these latter cases is not that we cannot establish the
factual evidence for the identity. Indeed, this part of the task may be just as
easy as in the case of cognitive states such as remembering the day. We do an
experiment, say, in which we get subjects to experience colour sensations,
while again we examine their brain by MRI. We discover that whenever
someone has a red sensation, there is activity in cortical area Q6. So we
postulate the identity: phantasm of red = activity in Q6 cortex.

So far, so good. But it is the next step that is problematical. For now, if we
try the same strategy as before and attempt to provide a functional description
of the phantasm so as to be able to match it with a functional description of
the brain state, the way is barred. No one, it seems, has the least idea how to
characterize the phenomenal experience of redness in functional terms-or for
that matter how to do it for any other variety of sensory phantasm. And in
fact there are well-known arguments (such as the Inverted Spectrum) that
purport to prove that it cannot be done, even in principle.

If not a functional description, then, might there be some other way of

describing these elusive states which, being also applicable to brain states,
could save the day? Unfortunately, the philosophical consensus seems to be
that the answer must be No. For many philosophers seem to be persuaded
that phenomenal states and brain states are indeed essentially such different
kinds of entity that there is simply no room whatever for negotiation. Colin
McGinn, in a fantasy dialogue, expressed the plain hopelessness of it sharply:
`Isn't it perfectly evident to you that ... [the brain] is just the wrong kind of
thing to give birth to [phenomenal] consciousness. You might as well assert
that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb."" A case of Mark
Twain = Midsummer Day.

Yet, as we've seen, this will not do! At least not if we are still looking for
explanatory understanding. So, where are we scientists to turn?

Let's focus on the candidate identity: phantasm, p = brain state, b. Given

that the statistical evidence supporting it remains as strong as ever, there
would seem to be three ways that we can go.

1. We can accept that, despite everything, this equation is in fact false.

Whatever the statistical evidence for there being a correlation
between the two, there is really not an identity between the two
states. Indeed, all the correlation shows is just that: that the states are
co-related. And if we want to pursue it, we shall have then to go off
and look for some other theoretical explanation for this correlation-
God's whim, for instance. (This would have been Descartes's
preferred solution.)

2. We can continue to believe in the equation, while at the same time

grudgingly acknowledging that we have met our match: either the
identity does not have an explanation or else the explanation really is
beyond our human reach. And, recognizing now that there is no point
in pursuing it, we shall he able, with good conscience, to retire and
 do something else. (This is McGinn's preferred solution.)

3. We can doggedly insist both that the identity is real and that we shall
explain it somehow-when eventually we do find the way of bringing
the dimensions into line. But then, despite the apparent harriers, we
shall have to set to work to browbeat the terms on one side or other
of the identity equation in such way as to make them line up. (This is
my own and I hope a good many others' preferred solution.)

Now, if we do choose this third option, there are several possibilities.

One strategy would be to find a new way of conceiving of sensory

phantasms so as to make them more obviously akin to brain states. But, let's
be careful. We must not be too radical in redefining these phantasms or we
shall be accused of redefining away the essential point. Daniel Dennett's
sallies in this direction can be a warning to us.'' His suggestion that sensations
are nothing other than complex behavioural (even purely linguistic?)
dispositions, while defensible in his own terms, has proved too far removed
from most people's intuitions to be persuasive.

An alternative strategy would be to find a new way of conceiving of brain

states so as to make them more like sensory phantasms. But again, we must
not go too far. Roger Penrose is the offender this time." His speculations
about the brain as a quantum computer, however ingenious, have seemed to
most neuroscientists to require too much special pleading to be taken
seriously.

Or then again, there would be the option of doing both. My own view is
that we should indeed try to meddle with both sides of the equation to bring
them into line. Dennett expects all the compromise to come from the
behavioural psychology of sensation, Penrose expects it all to come from the
physics of brain states. Neither of these strategies seems likely to deliver
what we want. But it's amazing how much more promising things look when
we allow some give on both sides-when we attempt to adjust our concept of
sensory phantasms and our concept of brain states until they do match up.

So this, I suppose, is how to solve the mind-brain identity problem. We shall

need to work on both sides to define the relevant mental states and brain
states in terms of concepts that really do have dual currency-being equally
applicable to the mental and the material. And now all that remains, for this
essay, is to do it.

Then let's begin: phantasm, p = brain state, b. Newton himself wrote: `To
determine ... by what modes or actions light pro-duceth in our minds the
phantasms of colours is not so easy. And I shall not mingle conjectures with
certainties." I Three and a half centuries later, let us see if we can at least mix
some certainties with the conjectures.

First, on one side of the equation, there are these sensory phantasms.
Precisely what are we are talking about here? What kind of thing are they?
What indeed are their dimensions?

Philosophers are-or at any rate have become in recent years-remarkably

cavalier about the need for careful definition in this area. They bandy about
terms such as 'phenomenal properties', `what it's like', `conscious feelings',
and so on, to refer to whatever it is that is at issue when people point
inwardly to their sensory experience-as if the hard-won lessons of positivist
philosophy had never been learned. In particular, that overworked term
`qualia', which did at least once have the merit of meaning something precise
(even if possibly vacuous),14 is now widely used as a catch-all term for
anything vaguely subjective and qualitative.

It is no wonder, then, that working scientists, having been abandoned by

those who might have been their pilots, have tended to lose their way even
more comprehensively. Francis Crick and Christoph Koch, for example,
begin a recent paper by saying that `everyone has a rough idea of what is
meant by consciousness' and that `it is better to avoid a precise definition of
consciousness'.'s In the same vein, Susan Greenfield writes, `consciousness is
impossible to define . . . [P]erhaps then it is simply best to give a hazy
description, something like consciousness being "your first-person, personal
world".''6 Antonio Damasio is fuzzier still: `Quite candidly, this first problem
of consciousness is the problem of how we get a "movie in the brain" ... [T]he
fundamental components of the images in the movie metaphor are thus made
of qualia.'17

But this is bad. Hazy or imprecise descriptions can only be a recipe for
trouble. And, anyway, they are unnecessary. For the fact is we have for a
long time had the conceptual tools for seeing through the haze and
distinguishing the phenomenon of central interest.

Try this. Look at a red screen, and consider what mental states you are
experiencing. Now let the screen suddenly turn blue, and notice how things
change. The important point to note is that there are two quite distinct parts to
the experience, and two things that change.

First (and I mean first), there is a change in the experience of something

happening to yourself-the bodily sensation of the quality of light arriving at
your eye. Second, there is a change in your attitude towards something in the
outer world-your perception of the colour of an external object.

It was Thomas Reid, one of the geniuses of the Scottish enlightenment,

who over two hundred years ago first drew philosophical attention to the
remarkable fact that we human beings-and presumably many other animals
also-do in fact use our senses in these two quite different ways:

The external senses have a double province-to make us feel, and to make us
perceive. They furnish us with a variety of sensations, some pleasant, others
painful, and others indifferent; at the same time they give us a conception and
an invincible belief of the existence of external objects.

Sensation, taken by itself, implies neither the conception nor belief of any
external object. It supposes a sentient being, and a certain manner in which
that being is affected; but it supposes no more. Perception implies a
conviction and belief of something external - something different both from
the mind that perceives, and the act of perception. Things so different in their
nature ought to be distinguished.'"

For example, Reid said, we smell a rose, and two separate and parallel
things happen: we both feel the sweet smell at our own nostrils and we
perceive the external presence of a rose. Or, again, we hear a hooter blowing
from the valley below: we both feel the booming sound at our own ears and
we perceive the external presence of a ship down in the Firth. In general we
can and usually do use the evidence of sensory stimulation both to provide a
`subject-centred affect-laden representation of what's happening to me', and
to provide `an objective, effectively neutral representation of what's
happening out there'.19

Now it seems quite clear that what we are after when we try to distinguish
and define the realm of sensory phantasms is the first of these: sensation
rather than perception. Yet one reason why we find it so hard to do the job
properly is that it is so easy to muddle the two up. Reid again:

]Yet] the perception and its corresponding sensation are produced at the same
time. In our experience we never find them disjoined. Hence, we are led to
consider them as one thing, to give them one name, and to confound their
different attributes. It becomes very difficult to separate them in thought, to
attend to each by itself, and to attribute nothing to it which belongs to the
other. To do this, requires a degree of attention to what passes in our own
minds, and a talent for distinguishing things that differ, which is not to be
expected in the vulgar, and is even rarely found in philosophers.

I shall conclude this chapter by observing that, as the confounding our

sensations with that perception of external objects which is constantly
conjoined with them, has been the occasion of most of the errors and false
theories of philosophers with regard to the senses; so the distinguishing these
operations seems to me to be the key that leads to a right understanding of
both .20

To repeat: sensation has to do with the self, with bodily stimulation, with
feelings about what's happening now to me and how I feel about it;
perception, by contrast, has to do with judgements about the objective facts
of the external world. Things so different in their nature ought to be
distinguished. Yet rarely are they. Indeed, many people still assume that
perceptual judgements, and even beliefs, desires, and thoughts, can have a
pseudo-sensory phenomenology in their own right.
 Philosophers will be found claiming, for example, that `there is something
it is like' not only to have sensations such as feeling warmth on one's skin, but
also to have perceptions such as seeing the shape of a distant cube, and even
to hold propositional attitudes such as believing that Paris is the capital of
France.''-' Meanwhile psychologists, adopting a halfunderstood vocabulary
borrowed from philosophy, talk all too casually about such hybrid notions as
the perception of `dog qualia' on looking at a picture of a dog. 2 While these
category mistakes persist we might as well give up.

So this must be the first step: we have to mark off the phenomenon that
interests us-sensation-and get the boundary in the right place. But then the
real work of analysis begins. For we must home in on what kind of thing we
are dealing with.

Look at the red screen. You feel the red sensation. You perceive the red
screen. We do in fact talk of both sensation and perception in structurally
similar ways. We talk of feeling or having sensations-as if somehow these
sensations, like perceptions, were the objects of our sensing, sense data, out
there waiting for us to grasp them or observe them with our mind's eye.

But, as Reid long ago recognized, our language misleads us here. In truth,
sensations are no more the objects of sensing than, say, volitions are the
objects of willing, intentions the objects of intending, or thoughts the object
of thinking.

Thus, I feel a pain; I see a tree: the first denoteth a sensation, the last a
perception. The grammatical analysis of both expressions is the same: for
both consist of an active verb and an object. But, if we attend to the things
signified by these expressions, we shall find that, in the first, the distinction
between the act and the object is not real but grammatical; in the second, the
distinction is not only grammatical but real.

The form of the expression, I feel pain, might seem to imply that the
feeling is something distinct from the pain felt; yet in reality, there is no
distinction. As thinking a thought is an expression which could signify no
more than thinking, so feeling a pain signifies no more than being pained.
What we have said of pain is applicable to every other mere sensation.'

So sensory awareness is an activity. We do not have pains, we get to be

pained.

This is an extraordinarily sophisticated insight. And all the more

remarkable that Reid should have come to it two hundred years before
Wittgenstein was tearing his hair about similar problems and not getting
noticeably further forward.

Even so, I believe Reid himself got only part way to the truth here. For my
own view (developed in detail in my book, A History of the Mind)24 is that
the right expression is not so much `being pained' as `paining'. That is to say,
sensing is not a passive state at all, but rather a form of active engagement
with the stimulus occurring at the body surface.

When, for example, I feel pain in my hand, or taste salt on my tongue, or

equally when I have a red sensation at my eye, I am not being pained, or
being stimulated saltily, or being stimulated redly. In each case I am in fact
the active agent. I am not sitting there passively absorbing what comes in
from the body surface, I am reflexly reaching out to the body surface with an
evaluative response-a response appropriate to the stimulus and the body part
affected.

Furthermore, it is this efferent activity that I am aware of. So what I

actually experience as the feeling-the sensation of what is happening to me-is
my reading of my own response to it. Hence the quality of the experience, the
way it feels, instead of revealing the way something is being done to me,
reveals the very way something is being done by me.

This is how I feel about what's happening right now at my hand-I'm feeling
painily about it!

This is how I feel about what's happening right now at this part of the field
of my eye-I'm feeling redly about it!

In A History of the Mind, I proposed that we should call the activity of

sensing `sentition'. The term has not caught on. But I bring it up again here,
in passing, because I believe we can well do with a word that captures the
active nature of sensation: and sentition, resonating as it does with volition
and cognition, sounds the right note of directed self-involvement.

The idea, to say it again, is that this sentition involves the subject `reaching
out to the body surface with an evaluative response-a response appropriate to
the stimulus and the body part affected'. This should not of course be taken to
imply that such sensory responses actually result in overt bodily behaviour-at
least certainly not in human beings as we are now. Nonetheless, I think there
is good reason to suppose that the responses we make today have in fact
evolved from responses that in the past did carry through into actual
behaviour. And the result is that even today the experience of sensation
retains many of the original characteristics of the experience of true bodily
action.

Let's consider, for example, the following five defining properties of the
experience of sensation-and, in each case, let's compare an example of
sensing, feeling a pain in my hand, with an example of bodily action,
performing a hand-wave.

1. Ownership. Sensation always belongs to the subject. When I have the

pain my hand, I own the paining, it's mine and no one else's, I am the
one and only author of it; as when I wave my hand, I own and am the
author of the action of waving.

2. Bodily location. Sensation is always indexical and invokes a

particular part of the subject's body. When I have the pain in my hand,
the paining intrinsically involves this part of me; as when I wave my
hand, the waving, too, intrinsically involves this part of me.

3. Presentness. Sensation is always present tense, ongoing, and

imperfect. When I have the pain in my hand, the paining is in
existence just now for the time being; as when I wave my hand, the
waving, too, exists just now.

4. Qualitative modality. Sensation always has the feel of one of several

 qualitatively distinct modalities. When I have the pain in my hand, the
paining belongs to the class of somatic sensations, quite different in
their whole style from, say, the class of visual sensations or of
olfactory ones; as when I wave my hand, the waving belongs to the
class of hand-waves, quite different in style from other classes of
bodily actions such as, say, the class of face-smiles or of knee-jerks.

5. Phenomenal immediacy. Most important, sensation is always

phenomenally immediate, and the four properties above are self-
disclosing. Thus, when I have the pain in my hand, my impression is
simply that my hand hurts: and, when my hand hurts, the fact that it is
my hand (rather than someone else's), that it is my hand (rather than
some other bit of me), that it is hurting now (rather than some other
time), and that it is acting in a painful fashion (rather than acting in a
visual, gustatory, or auditory fashion) are facts of which I am directly
and immediately aware for the very reason that it is I, the author of
the paining, who make these facts; just as when I wave my hand, my
impression is simply that my hand waves, and all the corresponding
properties of this action too are facts of which I, the author of the
wave, am immediately aware for similar reasons.

Thus, in these ways and others that I could point to, the positive analogies
between sensations and bodily activities add up. And yet, I acknowledge right
away that there is also an obvious disanalogy: namely that, to revert to that
old phrase, it is `like something' to have sensations, but not like anything
much to engage in most other bodily activities.

To say the least, our experience of other bodily activities is usually very
much shallower. When I wave my hand, there may be, perhaps, the ghost of
some phenomenal experience. But surely what it's like to wave hardly
compares with what it's like to feel pain, or taste salt, or sense red. The bodily
activity comes across as a flat and papery phenomenon, whereas the
sensation seems so much more velvety and thick. The bodily activity is like
an unvoiced whisper, whereas the sensation is like the rich, self-confirming
sound of a piano with the sustaining pedal down.
 Of course, neither metaphor quite captures the difference in quality I am
alluding to. But still I think the sustaining pedal brings us surprisingly close.
For I believe that ultimately the key to an experience being `like something'
does in fact lie in the experience being like itself in time-hence being about
itself, or taking itself as its own intentional object. And this is achieved, in the
special case of sensory responses, through a kind of self-resonance that
effectively stretches out the present moment to create what I have called the
thick moment of consciousness.25

There are, of course, loose ends to this analysis, and ambi guities. But I'd
say there are surely fewer of both than we began with. And this is the time to
take stock, and move on.

The task was to recast the terms on each side of the mind-brain identity
equation, phantasm, p = brain state, b, so as to make them look more like
each other.

What we have done so far is to redescribe the left-hand side of the equation
in progressively more concrete terms. Thus the phantasm of pain becomes the
sensation of pain, the sensation of pain becomes the experience of actively
paining, the activity of paining becomes the activity of reaching out to the
body surface in a painy way, and this activity becomes self-resonant and
thick. And with each step we have surely come a little closer to specifying
something of a kind that we can get a handle on.

We can therefore turn our attention to the right hand side of the equation.
As Ramsey wrote, `sometimes a consideration of dimensions alone is
sufficient to determine the form of the answer to a problem'. If we now have
this kind of thing on the mind side, we need to discover something like it on
the brain side. If the mind term involves a state of actively doing something
about something, namely issuing commands for an evaluative response
addressed to body surface, then the brain term must also be a state of actively
doing something about something, presumably doing the corresponding
thing. If the mind term involves self-resonance, then the brain state must also
involve self-resonance. And so on.
 Is this still the impossibly tall order that it seemed to be earlier-still a case
of ethics on one side, rhubarb on the other? No, I submit that the hard
problem has in fact been transformed into a relatively easy problem. For we
are now dealing with something on the mind side that surely could have the
same dimensions as a brain state could. Concepts such as `indexicality',
`present-tenseness', `modal quality', and `authorship' are indeed dual currency
concepts of just the kind required.

It looks surprisingly good. We can surely now imagine what it would take
on the brain side to make the identity work. But I think there is double cause
to be optimistic. For, as it turns out, this picture of what is needed on the
brain side ties in beautifully with a plausible account of the evolution of
sensations.

I shall round off this essay by sketching in this evolutionary history. And if I
do it in what amounts to cartoon form, I trust this will at least be sufficient to
let the major themes come through.

Let's return, then, in imagination to the earliest of times and imagine a

primitive amoeba-like animal floating in the ancient seas.

This animal has a defining edge to it, a structural boundary. This boundary
is crucial: the animal exists within this boundary-everything within it is part
of the animal, belongs to it, is part of `self', everything outside it is part of
`other'. The boundary holds the animal's own substance in and the rest of the
world out. The boundary is the vital frontier across which exchanges of
material and energy and information can take place.

Now light falls on the animal, objects bump into it, pressure waves press
against it, chemicals stick to it. No doubt some of these surface events are
going to be a good thing for the animal, others bad. If it is to survive, it must
evolve the ability to sort out the good from the bad and to respond differently
to them-reacting to this stimulus with an `Ow!', to that with an `Ouch!', to this
with a `Whowee!'.

Thus, when, say, salt arrives at its skin, it detects it and makes a
characteristic wriggle of activity-it wriggles saltily. When red light falls on it,
it makes a different kind of wriggle-it wriggles redly. These are adaptive
responses, selected because they are appropriate to the animal's particular
needs. Wriggling saltily has been selected as the best response to salt, while
wriggling sugarly, for example, would be the best response to sugar.
Wriggling redly has been selected as the best response to red light, while
wriggling bluely would be the best response to blue light.

To begin with, these wriggles are entirely local responses, organized

immediately around the site of stimulation. But later there develops
something more like a reflex arc passing via a central ganglion or proto-brain:
information arrives from the skin, it gets assessed, and appropriate adaptive
action is taken.

Still, as yet, these sensory responses are nothing other than responses, and
there is no reason to suppose that the animal is in any way mentally aware of
what is happening. Let's imagine, however, that, as this animal's life becomes
more complex, the time comes when it will indeed be advantageous for it to
have some kind of inner knowledge of what is affecting it, which it can begin
to use as a basis for more sophisticated planning and decision making. So it
needs the capacity to form mental representations of the sensory stimulation
at the surface of its body and how it feels about it.

Now, one way of developing this capacity might be to start over again with
a completely fresh analysis of the incoming information from the sense
organs. But this would be to miss a trick. For, the fact is that all the requisite
details about the stimulation-where the stimulus is occurring, what kind of
stimulus it is, and how it should be dealt with-are already encoded in the
command signals the animal is issuing when it makes the appropriate sensory
response.

Hence, all the animal needs to do to represent the stimulation is to pick up

on these already-occurring command signals. For example, to sense the
presence of salt at a certain location on its skin, it need only monitor its own
signals for wriggling saltily at that location, or, equally, to sense the presence
of red light it need only monitor its signals for wriggling redly.
 Note well, however, that all this time the animal's concern is merely with
what's occurring at its body surface. By monitoring its own responses, it
forms a representation of `what is happening to me'. But, at this stage, the
animal neither knows nor cares where the stimulation comes from, let alone
what the stimulation may imply about the world beyond its body.

Yet wouldn't it be better off if it were to care about the world beyond? Let's
say a pressure wave presses against its side: wouldn't it be better off if,
besides being aware of feeling the pressure wave as such, it were able to
interpret this stimulus as signalling an approaching predator? A chemical
odour drifts across its skin: wouldn't it be better off if it were able to interpret
this stimulus as signalling the presence of a tasty worm? In short, wouldn't
the animal be better off if, as well as reading the stimulation at its body
surface merely in terms of its immediate affective value, it were able to
interpret it as a sign of `what is happening out there'?

The answer of course is, Yes. And we can be sure that, early on, animals
did in fact hit on the idea of using the information contained in body surface
stimulation for this novel purpose-perception in addition to sensation. But the
purpose was indeed so novel that it meant a very different style of
information-processing was needed. When the question is `What is
happening to me?', the answer that is wanted is qualitative, present-tense,
transient, and subjective. When the question is `What is happening out
there?', the answer that is wanted is quantitative, analytical, permanent, and
objective.

So, to cut a long story short, there developed in consequence two parallel
channels to subserve the very different readings we now make of an event at
the surface of the body, sensation and perception: one providing an affect-
laden modality-specific body-centred representation of what the stimulation
is doing to me and how I feel about it, the other providing a more neutral,
abstract, body-independent representation of the outside world.

Sensation and perception continued along relatively independent paths in

evolution. But we need not he concerned further with perception in this
essay. For it is the fate of sensation that matters to our narrative.
 As we left it, the animal is actively responding to stimulation with public
bodily activity, and its experience or protoexperience of sensation (if we can
now call it that) arises from its monitoring its own command signals for these
sensory responses. Significantly, these responses are still tied in to the
animal's survival and their form is still being maintained by natural selection-
and it follows that the form of the animal's sensory experience is also at this
stage being determined in all its aspects by selection.

Yet, the story is by no means over. For, as this animal continues to evolve
and to change its lifestyle, the nature of the selection pressures is bound to
alter. In particular, as the animal becomes more independent of its immediate
environment, it has less and less to gain from the responses it has always
been making directly to the surface stimulus as such. In fact, there comes a
time when, for example, wriggling saltily or redly at the point of stimulation
no longer has any adaptive value at all.

Then why not simply give up on this primitive kind of local responding
altogether? The reason why not is that, even though the animal may no longer
want to respond directly to the stimulation at its body surface as such, it still
wants to be able to keep up to date mentally with what's occurring (not least
because this level of sensory representation retains a crucial role in policing
perception; see Chapter 10). So, even though the animal may no longer have
any use for the sensory responses in themselves, it has by this time become
quite dependent on the secondary representational functions that these
responses have acquired. And since the way it has been getting these
representations in the past has been by monitoring its own command signals
for sensory responses, it clearly cannot afford to stop issuing these command
signals entirely.

So, the situation now is this. In order to be able to represent `what's

happening to me', the animal must in fact continue to issue commands such
as would produce an appropriate response at the right place on the body if
they were to carry through into bodily behaviour. But, given that the
behaviour is no longer wanted, it may be better if these commands remain
virtual or as-if commands-in other words, commands which, while retaining
their original intentional properties, do not in fact have any real effects.
 The upshot is-or so I've argued-that, over evolutionary time, there is a slow
but remarkable change. What happens is that the whole sensory activity gets
`privatized': the command signals for sensory responses get short-circuited
before they reach the body surface, so that instead of reaching all the way out
to the site of stimulation, they now reach only to points closer and closer in
on the incoming sensory nerve, until eventually the whole process becomes
closed off from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain (Fig. 7).

Now once this happens, the role of natural selection must of course sharply
diminish. The sensory responses have lost all their original biological
importance and have in fact disappeared from view. Therefore selection is no
longer involved in determining the form of these responses and a fortiori it
can no longer be involved in determining the quality of the representations
based on them.

But the fact is that this privacy has come about only at the very end, after
natural selection has done its work to shape the sensory landscape. There is
therefore every reason to suppose that the forms of sensory responses and the
corresponding experiences have already been more or less permanently fixed.
And although, once selection becomes irrelevant, these forms may be liable
to drift somewhat, they are likely always to reflect their evolutionary
pedigree. Thus responses that start ed their evolutionary life as dedicated
wriggles of acceptance or rejection of a stimulus will still be recognizably of
their kind right down to the present day.
 Fig. 7

Yet, something is not in place yet: the `thickness factor'. And, as it

happens, there is a further remarkable evolutionary development to come-
made possible by the progressive shortening of the sensory response
pathway.

It has been true all along, ever since the days when sensory responses were
indeed actual wriggles at the body surface, that they have been having
feedback effects by modifying the very stimulation to which they are a
response. In the early days, however, this feedback circuit was too
roundabout and slow to have had any interesting consequences. However, as
and when the process becomes internalized and the circuit so much
shortened, the conditions are there for a significant degree of recursive
interaction to come into play. That's to say, the command signals for sensory
responses begin to loop back upon themselves, becoming in the process
partly self-creating and self-sustaining. These signals still take their cue from
input from the body surface, and still get styled by it, but on another level
they have become signals about themselves. To be the author of such
recursive signals is to enter a new intentional domain.

To return to our identity equation: we needed a certain set of features on the

brain side. We could have invented them if we were brave enough. But now,
I submit, we actually have them handed to us on a plate by an evolutionary
story that delivers on every important point.

I acknowledge that there is more to be done. And the final solution to the
mind-body problem, if ever we do agree on it, may still look rather different
from the way I'm telling it here. But the fact remains that this approach to the
problem has to be the right one. There is no escaping the need for dual
currency concepts - and any future theory will have to play by these rules.

Diderot wrote:

A tolerably clever man began his book with these words: `Man, like all
animals, is composed of two distinct substances, the soul and the body. If
anyone denies this proposition it is not for him that I write.' I nearly shut the
book. 0! ridiculous writer, if I once admit these two distinct substances, you
have nothing more to teach me.26

This essay has been about how to make one thing of these two.
D. H. Lawrence, the novelist, once remarked that if anyone presumes to ask
why the midday sky is blue rather than red, we should not even attempt to
give a scientific answer but should simply reply: `Because it is.' And if
anyone were to go still further, and to ask why his own conscious sensation
when he looks at the midday sky is characterized by blue qualia rather than
red qualia, I've no doubt that Lawrence, if he were still around-along with
several contemporary philosophers of mind-would be just as adamant that the
last place we should look for enlightenment is science.

But this is not my view. The poet and critic William Empson wrote:
`Critics are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the
flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. I
myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; unexplained
beauty arouses an irritation in me." And equally, I'd say, unexplained
subjective experience arouses an irritation in me. It is the irritation of
someone who is an unabashed Darwinian: one who holds that the theory of
evolution by natural selection has given us the licence to ask `why' questions
about almost every aspect of the design of living nature, and, what's more, to
expect that these `whys' will nearly always translate into scientifically
accredited `wherefores'.

Our default assumption, I believe, can and should be that living things are
designed the way they are because this kind of design is-or has been in the
past-biologically advantageous. And this will be so across the whole of
nature, even when we come to ask deep questions about the way the human
mind works, and even when what's at issue are the central facts of
consciousness.

Why is it like this to have red light fall on our eyes? Why like this to have
a salt taste in our mouths? Why like this to hear a trumpet sounding in our
ears? I think these questions, as much as any, deserve our best attempt to
provide Darwinian answers: answers, that is, in terms of the biological
function that is being-or has been-served.

There are two levels at which the questions can be put. First, we should ask
about the biological function of our having sensations at all. And, next, once
we have an answer to this first question, we can proceed to the trickier
question about the function of our sensations being of the special qualitative
character they are.

No doubt the first will strike most people as the easy question, and only the
second as the hard one. But I admit that even this first question may not be as
easy as it seems. And, although I want to spend most of this essay discussing
sensory quality, I realize I ought to begin at the beginning by asking: what do
we gain, of biological importance, from having sensations at all?

To see why this seemingly easy question requires serious consideration

and why the answer is not in fact self-evident, we have to take on board the
elementary distinction between sensation and perception.

The remarkable fact that human beings-and presumably many other

animals also-make use of their bodily senses in two quite different ways was
first brought to philosophical attention two hundred years ago by Thomas
Reid. `The external senses,' Reid wrote, `have a double province-to make us
feel, and to make us perceive.'Z Which is to say (as elaborated in Chapter 9)
we can and usually do use the evidence of sensory stimulation both to
provide `a subject-centred affectladen representation of what's happening to
me', and to provide `an objective, affectively neutral representation of what's
happening out there'.

Yet, while Reid insisted so firmly on this difference, he never, it seems,

thought it necessary to ask the question that so clearly follows on: why do the
senses have a double province? Do human beings really need both perception
and sensation? If, as might well be argued-especially in the case of vision and
hearing-what interests us in terms of our survival is not at all our personal
relation to the stimulation at our body surface but only what this stimulation
denotes about the outside world, why ever should we bother to represent
`what is happening to me' as well as `what is happening out there'? Why
should we not leave sensation out of it entirely and make do with perception
on its own? Would not such insensate perception serve our biological needs
perfectly well?

It is only in the last few years that psychologists have begun to face up to
the genuine challenge of this question `Why sensations?'. And there is
certainly no agreement yet on what the right Darwinian answer is. However,
there are now at least several possible answers in the offing. And I, Anthony
Marcel, and Richard Gregory have all, in different ways, endorsed what is
probably the strongest of these: namely, that sensations are required, in
Gregory's felicitous wording, `to flag the present'.3

The idea here is that the main role of sensations is, in effect, to help keep
perception honest. Both sensation and perception take sensory stimulation as
their starting point: yet, while sensation then proceeds to represent the
stimulation more or less as given, perception takes off in a much more
complex and risky way. Perception has to combine the evidence of
stimulation with contextual information, memory, and rules so as to construct
a hypothetical model of the external world as it exists independently of the
observer. Yet the danger is that, if this kind of construction is allowed simply
to run free, without being continually tied into present-tense reality, the
perceiver may become lost in a world of hypotheticals and counterfactuals.

What the perceiver needs is the capacity to run some kind of on-line reality
check, testing his perceptual model for its cur rency and relevance, and in
particular keeping tabs on where he himself now stands. And this, so the
argument goes, is precisely where low-level, unprocessed sensation does in
fact prove its value. As I summarized it earlier: `Sensation lends a here-ness
and a now-ness and a me-ness to the experience of the world, of which pure
perception in the absence of sensation is bereft. 14

I think we should be reasonably happy with this answer. The need to flag the
present provides at least one compelling reason why natural selection should
have chosen sensate human beings over insensate ones.

But we should be under no illusion about how far this answer takes us with
the larger project. For it must be obvious that even if it can explain why
sensations exist at all, it goes no way to explaining why sensations exist in
the particular qualitative form they do.

The difficulty is this. Suppose sensations have indeed evolved to flag the
present. Then surely it hardly matters precisely how they flag the present.
Nothing would seem to dictate that, for example, the sensation by which each
of us represents the presence of red light at our eye must have the particular
red quality it actually does have. Surely this function could have been
performed equally well by a sensation of green quality or some other quality
completely?

Indeed, would not the same be true of any other functional role we attribute
to sensations? For the fact is-isn't it?-that sensory quality is something private
and ineffable, maybe of deep significance to each of us subjectively but of no
consequence whatever to our standing in the outside world.

Certainly, there is a long philosophical tradition that makes exactly this

claim. John Locke originated it with his thought experiment about the
undetectable `inverted spectrum'.' Imagine, said Locke, that `if by the
different structure of our organs, it were so ordered, that the same object
should produce in several men's minds different ideas at the same time; e.g. if
the idea, that a violet produces in one man's mind by his eyes, were the same
that a marigold produced in another man's, and vice versa.' Then, Locke
surmised, there's no reason to think this difference in inner structure and the
resulting difference in the inner experience of the quality of colour would
make any difference to outer behaviour. In fact, he claimed, the difference in
inner experience `could never be known: because one man's mind could not
pass into another man's body'.

Ludwig Wittgenstein would later remark: `The assumption would thus be

possible-though unverifiable-that one section of mankind has one sensation
of red and another section another.' Indeed, this unsettling possibility became
one of the chief reasons why Wittgenstein himself decided to call a halt to
any further talk about privately sensed qualities. And it is the reason, too,
why other philosophers such as Daniel Dennett have been tempted to go even
further, and to argue that sensory qualia have no objective reality whatever.'

Now, we need not go all the way with Wittgenstein or Dennett to realize
that if even part of this argument about the privacy of qualia goes through, we
may as well give up on our ambition to have a Darwinian explanation of
them. For it must be obvious that nothing can possibly have evolved by
natural selection unless it does in fact have some sort of major public effect-
indeed, unless it has a measurably positive influence on survival and
reproduction. If, as common sense, let alone philosophy, suggests, sensory
quality really is for all practical purposes private, selection simply could
never have got a purchase on it.

It appears that we cannot have it both ways: either as Darwinists we

continue, against the odds, to try to explain sensory quality as a product of
selection, or we grudgingly accept the idea that sensations are just as private
as they seem to he.

So, what is to be done? Which of these two strongly motivated positions

must we give up?

I believe the answer is that actually we need not give up either. We can in
fact hold both to the idea that sensory quality is private, and to the idea that it
has been shaped by selection, provided we recognize that these two things
have not been true at the same time: that, in the course of evolution, the
privacy came only after the selection had occurred.

Here, in short, is the case that I would make. It may be true that the activity of
sensing is today largely hidden from public view, and that the particular
quality of sensations is not essential to the function they perform. It may be
true, for example, that my sensation of red is directly known only to me, and
that its particular redness is irrelevant to how it does its job. Yet, it was not
always so. In the evolutionary past the activity of sensing was a much more
open one, and its every aspect mattered to survival. In the past my ancestors
evolved to feel red this way because feeling it this way gave them a real
biological advantage.

Now, in case this sounds like a highly peculiar way of looking at history, I
should stress that it would not be so unusual for evolution to have worked
like this. Again and again in other areas of biology it turns out that, as the
function of an organ or behaviour has shifted over evolutionary time,
obsolete aspects of the original design have in fact carried on down more or
less unchanged.

For a simple example, consider the composition of our own blood. When
our fish ancestors were evolving four hundred million years ago in the
Devonian seas, it was essential that the salt composition of their blood should
closely resemble the external sea water, so that they would not lose water by
osmosis across their gills. Once our ancestors moved on to the land, however,
and started breathing air, this particular feature of blood was no longer of
critical importance. Nevertheless, since other aspects of vertebrate physiology
had developed to fit in with it and any change would have been at least
temporarily disadvantageous, well was left alone. The result is that human
blood is still today more or less interchangeable with sea water.

This tendency towards what can be called `stylistic inertia' is evident at

every level of evolution, not only in nature but in culture, too. Clear examples
occur in the development of language, manners, dress, and architectural
design (as has been beautifully documented by Philip Steadman).' But I
would say that as nice a case as any is provided by the history of clocks and
how their hands move.

Modern clocks have of course evolved from sundials. And in the Northern
hemisphere, where clocks began, the shadow of the sundial's vane moves
round the dial in the `sunwise' direction which we now call `clockwise'. Once
sundials came to be replaced by clockwork mechanisms with moving hands,
however, the reason for representing time by sunwise motion immediately
vanished. Nevertheless, since by this stage people's habits of time-telling
were already thoroughly ingrained, the result has been that nearly every clock
on earth still does use sunwise motion.

But suppose now, for the sake of argument, we were to be faced with a
modern clock, and, as inveterate Darwinians, we were to want to know why
its hands move the way they do. As with sensations, there would be two
levels at which the question could be posed.

If we were to ask about why the clock has hands at all, the answer would
be relatively easy. Obviously the clock needs to have hands of some kind so
as to have some way of representing the passage of time-just as we need to
have sensations of some kind so as to have some way of representing
stimulation at the body surface.

But if we ask about why the hands move clockwise as they do, the answer
would have to go much deeper. For clearly the job of representing time could
in fact nowadays be served equally well by rotationally inverted movement-
just as the job of representing sensory stimulation could nowadays be served
equally well by quality-inverted sensations. In fact, as we've seen, this second
question for the clock can only be answered by reference to ancestral history-
just as I would argue for sensations.

When an analogy fits the case as well as this, I would say it cries out to be
taken further. For it strongly suggests there is some profounder basis for the
resemblance than at first appears. And, in this instance, I believe we really
have struck gold. The clock analogy provides the very key to what sensations
are and how they have evolved.

A clock tells time by acting in a certain way, namely by moving its hands;
and this action has a certain style inherited from the past, a clockwise style,
clockwisely. The remarkable truth is, I believe, that a person also has
sensations by acting in a certain way; and, yes, each sensory action also has
its own inherited style-for example, a red style, redly.

This theory of `sensations as actions'-bodily actions that in the course of

evolution have become `privatized'-is the subject of my book A History of
the Mind, and is outlined in Chapter 9 (see especially pages 108-13). I shall
summarize here only the crucial details.

Sensations, I argue, originate with the protective and appetitive responses

of primitive animals to stimulation at their body surface. Under the influence
of natural selection, these sensory responses become finely adapted so as to
reflect the particular pattern of stimulation, with the intentional properties of
the response varying according to the nature of the stimulus, its bodily
location, its modality, and so on. These responses therefore encode
information about what is happening at the body surface and how the animal
evaluates it. However, in the early stages, the animal has no interest in
bringing this information to mind-no use, as yet, for any kind of
representation of `what's happening to me.

Life grows more complicated, and the animal, besides merely responding
to stimulation, does develop an interest in forming mental representations of
what's happening to it. But, given that the information is already encoded in
its own sensory responses, the obvious way of getting there is to monitor its
command signals for making these responses. In other words, the animal can,
as it were, tune into `what's happening to me and how I feel about it' by the
simple trick of noting `what I'm doing about it'.

The result is that sensations do indeed evolve at first as corollaries of the

animal's public bodily activity. And since, in these early days, the form of
this activity is still being maintained by natural selection, it follows that the
forms of the animal's mental representations-its sensory `experience' or proto-
experience, if you like-are also being determined in all their aspects by
selection.

Life moves on further, and the making of responses directly to stimuli at

the body surface becomes of less and less relevance to the organism's
biological survival. In fact, the time comes when it may be better to suppress
these responses altogether. But now the animal is in something of a bind. For,
while it may no longer have any need for the bodily responses as such, it has
become quite dependent on the mental representations of the stimuli-
representations that have been based on monitoring these very responses.

The animal has therefore to find a way of continuing to make as if to

respond to the stimuli, without actually carrying the activity through into
overt behaviour. And the upshot isor so I've argued-that the whole sensory
activity gets privatized, with the command signals getting short-circuited
before they reach the body surface, and eventually getting entirely closed off
from the outside world in an internal loop within the brain (Fig.7 at Chapter
9, p. 112).

Once this happens, the role of natural selection must sharply diminish. The
sensory responses have lost all their original biological importance and have
in fact disappeared from view. Note well, however, that this privatization has
come about only at the very end, after natural selection has done its work to
shape the sensory landscape. And the forms of sensory responses and the
corresponding experiences have already been more or less permanently fixed,
so as to reflect their pedigree.

It is this evolutionary pedigree that still colours private sensory experience

right down to the present day. If I today feel the sensation red this way-as I
know very well that I do-it is because I am descended from distant ancestors
who were selected to feel it this same way long ago.

Here we are, then, with the solution that I promised. We can have it both
ways. We can both make good on our ambition to explain sensory quality as
a product of selection, and we can accept the common-sense idea that
sensations are as private as they seem to be-provided we do indeed recognize
that these two things have not been true at the same time.

But the rewards of this Darwinian approach are, I believe, greater still. For
there remains to be told the story of how, after the privatized command
signals have begun to loop back on themselves within the brain, there are
likely to be dramatic consequences for sensory phenomenology. In particular,
how the activity of sensing is destined to become self-sustaining and partly
self-creating, so that sensory experiences get lifted into a time dimension of
their own-into what I have called the `thick time' of the subjective present.'
What is more, how the establishment of this time loop is the key to the thing
we value most about sensations: the fact that not only do they have quality
but that this quality comes across to us in the very special, self-intimating
way that we call the what it's like of consciousness.

When did this transformation finally occur? Euan Macphail, among others,
has argued that conscious sensations require the prior existence of a self."'
The philosopher Gottlob Frege made a similar claim: `An experience is
impossible without an experient. The inner world presupposes the person
whose inner world it is.'" I agree with both these writers about the
requirement that sensations have a self to whom they belong. But I think
Macphail, in particular, goes much too far with his insistence that such a self
can only emerge with language. My own view is that self-representations
arise through action, and that the `feeling self' may actually be created by
those very sensory activities that make up its experience.

This is, however, another story for another time. I will simply remark here,
with Rudyard Kipling, contra Lawrence, that `Them that asks no questions
isn't told a lie"2-and no truths either.
Outside the London Zoo the other day I saw a hydrogen-filled dolphin caught
in a tree. It was bobbing about, blown by the wind, every so often making a
little progress upwards, but with no prospect of escape. To the child who'd
released it, I was tempted to explain: yes, the balloon would `like' to rise into
the air, but unfortunately it doesn't have much common sense.

Now imagine a real dolphin caught under a tree. Like the balloon, it might
push and struggle for a time. But dolphins are clever. And having seen how
matters stood, a real dolphin would work out a solution in its mind: soon
enough it would dive and resurface somewhere else.

Dolphins have intelligence, balloons do not. A hundred years ago William

James defined intelligence: `With intelligent agents, altering the conditions
changes the activity displayed, but not the end reached ... The pursuance of
future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and
criterion of mentality in a phenomenon."

James was not interested in animals alone. He wrote of intelligent `agents'

and of mentality in a 'phenomenon'-and allowed that intelligence might
belong to entities quite other than creatures like dolphins or ourselves. Since
his time, we have indeed become used to the idea of intelligent man-made
machines. But for James, as he progressed towards a mystical old age, the
question became more open still. Does intelligence characterize the whole of
Nature? Is the sea intelligent, is the weather, are galaxies ... is God?

These issues have become hot topics again among philosopher-biologists,

but none hotter than the question of the `species mind'. Since Darwin's time,
it has been realized that evolving species behave as if they have a goal-the
goal of selfadvancement in the struggle for survival. But until recently it's
been assumed that the forces of evolution are no more intelligent or better
informed than the balloon. Species push up against the environmental limits,
but can go no further until some accidental change allows them to inch
forward. What's more, evolving species have no foresight-they cannot see the
dead end or the sharp twig (and indeed, like the balloon, they sometimes
pop).

Now, however, new ideas are emerging with an emphasis on the ways a
species may in fact play an `intelligent' part in its own evolution. It is even
being suggested that there is a sense in which a species may be able to `think
things through' before it ratifiesa particular evolutionary advance.

The philosopher Jonathan Schull argues it like this.2 The mark of higher
intelligence, he notes, is that the solution to a problem comes in stages: (i)
possible solutions are generated at random, (ii) those solutions likely to
succeed are followed through in the imagination, (iii) only then is the best of
these adopted in practice. But doesn't something very like this occur in
biological evolution, too? It does, and it has a name: the `Baldwin effect'.

Let's suppose the members of a species are confronted by a problem-the

problem, say, of how to keep warm. By chance there arises a particular
individual who learns by his own efforts how to build a cosy nest. Natural
selection then gets to work and favours him and his successors who show
equivalent inventiveness in nest-building. But, as a result of this, the process
of invention begins to get short-circuited, because there is selection for
anything that makes the invention more likely to occur. So more and more of
the elements of learned nest-building (selecting the material, weaving it
together, and so on) become incorporated in genetic programs-until
eventually the learned habit has become an unlearned instinct. In Schull's
words:

The adapting population of animals thus plays a role in evolution analogous

to that of the cortex in individual mammalian behaviour, interacting with the
environment to develop new patterns and try them out, and then passing
control of routinized patterns to more automatic centres.

For those who want to see it, the parallel to intelligence is striking. Where
we go with it is another matter. Does it mean that species, considered as
entities in their own right, are in some sense consciously aware? Are
individual organisms the species-equivalent of thoughts?
 Several mystical traditions have claimed as much. For myself, I'm chary of
any talk of species consciousness. But I like the idea of individuals as trial
runs for the population, whose passing strokes of ingenuity have slowly
become cast in DNA. It pleases me, too, to think that individual creativity
may have lain behind much of the inherited design in nature. Perhaps as a
species we owe more than we realize to those long-dead pioneers who once
thought up the answers we're now horn with: those individual heroes who,
like Shakespeare's Mark Antony, `dolphin-like showed their backs above the
element they lived in'.'
`Man is a great miracle', the art historian Ernst Gombrich was moved to say,
when writing about the newly discovered paintings at the Chauvet and
Cosquer caves.' The paintings of Chauvet, especially, dating to about 30,000
years ago, have prompted many people to marvel at this early flowering of
the modern human mind. Here, it has seemed, is clear evidence of a new kind
of mind at work: a mind that, after so long a childhood in the Old Stone Age,
had grown up as the mature, cognitively fluid mind we know today.

In particular it has been claimed that these and other examples of Ice Age
art demonstrate, first, that their makers must have possessed high level
conceptual thought: for example,

The Chauvet cave is testimony that modern humans . . . were capable of the
type of symbolic thought and sophisticated visual representation that was
beyond Neanderthals,'

or

Each of these painted animals ... is the embodiment and essence of the animal
species. The individual bison, for example, is a spiritualpsychic symbol; he is
in a sense the `father of the bison,' the idea of the bison, the `bison as such'.3

Second, that their makers must have had a specific intention to represent and
communicate information: for example,

The first cave paintings ... are the first irrefutable expressions of a symbolic
process that is capable of conveying a rich cultural heritage of images and
probably stories from generation to generation,'

or, more particularly,

This clearly deliberate and planned imagery functions to stress one part of the
body, or the animal's activity ... since it is these that are of interest Ito the
hunterl.'

And, third, that there must have been a long tradition of artistry behind them:
for example,

We now know that more than 30,000 years ago ice age artists had acquired a
complete mastery of their technical means, presumably based on a tradition
extending much further into the pasta

The paintings and engravings must surely strike anyone as wondrous. Still, I
draw attention here to evidence that suggests that the miracle they represent
may not be at all of the kind most people think. Indeed this evidence suggests
the very opposite: that the makers of these works of art may actually have
had distinctly premodern minds, have been little given to symbolic thought,
have had no great interest in communication, and have been essentially self-
taught and untrained. Cave art, so far from being the sign of a new order of
mentality, may perhaps better be thought the swan-song of the old.

The evidence I refer to, which has been available for more than twenty
years now (although apparently unnoticed in this context) comes from a study
made in the early 1970s by Lorna Selfe of the artwork of a young autistic girl
named Nadia.7

Nadia, born in Nottingham in 1967, was in several respects severely

retarded. By the age of six years she had still failed to develop any spoken
language, was socially unresponsive, and was physically clumsy. But already
in her third year she had begun to show an extraordinary drawing ability,
suddenly starting to produce line drawings of animals and people, mostly
from memory, with quite uncanny photographic accuracy and graphic
fluency:

Nadia's ability, apart from its being so superior to other children, was also
essentially different from the drawing of normal children. It is not that she
had an accelerated development in this sphere but rather that her development
was totally anomalous. Even her earlier drawings showed few of the
properties associated with infant drawings ... Perspective, for instance, was
present from the start."

These drawings of Nadia's, I now suggest, bear astonishing parallels to

high cave art.

Figure 8 shows part of the big horse panel from Chauvet, Figure 9 a
drawing of horses made by Nadia-one of her earliest-at age three years five
months. Figure 10 shows a tracing of horses from Lascaux, Figure 11 another
of Nadia's early drawings. Figure 12 shows an approaching bison from
Chauvet, Figure 13 an approaching cow by Nadia at age four. Figure 14
shows a mammoth from Pech Merle, Figure 15 two elephants by Nadia at age
four. Figure 16 a detail of a horsehead profile from Lascaux, Figure 17 a
horsehead by Nadia at age six. Figure 18, finally, a favourite and repeated
theme of Nadia's, a rider on horseback, this one at age five.

The remarkable similarities between the cave paintings and Nadia's speak
for themselves. There is first of all the striking naturalism and realism of the
individual animals. In both cases, as Jean Clottes writes of the Chauvet
paintings, `These are not stereotyped images which were transcribed to
convey the concept "lion" or "rhinoceros", but living animals faithfully
reproduced.'9 And in both cases, the graphic techniques by which this
naturalism is achieved are very similar. Linear contour is used to model the
body of the animals. Foreshortening and hidden-line occlusion are used to
give perspective and depth. Animals are typically `snapped' as it were in
active motion-prancing, say, or bellowing. Liveliness is enhanced by
doubling up on some of the body contours. There is a preference for side-on
views. Salient parts, such as faces and feet, are emphasized-with the rest of
the body sometimes being ignored.

Yet it is not only in these `sophisticated' respects that the cave drawings
and Nadia's are similar, but in some of their more idiosyncratic respects, too.
Particularly notable in both sets of drawings is the tendency for one figure to
be drawn, almost haphazardly, on top of another. True, this overlay may
sometimes be interpretable as a deliberate stylistic feature. Clottes, for
example, writes about Chauvet: `In many cases, the heads and bodies
overlap, doubtless to give an effect of numbers, unless it is a depiction of
movement.' " In many other cases, however, the overlap in the cave paintings
serves no such stylistic purpose and seems instead to be completely arbitrary,
as if the artist has simply paid no notice to what was already on the wall. And
the same goes for most of the examples of overlap in Nadia's drawings.
Figure 19, for example, shows a typical composite picture made by Nadia at
age five-comprising a cock, a cat, and two horses (one upside down).

Fig. 8. Painted horses from Chauvet Cave (Ardeche), probably Aurignacian

 Fig. 9. Horses by Nadia, at 3 years 5 months

Fig. 10. Painted and engraved horses from Lascaux (Dordogne), probably
Magdalenian
Fig. 11. Horses by Nadia, at 3 years 5 months
Fig. 12. Painted bison from Chauvet cave (Ardeche), probably Aurignacian
Fig. 13. Cow by Nadia, at approximately 4 years
Fig. 14. Painted mammoth from Pech Merle (Lot), probably Solutrean
Fig. 15. Elephants by Nadia, at approximately 4 years
Fig. 16. Engraved horsehead from Lascaux (Dordogne), probably
Magdalenian
Fig. 17. Horsehead by Nadia, at approximately 6 years
Fig. 18. Horse and rider by Nadia, at 5 years

In Nadia's case, this apparent obliviousness to overlapwith the messy

superimpositions that resulted-may in fact have been a positive feature of her
autism. Autistic children have often been noted to be unusually attentive to
detail in a sensory array, while being relatively uninfluenced-and even maybe
unaware of-the larger context." Indeed, such is their tendency to focus on
parts rather than wholes that, if and when the surrounding context of a figure
is potentially misleading or confusing, they may actually find it easier than
normal people to ignore the context and see through it. Amitta Shah and Uta
Frith have shown, for example, that autistics perform quite exceptionally well
on the so-called `hidden figure' test, where the task is to find a target figure
that has been deliberately camouflaged by surrounding lines.12

There is no knowing whether the cave artists did in fact share with Nadia
this trait which Frith calls `weak central coherence'." But if they did do so, it
might account for another eccentricity that occurs in both series of drawings.
Selfe reports that Nadia would sometimes use a detail that was already part of
one figure as the starting point for a new drawing-which would then take off
in another direction-as if she had lost track of the original context. 14 And it
seems (although I admit this is my own post hoc interpretation) that this
could even happen halfway through, so that a drawing that began as one kind
of animal would turn into another. Thus Figure 20 shows a strange composite
animal produced by Nadia, with the body of giraffe and the head of donkey.
The point to note is that chimeras of this kind are also to be found in cave art.
The Chauvet cave, for example, has a figure that apparently has the head of a
bison and the trunk and legs of a man.
Fig. 19. Superimposed animals by Nadia,at 6 years 3 months
 Fig. 20. Composite animal, part giraffe, part donkey, by Nadia, at
approximately 6 years

What lessons, if any, can be drawn from these surprising parallels? The
right answer might, of course, be: None. I am sure there will be readers-
including some of those who have thought longest and hardest about the
achievements of the Ice Age artists-who will insist that all the apparent
resemblances between the cave drawings and Nadia's can only be accidental,
and that it would be wrong-even impertinent-to look for any deeper meaning
in this `evidence'. I respect this possibility, and agree we should not be too
quick to see a significant pattern where there is none. In particular, I would be
the first to say that resemblances do not imply identity. I would not dream of
suggesting, for example, that the cave artists were themselves clinically
autistic, or that Nadia was some kind of a throwback to the Ice Age. Yet,
short of this, I still want to ask what can reasonably be made of the parallels
that incontrovertibly exist.

To start with, I think it undeniable that these parallels tell us something

important about what we should not assume about the mental capacities of
the cave artists. Given that Nadia could draw as she did despite her
undeveloped language, impoverished cognitive skills, apparent lack of
interest in communication, and absence of artistic training, it is evident that
so too could the cave artists have done so. Hence the existence of the cave
drawings should presumably not be taken to be the proof, which so many
people have thought it is, that the cave artists had essentially modern minds.
Tattersall, for instance, may claim that `[Chauvet] dramatically bolsters the
conclusion that the first modern people arrived in Europe equipped with all of
the cognitive skills that we possess today';" but he is clearly on less solid
ground than he supposes.

Next-and I realize this is bound to be more controversial-I think it possible

that the parallels also tell us something more positive about what we can
assume about the artists' minds. For suppose it were the case that Nadia could
draw as she did only because of her undeveloped language and other
impoverishments. Suppose, indeed, it were more generally the case that a
person not only does not need a typical modern mind to draw like that but
must not have a typical modern mind to draw like that. Then the cave
paintings might actually be taken to be proof positive that the cave artists'
minds were essentially premodern.

In Nadia's case, there has in fact already been a degree of rich speculation
on this score: speculation, that is, as to whether her drawing ability was
indeed something that was `released' in her only because her mind failed to
develop in directions that in normal children more typically smother such
ability. Selfe's hypothesis has always been that it was Nadia's language-or
rather her failure to develop it-that was the key.

At the age of six years Nadia's vocabulary consisted of only ten one-word
utterances, which she used rarely. And, although it was difficult to do formal
tests with her, there were strong hints that this lack of language went along
with a severe degree of literal-mindedness, so that she saw things merely as
they appeared at the moment and seldom if ever assigned them to higher-
level categories. Thus,
it was discovered that although Nadia could match difficult items with the
same perceptual quality, she failed to match items in the same conceptual
class. For example, she could match a picture of an object to a picture of its
silhouette, but she failed to match pictures of an armchair and a deck chair
from an array of objects that could be classified on their conceptual basis. 16

It was this very lack of conceptualization, Selfe believes, that permitted

Nadia to register exactly how things looked to her. Whereas a normal child of
her age, on seeing a horse, for example, would see it-and hence lay down a
memory of itas a token of the category `horse', Nadia was simply left with the
original visual impression it created.

Selfe went on to examine several other autistic subjects who also possessed
outstanding graphic skills (although none, it must be said, the equal of
Nadia), and she concludes that for this group as a whole the evidence points
the same way.

It is therefore proposed that without the hypothesised domination of language

and verbal mediation in the early years when graphic competence was being
acquired, these subjects were able to attend to the spatial characteristics of
their optic array and to represent these aspects in their drawing ... These
children therefore have a more direct access to visual imagery in the sense
that their drawings are not so strongly `contaminated' by the usual
`designating and naming' properties of normal children's drawings.''

Thus, whereas a normal child when asked to draw a horse would, in the
telling words of a five-year-old, `have a think, and then draw my think',
Nadia would perhaps simply have had a look at her remembered image and
then drawn that look.

This hypothesis is, admittedly, somewhat vague and openended; and Selfe
herself considers it no more than a fair guess as to what was going on with
Nadia. However, most subsequent commentators have taken it to be at least
on the right lines, and certainly nothing has been proposed to better it. I
suggest, therefore, we should assume, for the sake of argument at least, that it
is basically correct. In which case, the question about the cave artists
immediately follows. Could it he that in their case, too, their artistic prowess
was due to the fact that they had little if any language, so that their drawings
likewise were uncontaminated by `designating and naming'?

There are two possibilities we might consider. One is that language was
absent in the general population of human beings living in Europe 30,000
years ago. The other is that there were at least a few members of the
population who lacked language and it was from amongst this subgroup that
all the artists came. But this second idea-even though there is no reason to
rule it out entirely (and though the philosopher Daniel Dennett tells me it is
the one he favours)-would seem to involve too much special pleading to
deserve taking further, and I suggest we should focus solely on the first.

Then, we have to ask: is it really in any way plausible to suppose that

human beings of such a relatively recent epoch had as yet not developed the
capacity for full-scale language? The standard answer, coming from
anthropology and archaeology, would certainly he: No. Human spoken
language surely had its beginnings at least a million years ago, and most
likely had already evolved to more or less its present level by the time the
ancestral group of Homo sapiens sapiens left Africa around 100,000 years
ago. By the date of the first cave paintings, therefore, there can be no
question of there being any general deficiency in people's capacity to name or
designate.

Yet there are revisionist ideas about this in the air. Everybody agrees that
some kind of language for some purpose has likely been in existence among
humans for most of their history since they parted from the apes. But Robin
Dunbar, for example, has argued that human language evolved originally not
as a general purpose communication system for talking about anything
whatever, but rather as a specifically social tool for negotiating about-and
helping maintain-interpersonal relationships.'' And Steven J. Mithen has
taken up this idea and run with it, arguing that the `linguistic module' of the
brain was initially available only to the module of `social intelligence', not to
the modules of 'technical intelligence' or `natural history intelligence'." So, to
begin with, people would-and could-use language only as a medium for
naming and talking about other people and their personal concerns, and not
for anything else.

Even so, this idea of language having started off as a subspeciality may not
really be much help to the argument at hand. For Mithen himself has argued
that the walls around the mental modules came down at the latest some
50,000 years ago. In fact, he himself takes the existence of the supposedly
`symbolic' Chauvet paintings to be good evidence that this had already
happened by the date of their creation: `All that was needed was a connection
between these cognitive pro cesses which had evolved for other tasks to
create the wonderful paintings in Chauvet Cave."" Therefore, other things
being equal, even Mithen could not be expected to countenance the much
later date that this line of thinking that stems from Nadia indicates.

However, suppose that while Mithen is absolutely right in his view of the
sequence of changes in the structure of the human mind, he is still not
sufficiently radical in his timing of it. Suppose that the integration of modules
that he postulates did not take place until, say, just 20,000 years ago, and that
up to that time language did remain more or less exclusively social. So that
the people of that time-like Nadia todayreally did not have names for horses,
bison, and lions (not to mention chairs). Suppose, indeed, that the very idea
of something representing `the bison as such' had not yet entered their still
evolving minds. Then, I suggest, the whole story falls in place.

J. M. Keynes wrote of Isaac Newton that his private journals and

notebooks reveal him to have been not the first scientist of the Age of Reason
but the last of the magicians." Now, likewise, we might say that the cave
paintings reveal their makers to have been not the first artists of the age of
symbolism but the last of the innocents.

But 20,000 years ago? No language except for talking about other people?
In an experiment I did many years ago, I found clear evidence that rhesus
monkeys are cognitively biased towards taking an interest in and making
categorical distinctions between other rhesus monkeys, while they ignore the
differences between individuals of other species-cows, dogs, pigs, and so
on.22 I am therefore probably more ready than most to believe that early
humans might have had minds that permitted them to think about other
people in ways quite different from the ways they were capable of thinking
about non-human animals. Even so, I too would have thought the idea that
there could still have been structural constraints on the scope of human
language until just 20,000 years ago too fantastic to take seriously, were it not
for one further observation that seems to provide unanticipated confirmation
of it. This is the striking difference in the representation of humans as
opposed to animals in cave art.

Note that the hypothesis, as formulated, makes a testable prediction. If

before 20,000 years ago people had names available for talking about other
human individuals but not for other animals, and if it were indeed this lack of
naming that permitted those artists to depict animals so naturalistically, then
this naturalism ought not to extend to other human beings. In other words,
representations of humans should either be missing altogether from the cave
paintings, or if present should be much more stereotypical and modern.

But, behold, this is exactly what is the case. As a matter of fact, there are
no representations of humans at Chauvet. And when they do occur in later
paintings, as at Lascaux at 17,000 years ago, they are nothing other than
crudely drawn iconic symbols. So that we are presented in a famous scene
from Lascaux, for example, with the conjunction of a wellmodelled picture of
a bison with a little human stick-figure beside it (Fig. 21). In only one cave,
La Marche, dating to 12,000 years ago, are there semi-realistic portrayals of
other humans, scratched on portable plaquettes-but even these appear to be
more like caricatures.

Nadia provides a revealing comparison here. Unlike the cave artists, Nadia
as a young girl had names neither for animals nor people. It is to be expected,
therefore, that Nadia, unlike the cave artists, would in her early drawings
have accorded both classes of subject equal treatment. And so she did. While
it is true that Nadia drew animals much more frequently than people, when
she did try her hand at the latter she showed quite similar skills. Nadia's
pictures of footballers and horsemen at age five, for example, were as natural-
looking as her pictures of horses themselves. Figure 22 shows Nadia's
drawing of a human figure, made at age four.
 I accept, of course, that none of these comparisons add up to a solid
deductive argument. Nonetheless, I think the case for supposing that the cave
artists did share some of Nadia's mental limitations looks surprisingly strong.
And strong enough, surely, to warrant the question of how we might expect
the story to continue. What would we expect to have happened-and what did-
when the descendants of those early artists finally acquired truly modern
minds? Would we not predict an end to naturalistic drawing across the board?

Fig. 21. Painted bison and human figure, Lascaux (Dordogne), probably
Magdalenian
Fig. 22. Human figure by Nadia, at approximately 4 years

In Nadia's case it is significant that when at the age of eight and more, as a
result of intensive teaching, she did acquire a modicum of language, her
drawing skills partly (though by no means wholly) fell away. Elizabeth
Newson, who worked with her at age seven onwards, wrote:

Nadia seldom draws spontaneously now, although from time to time one of
her horses appears on a steamed up window. If asked, however, she will
draw: particularly portraits ... In style Ithesel are much more economical than
her earlier drawings, with much less detail ... The fact that Nadia at eight and
nine can produce recognisable drawings of the people around her still makes
her talent a remarkable one for her age: but one would no longer say that it is
unbelievable."

So, Newson went on, `If the partial loss of her gift is the price that must he
paid for language-even just enough language to bring her into some kind of
community of discourse with her small protected world-we must, I think, be
prepared to pay that price on Nadia's behalf.'

Was this the story of cave art, too? With all the obvious caveats, I would
suggest it might have been. What we know is that cave art, after Chauvet,
continued to flourish with remarkably little stylistic progression for the next
twenty millennia (though, interestingly, not without a change occurring about
20,000 years ago in the kinds of animals represented).24 But then at the end
of the Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago, for whatever reason, the art stopped.
And the new traditions of painting that emerged over five millennia later in
Assyria and Egypt were quite different in style, being much more
conventionally childish, stereotyped and stiff. Indeed, nothing to equal the
naturalism of cave art was seen again in Europe until the Italian Renaissance,
when lifelike perspective drawing was reinvented, but now as literally an `art'
that had to be learned through long professional apprenticeship.

Maybe, in the end, the loss of naturalistic painting was the price that had to
be paid for the coming of poetry. Human beings could have Chauvet or the
Epic of Gilgamesh but they could not have both. I am sure such a conclusion
will strike many people not merely as unexpected but as outlandish. But then
human beings are a great miracle, and if their history were not in some ways
unexpected and outlandish they would be less so.
POSTSCRIPT
When this essay was published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, it
was followed by eight critical commentaries by archaeologists and
psychologists.'' In my reply to these commentaries, I was able to expand on
and clarify some of my original points. This is an abbreviated version of that
reply (with the thrust of the commentators' criticisms emerging in the course
of my responses to them).

Paul Bahn remarks that one of the joys of being a specialist in prehistoric art
is the stream of strange ideas that come his way. I should say that one of the
joys of being a non-specialist is to have an opportunity such as this to be
listened to, enlarged upon, and corrected by scholars who know the field
better than I do.

The main purpose of my essay was to challenge the overconfident

`modernist' (with a small `m') interpretation of Ice Age art (not to mention
other aspects of Upper Palaeolithic culture) that pervades both academic and
popular accounts. As Robert Darnton has written in a different context,
`Nothing is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans
of the past] thought and felt just as we do today-allowing for the wigs and
wooden shoes' .2" And equally I would say nothing is easier than to slip into
the assumption that the Ice Age artists created pictures in the way and even
for some of the reasons that modern artists do today-allowing for the reindeer
picks and tallow candles. `We constantly need to be shaken out of a false
sense of familiarity with the past,' Darnton continued, `to be administered
doses of culture shock.'

What I set out to demonstrate in the first part of the essay was the shocking
truth that there are quite other ways of being an artist than the one we take for
granted. Nadia's skill was such that, if we did not know the provenance of her
drawings, we might well assume that they came from the hand of someone
with all the promise of a young Picasso. Yet Nadia was mentally disabled.
She lacked the capacity to speak or to symbolize, and she created her art only
for her own amusement. I argued, therefore, that just as we might so easily
misinterpret Nadia's drawings if we were to come across them cold, so there
is the possibility that we may have already been misinterpreting cave art. At
the very least, scholars should be more cautious than they have been before
jumping to grandiose conclusions about the mentality of the Ice Age artists.

Now, to this, the negative argument of the paper about what we should not
conclude about cave art, two kinds of objection are raised.

The first consists in denying that there is in fact any significant similarity
between cave art and Nadia's. Paul Bahn claims he simply cannot see the
similarity. Ezra Zubrow thinks it might be due to selective sampling, or else
merely chance. Steven Mithen has reservations about the drawing techniques
and says he sees `a glaring difference in the quality of line: Nadia appears to
draw in a series of unconnected lines, often repeated in the manner of a
sketch, while the dominant character of cave art is a confidence in line, single
authoritative strokes or engraved marks'.

But, as Selfe's description of Nadia's technique makes clear, Mithen is

making more of this technical difference than is warranted. `Nadia used fine,
quickly executed lines. Her motor control was highly developed ... Her lines
were firm and executed without unintentional wavering ... She almost
invariably appeared to have a definite idea about what she was drawing so
there were no wasted lines.'27 And if Bahn and Zubrow think the overall
similarities are nonexistent or accidental, all I can say is: look again. Or,
better, do not rely on the few illustrations of this paper, but take the hundred
or so drawings by Nadia in Selfe's book and match them however you will
with works from Chauvet or Lascaux. Mithen comments on `the remarkable
continuity in subject matter and style of Upper Palaeolithic art'. I defy anyone
with an eye for style not to see how easily Nadia's drawings could have been
part of this same tradition (indeed, how they are in some ways closer to
Chauvet on one side and Lascaux on the other, than Chauvet is to Lascaux!).

It is not fair, perhaps, to play the connoisseur and question the aesthetic
sensitivity of those who will not see things my way. But I confess that, when
Bahn asks why I make so much of Nadia in my paper as against other savant
artists such as Stephen Wiltshire,''-" and implies that Stephen Wiltshire's
drawings would have made an equally good (or, as he thinks, bad)
comparison for cave art, it does make me wonder about the quality of his
critical judgment. For I'd say it should be obvious to anyone with a good eye
that Nadia's drawings of animals demand this comparison, whereas Stephen
Wiltshire's drawings of buildings simply do not.

The second kind of objection to the negative argument about what we

should not conclude about cave art is at a different level. It consists in
claiming that what this argument does is to treat cave art as if it were an
isolated phenomenon, whereas it ought properly to be considered in the
context of the rest of the surrounding culture. Steven Mithen and Ian
Tattersall, for example, both concede that the argument about cave art being
produced by minds similar to Nadia's might possibly go through, if the art
was all we had to go on. But, they say, when the achievements of Upper
Palaeolithic culture are considered as a whole, this interpretation simply does
not wash. There is too much else in the archaeological record that speaks to
the presence at this time of sophisticated, symbolusing, language-saturated
minds: evidence of body decoration, music, funerary rituals, elaborate trade
networks, and so on. If human beings were so far advanced in all these other
areas, surely they must have been using the same high-level mental skills in
their art also.

This sounds persuasive, until we realize that it largely begs the question.
I'd agree it might be unarguable that, if it were certainly established that these
other cultural activities really occurred in the way that archaeologists imagine
and involved those high-level skills, then it would follow that art did too. But
what makes us so sure that Upper Palaeolithic humans were engaging in
ritual, music, trading, and so on at the level that everyone assumes? One
answer that clearly will not do here is to say that these were the same humans
who were producing symbolic art! Yet, as matter of fact this is just the
answer that comes across in much of the literature: cave art is taken as the
first and best evidence of there having been a leap in human mentality at
about this time, and the rest of the culture is taken as corroborating it.

Of course, another answer might be that high-level symbolic thought had

to be involved in these other activities because when we ourselves engage in
similar activities today, we use our full range of mental skills to do so. But,
again, this is precisely the kind of logic I (and Robert Darnton above) mean
to question. Just as there are ways of drawing beautiful and complex pictures
that are not our ways, we should be alert to the possibility that there are ways
of having intense and meaningful social engagements that are not our ways-
including forms, though not exactly our forms, of trade, ritual, dance, and so
on. In particular, we should not assume any necessary role in any of these
things for universal, cross-domain language.

I turn now to the positive argument that I mounted in the second half of the
essay, about what perhaps we can conclude about cave art: namely, that the
people who produced it not only might not have had modern minds like ours,
but really did not-and in particular, that they did still have minds more like
Nadia's, with underdeveloped language. I am hardly surprised that this
suggestion has met with more scepticism and hostility than the first, and
indeed that Daniel Dennett is virtually alone among the commentators in
looking kindly on it-for it is of course closer to the kind of no-holds-barred
`what if?' speculation that philosophers are familiar with than it is to normal
science.

But there may be another reason why Dennett likes this argument, while
others do not. For I realize now that there has been a general
misunderstanding of my position, one that I did not see coming, but which if
I had seen I should have tried to head off earlier. It appears that almost all the
other commentators have taken it for granted that when I talk about the
difference between a premodern and modern mind (or a linguistically
restricted/unrestricted mind, or a cognitively rigid/fluid mind), I must be
talking about a genetically determined difference in the underlying brain
circuitry. That's to say, that I must be assuming that humans were in the past
born with a premodern mind, while today they are (except for unfortunate
individuals such as Nadia) born with a modern mind.

But this not my position at all. For, in line with Dennett's own ideas about
recent cognitive evolution'21 I actually think it much more likely that the
change from premodern to modern came about not through genetic changes
in innately given `hardware' but rather through environmental changes in the
available `software': in other words, I think that premodern humans became
modern humans when their environmentand specifically the linguistic and
symbolic environment inherited through their culture-became such as to
reliably programme their minds in quite new ways.

In the longer run, of course, there must also have been important genetic
changes. No modern environment could make a modern human of a
chimpanzee or even of one of our ancestors from, say, 100,000 years ago.
Still, I'd suggest that, over the time period that concerns us here, genetic
changes in the structure of the brain actually account for very little. It is
primarily the modern twentieth-century cultural environment that makes
modern humans of our babies today, and it was primarily the premodern
Upper Palaeolithic environment that made premodern humans of their babies
then (so that, if our respective sets of babies were to swap places, so would
their minds).

Now, I realize that in this regard the analogy I drew with Nadia and with
autism is potentially misleading. For, as Bahn does well to point out, Nadia
like most autistic children almost certainly had some kind of congenital brain
abnormality (although the evidence is unclear as to whether, as Bahn claims,
there was specific damage to her temporal lobes). Unlike the premodern
humans we are talking about, Nadia did not have underdeveloped software,
but rather she had damaged hardware. I ought to have made it clear,
therefore, that the similarity I see between Nadia and premodern humans is at
the level of the functional architecture of their minds rather than of the
anatomy of their brains. Specifically, both premodern humans (because of
their culture) and Nadia (because of her brain damage) had very limited
language, and in consequence both had heightened pictorial memory and
drawing skills.

I hope it will be obvious how, with this being the proper reading of my
argument, some of the objections of the commentators no longer strike home.
In particular there need be no great problem in squaring my suggestion about
the relatively late arrival of modern minds in Europe with the known facts
about the geographic dispersion of the human population. Paul Bloom and
Uta Frith rightly observe that a genetic trait for modernity cannot have
originated in Europe as late as I suggest and subsequently spread through the
human population, because in that case there is no way this trait could have
come to be present in the Australian aborigines whose ancestors moved to
Australia 50,000 years ago. Steven Mithen is worried by the same issue and
reckons the only answer (by which he is clearly not convinced) is that there
might have been convergent evolution. But if the change from premodern to
modern resulted from a change in the cultural environment rather than in
genes, then, wherever this cultural development originated, it could easily
have spread like wildfire in the period between say 20,000 and 10,000 years
ago-right the way from Europe to Australia, or, equally possibly, from
Australia to Europe.

There are, however, other important issues that I still need to address. First,
there is the question of whether there really is any principled connection
between graphic skills and lack of language. Several commentators note that
lack of language is certainly not sufficient in itself to `release' artistic talent,
and indeed that the majority of autistic children who lack language do not
have any such special talent at all. But this is hardly surprising and hardly the
issue. The issue is whether lack of language is a necessary condition for such
extraordinary talent to break through. And here the evidence is remarkably
and even disturbingly clear: `no normal preschool child has been known to
draw naturalistically. Autism is apparently a necessary condition for a
preschool child to draw an accurate detail of natural scenes.' 3"

While it is true that all known artistic savants have in fact been autistic, I
agree with Chris McManus, and indeed it is an important part of my
argument, that autism as such is probably not the relevant condition. Rather,
what matters primarily is the lack of normal language development that is
part and parcel of the syndrome. I stressed in my essay the fact that when
Nadia did at last begin to acquire a little language at eight years old, her
graphic skills dramatically declined. If Nadia were alone in showing this
pattern, it might not mean much. But in fact it seems to be the typical pattern-
in so far as anything is typical-of other children who have shown similar
artistic talents at a very young age. And it provides strong corroborative
evidence for the idea that language and graphic skills are partly incompatible.
 Bahn is right to point out that there have been exceptions to this general
rule. But he is far from right to hold up the case of Stephen Wiltshire as a
knock-down counter-example. As I mentioned above, Stephen Wiltshire's
drawings are so different in style from cave art that I would never have
thought to discuss them in the present context. But, as Bahn makes so much
of Stephen Wiltshire's case, I should relay a few of the relevant facts.;'

Stephen Wiltshire, like Nadia, was severely autistic as a child and failed to
develop language normally. He began to produce his drawings at the age of
seven, whereas Nadia began earlier at age three. But like Nadia, Stephen still
had no language when this talent first appeared. At age nine, however, he did
begin to speak and understand a little. And it is true that, in contrast to Nadia,
Stephen's artistic ability thereafter grew alongside his language rather than
declined. But what makes his case so different from Nadia's is that Stephen,
who was much less socially withdrawn than Nadia, was intensively coached
by an art teacher from the age of eight onwards. There is every reason to
think, therefore, that the continuation of his ability into adolescence and
adulthood was not so much the persistence of savant skills, as the
replacement of these skills by those of a trained artist.

Although Bahn quotes me as suggesting that `a person must not have a

typical modern mind to draw like that', he must realize it is no part of my
argument to claim that no person with full possession of language can ever
draw naturalistically-even with training. How could I possibly claim
thisgiven the obvious presence in the contemporary world of countless people
with language who have indeed learned to draw perfectly well? Rather, the
`draw like that' in my statement clearly refers to the ability to draw like
Nadia-in other words, spontaneously, without formal training or access to the
canon of tricks we learn in art school. The point is that for normal people this
ability never comes that easily. As Gombrich has written, `this imitation of
visual reality must be very complex and indeed a very elusive affair, for why
should it otherwise have taken so many generations of gifted painters to learn
its tricks'.32 But in Nadia's case, the imitation of visual reality seems, by
contrast, to have been very simple and direct.

Returning to the issue of why Nadia's skills declined, Bahn speculates that
a more plausible explanation than the advent of language is the death of
Nadia's mother at about the same time. But Bahn fails to acknowledge that
neither of the psychologists who actually worked with Nadia and her family
considered this a likely explanation. Nor does he mention (presumably
because it wouldn't suit) that Stephen Wiltshire also had a parent die, his
father: but in his case the death occurred at the beginning of his drawing
career rather than the end of it.

Given that savant skills generally do come to an end, unless perhaps as in

Stephen Wiltshire's case there is active intervention by a teacher, is there
really any parallel for this in the history of art? On this question I regret that,
in the flourish of the final paragraphs, I oversimplified a story that in reality
has several complex strands. It is true, as I stated, that at end of the last Ice
Age, the tradition of cave art in the Franco-Cantabrian region where it had
flourished for the previous twenty millennia came to a surprising end. But
Bahn is right to take me to task for not acknowledging the persistence of rock
paintings elsewhere, and especially the newer tradition that took off in
southern Spain about 11,000 years ago and which seems to have links with
African art down to nearly the present day.

These later paintings from the Spanish Levant and Africa are so different
both in content and style from the ones we have been discussing that I have
no hesitation in reasserting that `the art stopped'. But I am still somewhat
embarrassed that Dennett should take this to be `the critical piece of evidence'
in favour of my theory. For I agree I was exaggerating when I wrote that
naturalistic painting died out altogether in Europe at the end of the Ice Age,
until it was reinvented in the recent Middle Ages. There are certainly fine
examples of naturalism to be found in Spanish-Levantine rock art, and, from
a later period, in Greek vase painting and Roman murals (and, further afield,
in the rock art of the San bushmen.)

Yet, what kind of examples are these, and what do they tell us? I think it
undeniable that, for all their truth to visual reality, they are still relatively
formulaic and predictable: copybook art that lacks the extraordinary freshness
of vision that makes us catch our breath on first seeing Chauvet or Lascaux-
as Newson said of Nadia's post-language drawings, `remarkable but no longer
unbelievable'. And if they have that copybook feel to them, I expect that is
because that is really what they are: already we are into the modern era where
learned tricks of artistry are having to substitute for the loss of the innocent
eye.

I avoided any discussion in my essay of the motivationsindividual or

social-for creating Ice Age art. But none of the commentators on the paper
have been so cautious. And since Bloom and Frith's observations, especially,
are provocative, let me join in finally with my own pennyworth.

Nadia, it seems, drew for the sake of her own pleasure in the drawing. `She
drew intensively for varying intervals of time but not for more than one
minute ... After surveying intently what she had drawn she often smiled,
babbled and shook her hands and knees in glee.'" But she had no interest in
sharing her creation with anyone else. And, as Bloom and Frith point out, it is
characteristic of autistic artists generally that `they produce, but do not show'.

This prompts these authors to continue: `It is interesting to speculate about

a species, different from modern humans, that did not have ostensive
communication, yet was able to outperform them in artistic production.' But,
though I doubt this is what they had in mind, the fact is we already know of
many other species that come close to doing just what they suggest: in other
words, they produce `artistic displays' without any insight into what they are
doing or why they do it and without any conscious intention to communicate.
And the place where it happens most dramatically and obviously is in the
context of courtship and sexual advertisement. The nightingale with its song,
the peacock with its tail, the octopus with its dance ... True, in such cases the
aesthetically brilliant display is at some level meant to impress another
individual; but the communication is certainly not ostensive or consciously
thought out-rather, it is species-typical behaviour that has evolved by sexual
selection as a way by which the artist is able to signal his or her quality to a
prospective mate.

Sexual selection is increasingly being recognized by human biologists as

having been a potent factor in human evolution. Geoffrey Miller believes that
there is hardly any aspect of human skilled performance that has not been
profoundly influenced by the exigencies of mate choice.34 And Steven
Mithen has recently speculated that the main use of Acheulian hand axes by
early humans may have been by males to woo females, with the axe being a
reliable token of the axe-maker's skills.35 I would suggest it is quite possible
that cave art evolved in this context as well: with painting after painting being
produced by fired-up young men (probably men, but possibly women too) as
an implicit demonstration of the artists' potential qualities as sires and
parents.

Would this be `art for art's sake', as some of the first theorists of cave art
argued? Not quite. But it would be art, stemming from the soul and body of
the artist, offered like the song of a bird in celebration of a mystery, without
the artist needing to be in any way aware of how his own sake was being
served.
The year 1987 being the three hundredth anniversary of Newton's Principia
Mathematica, published in 1687, I have been considering some of the other
anniversaries that fall in the same year: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387),
Leonardo's painting of the Virgin of the Rocks (1487), Marlowe's
Tamburlaine (1587), Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787), Nietzsche's Genealogy
of Morals (18 87).

The eighty-seventh year of the century would seem to have been an

auspicious time for art and scholarship. Yet, if we had to choose just one of
these great works to celebrate, we ought surely to give first place to the
Principia. Newton's law of gravitation, which states that `every body in the
universe attracts every other with a force inversely proportional to the square
of the distance between them', has been described as the greatest
generalization ever made by the human mind.

What, then, if we had to choose just one of these works to consign to

oblivion? If the choice were forced, we ought surely to let go the Principia.
How so? Because, of all those works, Newton's was the only one that would
have been replaceable. Quite simply: if Newton had not written his hook,
then someone else would have written another book just like it-probably
within the space of a few years.

C. P. Snow, in The Two Cultures, extolled the great discoveries of science

as `scientific Shakespeare'.' But in one way he was fundamentally mistaken.
Shakespeare's plays were Shakespeare's plays and no one else's; scientific
discoveries, by contrast, belong-ultimately-to no one in particular. Take away
the work of the person Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Mozart and you would
take away the contingent creation of a one-off human mind; take away the
work of Newton, or Darwin, or Einstein and you would take away nothing
that could not eventually be replaced by Mind at large.

It may be unfashionable to say that the job of science is to uncover God's

preexisting truths. But, notwithstanding today's `subject-centred theories of
reality', I think science does just that. There are preexisting truths out there
waiting to be found, and it is the job of the scientist to uncover them. In no
way, however, can the same be said of art. There are no preexisting novels
out there waiting to be written, nor preexisting pictures waiting to be painted.

Consider the disputes that arise in science, but not in art, about `priority'.
Newton quarrelled fiercely with Leibniz about which of them had in fact
invented the differential calculus before the other, and with Hooke about who
had discovered the inverse square law. But while, say, there may once have
been room for dispute about whether Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare's
plays, no one would ever have suggested that Marlowe got there before
Shakespeare.

Newton had a dog called Diamond. One day, the story goes, the dog
knocked over a candle, set fire to some papers and destroyed `the unfinished
labours of some years'. `Oh Diamond, Diamond!' Newton cried, `thou little
knowest the mischief done!" Suppose that the papers had been the manuscript
of the Principia, and that Newton, in chagrin or despair, had given up doing
science. Mischief, indeed. Nonetheless, Diamond's mischief would hardly
have changed the course of history. Imagine however that Diamond had
instead been Chaucer's dog and that he had set fire to the Canterbury Tales.
The loss would truly have been irrecoverable.

General James Wolfe said of Gray's Elegy, `I would rather have written
that poem than take Quebec'. In 1887 the architect Gustave Eiffel built the
Eiffel Tower. Would it be understandable for anyone to say he would rather
have built the Eiffel Tower than have written the Principia? It would depend
on what his personal ambitions were. The Principia was a glorious monument
to human intellect, the Eiffel Tower was a relatively minor feat of romantic
engineering. Yet the fact is that while Eiffel did it his way, Newton merely
did it God's way.

To be God's scribe, as Newton was, is not to have an undistinguished role.

Nevertheless I would conclude-until someone shows me why I am wrong-
that any person who wants to leave their own peculiar mark on the landscape
of other people's minds should build towers, paint pictures, or write stories
rather than devote themselves to uncovering the scientific truth. As a scientist
myself I find this conclusion worth thinking about, if not worth trying to live
by.
 And Jesus said, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's
eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they that
heard it said, Who then can he saved? And he said, The things which are
impossible with men are possible with God ... There is no man that hath
left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children, for the kingdom
of God's sake, Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time,
and in the world to come life everlasting.

Luke ] 8: 24-30

In 1711, William Derham, Canon of Windsor and Fellow of the Royal

Society, gave a series of lectures surveying the physical and natural world,
with the object of demonstrating how perfect is God's Creation in every
respect. His survey, published as his Physico-Theology, ranged from the
existence of gravity (without which, Derham observed, the earth would fly
apart) to the distribution of venomous snakes (of which, he noted with
evident satisfaction, all the worst ones live in lands peopled by non-
Christians). In particular, Derham found that man himself is, `every Part of
him, every Thing relating to him contriv'd, and made in the very best Manner;
his Body fitted up with the utmost Foresight, Art and Care'.' Indeed, if anyone
were to suggest, to the contrary, that there are ways in which the design of
human beings can be improved, it would be blasphemy.

That was three hundred years ago. Times have moved on, and our style of
argument has changed. Nonetheless, as modernday followers of Darwin we
remain no less committed than Derham and his fellow philosopher-
theologians to an idea of optimal design in nature. We may no longer believe
that we live in the best of all possible worlds. But we do have reason to
believe that we live in the best-or close to best-of all available worlds.

It is easy to see why. Let's suppose we are considering the evolution of

some desirable phenotypic trait that can be scaled from less to more-
intelligence, say, or beauty. Then theory tells us that, if and when an increase
in this trait is indeed an available option within the biological `design space'
of the species, and if it will indeed bring an increase in fitness to go that way,
then this is the way that natural selection will drive the population as a whole.
In other words, it is highly likely that, provided there is time and opportunity,
the species will evolve to the point where this trait goes to fixation at the best
level throughout the population.

We may well assume, then, just as Derham did, that in general there will
be little if any room for making further progress, at least by natural means.
Nature will already have done for human beings the very best that in practice
can be done. The last thing we shall expect, therefore, is that any significant
improvement in bodily or mental capacities can be achieved as a result
simply of minor tinkering with the human design plan.

Yet the truth is that there is accumulating evidence to suggest just this.

For a start, as medical science grows ever bolder, it is proving to be a

relatively straightforward task for doctors to increase human performance
levels by direct intervention in human embryology and later physiology-with,
say, foetal androgens for brain growth, anabolic steroids for strength, growth
hormones for height, and soon-to-come memoryenhancing drugs and anti-
ageing drugs. I recently saw a report that even such an elementary
intervention as providing extra oxygen to newborn babies can lead to
significantly above average IQ scores when tested at eight years.-

But, more to the point, there has long been evidence from natural history
that Nature herself can intervene to boost performance levels if she so
chooses-producing exceptionally well-endowed individuals all on her own.

These natural `sports', if I may use that word, can take the form of
individuals who grow up to have exceptional height, or strength, or beauty, or
brains, or long life because they carry rare genes that bias them specifically in
these directions. But, surprisingly enough, they can also show up as
individuals who develop islands of extraordinary ability in the context of
what we would more usually think of as retardation or pathology: epileptics
with remarkable eidetic imagery, idiot savants possessed of extraordinary
mnemonic faculties or musical talents, elderly patients with dementia who
come out with superb artistic skills.

Even enhanced beauty can come about as a secondary consequence of a

developmental disorder. There is a syndrome called CAIS, complete
androgen insensitivity syndrome, where male foetuses fail to respond to male
sex hormones and consequently grow up to have the bodies of women: but
not just any women-these transformed boys typically have enviable bodily
proportions, long legs, unusual symmetry, glossy hair, pellucid skin (indeed,
it is rumoured that several highly successful super-models and film actresses
have been just such cases).

Now, if these examples mean what they seem to mean, we Darwinians

perhaps have some explaining to do. For what the examples seem to suggest
is that there is room for further progress in human evolution. In some respects
anyway, human beings are not yet as highly evolved as in principle they
could be (and perhaps they'd like to be). Perhaps Nature, after all, has not
done the best that can be done for us-at least not yet. In which case the
question we must ask is: Why?

Since there can be nothing wrong with the logic of the argument that says
that any increase in a desirable trait will, when available, tend to go to
fixation, the answer must be that the situation with regard to availability
and/or desirability is not quite what it seems. That's to say, in these case we
are interest ed in, either an increase in the trait in question, over and above
what already typically exists, is actually not an available option within
biological design space, or it is actually not a desirable option that would lead
to increased fitness.

The first possibility, that the maximal level is actually not biologically
attainable-or at any rate sustainable-is very much the answer that is currently
in vogue among evolutionary biologists. In relation to IQ, for example, it is
argued that while Nature has indeed done her best to design all human brains
to maximize general intelligence, she is continually thwarted by the
occurrence of deleterious mutations that upset the delicate wiring.' Or in
relation to health and beauty, it is argued that while Nature has set us all up to
have the best chance of having perfectly symmetrical bodies, pure
complexions, and so on, there is no way she can provide complete protection
against the ravages of parasites and other environmental insults during
development.'

Yet, while there is surely something in this, it cannot he the whole story.
For we have already seen some of the most telling evidence against the idea
of there being this kind of upper ceiling: namely, that, despite the mutations,
parasites, and other retarding factors that are undoubtedly at work, it is
possible to intervene in quite simple ways-oxygen, foetal androgens, memory
drugs, and so on-to enhance performance in particular respects; and, what's
more, there do exist natural examples where, against the apparent odds, these
problems have been overcome-those genetic variants, pathological
compensations, and so on. In other words, it is clear that the reason why
human beings typically do not reach these levels cannot be entirely that
Nature's hands are tied.

The second possibility, that to reach for the maximum possible will not
actually pay off in fitness, is in several cases both more plausible and more
interesting.

This is the answer William Derham himself clearly preferred. What

Derham pointed out is that even when a trait seems desirable, and indeed is
so up to a certain point, in many cases it is possible to have too much of a
good thing. MrrbEv ayav (meden agan), as the classical proverb goes: do
nothing in excess. Too little and you will miss out on the benefits, but too
much and you will find yourself incurring unexpected costs.

So, Derham argued, we should expect that true perfection must often lie in
compromise. And in a perfect world, Godor as we now say, Nature-will have
occasion to settle not for the maximum but for the `golden mean'.

Thus, man's stature, for example, is not too small, but nor is it too large:
too small and, as Derham put it, man would not be able to have dominion
over all the other animals, but too large and he might become a tyrant even to
his own kind. Man's physical countenance is neither too plain but nor is it too
handsome: too plain and he would fail to attract the other sex, but too
beautiful and he might become lost in selfadmiration. Man's lifespan is
neither too short, nor is it too long: too short and he would not have time to
have enough children to propagate the species, too long and there would be
severe overcrowding.

However, while this explanation seems to work nicely provided we choose

our examples carefully, it is not clear it is going to work so well across the
board. For there are other traits-intelligence, for instance-for which the
dangers of excess are by no means so apparent and there might seem to be
advantages to be had all down the line.

True, even when this is so, and advantage never actually turns to
disadvantage, the returns to be had beyond a certain point might hardly be
worth having. As Darwin himself noted: `In many cases the continued
development of a part, for instance, of the beak of a bird, or of the teeth of a
mammal, would not aid the species in gaining its food, or for any other
object.' Yet the fact remains that in some other cases-and intelligence may
seem the prime example-the returns in terms of fitness would actually seem
likely to remain quite high. Would there ever come a point where a human
being, struggling for biological survival, would cease to benefit from being
just that little bit cleverer, for instance? Darwin himself thought not: `but with
man we can see no definite limit to the continued development of the brain
and mental abilities, so far as advantage is concerned. 16

Here, however, it seems that Derham was ahead of Darwin. Realizing that
if a trait such as intelligence really were to be unmitigatedly advantageous,
then God-or Nature-would have no excuse for settling for anything less than
the maximum possible, and being under no illusion that human intelligence in
general is in fact anywhere near this maximum point, Derham had no
hesitation in concluding that increased intelligence must in reality be
disadvantageous.

So, Derham reasoned, there must in fact be hidden costs to being too
clever. What could they be? Well, Derham's idea was that, if man had been
made any cleverer than he actually is, he would have been capable of
discovering things he ought not to know. And, to prove his point, he
proceeded to discuss three examples of discoveries to which man (at the time
of writing, in 1711) had failed to find the key, and which it seemed obvious
were beyond the powers of reasoning that God had given him. These are: in
mechanics, the ability to fly; in mathematics, the ability to square the circle;
and in navigation, the ability to judge longitude at sea.

Now, Derham admitted that he himself could not see what harm would
come from man's being able to square the circle or judge longitude. But in the
case of flying he had no doubt of the `dangerous and fatal Consequence' that
would follow if man were ever capable of taking to the skies:

As for Instance, By putting it in Man's Power to discover the Secrets of

Nations and Families, more than is consistent with the Peace of the World,
for Man to know; by giving ill Men greater Opportunities to do Mischief,
which it would not lie in the Power of others to prevent; and by making Man
less sociable, for upon every true or false Ground of Fear, or Discontent, and
other Occasions, he would have been fluttering away to some other Place.'

We smile. But this idea is by no means entirely silly. The notion that it is
possible for a person to be `too clever by half' is one that has considerable
folk credibility. And where there is folk credibility there is generally more
than a little factual basis. Beginning with the story of Adam and Eve eating
from the tree of knowledge, through Daedalus giving his son Icarus the wax
wings with which he flies too close to the sun, to Frankenstein creating a
monster he cannot control, myths and fairy tales offer us numerous examples
of individuals who come to grief as a result of their being too clever or
inquisitive for their own good. `Curiosity killed the cat,' we say. `More brains
than sense.' And in the course of human history there must indeed have been
many real life instances where human inventiveness has redounded in tragic
ways on the inventor.

Not only in human history, but most likely in the history of other species,
too. I am reminded of a report that appeared in the British Medical Journal
some years ago:
Charles Darwin would doubtless have been upset had he known of the Coco
de Mono tree of Venezuela. It apparently bears pods of such complexity that
only the most dexterous of monkeys can open them and obtain the tasty
almond-like nut. Once the nuts have been eaten the monkey's hair drops out
and he soon expires-thus ensuring the survival of the least fit members of
each generation."

But note that the author is wrong to have written `the survival of the least fit';
rather, he should have written, `the survival of the least skilled'-for the lesson
of this (possibly apocryphal) story is precisely that the least skilled may in
fact be the most fit.

What is true for practical intelligence can surely be true for social
intelligence as well. In an essay on the `Social Function of Intellect', nearly
thirty years ago, I myself raised just this possibility: arguing that
Machiavellian intelligence, beyond a certain point, may turn against its owner
because success in interpersonal politics becomes an obsession, leading him
or her to neglect the basic business of productive living. `There must surely
come a point when the time required to resolve a "social argument" becomes
insupportable.'

The same surely goes for other capacities that we do not usually think of as
having a downside. I have no doubt a case could be made for the dangers of
excess in relation beauty, say, or health. `Too beautiful by half' and a person
may run the risk of envious attacks by rivals. `Too healthy by half' and ...
well, I'm sure there is something to be said against it.

So, let's call this line of explanation `Derham's argument'. I think we can
agree that Derham's argument is a perfectly reasonable argument. And in
many cases it does provide a straightforward way of explaining why Nature
has not pushed desirable traits to their biological limits.

But it is not the only possible way of explaining this apparent paradox.
And it is not the one I am going to dwell on in this essay. For I think there is
an even more interesting possibility out there waiting to be explored. It is an
idea that was anticipated by another of those ingenious scientist-theologians
at the turn of the seventeenth century, one Nehemiah Grew. And it is an idea
that in some ways is the precise opposite of Derham's.

Derham's line was that too much of a good thing can get you into trouble.
But Grew's line, expounded a few years earlier in his Sacred Cosmology, was
that too much of a good thing can get you out of trouble, when actually it
would be better for you if you stayed in trouble-better because trouble can be
a blessing in disguise, forcing you to cope by other means.

Take the case of height and strength, for instance. Derham, as we have
seen, suggested that God in his wisdom does not choose to set man's height
greater than it is because if men were taller they might get into damaging,
self-destructive fights. Grew, however, came up with the remarkable
suggestion that God does not do so because if men were taller they might find
life too easy, and consequently neglect to cultivate other essential skills.

Had the Species of Mankind been Gigantick ... there would not have been the
same Use and Discovery of his Reason; in that he would have done many
Things by mere Strength, for which he is now put to invent innumerable
Engines.')

Less strength because only comparative weaklings can be expected to

invent innumerable engines! Let's call this 'Grew's argument'. It is a startling
idea. It needs some unpacking. But then I think it may turn out to hold the
key to several major puzzles about human evolution.

To see how Grew's argument can be developed, let's begin now from a more
modern perspective (which is , as you may guess, where I myself set out
from-having only later found my way back to Grew and Derham).

When the question is whether and how natural selection can arrive at the
best design for an organism, a recurrent issue for evolutionary biologists is
that of `local maxima'.

To illustrate the problem, Figure 23 shows a typical 'adaptive landscape'.

Here the biological fitness of a hypothetical organism, shown on the y-axis, is
seen to vary in an up-anddown way as a function of some continuously
varying phenotypic trait, shown on the x-axis. Under natural selection, which
favours any small increase in fitness, there must he a tendency for the
organism to evolve along the x-axis in whatever direction is upwards on the
y-axis. Clearly in this case the organism will be best off if it can in fact
evolve to the absolute maximum at point q. But suppose it is already at a
local maximum at point p. Then, because it will have to go downwards before
it can continue upwards, it is stuck where it is.

Fig. 23

Let's think of it in terms of the following analogy. Imagine the graph with
its local maxima is a ceiling with hollows, and the organism is a hydrogen-
filled balloon that is floating up against it, as in Figure 24. The balloon would
like to rise to the highest level, but it cannot-it is trapped in one of those
hollows.

This problem is, of course, typical of what happens to any kind of system,
evolving in a complex landscape, which seeks to maximize its short-term
gain and minimize its short-term losses. There is no way such a system can
take one step backwards for the sake of two steps forward; no way it can
make a tactical retreat so as to gain advantage later.

The situation is familiar enough in our own lives. Even we, who pride
ourselves on our capacity for foresight, easily get trapped by the short-
termism of our goals. `The good', as is said, `is the enemy of best': and,
provided we are already doing moderately well, we are often reluctant to
incur the temporary costs involved in moving on to something better. So, for
example, we continue in an all-right job rather than enter the uncertain
market for the quite-right one. We stick to techniques that work well enough
rather than retrain ourselves in ways that could potentially work so much
better. We stay with an adequate marriage rather than leave it for the distant
prospect of a perfect one.

Fig. 24

But let's look again at the balloon. Although it is true the balloon will never
take the one step backwards for itself, it may still happen, of course, that it
gets to have some kind of setback imposed from outside. Suppose a
whirlwind blows through and dislodges it, or it gets yanked down by a snare,
or it temporarily loses hydrogen. Then, once it has suffered this unlooked-for
reverse, there is actually a fair chance it may float higher at its next attempt.
In other words, there is a way the balloon can escape from the local hollow
and achieve its true potential after all. But, oddly enough, what is needed is
that something `bad' will happen to it-bad in the short term, but liberating in
the longer term.

And the same is true for us. Sometimes we, too, need to have a whirlwind
blow through our lives before we will start over again and give ourselves the
chance to move on to a new level.

Human history is full of examples of how seeming catastrophes can in fact

be the catalyst for profitable change. People suffer dire poverty, or slavery, or
are forced to migrate: they discover in their new world unprecedented riches.
They have their cities razed and factories destroyed by bombs: they rebuild in
ways far more efficient than the old. They lose their inherited wealth in a
stock-market crash: they go to work to become healthier and wealthier than
they ever were to start with.

Shakespeare, as always the superb student of human nature, remarked how

sweet are the uses of adversity `which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
wears yet a precious jewel in his head'." Nietzsche wrote:

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful men and peoples, and ask
yourselves whether a tree, if it is to grow proudly into the sky, can do without
had weather and storms: whether unkindness and opposition from without ...
do not belong to the favouring circumstances without which a great increase
in virtue is hardly possible.''

Even the children's film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, has a song that goes
`From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success'.

But people are more interesting than balloons. The reason why disaster so
often breeds success with human beings is not simply that it gives them, as it
were, a new throw of the diceso that with luck they may do better this time
round (although it is true that luck may sometimes have a hand in it: many a
human group forced to emigrate has by pure chance found a superior
environment awaiting them abroad). The more surprising reason is that when
people suffer losses and are obliged to find imaginative ways of replacing
assets they previously took for granted, they frequently come up with
solutions that bring a bonus over and above what they originally lost.

So, for example, when famine strikes, people who have previously foraged
for themselves may discover ways of collaborating with others, which in the
event bring in much more than the individuals could harvest even in good
times on their own. Or, when they lose their vision from short sight, they may
(they did!) invent spectacle lenses to make up for it, which in the event leads
to the development of telescopes and microscopes and so provides them with
better vision than they had before.

And it can happen on an individual level too. After Stephen Hawking

(whom I knew as a childhood friend and who lived with my family for two
years in the 1950s) suffered a debilitating neurological illness, he transformed
himself from a relatively ordinary student into the extraordinary
mathematical cosmologist he has since become. How did that happen? The
novelist Martin Amis wrote recently: `Hawking understood black holes
because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And
Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life." But the true reason is
both more prosaic and more wonderful. Stephen Hawking, having lost the
ability to write, could no longer work with algebraic formulae on paper, and
was obliged to begin using geometric methods which he could picture in his
mind's eye. But these geometric methods did more than substitute for the lost
algebra; they gave Hawking ways of looking at things that his old algebra
might never have revealed.

Remarkably enough, Albert Einstein told a similar story about how he

himself gained from a disability. Einstein claimed that he was very late
learning to speak and, even after he did, he found whole sentences tricky,
rehearsing them in an undertone before speaking them out loud. This delayed
development, Einstein said, meant that he went on asking childlike questions
about the nature of space, time and light long after others had simply
accepted the adult version of the world.14

Now, no one (at least no one who values his political correctness) would
want to say that Stephen Hawking or the survivors of the Hiroshima bomb or
the descendants of the African slaves were `fortunate' to have had such a
catastrophe in their personal or cultural background. Nonetheless, you can
see how, whatever the subjects may feel at the time, in some cases it is
objectively the case that what seems like ill fortune is actually good fortune.

So, we can come back to Nehemiah Grew. If ill fortune in the short term may
indeed actually be good fortune in the long term, then it does make obvious
sense that God himself will sometimes choose to impose ill fortune on his
creatures in the short term in order that they achieve good fortune in the long
term. That's to say, God may deliberately arrange to have human beings horn
less than perfect just in order that they find their way to becoming perfect. In
particular, God may, as Grew suggested, contrive to make human beings in
certain respects weak and inadequate by nature, precisely because they will
then be highly motivated to invent those 'innumerable engines'.

At any rate-God or not-here is the logic of these various examples:

• An accident or acquired defect threatens disaster by taking away a

person's normal means of coping with a problem.

• The person is thereby given the incentive to find some alternative route
to the same end.

• This alternative route, as it happens, not only overcomes the original

problem but brings unanticipated benefits as well.

The burden of this essay is to argue that something very like this has
played a significant part in biological evolution (and in particular the
evolution of human beings):

• A mutation-a genetic accident-threatens to reduce an individual's

fitness by removing some previously evolved means of solving a
survival problem.
 • The individual is thereby given the incentive to compensate by some
novel behavioural strategy.

• This novel strategy, in the event, more than makes up for the potential
loss in fitness and leaves the individual ahead.

I need hardly say that Nature-unlike God-cannot, of course, do things

deliberately. She will never take a step backwards in order to take two steps
forward. But I would argue that Nature may perhaps take a step backwards
by chance in circumstances where the individual-with the help of his own
intelligence, imagination, and culture-will be more than likely to take two (or
at any rate more than one) steps forward.

And here I do mean more than likely. For I think there are theoretical
grounds for supposing that, if and when an individual who finds himself
deficient in some way is obliged to make up for his deficiency by replacing a
genetically given strategy with an invented one, and succeeds, he will more
often than not end up better off than if he has not had to do it.

The simplest reason is this. Suppose we assume that in order to survive in

competition with others the deficient individual has to come up with a new
strategy that is at least as good as the genetically given one it is replacing.
True, he may be able to get by with a new strategy that is only just as good as
the original one, in which case he will have made one step backwards and
only one step forwards, and will be back where he started. But it is a simple
law of statistics that most of the possible strategies that are at least as good as
the original will actually be better than it. (If you want to see why, consider,
for example, why most of the people who pay at least as much tax as you do
actually pay more tax than you do; why most of the prime numbers that are at
least as high as 523 are higher than 523; and so on.) Hence the chances really
are high that the deficient individual, if he survives at all, will adopt a
strategy better than the one he started with.

Is it only human beings who will be able to get ahead in this surprising
way? In principle all that is required is the capacity to replace genetically
given features with invented ones. But in practice this probably does limit it-
as a significant path for change-to our human ancestors. For there is, of
course, one big barrier to its working out well even in the case of human
beings: namely, the need for the individual who suffers the setback to be not
only peculiarly inventive but peculiarly quick.

When Houdini was bound hand and foot and thrown into the lake, he could
not afford to wait for his grandchildren to set him free. No more could one of
our ancestors born with a biological deficiency leave it to later generations to
make good what he had lost. The human brain, working within the context of
human culture, is an organ-the one organ in nature?-that (quite unlike the
genetically programmed body) is able to make astonishing progress within
the span of an individual life.

Let's look, then, specifically to human prehistory. And let's look for scenarios
to fit the logic spelled out above: where human ancestors can be seen as
losing some genetically given beneficial trait (measured perhaps by
comparison with their chimpanzee-like cousins, who still have it), therefore
being obliged to make up for this loss by rapidly inventing a way round it (for
which their cousins have no obvious need), and as a result moving
unexpectedly ahead of the game (leaving those cousins standing-or extinct). 's

I will offer two examples of losses and replacements in the course of

human evolution to which this story may apply. First, the case of the loss of
body hair and the coming of firemaking; second, the case of the loss of
memory capacity and the coming of abstract thinking. The first is in some
ways a `toy example', which I shall present not because I am entirely serious
about it, but because I think it nicely illustrates how the principle can work.
But the second is a case about which I am serious to a degree.

Hair loss / Fire

Why have humans lost their body hair? Answers range from Desmond
Morris's interesting suggestion in his hook, The Naked Ape,'6 that
hairlessness makes sexual intercourse more pleasurable and so promotes pair-
bonding between human parents, to the standard theory that hairlessness
reduces the dangers to human hunters of getting too hot when running after
prey under the midday sun on the savannah.

These answers, within the conventional paradigm, seek to explain

hairlessness as a simple direct benefit: human beings function better as
lovers, say, or hunters without body hair than with it. Let's agree that such
direct benefits, so far as they go, may be a factor (although this may not be
very far).'' But what about the much more obvious direct costs: the costs of
getting cold?

The sun does not always shine, even in Africa. And while a hairless human
being may benefit from not overheating when active at midday, the plain fact
is the same human is bound to be at considerable risk of overcooling at other
times of day, especially when inactive and at night. The dangers of cold are
potentially severe. This is how the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human
Evolution summarizes the situation:

Although early human populations were established in quite cold climates

long before the evolutionary appearance of Homo sapiens, modern humans
have a very low tolerance of cold. Because we lack insulation such as fur and
hair, nude exposure to still air temperature as high as 26°C causes
constriction of blood vessels in the skin. At around 20°C, increased heat
production, manifest as shivering, begins, and at 5°C inactive young adults
may suffer such a reduction in brain temperature that they become
unconscious in a few hours ... Without the culture that produced clothing and
fire and without access to some kind of shelter, our predecessors were limited
to places where it never became colder than about 10°C."

Unfortunately for those predecessors, however, there are few if any places
in the whole world where it never becomes colder than 10°C. Even in much
of central Africa, the minimum daily temperature regularly drops below 10°C
at some season of the year. Nor has it been much different in mankind's
ancestral past: in fact, during an Ice Age around 800,000 years ago, Africa
must have been considerably colder than today.

We can picture those `early human populations' that were `established in

quite cold climates long before the evolutionary appearance of Homo sapiens'
as still having plenty of body hair and so as having no need as yet to go
looking for a remedy. We know that at some stage between then and now,
human beings did lose their hair, and they did indeed come through with the
culture that produced clothing, fire, and shelter. The question is: what is the
causal relationship here?

My hypothesis is that it was indeed hair loss that came first. That's to say,
certain of those early humans-those who in fact became our ancestors-were
driven to develop the arts of keeping warm precisely because they lacked
sufficient hair and were becoming cold. But then, as things turned out, these
individuals-and the trait for hairlessness-actually prospered: for the fact is
that the cultural innovations brought a significant, though unanticipated,
premium.

Consider in particular the case of fire. No doubt people first learned to

make and tend fires for no other reason than to stave off cold. Yet we now
know-as the first fire-makers presumably did not-that once the fires were
burning, a host of other benefits would soon become available. For the very
same fire that provided warmth could help keep predators away; it could
provide light; it could be used to harden stone and wooden tools; it could be
used for cooking food, rendering meat and vegetables more digestible and
killing parasites; and-perhaps the biggest if least tangible benefit of all-it
could provide a focus for family and friends to gather round, to exchange
gossip and information and cement social bonds.

The upshot is that the biological setback of hair loss-in so far as it was a
precondition for the cultural innovationswould have actually brought a net
gain in biological fitness. Hairlessness, therefore, would have proved to he on
balance an evolutionarily adaptive trait, and so would have been set to spread
through the population at a genetic level.

But why, you may ask, should it be true that hairlessness was a
precondition for firemaking? If fires could bring all those added benefits
besides warmth, why did not early human beings hit on the idea of making
fires anyway-even before they lost their hair?
 The probable answer is that these other benefits simply did not provide the
right kind of psychological incentive. Human beings, if and when they are
cold, have an instinctive liking for the warmth of fire. But they have no
comparable instinctive liking for parasite-free cooked meat, or fire-hardened
knives, or predator-scaring flames, or even camp-fire-facilitated social
gatherings. Even if these other benefits would have come to be appreciated in
good time, their absence would have been unlikely to provide the necessary
shock to the system that was required to get fire invention going.

I think the archaeological record supports this reading of events. The first
evidence of man-made hearths is at sites dating to about 400,000 years ago.
However, for reasons that have been thought to be something of a mystery,
firemaking does not seem to have caught on, and hearths remain remarkably
rare in areas known to have been lived in by humansuntil about 150,000
years ago, after which they soon become much more common.

The archaeologist Ian Tattersall comments: `The advantages of

domesticating fire are so great that, once technologies for its control had been
developed, it's hard to see why they should not have spread rapidly."' I'd say
the reason may well have been that it all depended on the history of hair loss-
and people first feeling cold.
Memory loss l Abstraction

Have human beings lost their memories? The fact that modern human beings
have less hair than their chimpanzee-like ancestors is obvious and
indisputable. But that they have less memory capacity than their ancestors is
not something generally acknowledged.

My chief reason for claiming it is so is some little-known research on

`picture memory' in chimpanzees, undertaken by Donald Farrer nearly forty
years ago.20

In his experiment, Farrer gave three chimpanzees a `matchto-sample task',

where the subject was presented with an array of pictures as shown below,
and was rewarded for finding and touching the picture in the bottom row that
matched the sample picture at the top.

Twenty-four different combinations were presented, as shown in Figure

25. But these were not a random selection. In fact, the same line-up in the
bottom row never recurred with a different matching picture above: so that,
for each particular line-up in the bottom row, there was only ever one correct
answer. This meant that, to perform well on the task, the subject did not
actually have to learn the `matchto-sample' rule at all, but could instead learn
by trial and error which one picture was correct for each of the twenty-four
possible lineups.
 Fig. 25. The twenty-four problems in the picture memory test

Farrer trained his chimpanzees until they were getting 90 per cent correct.
And then, so as to find out which strategy they had in fact used, he gave them
a series of test trials in which the bottom row of pictures was presented
without the sample on top being visible-so there was now no way of applying
the rule, and only rote memory for each particular line-up could possibly
suffice. Astonishingly, the chimps continued to perform as well as before,
selecting the `correct' picture between 90 per cent and 100 per cent of the
time. Clearly they had in fact learned the task by rote. Farrer's conclusion was
that chimpanzees do indeed have a supra-human capacity for `picture
memory'-or `photographic memory'.''

But if chimpanzees have this capacity today, then, unless they have
acquired it relatively recently, it is a fair guess that our human ancestors also
had it to begin with. And, if our ancestors had it, then modern humans must
indeed have lost it.

Why? Why lose a capacity for memorizing pictures, when prima facie
there can only be immediate costs-just as there are to losing hair? I suggest
the reasons for memory loss were indeed structurally of the same kind as the
reasons for hair loss: when human beings lost their memories they were
obliged to solve their problems some way else, and this some way else turned
out to be hugely advantageous.

And Farrer's experiment provides an immediate lead to what the advantage

of this some way else might be. If you or I were given the same matchto-
sample task, we with our poor memories would find it nearly impossible to
solve it by rote learning and so we would do the modern human thing and
search for some higher-order pattern in the data. But, lo and behold, once we
identified this pattern, the matchto-sample rule, we would have not merely
caught up with the chimpanzees on this one task, we would have
inadvertently qualified ourselves to solve a whole range of problems we have
never met before.

Suppose, for example, that after being trained with the original set of
twenty-four combinations of pictures, we were now given a combination that
was not part of the original set, such as the one below, where the same line-
up below appeared with a different picture above:
The chimpanzee in this new situation would presumably continue to choose
the *; but we, knowing the rule, would choose the 4 .

In short, the use of rules-and abstraction in generalallows knowledge of the

world acquired in one situation to be applied in another: a capacity that is the
very ground of our human cleverness and creativity.

There is increasing evidence that chimpanzees are in fact surprisingly

backward when it comes to rule learning and abstract thinking. It is not that
they are completely incapable of it-chimpanzees certainly can learn the
matchto-sample rule when there is no other way-but, rather, that in many
situations they simply do not bother with it. The work of Daniel Povinelli, in
particular, has demonstrated how superficial chimpanzees' understanding
generally tends to be: how they seldom, if ever, classify things on the basis of
essential properties or interpret events in terms of hidden causes. And
Povinelli himself raises the possibility that this failure to seek explanations
beneath the surface of appearances results from the fact that, for
chimpanzees, appearances are indeed too memorable-and salient-for them to
let go.Z'

But even better evidence of what might have become of us if we had

retained our memories is provided by the rare cases of modern human beings
who, for whatever reasons, still do possess a chimpanzee-like capacity. And
most remarkable is the case of the Russian, Mr S., described by Alexander
Luria in his book The Mind of a Mnemonist.

In the 1920s, S. was a young newspaper reporter in Moscow who, one day,
got into trouble with his editor for not taking notes at a briefing. By way of
excuse, he claimed he had no need for notes since he could remember
everything that had been said, word for word. When put to the test, he soon
demonstrated that he was in truth able to recall just about every detail of sight
and sound he had ever encountered.

For the rest of his life S. was intensively investigated. In laboratory tests he
was shown tables of hundreds of random numerals, and after looking at them
for just a few minutes, he was able to `read off from memory' exactly what
was thereforwards, backwards, diagonally, or in any way requested. What is
more, after years of memorizing thousands of such tables, he could go back
to any particular one of them on any particular date and recollect it perfectly,
whether it was an hour after he first saw it or twenty years. There really did
seem to be almost no limit to his memory capacity.

Yet S., too, was surprisingly backward. He remembered everything but he

understood next to nothing. The simplest conceptual structures passed him
by. He completely failed to grasp the connectedness of things. For example,
when he was given a list of words, some of which were names of birds, he
could remember the whole list, but he simply could not pick out the birds as a
separate group. When given a chart containing the following series of
numbers to remember:

he proceeded to recall the entire series, unaware that the numbers progressed
in a simple logical order. As he later remarked to Luria: `If I had been given
the letters of the alphabet arranged in a similar order, I wouldn't have noticed
their arrangement.'

It should be said that, as with the chimpanzees, S.'s problem was almost
certainly not that he was entirely incapable of abstract thinking; it was just
that he had little if any inclination for it. Memorizing was so comparatively
easy for him that he found abstract thinking unnecessary and uninviting.

So, S.'s plight perfectly illustrates what is at stake.24 In fact I'd suggest S.
can be regarded (with due respect) as having been a living exemplar of that
earlier stage in human evolution when our ancestors all had similar qualities
of mind: similar strengths in the memory department and consequently
similar weaknesses in understanding. There but for the grace of evolution, go
you and I.

What happened, however, was that memory loss liberated us. Those of our
ancestors unfortunate enough (but fortunate) to suffer a sudden decline in
memory capacity had to discover some way of making up for it. And the
happy result was that they found themselves reaping a range of unanticipated
benefits: the benefits that flow from a wholly new way of thinking about the
world. No longer able to picture the world as made up of countless particular
objects in particular relationships to each other, they had to begin to conceive
of it in terms of categories related by rules and laws. And in doing so they
must have gained new powers of predicting and controlling their
environment.

In fact, there would have been additional ways in which human beings,
once their memories begin to fail, would have tried to make up for it. No
doubt, for example, they would soon enough have been taking measures, just
as we do today, to organize their home environment along tidy and
predictable lines; they would have been making use of external ways of
recording and preserving information (the equivalent of S.'s absent
notebook!); they would have been finding ways of sharing the burden of
memorizing with other human beings. And all these tricks of off-loading
memory into the `extended mind' would certainly have increased the net gain.

But, more significant still, by taking these various steps to compensate for
their poor memory, our ancestors would have inadvertently created the
conditions required for the develop ment of language. Quite why and when
human language took off remains a scientific mystery. But, before it could
happen, there's no question several favouring factors had to be in place: (i)
human beings must have had minds prepared for using high-level concepts
and rules, (ii) they must have had a cultural environment prepared for the
externalization of symbols, and (iii) they must have had a social structure
where individuals were prepared for the sharing of ideas and information.
Each of these factors might well have arisen, separately, as a way of
compensating for the loss of memory.

Once these several factors were in place, things would most likely have
developed rapidly. Not only would language have proved of great survival
value in its own right, but there could have been an emergent influence
moving things along. I have been emphasizing how loss of memory would
have encouraged the development of language, with the causal influence
running just in one direction. But the fact is that memory and language can
interact in both directions. And there is reason to believe that in certain
circumstances the use of language may actually weaken memory: as if at
some level linguistic descriptions and picture memory are rivals-even as if
words actively erase pictures from memory.

Consider the following experimental finding. People are asked to

remember a visual scene, under two conditions: those in one group are asked
to describe the scene in words, while those in a control group do not describe
it. Later, both groups are given a recognition test in which they have to say
whether particular details-including some which were not in the description-
were present in the original scene. It turns out that those who have described
the scene in words are likely to have retained less of the information about
details than the control group.' S

But, now, think about what this might mean for the early stages of
language evolution. If the effect of using language was indeed to undermine
memory, while the effect of memory being undermined was to promote the
use of language, there would then have been the potential for a virtuous
circle, a snowball effect-with every advance in the use of language creating
conditions such as to make further advances more probable. The language
`meme' (compare a software virus) would effectively have been manipulating
the environment of human minds so as to make its own spread ever more
likely.

Thus, I'd say it really could have been the same story as with hair: the
biological setback of memory loss-in so far as it was a precondition for the
mental innovations-brought a net gain in biological fitness. Memory loss
proved on balance to be an evolutionarily adaptive trait, and so was set to
spread through the population at a genetic level.

But again you may ask: why should memory loss have been a precondition
for these innovations? If abstract thinking is so beneficial, why would people
not have adopted it anyway, irrespective of whether their memories had let
them down?

The examples of S. and the chimpanzees do seem to confirm that, for so

long as memory remains too good, there really is not sufficient immediate
payoff to do anything else (even if the capacity is latent). And yet the extent
of the mental laziness is certainly surprising. One of the founding fathers of
cognitive psychology, Frederick Bartlett, made much of what he called `the
effort after meaning', which he supposed to be an instinctive delight that all
human beings take in making sense of things: and it does seem strange that
this instinct-if it is such-should have been so little evident in a case like S.
Possibly the answer is that it kicks in only after a first attempt at gaining
cognitive control at a lower level by rote memory has failed. Maybe S., like a
man who has never been thirsty and so never known the joys of slaking his
thirst at a cool spring, simply never had cause to feel as we do about rules.

Let me turn to what we can discover from the archaeological record. The
evidence for when human beings first responded to memory loss by adopting
new styles of thinking is never going to be as clear as the evidence for when
they responded to hair loss by making fires. However, there could be indirect
evidence in the form of artefacts or traces of cultural practices that show the
clear signature of human beings who either were or were not thinking in
particular ways. Archaeologists do now claim, on the basis of traditions of
stone tool making, in particular, that humans were using abstract concepts-
and possibly verbal labels-as long ago as half a million years. 6 In which
case, presumably, it would follow that the crucial loss of memory capacity
must have occurred before that time.

I will not presume to criticize this interpretation of the stone tool evidence.
But I shall, nonetheless, refer to an observation of my own which, if it means
what I have elsewhere suggested it means, tells a very different story. This is
the observation (described at length in Chapter 12) of the uncanny
resemblance between Ice Age cave paintings of 30,000 years ago, and the
drawings of an autistic savant child, Nadia, living in the 1960s: a child with
photographic memory but few, if any, mental concepts and no language.

We have only to compare reproductions of the cave paintings side by side

with the child's to be struck by how similar they are in style, in content and in
execution (see Figures 8-22). But the reason this resemblance is so surprising
and important is that this level of graphic skill is never found in modernday
children in whom thinking and language have developed normally. Indeed,
there are good grounds for believing that Nadia (and the few other savant
children like her) could draw as she did only because she pictured the world
in a non-conceptual way.

I have argued that there is a real possibility that the cave artists themselves
had savant-like minds, with superior memories and undeveloped powers of
abstract thinking. In that case the loss of memory capacity and the
development of modern styles of abstract thinking might in fact have come
remarkably recently, only a few tens of thousands of years ago. "

Let this be as it may. You do not need to be convinced by every detail of the
story to accept we are on to an interesting set of possibilities here. Let's ask
what else falls into place if it is right.

An obvious question is: if there have been these steps backwards in the
design of minds and bodies in the course of human evolution, just how could
they have been brought about genetically? For, in principle, there would seem
to be two very different ways by which a genetically controlled feature, such
as hair or memory, could be got rid of, if and when it was no longer wanted:
it could be removed, or it could be switched off.

It might seem at first that removal would be bound to be the easier and
more efficient option. But this is likely to be wrong. For the fact is that in
order to remove an existing feature, as it appears in the adult organism, it
would often be necessary to tamper with the genetic instructions for the early
stages of development, and this might have unpredictable side effects
elsewhere in the system. So in many cases the safer and easier course would
actually be to switch the feature off-perhaps by leaving the original
instructions intact and simply inserting a `stop code' preventing these being
followed through at the final stage .28

The most dramatic evidence for switching off rather than removal of
genetic programs is the occurrence of so-called `atavisms'-when ghosts of a
long-past stage of evolution reemerge as it were from the dead. To give just
one remarkable example: in 1919, a humpback whale was caught off the
coast of Vancouver which at the back of its body had what were
unmistakably two hind legs. The explanation has to be that, when the hind
legs of the whale's ancestors were no longer adaptive, natural selection
eliminated them by turning off f hind-leg formation, while the program for
hind legs nonetheless remained latent in the whale's DNA-ready to be
reactivated by some new mutation that undid the turning off.

Do such atavisms occur in the areas of human biology we are interested in?

Let's consider first the case of hair. If body hair has been turned off, does it
ever happen that it gets turned on again? The answer is most probably: Yes.
Every so often people do in fact grow to have hair covering their whole
bodies, including their faces. The best-documented cases have occurred in
Mexico, where a mutant gene for hairiness (or, as I am suggesting, the return
to hairiness) has become well established in certain localities. 2'

But how about the case of picture memory? We have seen two remarkable
cases where the capacity for perfect recall popped up, as it were, from
nowhere: the mnemonist S. and the idiot savant artist Nadia. But lesser
examples of much better-than-average memory do turn up regularly, if rarely,
in a variety of other situations. The capacity for picture memory is actually
not uncommon in young children, although it seldom lasts beyond the age of
five years. In adults it sometimes occurs as an accompaniment to epilepsy, or
certain other forms of brain pathology, and it can emerge, in particular, in
cases of senile dementia associated with degeneration of the fronto-temporal
areas of the cortex. Several cases have recently been described of senile
patients who, as they have begun to lose their minds in other ways, have
developed a quite extraordinary-and novel-ability to make lifedrawings .31)

There is also evidence, albeit controversial, that certain racial groups

possess exceptional memory. The anthropologist Eugene Marais described in
his book, The Soul of the Ape, a variety of tests he undertook with Kalahari
Bushmen from which he concluded that the Bushmen have preserved a
capacity for memorizing features of the landscape that civilized human
beings have subsequently lost.'' More recently, and more reliably, studies of
Australian Aborigines show that they typically perform brilliantly-and much
better than European whites-at `Kim's game'-type memory tasks, where they
are asked to look at a complex spatial array of objects and then, after the
array has been disassembled, to put everything back in its right place.;'

In none of these cases can we be sure where the exceptional ability is

coming from. But, assuming that no special training has taken place, it does
seem likely that what is occurring is some kind of release effect. That is to
say, the extra memory capacity is emerging spontaneously as and when some
influence that normally keeps it in check is lifted."

Even in S.'s case it can he argued several ways. Nonetheless, I dare say S.
was indeed an example of the kind of atavism that our theory of evolved
memory loss predicts might sometimes occur: a man born to remember
because of a congenital absence of the active inhibition that in most modern
human beings creates forgetting.

Luria wrote: `There is no question that S.'s exceptional memory was an

innate characteristic, an element of his individuality.' Interestingly enough,
the trait seems to have run in S.'s family, with both his parents and a nephew
also having unusually good memories.

Was there a simple genetic cause involved here? We do not know. But,
let's suppose for a moment it was so. Then perhaps I may be allowed one
further speculation. If such a trait can run in a family, then presumably it
could run in a whole racial group. In which case the superior memory
capacity of Australian Aborigines (assuming the claims for this stand up)
may in fact be evidence that the Aborigines as a group are carrying genes for
a (newly acquired?) atavism.

This ends my main case. I have dwelt on the examples of hair loss and
memory because I reckon they provide textbook examples of how the Grew
effect might work. However, I realize these are not the examples that got the
discussion going at the beginning of this essay. And I owe it to you, before I
end, to try these ideas in relation to beauty loss and intelligence loss. These
cases are too complicated to treat here with due seriousness. But I will try not
to disappoint you entirely.
Beauty

Why are most people less than perfect beauties-certainly not as beautiful as
they would like to he, and probably not as beautiful as they could be if only
they were to have the right start in life (the right genes, the right hormones)?

I have mentioned already how one way of explaining the general

mediocrity is to attribute it to the sheer difficulty of achieving a perfect face
and body when everyone is up against the mutations, parasites, and accidents
that dog all human development. Beauty has evolved as a form of sexual
display, designed by sexual selection to show off each person's qualities as a
mate: and this means-to make matters worse-that the dimensions of beauty
most closely watched by other people are likely to be precisely those on
which it is most difficult to do well. Thus, we particularly admire bodily
symmetry, high cheekbones, unblemished complexion, and so on, precisely
because not everyone, not even most, can achieve a perfect score in these
respects. 15

Let's allow that this is partly it. Yet I make bold to assert that most people's
scores are so far off perfect-in fact so much closer to frank plainness than to
beauty-that something else must be going on. Perhaps this something else is
indeed the active masking of beauty.

Yet why should beauty be masked? Derham's view, as we saw, would be

that too great beauty (like too great anything) can get a person into
difficulties, perhaps by making him or her unduly narcissistic or the object of
too much attention from the opposite sex. But Grew's view, I assume, would
be that the problem with too great beauty is not simply that of attracting too
much attention, but of attracting it too easily, and so having no incentive to
compete for mates by other means. By contrast, those individuals blessed
with lack of beauty will have a strong incentive to make up for it. These
relatively plain men and women will indeed have to have recourse to the
`innumerable engines' by which individuals can and do try to compensate for
their deficits in physical attractiveness-by being particularly kind, witty,
artistic, creative, charming, houseproud, and so on. But in so doing they will
more than make up in attractiveness and fecundity for what they lacked to
start with.

My sister Charlotte will not mind me telling a story about her, that she
once told me. Charlotte remembers that, as a teenage girl, she consulted a
mirror and decided she was never going to win in love or in work by virtue of
her looks. So she came to a decision: instead of competing on the unfair
playing field that Nature had laid out for her, she would systematically set
about winning by other means. If she could not be especially beautiful, she
would make herself especially nice. And so, in fact, she did-going on to lead
an enviably successful life all round.

There are other grand examples. George Eliot had such a poor opinion of
her chances in the conventional marriage market that she took to writing
novels instead. And, on the man's side, Tolstoy complained that he could `see
no hope for happiness on earth for a man with such a wide nose, such thick
lips, and such tiny grey eyes as mine', and so he too decided he might as well
make the best of a bad job and develop himself asa writer.

Perhaps this has been a recurring theme in relatively recent human history.
But I emphasize relatively recent because I guess this route to success for
those who lack beauty would have opened up only once human beings had
already evolved the minds and the culture to enable them to seize the
opportunity to develop and showcase their compensatory talents. We can
imagine, then, an earlier stage of human evolution when physical beauty was
actually more important-and so presumably more prevalent-than it is today:
because, frankly, beauty was it and there were few if any ways of competing
at a cultural level.
Intelligence

And why are most people so far off being highly intelligent? Given that the
human brain is capable of creating a Newton or a Milton, the fact that the
average person is-well-only so averagely good at the kinds of reasoning and
imaginative tasks that form the basis for intelligence tests is, to say the least,
regrettable.

Again there is a possible explanation in terms of mutation load and

depredations to the brain during development. And again it is possible that
these effects are amplified by sexual selection. The evolutionary psychologist
Geoffrey Miller argues persuasively that a person's performance on an IQ test
(or its equivalent in courtship rituals) can function, like beauty, as a way of
displaying his or her genetic and physiological health, so that the signs of
intelligence and creativity we most value are likely to be precisely those
which only the highest-quality individuals can reliably lay on.36

Let's allow, once more, that there is something in this. But I seriously
question whether it is the whole explanation. An IQ of 100 is not just a notch
or two below the best, it would seem to he in a completely different league.
And with half the human population scoring less than this, we should be
thinking again about the possibility of active masking.

Yet, why mask intelligence? Derham's view would be that individuals with
too great intelligence may be at risk of bringing destruction on themselves by
finding answers to problems that are better left unsolved. But Grew would
point to a very different risk: not that there is a cost to getting to the solution
as such, but that there may be a cost to getting to it effortlessly and unaided.
By contrast, those individuals with a relative lack of brain power will be
bound to resort to more roundabout means, including again a variety of those
cultural `engines'. They will spend more time over each problem, make more
mistakes, use more props-all of which may bring serendipitous rewards.;' But,
most important, I would say, they will be obliged to seek assistance from
other people-and so will gain all that flows from this in terms of camaraderie
and social bonding.
 Perhaps you remember from your schooldays the risks of being the
member of the class whose mind works too fast, the know-all who races
ahead on his own while others seek help from the teacher and each other.
These days kids have a new word for it: to be too bright in class is distinctly
not `cool'. But it is not only schoolkids who will ostracize an individual who
may be too self-sufficient to work well with the team. I heard the following
CNN news report on the radio recently:

The police department in New London, Connecticut, has turned down a man
as a potential member of the force because he has too high an IQ. A
spokesman for the recruiting agency says: `The ideal police recruit has an IQ
of between 95 and 115.' The man rejected had an IQ of 125."

An IQ of 125 is about the level of most college students. Not, you might
think, so exceptionally, dangerously intelligent. Nonetheless, I suspect the
recruiting agency-and our classmates, and in the long run natural selection,
too-are better judges than we might like to believe of what plays out to
people's best advantage. When individuals are so clever that they have no
need to work with others, they will indeed tend to shift for themselves, and so
lose out on the irreplaceable benefits of teamwork and cooperation.

`But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall he first.''' It is hard for
a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. It is hard for a furry ape to catch
on to making fires, for a mnemonist to become an abstract thinker, for a
beautiful woman to become a professor, for a man with a high IQ to get into
the New London police force. The warm-coated, the memorious, the
beautiful, the smart, shall be last; the naked, the amnesic, the plain, the dull
shall be first.

Many of us must find the teaching of Jesus on this matterand the parallel
conclusions we have come to in this essayparadoxical. I think these
conclusions are and will probably always remain deeply and interestingly
counter-intuitive.

What we have discovered is that what people consider desirable is in fact

often less than optimal. But, then, the question remains: why do they still
desire it? Why has Nature saddled human beings with a yearning to possess
qualities they are better off without?

The answer, I suppose, is that this is part of the deal. If human beings did
not retain the ambition to regain the capacities they have lost-if they did not
envy those who are by nature warmer, better informed, more sexually
attractive, more brilliant than they-they would not try sufficiently hard to
compensate for their own perceived deficiencies by alternative means. They
have to be continually teased by the contrast between what they are and what
they imagine they might be before they will go on to on to take the two steps
forward that secure their place in history. It is the individual who, harking
back to the time when people were angels, still has a vision of what it must be
to fly like a bird, who will eventually learn how to take to the skies (and so
prove old Derham's worst fears wrong).

Lord Byron knew this, and wrote a poem about it in 1824, The Deformed
Transformed -a poem that captures in eight lines all that this chapter is about.
My great grandmother began a book about her family as follows: `Writing in
the middle of the twentieth century, it is something to be able to say that I
remember clearly my mother's father, born in 1797." She was a story-teller,
and so in turn am 1. Other people might have danced with a man who had
danced with a girl who had danced with the Prince of Wales. But I, as a boy,
had sat in the lap of someone who had sat in the lap of someone who had
fought alongside Wellington at Waterloo.

Waterloo? Well, I had done the sums, and there was no question the basic
facts were on my side. Born in 1797, my three-greats-grandfather must have
been eighteen at the time of the big battle: he could have been there-and no
doubt would have been there, if he had not (by unfortunate mischance)
become a Nonconformist minister instead. At any rate, the Waterloo version
was how I told it to myself and to my friends at school. I was not going to
spoil a good story for a ha'penny worth of embellishment.

I would like to be able to say that I have now grown up. I have, however,
listened to myself over the years and, in the face of the evidence that
continues to accumulate, I will not pretend I am so much more reliable now
than I was then. Indeed-I say this simply as a piece of scientific observationI
find myself embarrassingly often being overtaken by my tongue. I don't mean
just in relation to people I have known, or things I've heard, but in relation to
things I claim that I myself have seen.

For example (I should not tell you this, but in the interests of objectivity I
will), since returning from Moscow at the beginning of June this year [1987],
I have caught myself several times recounting to attentive friends the story of
how I saw that plucky German pilot land his Cessna aeroplane on the cobbles
beside the Kremlin wall. In one version I saw it from my hotel window; in
another I was actually standing in Red Square.

Now it so happens I was in Red Square on the afternoon the plane came in;
I did see it later that evening. But, as luck would have it, I was not actually
there when it arrived. In my first accounts I told the literal truth. But as the
story got repeated, so it got embellished-to the point where I now have to
remind myself that it's not true.

I mention all this, not in a spirit of confession, but rather as a contribution

to the study of human nature. For I do not think that it is only me. Not
everyone, admittedly, owns up to telling lies. But there are surely enough of
us about who enough of the time go in for a bit of innocent exaggeration, that
we ought to raise the general question: why?

The obvious answer is that it is a way of gaining unwarranted respect. One

of the basic principles of social life is that society accords a special place to
the person who has something to say. To have been present at, or even
intimately linked to, a newsworthy event makes one a valuable resource to
the community. One becomes the person `who was there', who has
information to impart. It gives one what might be called `witness power'. No
wonder, then, that we are sometimes tempted to assert that we have been
present at events where we were not.

Yet this answer would cover a range of sins, over and above those that I, at
least, would own up to committing. The truth is I seldom if ever invent
stories, I merely improve on them. And psychologically-perhaps morally as
well-there seems to be a world of difference between concocting a story for
which there is no basis whatsoever and merely taking a little licence with
existing facts. Nothing will come of nothing. In no way would I have claimed
that I saw the Cessna landing, if I had not seen it at all. And, even with that
ancestor who fought at Waterloo, I would not have told the story if I had not
had at least a half-truth on my side.

I am not saying I never make things up from scratch. But as a rule I am not
tempted unless and until the real world provides some kind of quasi-
legitimate excuse. I must have, as it were, a `near-miss' in my experience-
perhaps I was nearly there, or something happened to the next person along,
or the fish got off the hook, or the lottery ticket was just one number wrong.
And then I may not be able to control it.
 In real life, a miss may be as good as a mile. But fantasy works differently.
These near-misses provide lift-off for imagination, a ticket to the world of
might-have-beens. `The reason', W. H. Auden wrote, `why it is so difficult
for a poet not to tell lies is that in poetry all facts and all beliefs cease to be
true or false and become interesting possibilities.'2 The poet in us is evidently
responsible for some of our more interesting prose.
When you keep putting questions to Nature and Nature keeps saying `No', it
is not unreasonable to suppose that somewhere among the things you believe
there is something that isn't true.

It might have been Bertrand Russell who said it. But it was the philosopher
Jerry Fodor.' And he might have been talking about research into the
paranormal. But he was talking about psycholinguistics. Still, this is advice
that I think might very well be pinned up over the door of every
parapsychology laboratory in the land, and (since I may as well identify both
of my targets on this occasion) every department of theology too. It will serve
as a text for this essay, alongside the following that is from Russell:

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which

may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in
question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is
no ground whatever for supposing it true.'

A few years ago I had the good fortune to be offered a rather attractive
fellowship in Cambridge: a newly established research fellowship, where-I
was led to understandI would be allowed to do more or less whatever I
wanted. But there was a catch.

The money for this fellowship was coming from the Perrott and Warrick
Fund, administered by Trinity College. Mr Perrott and Mr Warrick, I soon
discovered, were two members of the British Society for Psychical Research
who in the 1930s had set up a fund at Trinity with somewhat peculiar terms
of reference. Specifically the fund was meant to promote `the investigation of
mental or physical phenomena which seem to suggest (a) the existence of
supernormal powers of cognition or action in human beings in their present
life, or (b) the persistence of the human mind after bodily death'.;
 Now, the trustees of the fund had been trying, for sixty years, to find
worthy causes to which to give this money. They had grudgingly given out
small grants here and there. But they could find hardly a single project they
thought academically respectable. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that the very
fact that anyone applied for a grant in this area was enough to disqualify them
from being given it. Meanwhile the fund with its accruing interest grew larger
and larger, swelling from an initial £50,000 to well over £1 million.
Something had to be done. Eventually the decision was made to pay for a
senior research fellowship at Darwin College (not at Trinity) in the general
area of parapsychology and philosophy of mind, without any specific
limitations. The job was advertised. I was approached by friends on the
committee who knew of my outspoken scepticism about the paranormal.
And-to cut a long story short-in what was something of a stitch-up I was told
the job was mine on the understanding that I would do something sensible
and not besmirch the good name of the college by dabbling in the occult or
entertaining `spooks and ectoplasm'.

Things do not always work out as expected. You know the story of Thomas a
Beckett-King Henry II's friend and drinking companion, whom he unwisely
appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury on the understanding that he would
keep the church under control? Thomas, as soon as he had the job, did an
about-turn and became the church's champion against the king. I won't say
that is quite what happened to me. But after my appointment I too underwent
something of a change of heart. I decided I should take my commission as
PerrottWarrick Fellow seriously. Even if I could not believe in any of this
stuff myself, I could at least make an honest job of asking about the sources
of other people's beliefs.

So I set out to see what happens when people put a particular set of
`questions to Nature about the supernatural'. The questions Messrs Perrott
and Warrick would presumably have wanted to have had answers to would
be such as these: `Do human beings have supernormal powers of cognition or
action in their present life?' Can they, for example, communicate by
telepathy, predict how dice are going to fall, bend a spoon merely by wishing
it? `Does the human mind persist after bodily death?' Can the mind, for
example, re-enter another body, pass on secrets via a medium, reveal the
location of ancient buried treasure? And so on.

The trouble is, as we all already know, that when you ask straight
questions like this, then the straight answer Nature keeps on giving back is
indeed an uncompromising `No'. No, human beings simply do not have these
supernormal powers of cognition or action. Carry out the straightforward
experiments to test for it, and you find the results are consistently negative.
And no, the human mind simply does not persist after bodily death.
Investigate the claims, and you find there is nothing to them. It turns out there
really are `laws of Nature', that will not allow certain things to happen. And
these natural laws are not like human laws which are typically riddled with
exceptions: with Nature there are no bank holidays or one-off amnesties
when the laws are suspended, nor are there any of those special people, like
the Queen of England, who are entitled to live above the laws.

This is a shame, perhaps. But there we are. As Ernest Hemingway once

said, `It would be pretty to think otherwise'. But it is not otherwise. This is
the world we live in. And so, you might suppose, most people would long
ago have grudgingly accepted that some-or indeed rather a lot-of the things
they would obviously have liked to believe in are not true. ESP,
psychokinesis, trance channelling, and so on really do not exist.

Yet it is not, of course, so simple. All right, if you put the straight question,
the straight answer Nature gives is `No'. But the fact is that most people
(either in or outside the fields of parapsychology and religion) usually do not
ask straight questions, or, even if they do, they do not insist on getting
straight answers. They tend instead to ask, for example: `Do things
sometimes happen consistent with the idea of, or which would not rule out
the possibility of supernormal powers of cognition or survival after death?'
And the answer Nature tends to give back is not a straight `No', but a
`Maybe', or a `Sort of', or-rather like a politician-a `Well, yes and no'. In fact,
sometimes Nature behaves even more like a politician. She, or whoever is
acting for her, instead of saying `No', sidesteps the question and says `Yes' to
something else. `Can you contact my dead uncle?' `Well, I don't know about
that, but I can tell you what's written in this sealed envelope, or I can make
this handkerchief vanish.'
 I thought the thing to do, then, must be to analyse some of these less than
straightforward interchanges-as they occur both in ordinary life and in the
parapsychological laboratory-to see what meanings people put on them.

However, not everyone responds to the same tricky evidence in the same
way. So I realized it would be important to ask about personal differences:
why some individuals (though it has to be said not many) remain pernickety
and sceptical while others jump immediately to the most fantastic of
conclusions. Thus, in the event, I turned my research to the study of the
psycho-biography of certain `extreme believers'-those who throughout history
have made the running as evangelists for what I have called `paranormal
fundamentalism'. Who were-and are-these activists, and what's got into them?

Here I'll review just one case history, to see what can be learned. It is, for
sure, a special case, but one which touches on many of the wider issues. The
case is that of Jesus Christ.4

I have several reasons for choosing to discuss the case of Jesus. First, of
course, he needs no introduction. Even those who know next to nothing about
other heroes of the supernatural, know at least something about Jesus.
Second, I think it can he said that the miracles of Jesus, as recorded in the
Bible, have done more than anything else to set the stage for all subsequent
paranormal phenomena in Western culture, outside as well as inside a
specifically religious context. Modern philosophy is not quite, as Whitehead
once remarked, merely footnotes to Plato, and modern parapsychology is not
quite footnotes to the Bible. But there can be no question that almost all of
the major themes of parapsychology do in fact stem from the Biblical
tradition. Third, and most important, I think Jesus is probably the best
example there has ever been of a person who not only believed in the reality
of paranormal powers, but believed he himself had them. Jesus, I shall argue,
quite probably believed he was the real thing: believed he really was the Son
of God, and that he really was capable of performing supernatural miracles. I
am going to ask, why?

Now, no doubt one perfectly adequate answer to this question-and a good

many people's preferred answer-would be that Jesus believed he was the real
thing because he really was the real thing. Except that there are, I would say,
very strong reasons for supposing that he really was not the real thing. And I
do not mean merely to point to the reasons that are usually trotted out by
sceptics: namely, that it would have been scientifically impossible for him to
have been the real thing, totally unprecedented, and so on. I mean to point to
the softer but just as devastating grounds that are to be found in the Bible
itself. For, when it comes down to it, Jesus just does not seem to have
behaved enough like the real thing. His supernatural powers (even as
recorded by friends) simply were not at the level we should expect of them:
they were in fact surprisingly restricted, and not only restricted but restricted
in a very suggestive way. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus in most if not
all of his public demonstrations behaved just like a conjuror.

From the point of view of Bible scholarship, I am not saying anything

dramatically new here; but, as you'll see, I shall he giving what has already
been said a rather different emphasis. Many Biblical scholars have noted (to
their dismay or glee, depending on which side they were taking) that Jesus's
miracles were in fact entirely typical of the tradition of performance magic
that flourished throughout the ancient world.'

Lucian, a Roman born in Syria, writing in the second century, catalogued

the range of phenomena that, as he put it, `the charlatans and tricksters' could
lay on, and that were, he said, on display in every market place around the
Mediterranean. They included walking on water, materialization and
dematerialization, clairvoyance, expulsion of demons, and prophecy. And he
went on to explain how many of these feats were achieved by normal means.
He described, for example, a `pseudo-miracle worker' called Marcus who
regularly turned water into wine by mixing the water in one cup with red
liquid from another cup while the onlookers' attention was dis-tracted.6

Christian apologists were, early on, only too well aware of how their
Messiah's demonstrations must have looked to outsiders. They tried to play
down the alarming parallels. There is even some reason to think that the
Gospels themselves were subjected to editing and censorship so as to exclude
some of Jesus' more obvious feats of conjuration.7
 The Christian commentators were, however, in something of a dilemma.
They obviously could not afford to exclude the miracles from the story
altogether. The somewhat lame solution, adopted by Origen and others, was
to admit that the miracles would indeed have been fraudulent if done by
anybody else simply to make money, but not when done by Jesus to inspire
religious awe. Origen wrote:

The things told of Jesus would he similar to those of the magicians if Celsus
had shown that Jesus did them as the magicians do, merely for the sake of
showing off. But as things are, none of the magicians, by the things he does,
calls the spectators to moral reformation, or teaches the fear of God to those
astounded by the show."

Yet there is a question that is not being asked here. Why ever should Jesus
have put his followers in this position of having to defend him against these
accusations in the first place? If Jesus, as the Son of God, really did have the
powers over mind and matter that he claimed, it should surely have been easy
for him to have put on entirely different class of show.

Think about it. If a fairy godmother gave you this kind of power, what
would you do with it? No doubt, you would hardly know where to begin. But,
given all the wondrous things you might contrive, would you consider for a
moment using these powers to mimic ordinary conjurors: to lay on magical
effects of the kind that other people could lay on without having them?
Would you produce rabbits from hats, or make handkerchiefs disappear, or
even saw ladies in half? Would you turn tables, or read the contents of sealed
envelopes, or contact a Red Indian guide? No, I imagine you would actually
take pains to distance yourself from the common conjurors and small-time
spirit mediums, precisely so as not to lay yourself open to being found guilty
by association.

I am not suggesting that all of Jesus's miracles were quite of this music-hall
variety (although wine into water, or the finding of a coin in the mouth of a
fish, are both straight out of the professional conjuror's canon). But what has
to be considered surprising is that any of them were so; moreover, that so few
of them, at least of those for which the reports are even moderately
trustworthy, were altogether of a different order.

With all that power, why can you do this, but not do that? It seems to have
been a common question put to Jesus even in his lifetime. If you are not a
conjuror, why do you behave so much like one? Why, if you are so
omnipotent in general, are you apparently so impotent in particular? Why-and
this seems to have been a constant refrain and implied criticismcan you
perform your wonders there but not here?

One of the telltale signs of an ordinary magician would be that his success
would often depend on his being able to take advantage of surprise and
unfamiliarity. And so, when the people of Jesus's home town, Nazareth,
asked that 'whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy
country',`' and when Jesus failed to deliver, they were filled with wrath and
suspicion and told him to get out. `And he could there do no mighty work,'
wrote Mark.'° Note `could not', not `would not'. Textual analysis has shown
that it was a later hand that added to Mark's bald and revealing statement the
apologetic rider, `save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed
them'."

The excuse given on this occasion in Nazareth was that Jesus's powers
failed `because of their unbelief'. 12 But this, if you think about it, was an
oddly circular excuse. Jesus himself acknowledged, even if somewhat
grudgingly, that the most effective way to get people to believe in him was to
show them his miraculous powers. `Except ye see signs and wonders,' he
admonished his followers, `ye will not believe.'' 3 How then could he blame
the fact that he could not produce the miracles they craved on the fact that
they did not believe to start with?

Did Jesus himself know the answer to these nagging doubts about his
paranormal powers? Did he know why, while he could do so much, he was
still unable to do all that other people-and maybe he himself-expected of
him?

Remember the taunts of the crowd at the crucifixion: `If thou be the Son of
God, come down from the cross ... He saved others; himself he cannot
save.'14 Hostile as these taunts were, still they must have seemed even to
Jesus like reasonable challenges. We do not know how Jesus answered them.
But the final words from the cross, `My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?', suggest genuine bewilderment about why he could not
summon up supernatural help when he most needed it.

Why this bewilderment? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Jesus
was in fact regularly using deception and trickery in his public performances.
Let's suppose that he really had no more paranormal powers than anybody
else, and this meant in effect he had no paranormal powers at all. Why might
he have been deluded into thinking he was able genuinely to exert the powers
he claimed?

We should begin, I think, by asking what there may have been in Jesus's
personal history that could provide a lead to what came later. It seems pretty
clear that Jesus's formative years were, to say the least, highly unusual.
Everything we are told about his upbringing suggests that even in the cradle
he was regarded as a being apart: someone who, whether or not he was born
to greatness, had greatness thrust upon him from an early age.

Admittedly, it is the privilege of many a human infant to he, for a time at

least, the apple of his or her parents' eyes. So that the fantasy of being a
uniquely favoured human being is actually quite common among little
children. For a good many it is a fantasy that is based squarely in the reality
of their family relationships. The psychoanalyst Ernst Becker wrote:

The small child lives in a situation of utter dependence; and when his needs
are met it must seem to him that he has magical powers, real omnipotence. If
he experiences pain, hunger or discomfort, all he has to do is to scream and
he is relieved and lulled by gentle, loving sounds. He is a magician and a
telepath who has only to mumble and to imagine and the world turns to his
desires.'

Although most children must, of course, soon discover that their powers are
not really all that they imagined, for many the idea will linger. It seems to be
quite usual for young people to continue to speculate about their having
abilities that no one else possesses. And it is certainly a common dream of
adolescents that they have been personally cut out to save the world.

The fact that the young Jesus may have had intimations of his own
greatness might not, therefore, have made him so different from any other
child. Except that there were in his case other-quite extraordinary-factors at
work to feed his fantasy and give him an even more exaggerated sense of his
uniqueness and importance. To start with, there were the very special
circumstances of his birth.

Among the Jews living under Roman rule in Palestine at the beginning of the
Christian era, it had been long been prophe sled that a Messiah, descended
from King David, would come to deliver God's chosen people from
oppression. And the markers-the tests-by which this saviour should be
recognized were known to everybody. They would include: (i) he would
indeed be a direct descendant of the king: `made of the seed of David'."' (ii)
He would be born to a virgin (or, in literal translation of the Hebrew, to a
young unmarried woman): `Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,
and shall call his name Immanuel.'' (iii) He would emanate from Bethlehem:
`But thou, Bethlehem, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah,
yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel."" (iv)
The birth would be marked by celestial sign: `A star shall come forth out of
Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel."9

We cannot of course be sure how close the advent of Jesus actually came
to meeting these criteria. The historical facts have been disputed, and many
modern scholars would insist that the story of the nativity as told in
Matthew's and Luke's Gospels was largely a post hoc reconstruction.'
Nonetheless, there is, to put it at its weakest, a reasonable possibility that the
gist of the story is historically accurate. (i) Even though the detailed
genealogies cannot be trusted, it is quite probable that Joseph was, as
claimed, descended from David. (ii) Even though it is highly unlikely that
Mary was actually a virgin, she could certainly have been carrying a baby
before she was married; and, if the father was not Joseph, Mary might-as
other women in her situation have been known to-have claimed that she fell
pregnant spontaneously. (iii) Granted that Jesus's family were settled in
Nazareth, there are still several plausible scenarios that would place his actual
birth in Bethlehem (even if Luke's story about the tax census does not add
up). (iv) Although the exact date of Jesus's birth is not known, it is known
that Halley's comet appeared in the year 12 Bc; and, given that other facts
suggest that Jesus was born between 10 and 14 BC, there could have been a
suitable `star'.

Some sceptics have felt obliged to challenge the accuracy of this version of
events on the grounds that the Old Testament prophets could not possibly
have `foretold' what would happen many centuries ahead. But such
scepticism is, I think, off target. For the point to note is that there need be
nothing in itself miraculous about foretelling the future, provided the prophet
has left it open as to when and where the prophecy is going to be fulfilled.
Given that a tribe of, let's say, a hundred thousand people could be expected
to have over a million births in the course of, let's say, three hundred years,
the chances that one of these births might `come to pass' in more or less the
way foretold are relatively high. It is not that it would have to happen to
someone somewhere, it is just that, if and when it did happen to someone
somewhere, there would be no reason to be too impressed.

The further point to note, however, is that even though there may he
nothing surprising about the fact that lightning, for example, strikes
somebody somewhere, it may still be very surprising to the person whom it
strikes. While nobody is overly impressed that someone or other wins the
lottery jackpot every few weeks, there is almost certainly some particular
person who cannot believe his or her luck-somebody who cannot but ask:
`Why me?' For the winner of the lottery herself and her close friends, the turn
of the wheel will very likely have provided irresistible evidence that fate is
smiling on her.

So too, maybe, with the family of Jesus. Suppose that through a chapter of
accidents-we need put it no more strongly than that-the birth of Jesus to
Joseph and Mary really did meet the preordained criteria. Assume that the set
of coincidences was noticed by everyone around, perhaps harped on
especially by Mary for her own good reasons, and later drawn to the young
boy's attention. Add to this an additional stroke of fortune (which, as told in
Matthew's gospel, may or may not be historically accurate): namely, that
Jesus escaped the massacre of children that was ordered by Herod, so that he
had good reason to think of himself as a `survivor'. It would seem to be
almost inevitable that his family-and later he himself-would have read deep
meaning into it, and that they would all have felt there was a great destiny
beckoning.

The image a person has of himself is bound to have a crucial influence on

his psychological development. Not only will it shape his choices as to what
he attempts to make of his own life, but-because of that-it will frequently be
self-confirming. The man who believes himself born to be king will attempt
to act like a king. The man who knows himself to have been selected from all
the possible Tibetan babies to be the future Dalai Lama will allow himself to
grow into the part. Children of Hollywood parents who are pushed towards
fame and fortune on the stage will sometimes be dramatically successful
(provided they are not, by having too much of it, dramatically hurt).

This kind of moulding of a person's character to match an imposed

standard can be effective even when the pressures are relatively weak. A
surprising, but possibly apposite, example is provided by a recent finding in
the area of astrology. When the psychologist Hans Eysenck looked to see
whether there is any correlation between particular individuals" sun signs'
and their personality, he discovered that people born under the odd numbered
signs of the zodiac (Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius) do in
fact tend to be more extrovert than those born under the even-numbered signs
(Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces)-just as predicted by
astrologers." But the explanation for this curious finding is almost certainly
not that people are being directly influenced by astral forces. A much more
likely explanation is that enough people regularly read their horoscopes for
the astrologers' predictions to have had a profound effect on what individuals
expect about their own character and the ways they behave. Further studies
by Eysenck showed that the correlation is, in fact, absent in those (relatively
few) adults who profess to know nothing about their sun sign or what it
`ought' to mean for them; and it is also absent in children.22

Now, if an individual's psychological development can be influenced

merely by reading a newspaper horoscope, imagine how it might affect a
young man for him to have been born, as it were, under the `sign of the
Messiah'. It would be wholly predictable that, as the meaning dawned on him,
it would turn his head to some degree.

The accounts of Jesus's youth do in fact tell of a boy who, besides being
highly precocious, was in several ways somewhat full of himself and even
supercilious." According to the book of James (a near-contemporary
`apocryphal Gospel', supposedly written by Jesus's brother), Jesus during his
'wondrous childhood' struck fear and respect into his playmates by the tricks
he played on them. Luke tells the revealing story of how, when Jesus was
twelve, he went missing from his family group in Jerusalem and was later
discovered by his worried parents in the Temple, `sitting in the midst of the
doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions'. His mother said:
`Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold thy father and I have sought
thee sorrowing.' To which the boy replied: `How is it that ye sought me? wilt
ye not that I must be about my Father's business ?124

Still, no one can survive entirely on prophecy and promise. However special
Jesus thought himself in theory, it is fair to assume he would also have
wanted to try his hand in practice. He would have sought-privately as well as
publicly-confirmation of the reputation that was building up around him. He
would have wanted concrete evidence that he did indeed have special powers.

In this Jesus would, again, not have been behaving so differently from
other children. Almost every child probably seeks in small ways to test his
fantasies, and conducts minor experiments to see just how far his powers
extend. `If I stare at that woman across the street, will she look round?' (Yes,
every so often she will.) `If I pray for my parents to stop squabbling, will they
let up?' (Yes, it usually works.) `If I carry this pebble wherever I go, will it
keep the wolves away?' (Yes, almost always.) But we may guess that Jesus,
with his especially high opinion of his own potential, might also have
experimented on a grander scale: `If I command this cup to break in pieces
...', `If I wish my brother's sandals to fly across the room ...', `If I conjure a
biscuit to appear inside the urn ...'.
 Unfortunately, unless Jesus really did have paranormal powers, such
larger-scale experiments would mostly have been unsuccessful. The facts of
life would soon have told him there was a mismatch between the reality and
his ambitions. Jesus would, however, have had to be a lesser child than
obviously he was if he let the facts stand in the way-accepting defeat and
possible humiliation. In such circumstances, the first step would be to
pretend. And then, since pretence would never prove wholly satisfactory, the
next step would be to invent.

Break the cup by attaching a fine thread and pulling .. . Hide the biscuit in
your sleeve and retrieve it from the urn ... By doing so, at least you get to see
how it would feel if you were to have those powers. But what is more,
provided you keep the way you do it to yourself, you get to see how other
people react if they believe you actually do have special powers. And since
you yourself have reason to think-and in any case they are continually telling
you-that deep down you really do possess such powers (even if not in this
precise way on the surface), this is fair enough.

So it might have come about that the young Jesus began to play deliberate
tricks on his family and friends and even on himself-as indeed many other
children, probably less talented and committed than he was, have been known
to do when their reputation is at stake. Yet, although I say `even on himself',
it hardly seems likely he could successfully have denied to himself what he
was up to. In such a situation you may he able to fool other people most of
the time, but not surely yourself. Pretending is one thing. Deluding yourself is
another thing entirely. It is nonetheless your reputation in your own eyes that
really matters. Jesus's position therefore would not have been an easy or a
happy one.

Imagine what it might feel like: to be pretty sure that you have paranormal
powers, to have other people acclaiming what you do as indeed evidence that
you have these powers, but to know that none of it is for real. The more that
other people fall for your inventions, the more surely you would yearn for
evidence that you could in fact achieve the same results without having to
pretend.
 Suppose, then, that one day it were to have come about that Jesus
discovered, to his own surprise, that his experiments to test his powers had
the desired effect without his using any sort of trick at all! What might he
have made of it then?

I speak from some experience of these matters (and surely some of you have
had similar experiences, too). Not, I should say, the experience of
deliberately cheating (at least no more than anyone else), but rather of
discovering as a child that certain of my own experimental `try-ons' were
successful when I least expected it.

For example, when I was about six years old I invented the game of there
being a magic tree on Hampstead Heath, about half a mile from where we
lived in London. Every few days I used to visit the tree, imagining to myself,
`What if the fairies have left sweets there?' Sometimes I would say elaborate
spells as I walked over there, although I would have felt a fool if anyone had
heard me. Yet, remarkably, not long after I began these visits, my spells
began to work. Time after time I found toffees in the hollow of the tree trunk.

Or, for another example, when my brother and I were a bit older we started
digging for Roman remains in the front garden of our house on the Great
North Road in London. Each night we would picture what we would discover
the next day, although we had little faith that anything would come of it.
Resuming the dig one morning we did find, under a covering of light earth,
two antique coins.

Draw your own conclusions about these particular examples. I have,

however, a still better case history to tell, which may arguably provide a
closer parallel to Jesus's own story. It concerns a teenage boy, Robert, who
had become famous as a `mini-Geller', a child spoon-bender, and whom I met
while taking part in a radio programme about the paranormal. I'll tell it here
as I wrote it up for a newspaper some years ago:

He had come with his father to the studio to take part in an experiment on
psychic metal-bending. He was seated at a table, on which was a small vice
holding a metal rod with a strain-gauge attached to it, and his task was to
`will' the rod to buckle.

Half an hour passed, and nothing happened. Then one of the production
team, growing bored, picked up a spoon from a tea-tray and idly bent it in
two. A few minutes later the producer noticed the bent spoon. `Well, I never,'
she said. `Hey, Robert, I think it's worked.' Both Robert and his father
beamed with pleasure. `Yes,' Robert said modestly, `my powers can work at
quite a distance; sometimes they kind of take off on their own.'

Later that afternoon I chatted to the boy. A few years previously Robert
had seen Uri Geller doing a television show. Robert himself had always been
good at conjuring, and-just for fun-he had decided to show off to his family
by bending a spoon by sleight of hand. To his surprise, his father had become
quite excited and had told everybody they had a psychic genius in the family.

Robert himself, at that stage, had no reason to believe he had any sort of
psychic power. But, still, he liked the idea and played along with it. Friends
and neighbours were brought in to watch him; his Dad was proud of him.
After a few weeks, however, he himself grew tired of the game and wanted to
give up. But he did not want people to know that he had been tricking them:
so, to save face, he simply told his father that the powers he had were
waning.

Next day something remarkable happened. At breakfast, his mother opened

the dresser and found that all the cutlery had bent. Robert protested it had
nothing to do with him. But his Dad said: `How did he know-perhaps he had
done it unconsciously ...?' There was no denying the cutlery had bent. And
how does a person know if he has done something unconsciously? It was then
that Robert realized he must be genuinely psychic.

Since that time, he had received plenty of confirmation. For example, he

had only to think about a clock in the next room stopping, and when his
father went in he would find that it had stopped. Or he would lie in bed
thinking about the door-bell, and it would suddenly start ringing. He had to
admit, however, that he was not exactly in control. And the trouble was that
people kept on asking him to do more than was psychically within his power.
So just occasionally he would go back to using some kind of trick ... He
would not have called it cheating, more a kind of psychic 'filling-in'.

Such was the boy's story. Then I talked to his father. Yes, the boy had
powers all right: he had proved it time and again. But he was only a kid, and
kids easily lose heart; they need encouraging. So, just occasionally, he-the
father-would try to restore his son's confidence by arranging for mysterious
happenings around the house ... He would not have called it cheating either,
more a kind of psychic `leg-up'.

This folie a deux had persisted for four years. Both father and son were
into it up to their necks, and neither could possibly let on to the other his own
part in the deception. Not that either felt bad about the 'help' he was
providing. After all, each of them had independent evidence that the
underlying phenomenon was genuine.''

The purpose of my telling this story is not to suggest any exact parallel
with Jesus, let alone to point the finger specifically at anyone in Jesus's
entourage, but rather to illustrate how easily an honest person could get
trapped in such a circle: how a combination of his own and others' well-
meaning trickery could establish a lifetime pattern of fraud laced with
genuine belief in powers he did not have.

Still, I cannot deny that, once the idea has been planted that Jesus became
caught up this way, it is hard to resist asking who might conceivably have
played the supporting role. His mother? Or, if it continued into later years,
John the Baptist? Or, later still, Judas, or one of the other disciples? Or all of
them by turns? They all had a great interest in spurring Jesus on.

I do not want to suggest any exact parallel with anyone else either. But there
are I think several clues that point to the possibility that just this kind of
escalating folly might have played a part in the self-development of several
other recent heros of the paranormal.

Many modern psychics-notably the Victorian spiritualist D. D. Home, and

in our own times Uri Geller-have been childhood prodigies. In Geller's case,
for example, it is reported:

At about the age of five he had the ability to predict the outcome of card
games played by his mother. Also he noted that spoons and forks would bend
while he was eating ... At school his exam papers seemed identical to those of
classmates sitting nearby ... Classmates also reported that, while sitting near
Geller, watches would move forwards or backwards an hour.26

And the same precocity is evident with several of those who have gone on
to be, if not psychics themselves, powerful spokesmen for the paranormal.
Arthur Koestler, for example, has told of how as a boy he `was in demand for
table-turning sessions in Budapest'."

It is also significant that when, as has frequently happened, celebrated

psychics have been discovered to be cheating by non-paranormal means, they
have nonetheless maintained that they did not always cheat. And it is
significant too that their supporters have found this mixture of fake and real
powers plausible and even reasonable. Of Geller, Koestler said: `Uri is
certainly 25 percent fraud and 25 percent showman, but 50 percent is 1211

But on top of this there is the remarkable degree of selfassurance that these
people have typically displayed. Again and again they have left others with
the strong impression that they really do believe in their own gifts. Geller has
impressed almost all who have met him-I include myself among themas a
man with absolute faith in his own powers. He comes over as being, as it
were, the chief of his own disciples. And it is hard to escape the conclusion
that in the past and maybe still today he has had incontrovertible evidence, as
he sees it, that he is genuinely psychic.

Let me give a small example: when Geller visited my house and offered to
bend a spoon, I reached into the kitchen drawer and picked out a spoon that I
had put there for the purpose-a spoon from the Israeli airline with E1. Al.
stamped on it. Geller at once claimed credit for this coincidence: `You pick a
spoon at random, and it is an Israeli spoon! My country! These things happen
all the time with me. I don't know how I influenced you.' I sensed, as I had
done with Robert, that Geller was really not at all surprised to find that he
had, as he thought, influenced me by ESP. It was as if he took it to be just one
more of the strange things that typically happen in his presence and which he
himself could not explain except as evidence of his paranormal powers-'those
oddly clownish forces', as he called them on another occasion. 1

The suspicion grows that someone else has over the years been `helping'
Geller without his knowing it, by unilaterally arranging for a series of
apparently genuine minor miracles to occur in his vicinity. A possible
candidate for this supportive role might he his shadowy companion, Shipi
Shtrang. Shtrang, Geller's best friend from childhood, later his agent and
producer, and whose sister he married, would have had every reason to
encourage Geller in whatever ways he could; and Geller himself is on record
as saying that his powers improve when Shtrang is around.3° (Noting the
family relationship between Shtrang and Geller, we might note too that John
the Baptist and Jesus were related: their mothers, according to Luke, were
first cousins.)

Now, maybe this all seems too much and too Machiavellian. If you do not see
how these examples have any relevance to that of Jesus, you do not see it,
and I will not insist by spelling it out further.

But now I have a different and more positive suggestion to make about
why a man as remarkable as Jesus (and maybe Geller too) might have
become convinced he could work wonders-and all the more strongly as his
career progressed. It is that, in some contexts, the very fact of being
remarkable may be enough to achieve semi-miraculous results.

I have as yet said little of Jesus as a `healer'. My reason for not attending to
this aspect of his art so far is that so-called `faith healing' is no longer
regarded by most doctors, theologians, or parapsychologists as being strictly
paranormal. Although, until quite recently, the miracle cures that Jesus is
reported to have effected were thought to be beyond the scope of natural
explanation, they no longer are so.

It is now widely recognized by the medical community that the course of

many kinds of illness, of the body as well as of the mind, can be influenced
by the patient's hopes and expectations and thus by the suggestions given him
by an authority figure whom he trusts." Not only can the patient's own mental
state, guided by another, profoundly affect the way he himself perceives his
symptoms, but it can also help mobilize his body's immunological defences
to help achieve more lasting recovery. It is unfortunately true that only
certain sorts of illness benefit, and that in any case the effects are not always
permanent-so that the pain or the stiffness or the depression tends to return.
But, at least in the short term, the cure can be dramatic.

To say that these cures have a normal explanation, however, is not to deny
that they may often rely on the idea of a paranormal explanation. In fact, it is
often quite clear that they do rely on it. It is for most people, including the
healer, extremely hard to imagine how the voice or the touch of another
person could possibly bring about a cure unless this other person were to
have paranormal powers. It follows that the more the patient believes in these
powers, the more he will be inclined to take the suggestions seriously-and the
better they will work. Equally, the more the healer himself believes in his
powers, the more he can make his suggestions sound convincing-and, again,
the better they will work.

The consequence is that a kind of virtuous circle can get established.

Success in bringing about a cure feeds back to the healer, boosting both his
image in the eyes of the world and his image of himself. And thereafter
nothing succeeds like more success. The process must of course be launched
in some way. There has to be some degree of faith present initially, otherwise
the process cannot be expected to get going. But all that this requires is that
there should already be some small reason-however unsubstantiated-why
people should consider the healer a special person.

In Jesus's case we can assume that, for some or all of the reasons given
earlier, his reputation as a potential miracle worker would in fact have been
established early in his career and have run ahead of him wherever he went.
He would very likely have found, therefore, that he had surprisingly
welldeveloped capacities for healing almost as soon as he first attempted it.
And thereafter, as word spread, he would have got better at it still.
 Thus, even if I am right in suggesting that his own or others' subterfuges
played some part in creating the general mystique with which he was
surrounded, we may guess that in this area Jesus would soon have found
himself being given all the proof he could have asked for that he was capable
of the real thing.

A minor but instructive parallel can again be provided by the case of Uri
Geller. As far as I know, Geller has never claimed to be able to heal sick
human beings, but he has certainly claimed to be able to heal broken watches.
In fact, this was one of the phenomena by which he originally made his
name.

In a typical demonstration, Geller would ask someone to provide him with

a watch that had stopped working and then, merely by grasping it in his hands
for a minute or so, he would set it going again. In his own words (as ever,
disarmingly ingenuous): `I put an energy into it. I don't know what kind of
energy it is, but apparently it fixes the watch. I don't think it will ever stop
again. Maybe it will, but it's working because I'm around now."'

As with human healing, this kind of watch-cure may in fact be perfectly

genuine. It works when it does because the commonest cause of a watch
breaking down is that it has become jammed with dust and thickened oil; and,
if such a watch is held in the hand for a few minutes, body heat can warm and
thin the oil and free the mechanism. When the psychologists David Marks
and Richard Kammann, investigating the phenomenon, collected an unbiased
sample of sixty-one broken watches and subjected them merely to holding
and handling, they found that 57 per cent were successfully started." As with
human healing, the cure does not work if there are actu ally parts broken or
missing, nor is it usually permanent. But the effect is unexpected and
impressive, all the same.

The cure can easily seem paranormal. So, it is not surprising that few if any
people watching Geller realized they could in fact perfectly well do it on their
own without Geller's encouragement. What probably occurred, therefore, was
another example of positive feedback. The higher were people's expectations
of Geller's powers-based, as with Jesus, on his preceding reputation as a
psychic-the more likely they were to rely on him to give the lead with his
suggestions, and hence the more successes he had and the more his reputation
spread.

But the crucial question now is what Geller himself thought of it. Is it
possible that he was as impressed by his own achievements as everybody
else? Suppose he himself had no more understanding of how watches work
(at least until it was forcibly brought to his notice by sceptics) than Jesus had
of how the immune system works. In that case, he could easily have deduced
that he really did have some kind of remarkable power. Like Jesus, he would
have been finding that in one area he could genuinely meet his own and
others' expectations of him.

And yet ... And yet, `about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice,
saying, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'. Many have
speculated on what he meant. But if at the point of death Jesus really did
speak these opening lines of the Twenty-Second Psalm, the clue may lie, I
suggest, in the way the psalm continues: `Why art thou so far from helping
me? ... Thou art he that took me out of the womb; thou didst make me hope
when I was upon my mother's breasts.74

It was Jesus's tragedy-his glory, too-to have been cast in a role that no one
could live up to. He did not choose to be taken from the womb of a particular
woman, at a particular place, under a particular star. It was not his fault that
he was given quite unrealistic hopes upon his mother's breasts. He did his
best to be someone nobody can be. He tried to fulfil the impossible mission.
He played the game in the only way it could be played. And the game
unexpectedly played backand overtook him.
Dostoevsky, during his travels in Europe, saw in a Basel church Holbein's
brutally natural painting of the Dead Christ, showing the body of the Saviour
reduced to a gangrenous slab of meat upon a table. In Dostoevsky's novel The
Idiot, Prince Myshkin confronts a reproduction of the picture in a friend's
house: `That picture . . . that picture!' Myshkin cries. `Why, some people
might lose their faith by looking at that picture.' Then, later in the novel,
Myshkin's alter ego, Ippolit, continues:

As one looks at the body of this tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself
the peculiar and interesting question: if the laws of nature are so powerful,
then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He
did not conquer them, He who overcame nature during His lifetime and
whom nature obeyed? . . Looking at that picture, you get the impression of
nature as some enormous, implacable and dumb beast, or ... as some huge
engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces and
swallowed up-impassively and unfeelingly-a great and priceless Being, a
Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws ... If, on the eve of the
crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken
from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?"

Nature as some enormous, implacable and dumb beast ... a huge and
senseless engine. Here is what has been at issue all along. Nature is the
enemy. What Christ's life seemed to promise, what the paranormal has
always seemed to promise people, is that we, mere human beings, can
vanquish this dumb beast of natural law. What the emptiness of this promise
eventually forces us to recognize is that, when we do treat Nature as the
enemy and seek to conquer her, Nature inevitably has the last depressing
word: `No.' We put the question, `Can a man be a god?', and Nature says-as
only she knows how-'No, a man can be only a mortal man'.

Yet perhaps where we go wrong is with our idea of what we would like
Nature to say. The assumption that we would be better off if Nature did say
'Yes-I surrender, you can have your miracles'.

This is not the point at which to open up a whole new line of argument.
But, so as to lighten this discussion at the end, I shall leave you to consider
this quite different possibility: that Nature-Mother Nature-is not the enemy at
all, but in reality the best ally we could possibly have had. The possibility
that the world we know and everything we value in it has come into being
because of and not despite the fact that the laws of nature are as they are. And
what is more, the possibility that it may have been an essential condition of
the evolution of life on earth that these laws preclude the miracles that so
many people imagine would be so desirable: action at a distance, thought
transfer, survival of the mind after death, and so on. The possibility that the
dumb beast-Nature and her laws-is actually something of a Beauty.

I expect you have heard of the so-called `anthropic principle': the idea that
the laws of physics that we live with in our universe are as they are because if
they weren't as they are, this universe wouldn't be the kind of place in which
human beings could exist. Adjust the laws ever so little, and it would all go
wrong: the universe would expand too fast or too slowly, it would become
too hot or too cold, organic molecules would be unstable-and we human
beings would not be here to observe and seek the meaning of it.

I believe there is a similar story to be told about the paranormal.;6 That's to

say, if the laws of nature were to be adjusted to allow for paranormal
phenomena, this too would have a disastrous consequences for human beings,
fatally compromising their individuality and creativity and undermining the
basis of biological and cultural progress. It would not only be the end of life
as we know it, but very possibly enough to prevent life ever having started.

If this is right, it means there is a kind of `Catch 22' about research in

parapsychology, at least if you try to live up to the expectations of the
gentlemen who endowed the PerrottWarrick Fellowship. For it means,
perhaps, that you can only be asking those questions of Nature-looking for
supernormal powers of cognition or action, or the persistence of the mind
after death-in a world where Nature is bound to answer: `No, there's nothing
to it.' In any world where Nature could say `Yes' to those questions, we
would not be here to ask them.
Londoners may have seen a poster in the tube stations inviting them to
telephone the Zodiac Line to Russell Grant. Always a sucker for having my
fortune told, I telephoned two 0's and seven 7's. `Russell Grant here,' said a
voice. `Thank you for calling. I've got a computer which is going to work out
your horoscope, personal only to you. The computer is very sensitive. Please
code in your date of birth by pressing the keys on your telephone.' I obliged:
27...03 ... 43.

`Hello, Aquarius,' said Russell's voice. `You were born on ... January ...
27th ... 1943.' Well, not quite; but the poster had promised that Russell would
tell me `a couple of personal things just between you and him', and perhaps
this was one of them. I listened, all ears. `Your winning personality will take
the world by storm today.' The sun, it seemed, was shining on me. Money,
love, health-all, I was told, were set fair. I would even be a good day for
philosophical, religious, and legal projects.

Philosophical, religious, and legal projects? I had as it happened given a

talk on the radio the previous evening about the philosophical and legal
aspects of the trials of animals which took place in the Middle Ages before
religious courts. The coincidence was, to say the least, uncanny.

Shaken somewhat, I tried again. 27 ... 03 ... 43. This time the computer
decided to take my word for it. `Hello Aries, you were born on ... March ...
27th ... 1943.' But now, sadly, the forecast had changed. I still had my
winning personality. But there was no mention now of philosophy, law, or
religion. And my prospects were in general decidedly gloomier. `Dig for
victory,' said Russell. `Get on your bike.' I tried once more. `Hello, Pisces,'
said the voice (either my phone needs mending, or Russell's computer is
peculiarly sensitive to my protean nature). Miraculously, philosophy and
religion were back on the agenda, and digging for victory.

Third time through, however, I was beginning to become slightly more

sensitive myself. Why those telltale pauses after each tidbit of information?
Why the just-discernible changes of inflection? I began to realize that the
computer was playing a game of heads, bodies, and legs, in which snippets of
Russell's wisdom were being recombined (at random? surely not!) to give the
impression of originality.

Now I don't say it's not fun. But what it makes it less than harmless fun is
the multi-layered deceitfulness of the whole thing. First, the pretence that Mr
Grant is there on the end of the line (all right, we all know about answering
machines, but the illusion is still powerful); second, the pretence that any
genuine astrological analysis has been done by either Mr Grant or the
computer; third, the pretence that even if it had been done it would have had
any validity at all.

Let the buyer beware, it's said. If people want to waste their money in
talking to a robot at 46p a minute (at least £1.00 a call), that's their business.
But actually it's not that simple. The little old ladies who even now no doubt
are calling in for their daily fix of Russell Grant are-as the promoters of this
scheme presumably well know-complicated beings with complicated beliefs.
And they cannot be counted on to recognize rubbish when they hear it.
Russell Grant has already been given a spurious authority by his appearances
on breakfast-time television. Astrology in general is covertly legitimized in a
host of ways in newspapers and magazines (even the Financial Times has an
occasional column giving astrological predictions for the markets). The fact
is, our culture provides very little defence against the seductions of
irrationality.

But the real problem in persuading people to abandon nonsensical beliefs

is precisely the one I came up against on my first call. There can be no doubt
that the so-called predictions sometimes work. And human beings being what
they are, they will often consider one surprising success more than a match
for a thousand unsurprising failures. Add to that the human tendency to
convert apparent failures to successes by reinterpreting the facts, or to change
their own behaviour to bring it into line with what has been predicted, and the
persistence of superstition is assured.

Who wins? False prophets, I don't doubt, make quite fat profits. If I had
money to invest, I'd invest it straight away in Grant & Co. and their
computer. But there must, I'm afraid, be a price to be paid by society when
high technology-the fruit of human rationality-is used for such stupid ends.
Computers gave us Star Wars; it can be no consolation that they are now
giving us Star-Gazing as well.
On 5 March 1986, some villagers near Malacca in Malaysia beat to death a
dog, which they believed was one of a gang of thieves who transform
themselves into animals to carry out their crimes. The story was reported on
the front page of the London Financial Times. `When a dog bites a man,' it is
said, `that's not news; but when a man bites a dog, that is news.'

Such stories, however, are apparently not news for very long. Indeed, the
most extraordinary examples of people taking retribution against animals
seem to have been almost totally forgotten. A few years ago I lighted on a
book, first published in 1906, with the surprising title, The Criminal
Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, by E. P. Evans, author of
Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture, Bugs and Beasts Before
the Law, and so on.' The frontispiece showed an engraving of a pig, dressed
up in a jacket and breeches, being strung up on a gallows in the market
square of a town in Normandy in 1386; the pig had been formally tried and
convicted of murder by the local court. When I borrowed the book from the
Cambridge University Library, I showed this picture of the pig to the
librarian. `Is it a joke?' she asked.

No, it was not a joke.' All over Europe, throughout the Middle Ages and
right on into the nineteenth century, animals were, as it turns out, tried for
human crimes. Dogs, pigs, cows, rats, and even flies and caterpillars were
arraigned in court on charges ranging from murder to obscenity. The trials
were conducted with full ceremony: evidence was heard on both sides,
witnesses were called, and in many cases the accused animal was granted a
form of legal aid-a lawyer being appointed at the taxpayer's expense to
conduct the animal's defence.
Fig. 27. Frontispiece to E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital
Punishment of Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906).

In 1494, for example, near Clermont in France, a young pig was arrested
for having `strangled and defaced a child in its cradle'. Several witnesses
were examined, who testified that `on the morning of Easter Day, the infant
being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time the said
house and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child . . . which in
consequence departed this life'. Having weighed up the evidence and found
no extenuating circumstances, the judge gave sentence:

We, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an
example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced,
pronounced and appointed that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner
and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged
and strangled on a gibbet of wood.`

Evans's book details more than two hundred such cases: sparrows being
prosecuted for chattering in church, a pig executed for stealing a communion
wafer, a cock burnt at the stake for laying an egg. As I read my eyes grew
wider and wider. Why did no one tell us this at school? We all know how
King Canute attempted to stay the tide at Lambeth. But who has heard of the
solemn threats made against the tides of locusts which threatened to engulf
the countryside of France and Italy?

In the name and by virtue of God, the omnipotent, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, and of Mary, the most blessed Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by
the authority of the holy apostles Peter and Paul ... we admonish by these
presents the aforesaid locusts ... under pain of malediction and anathema to
depart from the vineyards and fields of this district within six days from the
publication of this sentence and to do no further damage there or elsewhere.4

The Pied Piper, who charmed the rats from Hamelin, is a part of legend.
But who has heard of Bartholomew Chassenee, a French jurist of the
sixteenth century, who made his reputation at the bar as the defence counsel
for some rats? The rats had been put on trial in the ecclesiastical court on the
charge of having `feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed' the local
barley. When the culprits did not in fact turn up in court on the appointed
day, Chassenee made use of all his legal cunning to excuse them. They had,
he urged in the first place, probably not received the summons, since they
moved from village to village; but even if they had received it, they were
probably too frightened to obey, since as everyone knew they were in danger
of being set on by their mortal enemies, the cats. On this point Chassenee
addressed the court at some length, in order to show that if a person be cited
to appear at a place to which he cannot come in safety, he may legally refuse.
The judge, recognizing the justice of this claim, but being unable to persuade
the villagers to keep their cats indoors, was obliged to let the matter drop.

Every case was argued with the utmost ingenuity. Precedents were bandied
back and forth, and appeals made to classical and biblical authority. There
was no question that God himself-when he created animals-was moving in a
most mysterious way, and the court had to rule on what His deeper motives
were. In 1478, for example, proceedings were begun near Berne in
Switzerland against a species of insect called the inger, which had been
damaging the crops. The animals, as was only fair, were first warned by a
proclamation from the pulpit:

Thou irrational and imperfect creature, the inger, called imperfect because
there was none of thy species in Noah's ark at the time of the great bane and
ruin of the deluge, thou art now come in numerous hands and hast done
immense damage in the ground and above the ground to the perceptible
diminution of food for men and animals; ... therefore ... I do command and
admonish you, each and all, to depart within the next six days from all places
where you have secretly or openly done or might still do damage.'

Experience had shown however that the defendants were unlikely to

respond:

In case, however, you do not heed this admonition or obey this command,
and think you have some reason for not complying with them, I admonish,
notify and summon you in virtue of and obedience to the Holy Church, to
appear on the sixth day after this execution at precisely one o'clock after
midday at Wifflisburg, there to justify yourselves or answer for your conduct
through your advocate before his Grace the Bishop of Lausanne or his vicar
and deputy. Thereupon my Lord of Lausanne will proceed against you
according to the rules of justice with curses and other exorcisms, as is proper
in such cases in accordance with legal form and established practice.`'
 The appointed six days having elapsed, the mayor and common council of
Berne appointed

after mature deliberation ... the excellent Thuring Fricker, doctor of the
liberal arts and of laws, our now chancellor, to be our legal delegate ... Itoj
plead, demur, reply, prove by witnesses, hear judgment, appoint other
defenders, and in general and specially do each and every thing which the
importance of the cause may demand.7

The defender of the insects was to be a certain jean Perrodet of Freiburg.

Perrodet put in the usual plea that since God had created the inger, he must
have meant them to survive, indeed to multiply. Was it not stated explicitly in
Genesis that on the sixth day of creation God had given `to every fowl of the
air and to everything that creepeth upon the earth ... the green herbs for
meat'?

But the defence in this case was outmatched. The inger, it was claimed in
the indictment, were a mistake: they had not been taken on board Noah's ark.
Hence when God had sent the great flood he must have meant to wipe them
out. To have survived at all, the inger must have been illegal stowawaysand
as such they clearly had no rights, indeed it was doubtful wheter they were
animals at all. The sentence of the court was as follows:

Ye accursed uncleanness of the inger, which shall not be called animals nor
mentioned as such ... your reply through your proctor has been fully heard,
and the legal terms have been justly observed by both parties, and a lawful
decision pronounced word for word in this wise: We, Benedict of
Montferrand, Bishop of Lausanne, etc., having heard the entreaty of the high
and mighty lords of Berne against the inger and the ineffectual and rejectable
answer of the latter ... I declare and affirm that you are banned and exorcised,
and through the power of Almighty God shall be called accursed and shall
daily decrease whithersoever you may go.'

The inger did not have a chance. But other ordinary creatures, field-mice or
rats, for example, clearly had been present on Noah's ark and they could not
be dealt with so summarily. In 1519, the commune of Stelvio in Western
Tyrol instituted criminal proceedings against some mice which had been
causing severe damage in the fields. But in order that the said mice-being
God's creatures and proper animals-might `be able to show cause for their
conduct by pleading their exigencies and distress', a procurator was charged
with their defence. Numerous witnesses were called by the prosecution, who
testified to the serious injury done by these creatures, which rendered it quite
impossible for the tenants to pay their rents. But the counsel for the defence
argued to the contrary that the mice actually did good by destroying noxious
insects and larvae and by stirring up and enriching the soil. He hoped that, if
they did have to be banished, they would at least be treated kindly. He hoped
moreover that if any of the creatures were pregnant, they would be given time
to be delivered of their young, and only then be made to move away. The
judge clearly recognized the reasonableness of the latter request:

Having examined, in the name of all that is just, the case for the prosecution
and that for the defence, it is the judgement of this court that the harmful
creatures known as field-mice be made to leave the fields and meadows of
this community, never to return. Should, however, one or more of the little
creatures be pregnant or too young to travel unaided, they shall be granted
fourteen day's grace before being made to move.")

The trials were by no means merely `show trials'. Every effort was made to
see fair play, and to apply the principles of natural justice. Sometimes the
defendants were even awarded compensation. In the fourteenth century, for
example, a case was brought against some flies for causing trouble to the
peasants of Mayence. The flies were cited to appear at a specified time to
answer for their conduct; but `in consideration of their small size and the fact
that they had not yet reached the age of their majority', the judge appointed an
advocate to answer for them. Their advocate argued so well that the flies,
instead of being punished, were granted a piece of land of their own to which
they were enjoined peaceably to retire.'' A similar pact was made with some
weevils in a case argued at St-Julien in 1587. In return for the weevils'
agreeing to leave the local vineyards, they were offered a fine estate some
distance away. The weevils' lawyer objected at first that the land offered to
his clients was not good enough, and it was only after a thorough inspection
of it by the court officials that terms were finally agreed.''
 In doubtful cases, the courts appear in general to have been lenient, on the
principle of `innocent until proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt'. In 1457,
a sow was convicted of murder and sentenced to be `hanged by the hind feet
from a gallows tree'. Her six piglets, being found stained with blood, were
included in the indictment as accomplices. But no evidence was offered
against them, and on account of their tender age they were acquitted." In
1750, a man and a she-ass were taken together in an act of buggery. The
prosecution asked for the death sentence for both of them. After due process
of law, the man was sentenced, but the animal was let off on the ground that
she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master's crime
of her own free will. The local priest gave evidence that he had known the
said she-ass for four years, that she had always shown herself to be virtuous
and well behaved, that she had never given occasion of scandal to anyone,
and that therefore he was `willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed
and in all her habits of life a most honest creature'.14

It would be wrong to assume that, even at the time these strange trials were
going on, everyone took them seriously. Then as now there were city
intellectuals ready to laugh at the superstitious practices of country folk, and
in particular to mock the pomposity of provincial lawyers. In 1668, Racine
wrote a play-his only comedy-entitled Les Plaideurs ('The Litigants')." One
scene centres round the trial of a dog in a village of Lower Normandy. The
dog has been arrested for stealing a cock. The dog's advocate, L'Intime,
peppers his speeches with classical references, especially to the Politics of
Aristotle. The judge, Dandin, finds it all a bit much. But the defence puts in a
plea of previous good behaviour:16

L'INTIME. Fearing nothing, I reach

The demands of my case and so open my speech.

Aristotle, in `Politics' argues it thus,

And with strength ...

DANDIN. 'Tis a capon we're here to discuss.

 Aristotle and `Politics' put on one side.

L'INTIME. But by taking the `Peripatetic' as guide

You can prove good and ill ...

DANDIN. But I rule, Sir, in short,

Aristotle to be without weight in this court.

To the point!

L'INTIME. Here's the point. A dog enters a kitchen. That's flat.

The judge, unfortunately, is unmoved by such considerations, and sentences

the dog to the gallows. But the defence counsel has not exhausted his
resources. In a last plea for mercy he brings into court a litter of puppies and
appeals to the judge's paternal feelings:

L'INTIME. Come! ... poor desolate strays.

DANDIN. Go away! Go away!

L'INTIMH.. Our father, good Sirs ...

DANDIN. Go away!! My poor ears! They have

wetted all over the place!

i.'INTIMH.. See our tears!

DANDIN. Och! Already o'erwhelmed with compassion I feel.

The good judge can stand no more; he is a father himself and has bowels of
compassion; and besides, he is a public officer and is chary of putting the
state to the expense of bringing up the puppies. When finally a pretty girl
turns up in court and puts in her pennyworth on behalf of the accused, the
judge generously agrees to let him go.

The interesting thing is that this play was written nearly a hundred years
before the she-ass, for example, was pardoned on account of her honesty and
previous good behaviour by a French provincial court. Laughter, it's been
said, is the best detergent for nonsense. Not in France, it seems. But perhaps
these trials were not altogether nonsense. What was going on?
 I shall come to my own interpretation in a while. But first, what help can
we get from the professional historians? The answer, so far as I can find it, is:
almost none. This is all the more extraordinary because it is not as if the
historical evidence has been unavailable. The court records of what were
indubitably real trials have existed in the archives for some several hundred
years. At the time the trials were occurring they were widely discussed. The
existence of this material has been known about by modern scholars. Yet in
recent times the whole subject has remained virtually untouched. Two or
three papers have appeared in learned journals.'' Now and again a few of the
stories have filtered out.'" But, for the most part, silence. In 1820, the original
church painting of the Falaise pig was whitewashed out of sight; and it is
almost as if the same has been done to the historical recordas if the authorities
have thought it better that we should be protected from the truth.

I do not know the explanation for this reticence, and can only leave it for
the historians to answer for themselves. I dare say, however, that one reason
for their embarrassed silence has been the lack, at the level of theory, of
anything sensible to say. Take, for example, the long and elegant treatment of
the subject by W. W. Hyde (tucked away in the University of Pennsylvania
Law Review, 1916).19 Hyde clearly knew enough about the facts: but when
it came to explaining them, he could do no better than to plump for the
remarkable suggestion that `the savage in his rage at an animal's misdeed
obliterates all distinctions between man and beast, and treats the latter in all '
respects as the equal of the former'.°

Recently Esther Cohen has been more constructive .21 Making a

distinction which she says (unfairly, in my view) Evans himself ignores, she
points out that it would be wrong to see the trials as being all of a kind. There
were in fact two species of trial: on the one hand, those where an individual
animal was accused of a specific crime, proceeded against in person (as it
were), and condemned like an ordinary criminal, and on the other, those
where whole groups of natural pests were accused of being a public nuisance,
tried in absentia, and dealt with-perforce-by more supernatural means.22 The
former, dating back at least to the Dark Ages, were generally conducted by
secular courts under the common law and were relatively down-to-earth
affairs. The latter, which did not come into their own until the fifteenth
century, were instituted by the Church and as time went on became
increasingly suffused with theological hot air: they were, Cohen suggests,
closely related to the development of witch trials.23

Cohen's discussion of the intellectual background to the trials-particularly

her survey of the opinions of contemporary scholars-is informative and
interesting. I have no wish to disparage it, and yet I do not find it satisfying.
She concentrates entirely upon what the trials may have meant to the
authorities sitting in Paris or Rome and ignores their significance for ordinary
people. Yet, as she herself notes, learned opinion is one thing, but popular
belief quite another; and it seems obvious that there was never any close
congruence between the bookish ideas of those contemporary thinkersfrom
Thomas Aquinas to Leibniz-who mulled over the legal and spiritual
dimensions of these trials, and the attitudes of the less-educated people who
actually carried out the job of putting animals in the dock. Yet, unless we can
get down to the level of `folk psychology', we have really explained very
little. What we need, in short, is an idea of what the common people made of
it: for we can be quite sure they made something of it, and moreover that
whatever that something was made sense. The question is, can we make
sense of what made sense to them?

Now here two schools of cross-cultural psychology divide. One says,

`other people are other' and we must we wary of ever believing we can
understand them by reference to ourselves. `There is nothing easier', Robert
Darnton writes, `than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans
[of the past] thought and felt just as we do today-allowing for the wigs and
wooden shoes.'24 I take his point. But equally, I'd suggest, we must be wary
of going to the opposite extreme and of assuming that people of medieval
Europe were so different from ourselves that it is not worth trying to apply
any of the standards of rationality we have today. True enough, when we hear
of people dressing up a pig in human clothes and hanging it as a human
criminal, it does seem to indicate that they were in some kind of conceptual
muddle. But to suggest, for example, that the grown-up people involved
really could not tell the difference between animals and human beings cannot
be right. Other people may be other, but they are not necessarily stupid.
 So here, in full recognition that this kind of speculation can easily be
criticized, let me invite you to put yourself in the place of the participants,
and see what kind of explanation might make sense. Let us consider, for
example, the trial and subsequent execution of a pig for child-murder-a case
that seems to have been all too common, and of which Evans mentions thirty-
four recorded instances. Presumably such a trial would have been discussed
all over town. What might the mother of the child have said about it, or the
farmer to whom the pig belonged, or the law officers who arrested the pig
and brought her to the gallows?

No doubt their answers, had we got them, would have varied widely. Yet I
imagine there would have been consensus on one point at least: the trial of
the pig was not a game. It was undertaken for the good of society, and if
properly conducted, it was intended to bring social benefits to the
communitybenefits, that is, to human beings. Certainly the trial had social
costs for human beings. It not only took up a lot of people's time, it actually
cost a good deal of hard cash. The accused animal had to be held in gaol and
provided like any other prisoner with the `king's bread'; expensive lawyers
had to be engaged for weeks on end; the hangman, alias `the master of high
works', had to be brought into town, and inevitably he would require new
gloves for the occasion. Among the records that have survived there are in
fact numerous bills:

To all who shall read these letters: Let it be known that in order to bring to
justice a sow that has devoured a little child, the bailiff has incurred the costs,
commissions and expenses hereinafter declared:

Item, expenses of keeping her in gaol, six sous.

Item, to the master of high works, who came from Paris to Meullant to
perform the said execution by command and authority of the said bailiff,
fifty-four sous.

Item, for a carriage to take her to justice, six sous.

Item, for cords to bind and hale her, two sous eight deniers.
 Item, fora new pair of gloves, two deniers.

Sum total sixty-nine sous eight deniers. Certified true and correct, and
sealed with our seal. Signed: Simon de Baudemont, lieutenant of the bailiff of
Mantes and Meullant, March 15th, 1403.25

Two centuries later, the cost of prosecuting, hanging, and burning a bitch
for an act of gross indecency was set at five hundred pounds-to be recovered
in this case from her human accomplice's estate.26 When people go to this
sort of trouble and expense, presumably the community that foots the bill
expects to reap some kind of advantage from it.

But what kind of advantage? Actually, three relatively simple answers

spring to mind, all worth considering. Let's take them one by one.

First, the elimination of a social danger. A pig who has killed once may do
so again. Hence, by sentencing the pig to death, the court made life safer for
everybody else. This is precisely the reasoning that is still used today in
dealing, for example, with a rabid dog or a man-eating tiger. Yet the
comparison serves only to show that this can hardly be a sufficient
explanation of the medieval trials. It's not just that it would seem unnecessary
to go to such lengths to establish the animal's culpability; it's that having
found her guilty, the obvious remedy would be to knock her quietly on the
head. Far from it: the guilty party was made to suffer the public disgrace of
being hung up or burned at the stake in the town square. What is more, she
was sometimes subjected to whippings or other tortures before being
executed. At Falaise in 1386, the sow that had torn the face and arms of a
young child was sentenced to be `mangled and maimed in the head and
forelegs' prior to being hanged. Everything suggests that the intention was not
merely to be rid of the animal but to punish her for her misdeeds.

Yet why punish an animal? Punishments are commonly given as a means

of discouraging any repetition of the crime, either by the original culprit or by
others. Capital punishment, of course, is in a special class, since its deterrent
effects must be assumed to act only on others (the original culprit being now
beyond deterring). Still, if word got around about what happened to the last
pig that ate a human child, might not other pigs have been persuaded to think
twice?

Again we have a parallel in modern times. A gamekeeper who has shot a

magpie, for example, will hang up the dead bird in a prominent position on a
fence, in the full expectation that other magpies will see it and take note. But
if such was indeed the purpose of executing a pig in the town square, you
would think that the officers of justice would-as the gamekeeper does-have
gone to some lengths to make sure that the lesson was directed where it
mattered, namely, at other potentially delinquent pigs. Not at all: plenty of
people saw what happened, but so far as I can discover no one ever brought
another pig to see the execution. Now, maybe, as some churchmen of the
period argued, pigs contain the souls of devils, and devils of course may have
their own ways of gathering intelligence. Still, the fact is that if the
punishment was meant as a lesson, the obvious target for it would seem to
have been the local human populace, not pigs at all.

Then was the purpose, after all, to keep people rather than animals in line?
Until comparatively recently, the execution of human criminals was done in
public with the explicit intention of reminding people what lay in store for
future lawbreakers. The effect on impressionable human minds was
presumably a powerful one. Then why should not the sight of a pig on the
scaffold for a human crime have had a like effect? Perhaps it might have
proved doubly effective, for such a demonstration that even pigs must pay the
penalty for lawbreaking would surely have given any sensible person pause.

As an explanation, this might indeed have something going for it. The
extraordinary rigmarole in court, the anthropomorphic language of the
lawyers, even the dressing up of the convicted animal as if it were a person:
these would all fall into place, because only if the proceedings had the
semblance of a human trial could the authorities be sure that people would
draw the appropriate moral lesson. If the trials look to us now-as to Racine-
like pieces of grotesque theatre, that is not surprising. For theatre in a sense
they may have been: `morality plays' designed-perhaps with the full
acknowledgement of everyone involved-to demonstrate the power of Church
and State to root out crime wherever it occurred.
 It would make sense, and yet I do not think this is in fact the answer. What
impresses me, reading the transcripts, is that in case after case there was an
intellectual and emotional commitment to the process that just does not fit
with the whole thing being merely a theatrical charade. There is, moreover, a
side that I have not yet revealed, and which provides in some respects the
strangest chapter in the story.

I said that we should be wary of dismissing the entire phenomenon of

animal trials as the product of an irrational `medieval mind'. Let me give you
now the best reason of all for saying this, which is that similar trials took
place centuries earlier in one of the most rational societies the world has ever
seen-in ancient Greece. Judicial proceedings against animals were regularly
conducted before the Athenian law court known as the Prytaneion. They were
alluded to by many classical authors, and Plato himself set out the procedure
to be followed:

If a draught animal or any other beast kill a person, unless it be in a combat

authorized and instituted by the state, the kinsmen of the slain shall prosecute
the said homicide for murder, and the overseers of the public lands, as many
as may be commissioned by the said kinsmen, shall adjudicate upon the case
and send the offender beyond the boundaries of the country.27

But here is the most surprising fact of all. It was not only animals that were
prosecuted by the Greeks-lifeless objects were brought to court as well: a
doorpost for falling on a man and killing him, a sword used by a murderer, a
cart which ran over a child. The sentence was again banishment beyond the
Athenian boundaries, which for the Greeks was literally `extermination'.
Plato again:

If a lifeless thing shall deprive a person of life, provided it may not be a

thunderbolt or other missile hurled by a god, but an object which the said
person may have run against or by which he may have been struck and slain ..
then the culprit shall be put beyond the boundaries, in the same manner as if
it were an animal.'"

Even in cases where the inanimate object was truly not at fault, no mercy
was allowed. Thus the statue erected by the Athenians in honour of the
famous athlete Nikon was assailed by his envious rivals and pushed from its
pedestal; in falling, it crushed one of its assailants. Although the statue had
clearly been provoked-some might even say it was acting in its own defence-
it was brought before a tribunal, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to
be cast into the sea.

Now, whatever we may think about the case of pigs, no one can seriously
suppose that the purpose of prosecuting a statue was to prevent it toppling
again, or to discourage other statues, or even to provide a moral lesson to
Athenians. If such a prosecution had a function, which presumably it did, we
must look for it on quite another level. And if that is true here, it is true, I
suspect, for the whole panoply of trials we have been considering. Indeed, my
hunch is that neither this nor most of the later trials of animals had anything
to do with what we might call `preventive justice', with punishment,
deterrence, or the discouragement of future crime. I doubt in fact that the
future conduct of objects, animals, or people was in any way the court's
concern: its concern was to establish the meaning to society of the culprit's
past behaviour.

What the Greeks and medieval Europeans had in common was a deep fear
of lawlessness: not so much fear of laws being contravened, as the much
worse fear that the world they lived in might not be a lawful place at all. A
statue fell on a man out of the blue, a pig killed a baby while its mother was
at Mass, swarms of locusts appeared from nowhere and devastated the crops.
At first sight such misfortunes must have seemed to have no rhyme or reason
to them. To an extent that we today cannot find easy to conceive, these
people of the pre-scientific era lived every day at the edge of explanatory
darkness. No wonder if, like Einstein in the twentieth century, they were
terrified of the real possibility that `God was playing dice with the universe'.

The same anxiety has indeed continued to pervade more modern minds.
Ivan Karamazov, having declared that `Everything is permitted', concluded
that were his thesis to be generally acknowledged, `every living force on
which all life depends would dry up at once'.29 Alexander Pope claimed that
`order is heaven's first law'."' And Yeats drew a grim picture of a lawless
world:

Yet the natural universe, lawful as it may in fact have always been, was never
in all respects self-evidently lawful. And people's need to believe that it was
so, their faith in determinism, that everything was not permitted, that the
centre did hold, had to be continually confirmed by the success of their
attempts at explanation.

So the law courts, on behalf of society, took matters into their own hands.
Just as today, when things are unexplained, we expect the institutions of
science to put the facts on trial, I'd suggest the whole purpose of the legal
actions was to establish cognitive control. In other words, the job of the
courts was to domesticate chaos, to impose order on a world of accidents-and
specifically to make sense of certain seemingly inexplicable events by
redefining them as crimes.

As the courts recognized, a crime would not be a crime unless the party
responsible was aware at the time that he or she was acting in contravention
of the law. Thus when a pig, say, was found guilty of a murder, the explicit
assumption was that the pig knew very well what she was doing. The pig's
action, therefore, was not in any way arbitrary or accidental, and by the same
token the child's death became explicable. The child had died as the
consequence of an act of calculated wickedness, and however awful that still
was, at least it made some kind of sense. Wickedness had a place within the
human scheme of things, inexplicable accidents did not. We still see it today,
for example, in the reaction people show when a modern court brings in a
verdict of `accidental death' : the relatives of the deceased would often rather
believe the death was a deliberate murder than that it was `bad luck'.32

I read recently another report in a London newspaper:

A jilted woman who attempted suicide by leaping from a 12th floor window
but landed on and killed a street salesman has been charged with
manslaughter. Prosecutors in Taipei, Taiwan said 21-year-old Ho Yu-Mei
was responsible for the death of the food salesman because she failed to make
sure that there was no one below when she jumped. Ho had argued that she
thought the man would have moved away by the time she hit the ground. She
also said she had threatened earlier to sue the salesman because `he
interfered' with her freedom to take her own life. If convicted, Ho could be
imprisoned for two years."

Who says that the medieval obsession with responsibility has gone away?

But it was with dogs as criminals I began, and with dogs as criminals I'll
end. A story in The Times some years ago told how a dead dog had been
thrown by an unknown hand from the roof of a skyscraper in Johannesburg,
had landed on a man, and flattened him-the said man having in consequence
departed this life. The headline read-oh, how un-news- worthy!-Doc KILLS
MAN. I wonder what Plato, Chassenee, or E. P. Evans would have made of
that. 34

POSTSCRIPT

After this essay was written, I was directed, by Peter Howell, to an ancient
account of the trial of a wooden statue (an image of the Virgin Mary) for
murder, which took place in North Wales in the tenth century. The case is so
remarkable and provides such a clear illustration of the human need to find
due cause for an accident, that I give it here in full.31

In the sixth year of the reign of Conan (ap Elis ap Anarawd) King of
(Gwyneth, or) North Wales (which was about AD 946) there was in the
Christian Temple at a place called Harden, in the Kingdom of North Wales, a
Rood loft, in which was placed an image of the Virgin Mary, with a very
large cross, which was in the hands of the image, called Holy Rood; about
this time there happened a very hot and dry summer, so dry, that there was
not grass for the cattle; upon which, most of the inhabitants went and prayed
to the image, or Holy Rood, that it would cause it to rain, but to no purpose;
amongst the rest, the Lady Trawst (whose husband's name was Sytaylht, a
Nobleman and Governor of Harden Castle) went to pray to the said Holy
Rood, and she praying earnestly and long, the image, or Holy Rood, fell
down upon her head and killed her; upon which a great uproar was raised,
and it was concluded and resolved upon, to try the said image for the murder
of the said Lady Trawst, and a jury was summoned for this purpose, whose
names were as follow, viz.

who, upon examination of evidences, declare the said Lady Trawst, to be

wilfully murdered by the said Holy Rood, and guilty of the murder, and also
guilty in not answering the many petitioners; but whereas the said Holy Rood
being very old and done, she was ordered to be hanged-but Span opposed
that, saying, they wanted rain, and it would be best to drown her-but was
fiercely opposed by Corbin, who answered, as she was Holy Rood, they had
no right to kill her, but he advised to lay her on the sands of the river below
Harden Castle, from whence they might see what became of her, which was
accordingly done; soon after which, the tide of the sea came and carried the
said image to some low land (being an island) near the walls of the city called
Caer Leon (supposed Chester), where it was found the next day, drowned and
dead; upon which the inhabitants of Caer Leon, buried it at the place where
found, and erected a monument of stone over it, with this inscription:

The shaft of the Hawarden Cross, which is supposed to be this very

monument, may still be seen, standing in a field known as the Rood-Dee,
near the racecourse in Chester.
 I said that the cure itself is a certain leaf, but in addition to the drug there
is a certain charm, which if someone chants when he makes use of it, the
medicine altogether restores him to health, but without the charm there
is no profit from the leaf.

Plato, Charmides, 155-6

I too have a story about leaves and charms. My little daughter, Ada, did not
encounter stinging nettles until we returned to England from America when
she was nearly four years old. We were in the fields near Cambridge. I
pointed out a nettle to her, and warned her not to touch. But, to reassure her, I
told her about dock leaves: `If you get stung,' I said, `then we'll rub the bad
place with a dock leaf and it will very soon be better.'

Ten minutes later Ada had taken her shoes and socks off and had walked
into a nettle patch. `Daddy, daddy, it hurts. Dad, do something.' `It's all right,
we'll find a dock leaf.' I made a show of looking for a dock leaf. But then-in
the interests of science-I played a trick.

`Oh dear, I can't see a dock leaf anywhere. But here's a dandelion leaf,' I
said, picking a dock leaf. `I wonder if that will work. I'm afraid it probably
won't. Dandelion's aren't the same as dock leaves. They just aren't so magic.'

Ada's foot had come up with a nasty rash. I rubbed it with the dock leaf
which Ada thought to be a dandelion. `Ow, Daddy, it's no better, it still hurts.
It's getting worse.' And the rash certainly looked as bad as ever.

`Let's see if we can't find a proper dock leaf.' And we looked some more.
`Ah, here's just what we need,' I said, picking a dandelion leaf. `This should
work.'
 I rubbed Ada's foot again with the dandelion leaf which she now believed
to be a dock. `How's it feel now?' `Well, a little bit better.' `But, look, the rash
is going away'-as indeed it was. `It does feel better.' And within a couple of
minutes there was nothing left to show.

So, dock-leaf magic clearly works. And yet dock-leaf magic is placebo
magic. Dock leaves, as such, have no pharmacologically relevant properties
(any more than do dandelion leaves). Their power to heal depends on nothing
other than the reputation they have acquired over the centuries-a reputation
based, so far as I can gather, simply on the grounds than that their old English
name, docce, sounds like the Latin doctor, hence doctor leaf, and also that
they happen providentially to grow alongside nettles.

But father magic clearly works too. Ada, after all, simply took my word for
it that what was needed was a dock leaf. And very likely if I had merely
blown her foot a kiss or said a spell it would have worked just as well. Maybe
father magic is also a placebo.

We should have a definition. Despite this talk of magic, there's every reason
to believe that, when a patient gets better under the influence of a placebo,
normal physiological processes of bodily healing are involved. But what's
remarkable, and what distinguishes placebos from conventional medical
treatments, is that with placebos the process of healing must be entirely
selfgenerated. In fact, with placebos no external help is being provided to the
patient's body except by way of ideas being planted in her mind.

Let's say, then, that a placebo is a treatment which, while not being
effective through its direct action on the body, works when and because:
Fig. 28. Cicely Mary Barker, The Self-Heal Fairy, from Flower Fairies of the
Wayside (Blackie, 1948).

• the patient is aware that the treatment is being given;

 • the patient has a certain belief in the treatment, based, for example, on
prior experience or on the treatment's reputation;

• the patient's belief leads her to expect that, following this treatment,
she is likely to get better;

• the expectation influences her capacity for self-cure, so as to hasten the

very result that she expects.

How common are placebo effects, so defined? The surprising truth seems
to be that they are everywhere. Stories of the kind I've just recounted about
Ada are not, of course, to be relied on to make a scientific case. But the
scientific evidence has been accumulating, both from experimental studies
within mainstream medicine and from the burgeoning research on alternative
medicine and faith healing. And it shows beyond doubt that these effects are
genuine, powerful and remarkably widespread.'

Andrew Well, one of the best-known advocates of alternative medicine,

now argues that `the art of medicine' in general `is in the selection of
treatments and their presentation to patients in ways that increase their
effectiveness through the activation of placebo responses'.2 And he describes
in his book, Spontaneous Healing, the range of things that he has found from
his own experience can do the trick:

Over the years ... patients have sung the praises of an astonishing variety of
therapies: herbs (familiar and unfamiliar), particular foods and dietary
regimens, vitamins and supplements, drugs (prescription, over-the-counter,
and illegal), acupuncture, yoga, biofeedback, homeopathy, chiropractic,
prayer, massage, psychotherapy, love, marriage, divorce, exercise, sunlight,
fasting, and on and on ... In its totality and range and abundance this material
makes one powerful point: People can get better.'

What's more, as Well goes on, `people can get better from all sorts of
conditions of disease, even very severe ones of long duration'. Indeed,
experimental studies have shown that placebos, as well as being particularly
effective for the relief of pain and inflammation, can., for example, speed
wound healing, boost immune responses to infection, cure angina, prevent
asthma, lift depression, and even help fight cancer. Robert Buckman, a
clinical oncologist and professor of medicine, concludes:

Placebos are extraordinary drugs. They seem to have some effect on almost
every symptom known to mankind, and work in at least a third of patients
and sometimes in up to 60 per cent. They have no serious side-effects and
cannot be given in overdose. In short they hold the prize for the most
adaptable, protean, effective, safe and cheap drugs in the world's
pharmacopoeia .4

Likewise, another medical authority, quoted in a recent review in the

British Medical Journal, dubs placebos `the most effective medication known
to science, subjected to more clinical trials than any other medicament yet
nearly always doing better than anticipated. The range of susceptible
conditions appears to be limitless'.'

`Limitless' may be an exaggeration. Nonetheless, it's fair to say that just

about wherever placebos might work, they do. In other words, wherever a
capacity for self-cure exists as a latent possibility in principle, placebos will
be found to activate this capacity in practice. It's true that the effects may not
always be consistent or entirely successful. But they certainly occur with
sufficient regularity and on a sufficient scale to ensure that they can and do
make a highly significant contribution to human health.

And there's the puzzle: the puzzle that I'll try to address in this essay from the
perspective of evolutionary biology. If placebos can make such a contribution
to human health, then what are we waiting for? Why should it be that we so
often need what amounts to outside permission before taking charge of
healing our own bodies?

I can illustrate the paradox with one of Well's case histories. He describes
the case of a woman with a metastatic cancer in her abdomen who refused
chemotherapy and relied instead on dieting, exercise, and a regime of
`positive thinking' including `regular meditation incorporating visualization
of tumour shrinkage'-following which, to the physicians' astonishment, the
tumour completely disappeared.
 Weil asks:

What happened in this woman's abdomen that eliminated widely

disseminated cancer and restored her internal organs to good health? Her
healing system, probably making use of immune mechanisms, was surely
responsible; but why did it not act before?6

Precisely. Why? Why should her bodily immune system be prepared,

apparently, to let her die unless and until her mind decided otherwise?

Weil asks the question as a doctor, and his `why?' is the why of
physiological mechanism: `What happened?' But I myself, as I said, want to
take the perspective of an evolutionist, and my `why?' is the why of
biological function: `Why are we designed this way?'

There are two reasons for thinking that evolutionary theory may in fact have
something important to say here. One reason is that the human capacity to
respond to placebos must in the past have had a major impact on people's
chances of survival and reproduction (as indeed it does today), which means
that it must have been subject to strong pressure from natural selection. The
other reason is that this capacity apparently involves dedicated pathways
linking the brain and the healing systems, which certainly look is if they have
been designed to play this very role.'

I'd say therefore it is altogether likely that we are dealing with a trait that in
one way or another has been shaped up as a Darwinian adaptation-an evolved
solution to a problem that faced our ancestors.

In which case, the questions are: what was the problem? and what is the
solution?

I am not the first to ask these questions. Others have suggest ed that the key
to understanding the placebo response lies in understanding its evolutionary
history. George Zajicek wrote in the Cancer journal a few years ago: `Like
any other response in the organism, the placebo effect was selected in
Darwinian fashion, and today's organisms are equipped with the best placebo
effects.'R And Arthur and Elaine Shapiro wrote in a book, The Placebo
Effect:

Does the ubiquity of the placebo effect throughout history suggest the
possibility ... that positive placebo effects are an inherited adaptive
characteristic, conferring evolutionary advantages, and that this allowed more
people with the placebo trait to survive than those without it?`'

But, as these quotations illustrate only too well, the thinking in this area
has tended to be question-begging and unrevealing. I hope we can do better.

So, let me tell you the conclusion I myself have come to. And then I shall
explain how I have come to it, and where it leads.

My view is this. The human capacity for responding to placebos is in fact not
necessarily adaptive in its own right (indeed, it can sometimes even be
maladaptive). Instead, this capacity is an emergent property of something else
that is genuinely adaptive: namely, a specially designed procedure for
'economic resource management' that is, I believe, one of the key features of
the `natural healthcare service' which has evolved in ourselves and other
animals to help us deal throughout our lives with repeated bouts of sickness,
injury, and other threats to our wellbeing.

Now, if you wonder about this choice of managerial terminology for

talking about biological healing systems, I should say that it is quite
deliberate (and so is the pun on `National Health Service'). With the phrase
`natural healthcare service' I do intend to evoke, at a biological level, all the
economic connotations that are so much a part of modern healthcare in
society. `Managed healthcare' as it's practised these days is of course not just
to do with health-sometimes it isn't even primarily to do with health-it is to
do with balancing budgets, cutting costs, deciding resource allocation,
operating a triage system, and so on. I am suggesting that the same applies in
crucial ways to nature's own bodily healing systems.

And the point is that, if that's right, we can take a new theoretical approach.
Suppose we adopt the point of view not of the doctors or the nurses in a
hospital, but of the hospital administrator whose concern as much as anything
is to husband resources, spend less on drugs, free up beds, discharge patients
earlier, and so on. Then, if we take this view of the natural healthcare service,
instead of asking about the adaptiveness of bodily healing as such, we can
turn the question round and ask about the adaptiveness of features that limit
healing or delay it. What we'll be doing is a kind of figureground reversal,
looking at the gaps between the healing.

So let's try it. And, in taking this approach, let's go about it logically. That's to
say, let's start with the bare facts and then try to deduce what else has to be
going on behind the scenes to explain these facts, on the assumption that we
are indeed dealing with a healthcare system that has been designed to
increase people's overall chances of survival. Then, once we know what has
to be the case, we shall surely be well placed to take a closer look at what
actually is the case.

I am setting this out somewhat formally, and each proposition should be

taken slowly. Here are some basic facts to start with:

1. Other things being equal, wellbeing is to be preferred to sickness.

I assume this is uncontroversial.

2. People's bodies and minds have a considerable capacity for curing

themselves.

This is what all the evidence of spontaneous recovery shows.

3. Sometimes this capacity for self-cure is not expressed spontaneously,

but can be triggered by the influence of a third party.

This is the basic placebo phenomenon.

Then, it follows from 1 and 2, presumably, that:

4. In such cases, self-cure is being inhibited until the third-party

influence releases it.

And from the assumption that this pattern is non-accidental, that:

 5. When self-cure is inhibited there must be good reason for this under
the existing circumstances; and when inhibition is lifted there must
be good reason for this under the new circumstances.

Put this together with the starting assumption that people want to be as well
as they can be, and we have:

6. The good reason for inhibiting self-cure must be that the subject is
likely to be better off, for the time being, not being cured.

In which case:

7. Either there must be benefits to remaining sick, or there must be costs

to the process of self-cure.

Likewise:

8. The good reason for lifting the inhibition must be that the subject is
now likely to be better off if self-cure goes ahead.

In which case:

9. Either the benefits of remaining sick must now be less, or the costs of
the process of self-cure must now be less.

I'd say all the above do follow deductively. Given the premises, something
like these conclusions must be true. In which case, our next step ought to be
to turn to the real world and to find out how and in what sense these rather
surprising conclusions could be true.

The following are the most obvious matters which want unwrapping and
substantiating:

Is it indeed sometimes the case that there are benefits to remaining sick
and, correspondingly, costs to premature cure?

Is it, as we might guess, more usually the case that there are benefits to
getting better and, correspondingly, costs to delayed cure?
 In either case, are there really costs associated with the process of cure
as such?

Is it possible to predict how these costs and benefits will change

according to external circumstances, so that the subject might in fact be
able to take control of her own health budget?

Let me take these questions in turn.

Benefits of remaining sick vs. costs of premature cure

It depends how we define sickness. If sickness means a pathological

condition of the body or mind that is unconditionally harmful, then there
cannot of course ever be benefits to remaining sick. However, if sickness is
taken more broadly to mean any abnormal condition of body or mind that
you, the patient, find distressing and from which you seek relief, then it may
be quite another matter.

It has been one of the major contributions of evolutionary theory to

medicine to remind us that many of those conditions from which people seek
relief are not in fact defects in themselves, but rather selfgenerated defences
against another more real defect or threat.''

Pain is the most obvious example. Pain is not itself a case of bodily
damage or malfunction-it is an adaptive response to it. The main function of
your feeling pain is to deter you from incurring further injury, and to
encourage you to hole up and rest. Unpleasant as it may be, pain is
nonetheless generally a good thing-not so much a problem as a part of the
solution.

It's a similar story with many other nasty symptoms. For example, fever
associated with infection is a way of helping you to fight off the invading
bacteria or viruses. Vomiting serves to rid your body of toxins. And the same
for certain psychological symptoms too. Phobias serve to limit your exposure
to potential dangers. Depression can help bring about a change in your
lifestyle. Crying and tears signal your need for love or care. And so on.
 Now, just to the extent that these evolved defences are indeed defences
against something worse, it stands to reason that there will be benefits to
keeping them in place and costs to premature cure. If you don't feel pain,
you're much more likely to exacerbate an injury; if you have your bout of
influenza controlled by aspirin, you may take considerably longer to recover;
if you take Prozac to avoid facing social reality you may end up repeating the
same mistakes, and so on. The moral is: sometimes it really is good to keep
on feeling bad.''

So, in that case, how about the other side?

Benefits of getting better vs. costs of delayed cure

There is, of course, another side. Even-when an ailment is one of these

evolved defences, this does not necessarily mean there is nothing legitimately
to complain of. For the fact is that, while the defences are there to do you
good, they may still in themselves be quite a burden-not just because you do
not like them, but because they can actually threaten your fitness directly,
sometimes severely so.

Take the case of pain again. Yes, it helps protect you. Nevertheless, it is by
no means without cost. When pain makes it hard to move your limbs you
may become more vulnerable to other dangers, such as predators. When the
horribleness of pain takes all your attention, you may no longer he capable of
thinking clearly. When pain causes psychological stress, it may make you
bad-tempered or incapable or hopeless. It may even take away your will to
live. In cancer wards it's said that patients in greatest pain are likely to die
soonest and that treating the pain with morphine can actually prolong life.

Or take some of the other defences I listed above. Fever helps fight
infection, but it also drains your energy and can have damaging side effects
such as febrile convulsions. Vomiting helps get rid of toxins, but it also
throws away nourishment. Depression helps disconnect from maladaptive
situations, but it also leads to social withdrawal and loss of initiative. Crying
helps bring rescue from friends, but it also reveals your situation to potential
enemies.
 So now it stands to reason that there will after all be benefits to getting
better and costs to delaying cure. The moral is: sometimes it really is had not
to return to feeling good as soon as possible.

And I have been discussing here only examples of selfgenerated defences.

In cases where the sickness in question is a genuine defect or malfunction-a
broken leg, say, or a snake bite or a cancerous growth-the balance of
advantage must be clearer still. Surely in these cases there could be no
advantage at all in withholding cure.

Or couldn't there be?

Costs of the process of cure as such

When the sickness is selfgenerated, so that cure can be achieved simply by

switching off whatever internal process is responsible for generating the
symptoms in the first place, then, it's true, the cure comes cheap-and there
should indeed be little reason to hold back just on cost grounds.

With pain, for example, you may well be able to achieve relief, when and
if desirable, simply by sending a barrage of nerve signals down your own
spinal cord or by releasing a small amount of endogenous opiate molecules.
Similarly with depression, you may be able to lift your mood simply by
producing some extra serotonin. The production costs of the
neurotransmitters, the endorphins or serotonin, are hardly likely to he a
serious limitation.

However, it may be a very different story when the sickness involves

genuine pathology and the cure requires extensive repair work or a drawn-out
battle against foreign invadersas with healing a wound or fighting an
infection or cancer. For in this case the process of cure may turn out to be far
from cheap.

In particular, if and when the cure involves the activity of the immune
system, the costs can mount rapidly. 12 For a start, the production of immune
agents (antibodies and so on) uses up a surprisingly large amount of
metabolic energy; so much so, that early in life when a child's immune
system is being built up, it actually takes as much energy as does the brain;
and it has been found in animals that when the immune system is artificially
stimulated into extra activity, the animals lose weight unless they are given
extra food." But besides the calories, the production of immune agents also
requires a continual supply of quite rare nutrients in the diet, such as
carotenoids.14 Ideally you should be able to build up reserves when times are
good. But, even so, once a major immune response is under way, even the
best reserves may get used up-so that every time you go on the attack against
today's threat you are compromising your ability to respond to a new threat
further down the road.

And then, as if this weren't enough, there is the added problem that
mounting an immune response can pose quite a danger to your own body,
because the immune agents, unless they are controlled, may turn on your own
tissues and cause autoimmune disease. This is a particular danger when the
body is already under stress, for example as a result of strenuous exercise. 's
It means that even when the resources for overcoming an invader are
potentially available, it will not always be possible to deploy them safely to
maximum effect.

The overall costs of the immune system are in fact so very great that most
people most of the time simply cannot afford to keep their system in tip-top
order. At any rate this is true for animals living in the wild. And the
ramifications of this go beyond health issues as such, to affect courtship and
reproduction. In several animal species, and maybe humans too, differential
ability to maintain the costly immune system has become the basis for sexual
selection.16 So when a male or female is looking for a mate they pay close
attention to indicators of immunocompetence-as shown, for example, by the
colours of a bird's feathers, or the symmetry of the body or quality of skin.

All in all, we are beginning to see just how complex the accounting has to be.
We have found that with selfgenerated defences, the sickness itself is
designed to bring benefits, but it also has costs, although the process of self-
cure is cheap. With sickness arising from outside, the sickness has costs with
no benefits, but the process of self-cure can be costly.
 Imagine, now, you are one of those hospital managers in charge of this
natural health service. It would be the height of irresponsibility if you were to
allow all the different departments to operate autonomously, with defences
and cures being switched on or off regardless. Instead you should surely be
trying to plan ahead, so that you are in a position to decide on your present
priorities in the light of future needs. You would want to ask what weight to
attach to this cost or that benefit in the particular circumstances that you're
now in.

Reckoning how the costs and benefits change according to circumstances

Let's think about some particular examples.

Pain. You've sprained your ankle. Question: is this the defence you really
need right now, or on this occasion will it actually do more harm than good?
Suppose you are chasing a gazelle and the pain has made you stop-then, fair
enough, it's going to save your ankle from further damage even if it means
your losing the gazelle. But suppose you yourself are being chased by a lion-
then if you stop it will likely be the end of you.

Nausea. You feel sick when you taste strange food. Question: how serious a
risk would you be taking in your present state of health if you did not feel
sick? Suppose you are a pregnant woman, and it's essential to protect your
baby from toxinsthen, yes, you really don't want to take any risks with what
you eat. But suppose you are starving and this is the only food there is-then
you and the baby will suffer still more if you don't take the chance.

Crying. You are upset by a letter telling you you've been betrayed. Question:
are the benefits of sending out this signal of distress actually on offer in
present company? Suppose you are among friends who can be expected to
sympathize with you-then, well and good. But suppose you are among
strangers-they may merely find your display embarrassing.

Immune response. You have a head cold. Question: is this the right time to
mount a full-scale immune response, or should you be saving your reserves in
case of something more serious? Suppose you are safe at home with your
family and there's going to be time enough to convalesce-then, sure, you can
afford to throw everything you've got against the virus. But suppose you are
abroad, facing unknown dangers, under physical stress-then, paradoxically,
since you might think you'd want to get better as fast as possible, on balance
you might do better to keep your response to the level of a holding operation.

As we see, especially with this last example, the crucial question will very
often be: what is going to happen next?

The fact is that many of the healthcare measures we've been discussing are
precautionary measures designed to protect from dangers that lie ahead in an
uncertain future. Pain is a way of making sure you give your body rest just in
case you need it. Rationing the use of the immune system is a way of making
sure you have the resources to cope with renewed attacks just in case they
happen. Your healing systems are basically tending to be cautious, and
sometimes overcautious, as if working on the principle of better safe than
sorry.

Now, this principle is clearly a sensible one, if and when you really cannot
tell what is in store for you. It's the same principle that advises you to carry
an umbrella when you don't know whether it's going to rain, or to keep your
running pace down to a trot when you don't know how far you may have to
run.

But suppose you were to know.

Continuing the analogy, suppose you could tell for sure that the weather
would stay dry-then you could leave the umbrella behind. Or suppose you
had definite information that the race was just one hundred metres long-then
you could sprint all the way.

And it is the same with health care. Suppose you were to be able to tell in
advance that an injury was non-serious, food was non-toxic, an infection was
not going to lead to complications, no further threats were in the offing,
rescue was just around the corner, tender loving care about to be
suppliedthen, on a variety of levels, you could let down your guard.
 It will now be clear, I hope, where this is going. I have been saying `you'
should ask these questions about costs and benefits, as if it were a matter of
each individual acting as his or her own healthcare manager at a rational,
conscious level. But of course what I am really leading up to is the suggestion
that Nature has already asked the same questions up ahead and supplied a set
of adaptive answers-so that humans now have efficient management
strategies built into their constitution.

I would expect this to have occurred on two levels.

To start with, given that there are certain universals in how people fare in
different situations, there are presumably general rules to be found linking
global features of the physical and psychological environment to changes in
the costs and benefits of healthcare-features such as where you live, what the
weather is like, the season of the year, what you can see out of the window,
how much you feel at home here, and, especially important, what social
support you've got.

Generally speaking, any such features that make you feel happy and
secure-success, good company, sunshine, regular meals, comforting rituals-
are going to be associated with lower benefits to having the symptoms of
illness (for example, feeling pain) and lower costs to self-cure (for example,
mounting a full-scale immune response). By the same token, any of them that
make you feel worried and alone-failure, winter darkness, losing a job,
moving house-are going to be associated with higher benefits to continuing to
show the symptoms and higher costs to self-cure.

Now, appreciating these cost/benefit changes, and switching healthcare

strategy accordingly, would bring clear advantages in the competition for
biological survival. So it's a fair bet that natural selection will have
discovered these general rules and that humans will now be genetically
designed to make good use of them-with the appropriate environmentally
activated switches being wired into the brain. And indeed there is lots of
evidence that this is actually the case. People's health does respond quite
predictably to global environmental factors of the sort just listed. Much of the
science of `health psychology' is now concerned with charting just how
important these global effects are."

However, let's come to the second level. Knowing the general rules as they
apply to everybody is all very well. But it should surely be possible to do still
better. If only you were to have a more precise understanding of local
conditions and the rules as they apply in your own individual case, then in
principle you should be able to come up with predictions at the level of
personal expectancies. These then could be used to fine-tune your healthcare
management policy to even greater advantage. In which case, natural
selection-in an ideal world, anyway-should have discovered this as well.

But, in reality, this might not be straightforward. The problem is likely to

be that specific personal expectancies must involve high-level cognitive
processing, taking account of learned associations, reasons, and beliefs that
are peculiar to each individual. And it would surely he asking too much to
suppose that human beings could have been genetically designed so that
every one-off prediction generated by an individual brain will have just the
right effect directly on the healing systems.

If this were asking too much, however, then presumably the answer would
have been for natural selection to go for a bit less. And, in any case, I'd
suggest that such a degree of direct one-to-one linkage would actually have
been something of an extravagance. For the fact is that most of the benefits of
personal prediction ought to be achievable in practice by the much simpler
expedient of linking expectancy to healing by way of an emotional variable:
for which there exists a readymade candidate, in the form of `hope' and its
antithesis `despair'.

Thus, what we might expect to have evolved-and it would do the job quite
well-would be an arrangement on the following lines. Each individual's
beliefs and information create specific expectancies as to how things will turn
out for them. These expectancies generate specific hopes-or, as it may be,
despairs. And these hopes and despairs, being generic human feelings, act
directly on the healing system, in ways shared by all human beings. Hope and
despair will have become a crucial feature of the internal environment to
which human individuals have been designed to respond with appropriate
budgetary measures.

I am suggesting natural selection could and should have arranged things this
way. It would make sense. Yet it remains to be seen whether it is actually the
case. Do we have evidence that hope can and does play this crucial role in
health care?

Well, yes, of course we do have evidence. It's the very evidence we started
with. Ada and the stinging nettles. The lady with the vanishing cancer.
Placebos themselves provide as good evidence as we could ask for. Because
what placebo treatments do is precisely to give people reason to hope, albeit
that the reason may in fact be specious. No matter, it works! People do
change their priorities, let down their guard, throw caution to the winds.
That's the placebo effect!

I shall say more about placebos in a moment. But let me first bring in some
research on the effects of hope that might have been tailor-made for the
purpose of testing these ideas (although in fact it was done quite
independently). This is the research of my former colleague at the New
School, Shlomo Breznitz.

Breznitz begins a recent paper on `The Effect of Hope on Pain Tolerance'''

with a discussion of what has come to be called the `tour of duty
phenomenon'. In the Second World War, American bomber crews who flew
nightly missions over Germany suffered terrible casualties, with planes and
crews being lost each night. Morale was inevitably low, and low morale
brought with it a variety of stress-related illnesses. Psychologists were called
in to help. They surmised that a main cause of the problem was uncertainty as
to when the ordeal would come to an end. Their advice was to give the crews
specific information about when their tour of duty would be over.

Forty missions had been the unofficial average. But now the airmen were
told it would be forty missions and no more. The effects were dramatic: once
the airmen knew that they only had to hold out just so long, they became able
to cope as never before.

Breznitz in his own research set out to study this phenomenon

experimentally. He undertook a series of studies in which human subjects
were made to suffer pain or anxiety or fatigue, and he manipulated their
expectations about how long it might last. His question was whether hope for
a relatively early end would indeed allow subjects to manage better, while
dread that the ordeal might go on and on would do the opposite.

In one study, for example, he required subjects to keep one of their hands
in ice-cold water until they could no longer stand the pain and had to remove
it. Subjects in one group were told that the test would be over in four minutes,
while those in another group were not told anything. In fact the test lasted a
maximum of four minutes in both cases. The result was that 60 per cent of
those who knew when the test would end were able to endure the full four
minutes, whereas only 30 per cent of those who were kept in the dark were.

Breznitz does not report whether the subjects who were in the know
actually felt less pain than the others (this was a study done for the Israeli
army, and no doubt the sponsors were more interested in objective behaviour
than subjective feeling). But I strongly suspect that, if the question had been
asked, it would have been found that, yes, when the subject had reason to
believe that the external cause of the pain was shortly to be removed, it
actually hurt less.

You'll see, I trust, how nicely this could fit with the healthcare
management story that I have been proposing. My explanation would be that
when it's known that the threat posed by the cause of the pain is soon to be
lifted, there's much less need to feel the pain as a precautionary defence.
Likewise with the tour of duty phenomenon, my explanation would be that
when it's known that safety and rest are coming relatively soon, there's much
less need to employ defences such as anxiety and, furthermore, healing
systems such as the immune response can he thrown into high gear.

I should stress this is my take on things, not Breznitz's. But I am glad to

say he himself concludes the review of his research with words that might
have been my own: `it is quite conceivable that people are capable of
finetuning the distribution of their resources according to the anticipated
duration ahead of them."'
So I'll turn to how placebos fit with and extend the story. But first there is one
more twist-relating to the question of how hopes get generated.

Breznitz's experimental situations are, of course, somewhat contrived. If

people in the real world are finetuning their healthcare budgets on the basis of
their specific hopes, we need to consider how they come to have these hopes.
Or, because this is what it will often come down to in the cases that interest
us, how they come to have the beliefs that underpin these hopes-especially
the belief in the power of a particular treatment to bring recovery.

Well, we have just seen one way in which you can come to believe
something: someone you suppose to be trustworthy tells you so. `You have
my word for it, I promise it will be over in four minutes.' But this is
presumably not the only way or indeed the usual way.

In general there are going to be three different ways by which you are
likely to acquire a new belief (discussed at greater length in my book, Soul
Searching).20 These are: (a) personal experience-observing something with
your own eyes, (b) rational argument-being able to reason your way to the
belief by logical argument, and (c) external authoritycoming under the sway
of a respected external figure.

Now, if these are indeed the ways you can come to believe that a specific
treatment is good for you, we should find each of these factors affecting your
hopes for your future wellbeing-and so, presumably, having significant
effects on health management strategies.

Do we? Again, I trust it will have been obvious where the argument is
going. But now I want to bring placebos front stage-not just as corroborative
evidence but as very proof of these ideas about hope and health management.

Suppose we were designing a scientific test of the predicted hope effects.

We would want to show that treatments that generate hope in each of the
ways just described are capable of calling up the healing process. But, to
show it's really hope that's doing it, we would want to be able to separate the
`pure hope' component of the treatment from any other component that might
be having direct effects on healing. So ideally we would want to use `hope
only' treatments. Which is, of course, precisely what pure placebos are.

Let's see, then. How do these three hope-generating factors play?

Personal experience

Someone believes she is going to recover after a treatment because it has

worked for her before. `This pink pill, labelled "aspirin", cured my headache
last time. I'll soon he fine when I take it again.' Or, `When Nurse Jones
looked after me before, I found I was in completely safe hands. I'll be safe
enough this time too.'

Past associations of this kind are indeed a fairly reliable basis for hopes
about the future. There ought then to be a major learned component to
placebos. And there is. In fact the learning that recovery from sickness has in
the past been associated with particular colours, tastes, labels, faces, and so
on is the commonest way by which placebo properties get to be conferred on
an otherwise ineffective treatment.

Rational argument

Someone believes in a treatment because she reckons she understands

something about the causal basis. `I know that if a medical treatment is to
work it must be strong medicine, the kind that tastes nasty, or hurts, or is very
expensive. This rhinoceros horn extract has all the right properties.' Or, `I
realize I can't expect to get better unless I myself take positive action and do
something. That's why I am taking a flight to Lourdes.'

Such arguments do make reasonable sense, and provide rational grounds

for hope. So there ought to be a major rationalized component to placebos.
Again there is. In fact, so-called `active placebos'-for example, those with
unpleasant side-effects or those that involve pseudo-medical pro cedures such
as injection or surgery-are found to work especially well; as, equally, do
those that require effort and involvement by the patient. Patrick Wall, the
leading pain researcher, has concluded that the process of doing something
about the pain is indeed all there is to placebo analgesia.21
External authority

Someone believes in a treatment because she trusts the word of someone else.
`Everyone I know swears by homeopathy. Presumably it will work for me as
well.' `The doctor has a degree from Harvard. Obviously he'll give me the
best treatment going.'

In general, taking the word of others with some claim to authority is a

sensible strategy, and people would be foolish not to let their hopes be
swayed this way. So there ought to be a major faith component to placebos.
And once again, of course, there is. In fact, the evidence ranging from faith
healing to hypnosis shows that this is potentially the most effective way of all
by which otherwise bland treatments and procedures can achieve marvellous
powers.

Enough. And it's time to take stock. Let me run back over how the argument
has gone so far.

We began by asking what the existence of placebos tells us about the

nature of our healing systems. We showed, deductively, that placebos imply
that there has to be some kind of healthcare management policy in place. And
we discovered that, when we look into the biology and natural history, the
existence of such a policy would make sense as an evolved adaptation. We
speculated about how natural selection would have designed it. We came up
with some ideas about the cognitive factors that might well be used to fine-
tune the allocation of resources. We predicted what would follow-and asked
for evidence. And I think it's fair to say we've found it. The circle is closed.
The facts about placebos are evidence for the very analysis that placebos
started.

Yet there is some unfinished business here-rather serious and interesting

business. And it will become clear just what the issue is as soon as we try, as
we probably should have done already, to straighten out a potential confusion
about terminology.

The term `placebo', as we defined it at the outset, was supposed to apply

only to those treatments that do nothing directly to help with healing, but
rather exert their influence on bodily processes indirectly, through what we've
been calling the `placebo effect' or `placebo response'. By contrast, if the
treatment does have a direct effect on healing, we should consider it to he a
`genuine treatment' and not a `placebo'.

However, it hardly needs saying, at this stage of this essay, that genuine
treatments with direct effects can of course also influence healing indirectly.
In fact genuine treatments-for obvious reasons, to do with how easy it is for
the subject to believe in them-are even more likely than are placebos to bring
about the kind of hope-based changes in healthcare strategy that we've been
considering. Thus, odd though this may sound, we should want to say that
genuine treatments often have placebo effects.

Now, to avoid having to talk this way, I can see we might do better to
introduce an entirely new term for these effects: perhaps something like
`hope-for-relief effects', as the generic name for the hope-based components
of any kind of treatment. Except that this is clumsy and also arguably too
theoryridden. And in any case, the reality is that in the placebo literature the
term `placebo effect' has already become to some degree established in this
wider role. So let's keep to it, provided we realize what we are doing.

However, in that case there is surely a further distinction that we should

want to draw: namely, between what we may call `justified' and `unjustified
placebo effects', based on valid and invalid hopes.

Suppose, for example, a doctor gives someone who is suffering an

infection a pill that the patient rightly believes to contain an antibiotic:
because the patient's hopes will be raised, she will no doubt make appropriate
adjustments to her health management strategy-lowering her precautionary
defences and turning up her immune system in anticipation of the sickness
not lasting long. But now suppose instead he gives her a pill that she wrongly
believes to contain an antibiotic: because her hopes will be raised in the same
way, she will no doubt again make adjustments-in fact, the very same ones.
In the first case it would be a justified placebo response, in the second an
unjustified placebo response.
 I said we should want to draw this distinction, but actually why should we?
For it might be argued that, as we have just seen, it will not be a distinction of
any consequence. From the point of view of the subject, all hopes are on a
par-all hopes have subjectively to be valid or else they would not count as
hopes. So, provided the patient truly believes that when the doctor gives her
the pill she can expect a quick recovery, it is not going to make any
difference to her response whether it's the real thing or the fake.

However, to argue this would be to have missed the main point of this
essay. For it ought to be clear that, on another level, the distinction may be
crucial: the reason being that only when the patient's hope is valid will her
anticipatory adjustments to her healing system be likely to be biologically
adaptive. In fact, when her hope is invalid the same adjustments may actually
be maladaptive-because she may be risking lowering her fever too soon or
using up her precious resources when she cannot afford to.

Thus, from the point of view of natural selection, all hopes are by no
means on a par. Unjustified placebo responses, triggered by invalid hopes,
must be counted a biological mistake.

Why, then, haven't humans evolved not to make such mistakes?

The answer, most likely, is that this has never really been an option. The
possibility of making mistakes comes with the territory. If you have evolved
to be open to true information about the future-coming from experience,
reason, or authority-you are bound to be vulnerable to the disinformation that
sometimes comes by the same routes. You cannot reap the advantages
without running the risks.

Still, the chance of encountering fakes in the natural world in which human
beings evolved was presumably relatively small-relative, at any rate, to the
world we now are in. So placebos were probably hardly an issue for most of
human prehistory.

This is not to say that in the past the risk did not exist at all. Superstition
has always existed. Indeed it is a pre-human trait. And when I hear of
chimpanzees, for example, making great efforts to seek out some supposed
herbal or mineral cure, I have to say: I wonder; have these superstitious
chimps duped themselves into relying on a placebo, just as we humans might
have done?

Nevertheless, it's probably only with modern medical opportunities and

new forms of propaganda that the possibility of people being snared by
placebos has become a more serious danger: the danger being that they will
indeed indulge in premature cure and the unwise allocation of resources. And
it's fortunate perhaps that this danger has increased only at the same time as,
today, people's increased security and affluence, along with modern regimens
of care, have made it actually less important than it was in the past that they
let natural defences, such as pain, run their course or that they husband
resources for the lean times that might lie ahead.

All the same, the risk is there, and here is another reason to take it seriously.

It's obviously of some significance that placebo effects are generally

rewarding to the subject. To coin a phrase, placebos are pleasing! People
prefer to feel good-prefer not to have a headache or fever or to remain sick-
even in those relatively rare but crucial cases when continuing to feel bad
would be the safer option.

Hence, we should hardly be surprised to find that people continually go

looking for placebo treatments, seeking to dis cover new forms of placebo-
even when they might, as it happens, be better off staying as they are.

But to discover a new placebo, all you need do is to invent it, and to invent
it all you need do is change your beliefs. So it seems the way might well be
open for everyone to take voluntary and possibly irresponsible control of
their own health.

Yet, the truth is that-fortunately, perhaps-it's not that easy. When it comes
to it, how do you change your own beliefs to suit yourself?

No one can simply bootstrap themselves into believing what they choose.
Many philosophers, from Pascal through Nietzsche to Orwell, have made this
point. But the physicist Stephen Weinberg puts it as nicely as anyone at the
end of his book Dreams of a Final Theory:

The decision to believe or not believe is not entirely in our hands. I might be
happier and have better manners if I thought I were descended from the
emperors of China, but no effort of will on my part can make me believe it,
any more than I can will my heart to stop beating."

So what ways-if any-are actually open for the person who longs to believe?
Suppose you would desperately like it to be true that, for example, snake oil
will relieve your back pain. Which of the belief-creation processes we looked
at earlier might you turn to?

Personal experience? Other things being equal, there's little likelihood that
snake oil will have worked for you in the past.

Rational argument? There's not going to be much you can do to make a

reasoned case for it.

External authority? Ah. Maybe here is the potential weak spot. For surely
there will always be somebody out there in the wide world, somebody you
find plausible, who will be only too ready to tell you that snake oil is the
perfect remedy for your bad back.

In the end, then, it's not so surprising that, as we noted at the start of this
discussion, people have come to require outside permission to get on with the
process of self-cure. They may, for sure, have to go looking for it. But who
doubts that, in the kind of rich and willing culture we live in, there will be
someone, somewhere, to supply them. And around the world and across the
ages people have indeed gone looking-seeking the shaman, therapist, guru, or
other charismatic healer who can be counted on to tell them the lies they need
to believe to make themselves feel good.

However, even as we count the blessings that flow from this tradition of
self-deception and delusion, I think that as evolutionary biologists we should
keep a critical perspective on it. The fact is it may sometimes be imprudent
and improvident to feel this good. Your back pain gets better with the snake
oil. But your back pain was designed by natural selection to protect you. And
the danger is that while your pain gets better your back gets worse.

Don't tell this to my daughter Ada, or she'll never trust her Dad again.
POSTSCRIPT
Now, friends have told me this isn't the right note to end on. So downbeat.
Arguing that placebos are a evolutionary mistake. What about that woman
with her metastatic cancer, for example? It seems she owed her life to the
snake oil-or rather, in her case, to the guided visualisation. Isn't there a case
to be made for the real health benefits of submitting to at least some of these
illusions?

Yes, happily, there is. And I can and will turn the argument around before I
end.

As I've just said, it may sometimes be imprudent for you to show a placebo
response when it is unjustified by the reality of your condition. To do so must
be counted a biological mistake. But of course you don't want to err in the
other direction either. For it could be equally imprudent, or worse, if you
were not to show a placebo response when it is justified by the reality of your
condition.

I suspect that just such a situation can arise. And in fact a particularly
serious case of it can arise for a surprising reason: which is that your evolved
healthcare management system may sometimes make egregious errors in the
allocation of resources-errors which you can only undo by overriding the
system with a placebo response based on invalid hope.

Let me explain. I think we should look more closely at that woman with
her cancer. I'd be the last to pretend we really know what was happening in
such an extraordinary case. Nonetheless, in the spirit of this essay, I can now
make a suggestion. The fact is, or at any rate this the simplest reading of it,
that, while the cancer was developing, instead of mounting a full-scale
immune response, she continued to withhold some of her immune resources.
Earlier in this essay I called this paradoxical: `Why did she not act before?'
But now we have the makings of an explanation: namely that, strange to say,
this was quite likely a calculated piece of healthcare budgeting. Lacking hope
for a speedy recovery, the woman was following the rule that says: when in
doubt, play safe and keep something in reserve.

Yet, obviously, for her to follow this rule, given the reality of her situation,
was to invite potential disaster. To adopt this safety-first policy with regard to
future needs was to make it certain there would be no future needs. To
withhold her own immune resources as if she might need them in six months'
time was to ensure she would be dead within weeks. And so it would have
proved, if in fact she had not rebelled in time.

Now, I presume we should not conclude that, because this rule was
working out so badly for this woman in this one case, natural selection must
have gone wrong in selecting it. Rather, we should recognize that natural
selection, in designing human beings to follow these general rules, has had to
judge things statistically, on the basis of actuarial data. From natural
selection's point of view, this woman would have been a single statistic,
whose death as a result of her overcautious health policy would have been
more than compensated for by the longer life of her kin, for whom the same
policy in somewhat different situations did pay off.

Still, no one could expect the woman herself to have seen things this way.
She of course would have wanted to judge things not statistically but
individually. And if she could better the built-in general rules by going her
own way, using a more up-to-date and relevant model of her personal
prospects, this was clearly what she ought to do. Indeed, this ties directly to
the argument we've already made about the advantage of finetuning the
healthcare budget on the basis of personal expectancies. It's the very reason
why the placebo effect, based on personal hopes, exists. Or, at any rate, why
justified placebo responses exist.

But in this woman's case, could any placebo response have possibly been
justified? She certainly had few if any valid grounds for hope. And there is no
denying the force of the calculation that she would be taking a big risk with
her future health if she were to use up her entire immune resources in one all-
or-none onslaught on her cancer, leaving her dangerously vulnerable to
further threats down the road.
 `Certainly' and `no denying'-except for one simple fact that changes
everything: it's never too early to act when otherwise it's the last act you'll
ever have the chance to make. When the alternative is oblivion, hope is
always justified. Which is, I think we can say, what she herself proved in real
life-when she took matters into her own hands, found her own invented
reasons for hoping for a better outcome, released her immune system, beat
the cancer, survived the aftermath, and lived on.

Now this is, of course, a special and extreme case. But, in conclusion, I
think the reason to be more generally positive about placebos is that several
of the same considerations will apply in other less dramatic situations. Your
evolved healthcare system will have over-erred on the side of caution, and as
a result you'll be in unnecessary trouble. It will be appropriate to rebel. And
yet having no conventional valid grounds for hope, you too will need to go
looking for those rent-a-placebo cures.

Actually, now I come to think about it, the pain of a nettle rash is just such
a case of an over-reaction to a rather unthreatening sting.

You can tell this to my daughter Ada, and she'll see that after all her father
does know best.
`Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me', the
proverb goes. And since, like most proverbs, this one captures at least part of
the truth, it makes sense that Amnesty International should have devoted
most of its efforts to protecting people from the menace of sticks and stones,
not words. Worrying about words must have seemed something of a luxury.

Still, the proverb, like most proverbs, is also in part obviously false. The
fact is that words can hurt. For a start, they can hurt people indirectly by
inciting others to hurt them: a crusade preached by a pope, racist propaganda
from the Nazis, malevolent gossip from a rival ... They can hurt people not so
indirectly, by inciting them to take actions that harm themselves: the lies of a
false prophet, the blackmail of a bully, the flattery of a seducer ... And words
can hurt directly, too: the lash of a malicious tongue, the dreaded message
carried by a telegram, the spiteful onslaught that makes the hearer beg his
tormentor say no more.

Sometimes, indeed, mere words can kill outright. There is a story by

Christopher Cherniak about a deadly `word-virus' that appeared one night on
a computer screen.' It took the form of a brain-teaser, a riddle, so paradoxical
that it fatally twisted the mind of anyone who heard or read it, making him
fall into an irreversible coma. A fiction? Yes, of course. But a fiction with
some horrible parallels in the real world. There have been all too many
examples historically of how words can take possession of a person's mind,
destroying his will to live. Think, for example, of so-called voodoo death.
The witch-doctor has merely to cast his spell of death upon a man and within
hours the victim will collapse and die. Or, on a larger and more dreadful
scale, think of the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana in 1972. The cult
leader Jim Jones had only to plant certain crazed ideas in the heads of his
disciples, and at his signal nine hundred of them willingly drank cyanide.

`Words will never hurt me'? The truth may rather be that words have a
unique power to hurt. And if we were to make an inventory of the man-made
causes of human misery, it would be words, not sticks and stones, that head
the list. Even guns and high explosives might be considered playthings by
comparison. Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote in his poem `I':

Should we then he fighting Amnesty's battle on this front too? Should we be

campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal
oppression and manipulation? Do we need `word laws', just as all civilized
societies have gun laws, licensing who should be allowed to use them in what
circumstances? Should there he Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of
speech act count as crimes against humanity?

No. The answer, I'm sure, ought in general to be `No, don't even think of
it'. Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And
however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some
people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By
all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people's words do,
but not by censoring the words as such.

And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I'd expect most of you
to he so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of this
essay to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in
favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so, moreover,
in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the

education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed-even expected-
to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and
wrong.

Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by
exposure to other people's bad ideas-no matter who these other people are.
Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their
children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the
horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of
dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths
of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense.
And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no
more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the
literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should
allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

That's the negative side of what I want to say. But there will be a positive
side as well. If children have a right to be protected from false ideas, they
have too a right to be succoured by the truth. And we as a society have a duty
to provide it. Therefore we should feel as much obliged to pass on to our
children the best scientific and philosophical understanding of the natural
world-to teach, for example, the truths of evolution and cosmology, or the
methods of rational analysis-as we already feel obliged to feed and shelter
them.

I don't suppose you'll doubt my good intentions here. Even so, I realize there
may be many readers-especially the more liberal ones-who do not like the
sound of this at all: neither the negative nor, still less, the positive side of it.

In which case, among the good questions you may have for me, will
probably be these.

First, what is all this about `truths' and `lies'? How could anyone these days
have the face to argue that the modern scientific view of the world is the only
true view that there is? Haven't the postmodernists and relativists taught us
that more or less anything can be true in its own way? What possible
justification could there be, then, for presuming to protect children from one
set of ideas or to steer them towards another, if in the end all are all equally
valid?

Second, even supposing that in some boring sense the scientific view really
is `more true' than some others, who's to say that this truer world view is the
better one? At any rate, the better for everybody? Isn't it possible-or actually
likelythat particular individuals, given who they are and what their life
situation is, would be better served by one of the not-sotrue world views?
How could it possibly be right to insist on teaching children to think this
modern way when, in practice, the more traditional way of thinking might
actually work best for them?

Third, even in the unlikely event that almost everybody really would be
happier and better off if they were brought up with the modern scientific
picture, do we-as a global community-really want everyone right across the
world thinking the same way, everyone living in a dreary scientific
monoculture? Don't we want pluralism and cultural diversity? A hundred
flowers blooming, a hundred schools of thought contending?

And then, last, why-when it comes to it-should children's rights be

considered so much more important than those of other people? Everyone
would grant of course that children are relatively innocent and relatively
vulnerable, and so may have more need of protection than their seniors do.
Still, why should their special rights in this respect take precedence over
everybody else's rights in other respects? Don't parents have their own rights
too, their rights as parents? The right, most obviously, to be parents, or
literally to bring forth and pre-pare their children for the future as they see
fit?

Good questions? Knock-down questions, some of you may think, and

questions to which any broad-minded and progressive person could give only
one answer.

I agree they are good-ish questions, and ones that I should deal with. But I
don't think it is by any means so obvious what the answers are. Especially for
a liberal. Indeed, were we to change the context not so greatly, most people's
liberal instincts would, I'm sure, pull quite the other way.

Let's suppose we were talking not about children's minds but children's
bodies. Suppose the issue were not who should control a child's intellectual
development, but who should control the development of her hands or feet ...
or genitalia. Let's suppose, indeed, that this is an essay about female
circumcision. And the issue is not whether anyone should be permitted to
deny a girl knowledge of Darwin, but whether anyone should be permitted to
deny her the uses of a clitoris.

And now here I am suggesting that it is a girl's right to be left intact, that
parents have no right to mutilate their daughters to suit their own socio-
sexual agenda, and that we as a society ought to prevent it. What's more, to
make the positive case as well, that every girl should actually be encouraged
to find out how best to use to her own advantage the intact body she was born
with.

Would you still have those good questions for me? And would it still be so
obvious what the liberal answers are? There will be a lesson-even if an awful
one-in hearing how the questions sound.

First, what's all this about `intactness' and `mutilation'? Haven't the
anthropological relativists taught us that the idea of there being any such
thing as `absolute intactness' is an illusion, and that girls are-in a way-just as
intact without their clitorises?

Anyway, even if uncircumcised girls are in some boring sense `more

intact', who's to say that intactness is a virtue? Isn't it possible that some girls,
given their life situation, would actually be better off being not-so-intact?
What if the men of their culture consider intact women unmarriageable?

Besides, who wants to live in a world where all women have standard
genitalia? Isn't it essential to maintaining the rich tapestry of human culture
that there should be at least a few groups where circumcision is still
practised? Doesn't it indirectly enrich the lives of all of us to know that some
women somewhere have had their clitorises removed?

In any case, why should it be only the rights of the girls that concern us?
Don't other people have rights in relation to circumcision also? How about
the rights of the circumcisers themselves, their rights as circumcisers? Or the
rights of mothers to do what they think best, just as in their day was done to
them?
You'll agree, I hope, that the answers go the other way now. But maybe some
of you are going to say that this is not playing fair. Whatever the superficial
similarities between doing things to a child's body and doing things to her
mind, there are also several obvious and important differences. For one thing,
the effects of circumcision are final and irreversible, while the effects of even
the most restrictive regime of education can perhaps he undone later. For
another, circumcision involves the removal of something that is already part
of the body and will naturally be missed, while education involves selectively
adding new things to the mind that would otherwise never have been there.
To be deprived of the pleasures of bodily sensation is an insult on the most
personal of levels, but to be deprived of a way of thinking is perhaps no great
personal loss.

So, you might argue, the analogy is far too crude for us to learn from it.
And those original questions about the rights to control a child's education
still need addressing and answering on their own terms.

Very well. I'll try to answer them just so-and we shall see whether or not
the analogy with circumcision was unfair. But there may be another kind of
objection to my project that I should deal with first. For it might he argued, I
suppose, that the whole issue of intellectual rights is not worth bothering
with, since so few of the world's children are in point of fact at risk of being
hurt by any severely misleading forms of education-and those who are, are
mostly far away and out of reach.

Now that I say it, however, I wonder whether anyone could make such a
claim with a straight face. Look around-close to home. We ourselves live in a
society where most adults-not just a few crazies, but most adults-subscribe to
a whole variety of weird and nonsensical beliefs, that in one way or another
they shamelessly impose upon their children.

In the United States, for example, it sometimes seems that almost everyone
is either a religious fundamentalist or a New Age mystic or both. And even
those who aren't will scarcely dare admit it. Opinion polls confirm that, for
example, a full 98 per cent of the US population say they believe in God, 70
per cent believe in life after death, 50 per cent believe in human psychic
powers, 30 per cent think their lives are directly influenced by the position of
the stars (and 70 per cent follow their horoscopes anyway-just in case), and
20 per cent believe they are at risk of being abducted by aliens.'

The problem-I mean the problem for children's education-is not just that so
many adults positively believe in things that flatly contradict the modern
scientific world view, but that so many do not believe in things that are
absolutely central to the scientific view. A survey published last year showed
that half the American people do not know, for example, that the Earth goes
round the Sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is.
More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal
ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution-if it has occurred-
can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do
people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science
is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2
per cent realized it involves putting theories to the test, 34 per cent vaguely
knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66 per
cent didn't have a clue.4

Nor do these figures, worrying as they are, give the full picture of what
children are up against. They tell us about the beliefs of typical people, and
so about the belief environment of the average child. But there are small but
significant communities just down the road from us-in New York, or London,
or Oxford-where the situation is arguably very much worse: communities
where not only are superstition and ignorance even more firmly entrenched,
but where this goes hand in hand with the imposition of repressive regimes of
social and interpersonal conduct-in relation to hygiene, diet, dress, sex,
gender roles, marriage arrangements, and so on. I think, for example, of the
Amish Christians, Hasidic Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Muslims, or,
for that matter, the radical New Agers; all no doubt very different from each
other, all with their own peculiar hang-ups and neuroses, but alike in
providing an intellectual and cultural dungeon for those who live among
them.

In theory, maybe, the children need not suffer. Adults might perhaps keep
their beliefs to themselves and not make any active attempt to pass them on.
But we know, I'm sure, better than to expect that. This kind of selfrestraint is
simply not in the nature of a parent-child relationship. If a mother, for
example, sincerely believes that eating pork is a sin, or that the best cure for
depression is holding a crystal to her head, or that after she dies she will be
reincarnated as a mongoose, or that Capricorns and Aries are bound to
quarrel, she is hardly likely to withhold such serious matters from her own
offspring.

But, more important, as Richard Dawkins has explained so well,' this kind
of selfrestraint is not in the nature of successful belief systems. Belief
systems in general flourish or die out according to how good they are at
reproduction and competition. The better a system is at creating copies of
itself, and the better at keeping other rival belief systems at bay, the greater
its own chances of evolving and holding its own. So we should expect that it
will be characteristic of successful belief systems-especially those that
survive when everything else seems to be against them-that their devotees
will be obsessed with education and with discipline: insisting on the rightness
of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others. We should
expect, moreover, that they will make a special point of targeting children in
the home, while they are still available, impressionable, and vulnerable. For,
as the Jesuit master wisely noted, `If I have the teaching of children up to
seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they
are mine for life'.6

Donald Kraybill, an anthropologist who made a close study of an Amish

community in Pennsylvania, was well placed to observe how this works out
in practice:

Groups threatened by cultural extinction must indoctrinate their offspring if

they want to preserve their unique heritage. Socialization of the very young is
one of the most potent forms of social control. As cultural values slip into the
child's mind, they become personal values-embedded in conscience and
governed by emotions ... The Amish contend that the Bible commissions
parents to train their children in religious matters as well as the Amish way of
life ... An ethnic nursery, staffed by extended family and church members,
moulds the Amish world view in the child's mind from the earliest moments
of consciousness.'

But what he is describing is not, of course, peculiar to the Amish. `An

ethnic nursery, staffed by extended family and church members' could be as
much a description of the early environment of a Belfast Catholic, a
Birmingham Sikh, a Brooklyn Hasidic Jew-or maybe the child of a North
Oxford don. All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed
make every attempt to flood the child's mind with their own propaganda, and
to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints.

In the United States, this kind of restricted education has continually received
the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right, if they wish, to educate
their children entirely at home, and nearly one million families do so.' But
many more who wish to limit what their children learn can rely on the
thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only
minimal state supervision. A US court did recently insist that teachers at a
Baptist school should at least hold teaching certificates; but at the same time
it recognized that `the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the
development of their children's minds in a religious environment' and
therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects `in its own
way'-which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical
point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree
with the church's doctrinal position.9

Yet, parents hardly need the support of the law to achieve such a baleful
hegemony over their children's minds. For there are, unfortunately, many
ways of isolating children from external influences without actually
physically removing them or controlling what they hear in class. Dress a little
boy in the uniform of the Hasidim, curl his side-locks, subject him to strange
dietary taboos, make him spend all weekend reading the Torah, tell him that
Gentiles are dirty, and you could send him to any school in the world and
he'd still be a child of the Hasidim. The same-just change the terms a bit-for a
child of the Muslims, or the Roman Catholics, or followers of the Maharishi
Yogi.
 More worrying still, the children themselves may often be unwitting
collaborators in this game of isolation. For children all too easily learn who
they are, what is allowed for them and where they must not go-even in
thought. John Schumaker, an Australian psychologist, has described his own
Catholic boyhood:

I believed wholeheartedly that I would burn in eternal fire if I ate meat on a

Friday. I now hear that people no longer spend an eternity in fire for eating
meat on Fridays. Yet, I cannot help thinking back on the many Saturdays
when I rushed to confess about the bologna and ketchup sandwich I could not
resist the day before. I usually hoped I would not die before getting to the 3
p.m. confession.")

All the same, this particular Catholic boy actually escaped and lived to tell
the tale. In fact Schumaker became an atheist, and has gone on to make
something of a profession of his godlessness. Nor, of course, is he unique.
There are plenty of other examples, known to all of us, of men and women
who as children were pressured into becoming junior members of a sect,
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Marxist-and yet who came out on the other side,
free thinkers, and seemingly none the worse for their experience.

Then perhaps I am, after all, being too alarmist about what all this means.
For sure, the risks are real enough. We do liveeven in our advanced,
democratic, Western nations-in an environment of spiritual oppression, where
many little children-our neighbours' children, if not actually ours-are daily
exposed to the attempts of adults to annexe their minds. Yet, you may still
want to point out that there's a big difference between what the adults want
and what actually transpires. All right, so children do frequently get saddled
with adult nonsense. But so what. Maybe it's just something the child has to
put up with until he or she is able to leave home and learn better. In which
case, I would have to admit that the issue is certainly nothing like so serious
as I have been making out. After all, there are surely lots of things that are
done to children either accidentally or by design that-though they may not he
ideal for the child at the time-have no lasting ill effects.

I'd reply: Yes and No. Yes, it's right we should not fall into the error of a
previous era of psychology of assuming that people's values and beliefs are
determined once and for all by what they learn-or do not learn-as children.
The first years of life, though certainly formative, are not necessarily the
`critical period' they were once thought to be. Psychologists no longer
generally believe that children `imprint' on the first ideas they come across,
and thereafter refuse to follow any others. In most cases, rather, it seems that
individuals can and will remain open to new opportunities of learning later in
lifeand, if need be, will be able to make up a surprising amount of lost ground
in areas where they have earlier been deprived or been misled.''

Yes, I agree therefore we should not be too alarmist-or too prissy-about the
effects of early learning. But, No, we should certainly not be too sanguine
about it, either. True, it may not be so difficult for a person to unlearn or
replace factual knowledge later in life: someone who once thought the world
was flat, for example, may, when faced by overwhelming evidence to the
contrary, grudgingly come round to accepting that the world is round. It will,
however, often be very much more difficult for a person to unlearn
established procedures or habits of thought: someone who has grown used,
for example, to taking everything on trust from biblical authority may find it
very hard indeed to adopt a more critical and questioning attitude. And it may
he nigh impossible for a person to unlearn attitudes and emotional reactions:
someone who has learned as a child, for example, to think of sex as sinful
may never again be able to be relaxed about making love.

But there is another even more pressing reason not to be too sanguine, or
sanguine in the least. Research has shown that given the opportunity
individuals can go on learning and can recover from poor childhood
environments. However, what we should be worrying about are precisely
those cases where such opportunities do not-indeed are not allowed to-occur.

Suppose, as I began to describe above, children are in effect locked out by

their families from access to any alternative ideas. Or, worse, that they are so
effectively immunized against foreign influences that they do the locking out
themselves.

Think of those cases, not so uncommon, when it has become a central

plank of someone's belief system that they must not let themselves be defiled
by mixing with others. When, because of their faith, all they want to hear is
one voice, and all they want to read is one text. When they treat new ideas as
if they carry infection. When, later, as they grow more sophisticated, they
come to deride reason as an instrument of Satan. When they regard the
humility of unquestioning obedience as a virtue. When they identify
ignorance of worldly affairs with spiritual grace ... In such case, it hardly
matters what their minds may still remain capable of learning, because they
themselves will have made certain they never again use this capacity.

The question was, does childhood indoctrination matter? And the answer, I
regret to say, is that it matters more than you might guess. The Jesuit did
know what he was saying. Though human beings are remarkably resilient, the
truth is that the effects of well-designed indoctrination may still prove
irreversible, because one of the effects of such indoctrination will be
precisely to remove the means and the motivation to reverse it. Several of
these belief systems simply could not survive in a free and open market of
comparison and criticism: but they have cunningly seen to it that they don't
have to, by enlisting believers as their own gaolers. So, the bright young lad,
full of hope and joy and inquisitiveness, becomes in time the nodding elder
buried in the Torah; the little maid, fresh to the morning of the world,
becomes the washed-up New Age earth mother lost in mists of superstition.

Yet, we can ask, if this is right: what would happen if this kind of vicious
circle were to be forcibly broken? What would happen if, for example, there
were to be an externally imposed ,time out'? Wouldn't we predict that, just to
the extent it is a vicious circle, the process of becoming a fully fledged
believer might be surprisingly easy to disrupt? I think the clearest evidence of
how these belief systems typically hold sway over their followers can in fact
be found in historical examples of what has happened when group members
have been involuntarily exposed to the fresh air of the outside world.

A interesting test was provided in the 1960s by the case of the Amish and
the military Draft.12 The Amish have consistently refused to serve in the
armed forces of the United States on grounds of conscience. Up to 1960s,
young Amish men who were due to be drafted for military service were
regularly granted `agricultural deferments' and were able to continue working
safely on their family farms. But as the draft continued through the Vietnam
war, an increasing number of these men were deemed ineligible for farm
deferments and were required instead to serve two years working in public
hospitals-where they were introduced, like it or not, to all manner of non-
Amish people and non-Amish ways. Now, when the time came for these men
to return home, many no longer wanted to do so and opted to defect. They
had tasted the sweets of a more open, adventurous, free-thinking way of
lifeand they were not about to declare it all a snare and a delusion.

These defections were rightly regarded by Amish leaders as such a serious

threat to their culture's survival that they quickly moved to negotiate a special
agreement with the government, under which all their draftees could in future
be sent to Amish-run farms-so that this kind of breach of security should not
happen again.

Let me take stock. I have been discussing the survival strategies of some of
the more tenacious beliefs systems-the epidemiology, if you like, of those
religions and pseudo-religions that Richard Dawkins has called `cultural
viruses'." But you'll see that, especially with this last example, I have begun
to approach the next and more important of the issues I wanted to address:
the ethical one.

Suppose that, as the Amish case suggests, young members of such a faith
would-if given the opportunity to make up their own minds-choose to leave.
Doesn't this say something important about the morality of imposing any
such faith on children to begin with? I think it does. In fact, I think it says
everything we need to know in order to condemn it.

You'll agree that, if it were female circumcision we were talking about, we

could build a moral case against it based just on considering whether it is
something a woman would choose for herself. Given the fact-I assume it is a
fact-that most of those women who were circumcised as children, if they only
knew what they were missing, would have preferred to remain intact. Given
that almost no woman who was not circumcised as a child volunteers to
undergo the operation later in life. Given, in short, that it seems not to be
what free women want to have done to their bodies. Then it seems clear that
whoever takes advantage of their temporary power over a child's body to
perform the operation must be abusing this power and acting wrongly.

Well, then, if this is so for bodies, it is the same for minds. Given, let's say,
that most people who have been brought up as members of a sect, if they only
knew what they were being denied, would have preferred to remain outside
it. Given that almost no one who was not brought up this way volunteers to
adopt the faith later in life. Given, in short, that it is not a faith that a free
thinker would adopt. Then, likewise, it seems clear that whoever takes
advantage of their temporary power over a child's mind to impose this faith,
is equally abusing this power and acting wrongly.

So I'll come to the main point-and lesson-of this essay. I want to propose a
general test for deciding when and whether the teaching of a belief system to
children is morally defensible, as follows. If it is ever the case that teaching
this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs
that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most
likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever
presumes to impose this system and to chose for them to do so. No one has
the right to choose badly for anyone else.

This test, I admit, will not be simple to apply. It is rare enough for there to
be the kind of social experiment that occurred with the Amish and the
military draft. And even such an experiment does not actually provide so
strong a test as I'm suggesting we require. After all, the young Amish men
were not offered the alternative until they were already almost grown up,
whereas what we need to know is what the children of the Amish or any other
sect would choose for themselves if they were to have had access to the full
range of alternatives all along. But in practice, of course, such a totally free
choice is never going to be available.

Still, utopian as the criterion is, I think its moral implications remain pretty
obvious. For, even supposing we cannot know-and can only guess on the
basis of weaker testswhether an individual exercising this genuinely free
choice would himself choose the beliefs that others intend to impose upon
him, then this state of ignorance in itself must be grounds for making it
morally wrong to proceed. In fact, perhaps the best way of expressing this is
to put it the other way round, and say: only if we know that teaching a system
to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were
they to have had access to alternatives, they would still have chosen for
themselves, only then can it be morally allowable for whoever imposes this
system and choses for them to do so. And in all other cases, the moral
imperative must be to hold off.

Now, I expect most of you will probably be happy to agree with this-so far as
it goes. Of course, other things being equal, everybody has a right to self-
determination of both body and mind-and it must indeed be morally wrong of
others to stand in the way of it. But this is: other things being equal. And, to
continue with those questions I raised earlier, what happens when other
things are not equal?

It is surely a commonplace in ethics that sometimes the rights of

individuals have to be limited or even overruled in the interests of the larger
good or to protect the rights of other people. And it's certainly not
immediately obvious why the case of children's intellectual rights should be
an exception.

As we saw, there are several factors that might be considered

counterbalancing. And of these, the one that seems to many people
weightiest, or at least the one that is often mentioned first, is our interest as a
society in maintaining cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so
it's tough on a child of the Amish, or the Hasidim, or the gypsies to be shaped
up by their parents in the ways they are-but at least the result is that these
fascinating cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole civilization be
impoverished if they were to go? It's a shame, maybe, when individuals have
to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But there it is: it's the price we pay
as a society.

Except, I would feel bound to remind you, we do not pay it, they do.

Let me give a telling example. In 1995, in the high mountains of Peru,

some climbers came across the frozen mummified body of a young Inca girl.
She was dressed as a princess. She was thirteen years old. About five hundred
years ago, this little girl had, it seems, been taken alive up the mountain by a
party of priests, and then ritually killed-a sacrifice to the mountain's gods in
the hope that they would look kindly on the people below.

The discovery was described by the anthropologist, Johan Reinhard, in an

article for National Geographic. 14 He was clearly elated both as a scientist
and as a human being by the romance of finding this `ice maiden', as he
called her. Even so, he did express some reservations about how she had
come to be there: `we can't help but shudder,' he wrote, `at Ithe Incas'l
practice of performing human sacrifice.'

The discovery was also made the subject of a documentary film shown on
American television. Here, however, no one expressed any reservation
whatsoever. Instead, viewers were simply invited to marvel at the spiritual
commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey
her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of
being sacrificed. The message of the television programme was in effect that
the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural
invention-another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.

Yet, how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us-in our
sitting rooms, watching television-to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of
ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed
up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for
ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?

Immoral? By Inca standards? No, that's not what matters. Immoral by ours-
and in particular by just the standard of free choice that I was enunciating
earlier. The plain fact is that none of us, knowing what we do about the way
the world works, would freely choose to be sacrificed as she was. And
however `proud' the Inca girl may or may not have been to have had the
choice made for her by her family (and for all we know she may actually
have felt betrayed and terrified), we can still be pretty sure that she, if she had
known what we now know, would not have chosen this fate for herself either.
 No, this girl was used by others as a means for achieving their ends. The
elders of her community valued their collective security above her life, and
decided for her that she must die in order that their crops might grow and
they might live. Now, five hundred years later, we ourselves must not, in a
lesser way, do the same: by thinking of her death as something that enriches
our collective culture.

We must not do it here, nor in any other case where we are invited to
celebrate other people's subjection to quaint and backward traditions as
evidence of what a rich world we live in. We mustn't do it even when it can
be argued, as I'd agree it sometimes can be, that the maintenance of these
minority traditions is potentially of benefit to all of us because they keep
alive ways of thinking that might one day serve as a valuable counterpoint to
the majority culture.

The US Supreme Court, in supporting the Amish claim to be exempt from

sending their children to public schools, commented in an aside: `We must
not forget that in the Middle Ages important values of the civilization of the
Western World were preserved by members of religious orders who isolated
themselves from all worldly influences against great obstacles."' By analogy,
the court implied, we should recognize that the Amish may be preserving
ideas and values that our own descendants may one day wish to return to.

But what the court failed to recognize is that there is a crucial difference
between the religious communities of the Middle Ages, the monks of Holy
Island for example, and the present-day Amish: namely, that the monks made
their own choice to become monks, they did not have their monasticism
imposed on them as children, and nor did they in their turn impose it on their
own children-for indeed they did not have any. Those medieval orders
survived by the recruitment of adult volunteers. The Amish, by contrast,
survive only by kidnapping little children before they can protest.

The Amish may-possibly-have wonderful things to teach the rest of us; and
so may-possibly-the Incas, and so may several other outlying groups. But
these things must not be paid for with the children's lives.
This is, surely, the crux of it. It is a cornerstone of every decent moral system,
stated explicitly by Immanuel Kant but already implicit in most people's very
idea of morality, that human individuals have an absolute right to be treated
as ends in themselves-and never as means to achieving other people's ends. It
goes without saying that this right applies no less to children than to anybody
else. And since, in so many situations, children are in no position to look after
themselves, it is morally obvious that the rest of us have a particular duty to
watch out for them.

So, in every case where we come across examples of children's lives being
manipulated to serve other ends, we have a duty to protest. And this, no
matter whether the other ends involve the mollification of the gods, `the
preservation of important values for Western civilization', the creation of an
interesting anthropological exhibit for the rest of us ... ornow I'll come to the
next big question that's been waiting-the fulfilment of certain needs and
aspirations of the child's own parents.

There is, I'd say, no reason whatever why we should treat the actions of
parents as coming under a different set of moral rules here.

The relationship of parent to child is of course a special one in all sorts of

ways. But it is not so special as to deny the child her individual personhood.
It is not a relationship of co-extension, nor one of ownership. Children are not
a part of their parents, nor except figuratively do they `belong' to them.
Children are in no sense their parents' private property. Indeed, to quote the
US Supreme Court, commenting in a different context on this same issue: it
is a `moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society
as a whole'. 16

It will therefore be as much a breach of a child's rights if he or she is used

by his or her parents to achieve the parents' personal goals, as it would be if
this were done by anyone else. No one has a right to treat children as
anything less than ends in themselves.

Still, some of you I'm sure will want to argue that the case of parents is not
quite the same as that of outsiders. No doubt we'd all agree that parents have
no more right than anyone else to exploit children for ends that are obviously
selfish-to abuse them sexually, for example, or to exploit them as servants, or
to sell them into slavery. But, first, isn't it different when the parents at least
think their own ends are the child's ends too? When their manipulation of the
child's beliefs to conform to theirs is-so as far as they are concerned-entirely
in the child's best interests? And then, second, isn't it different when the
parents have already invested so much of their own resources in the child,
giving him or her so much of their love and care and time? Haven't they
somehow earned the reward of having the child honour their beliefs, even if
these beliefs are-by other people's lights-eccentric or oldfashioned?

Don't these considerations, together, mean that parents have at least some
rights that other people don't have? And rights which arguably should come
before-or at least rank beside-the rights of the children themselves?

No. The truth is these considerations simply don't add up to any form of
rights, let alone rights that could outweigh the children's: at most they merely
provide mitigating circumstances. Imagine: suppose you were misguidedly to
give your own child poison. The fact that you might think the poison you
were administering was good for your child, the fact that you might have
gone to a lot of trouble to obtain this poison, and that if it were not for all
your efforts your child would not even have been there to be offered it, none
of this would give you a right to administer the poison-at most, it would only
make you less culpable when the child died.

But in any case, to see the parents as simply misguided about the child's
true interests is, I think, to put too generous a construction on it. For it is not
at all clear that parents, when they take control of their children's spiritual and
intellectual lives, really do believe they are acting in the child's best interests
rather than their own. Abraham, when he was commanded by God on the
mountain to kill his son, Isaac, and dutifully went ahead with the preparation,
was surely not thinking of what was best for Isaac-he was thinking of his own
relationship with God. And so on down the ages. Parents have used and still
use their children to bring themselves spiritual or social benefits: dressing
them up, educating them, baptising them, bringing them to confirmation or
Bar Mitzvah in order to maintain their own social and religious standing.
 Consider again the analogy with circumcision. No one should make the
mistake of supposing that female circumcision, in those places where it's
practised, is done to benefit the girl. Rather, it is done for the honour of the
family, to demonstrate the parents' commitment to a tradition, to save them
from dishonour. Although I would not push the analogy too far, I think the
motivation of the parents is not so different at many other levels of parental
manipulation-even when it comes to such apparently unselfish acts as
deciding what a child should or should not learn in school.

A Christian fundamentalist mother, for example, forbids her child from

attending classes on evolution: though she may claim she is doing it for the
child and not of course herself, she is very likely motivated primarily by a
desire to make a display of her own purity. Doesn't she just know that God is
mighty proud of her for conforming to his will? ... The chief mullah of Saudi
Arabia proclaims that the Earth is flat and that anyone who teaches otherwise
is a friend of Satan:"won't he himself be thrice blessed by Allah for making
this courageous stand? A group of rabbis in Jerusalem try to ban the showing
of the film Jurassic Park on the grounds that it may give children the idea that
there were dinosaurs living on earth sixty million years ago, when the
scriptures state that in fact the world is just six thousand years old:'% are they
not making a wonderful public demonstration of their own piety?

What we are seeing, as often as not, is pure self-interest. In which case, we

should not even allow a mitigating plea of good intentions on the part of the
parent or other responsible adult. They are looking after none other than
themselves.

Yet, as I said, in the end it hardly matters what the parents' intentions are;
because even the best of intentions would not be sufficient to buy them
`parental rights' over their children. Indeed, the very idea that parents or any
other adults have `rights' over children is morally insupportable.

No human being, in any other circumstances, is credited with having rights

over any one else. No one is entitled, as of right, to control, use, or direct the
life-course of another person-even for objectively good ends. It's true that in
the past slave-owners had such legal rights over their slaves. And it's true,
too, that, until comparatively recently, the anomaly persisted of husbands
having certain such rights over their wives-the right to have sex with them,
for instance. But neither of these exceptions provides a good model for
regulating parent-child relationships.

Children, to repeat, have to be considered as having interests independent

of their parents. They cannot be subsumed as if they were part of the same
person. At least so it should be. Unless, that is, we make the extraordinary
mistake that the US Supreme Court apparently did when it ruled, in relation
to the Amish, that while the Amish way of life may be considered `odd or
even erratic', it `interferes with no rights or interests of others (my italics)."
As if the children of the Amish are not even to be counted as potentially
`others'.

I think we should stop talking of `parental rights' at all. In so far as they

compromise the child's rights as an individual, parents' rights have no status
in ethics and should have none in law.20

That's not to say that, other things being equal, parents should not be
treated by the rest of us with due respect and accorded certain `privileges' in
relation to their children. `Privileges', however, do not have the same legal or
moral significance as rights. Privileges are by no means unconditional; they
come as the quid pro quo for agreeing to abide by certain rules of conduct
imposed by society at large. And anyone to whom a privilege is granted
remains in effect on probation: a privilege granted can be taken away.

Let's suppose that the privilege of parenting will mean, for example, that,
provided parents agree to act within a certain framework, they shall indeed be
allowed-without interference from the law-to do all the things that parents
everywhere usually do: feeding, clothing, educating, disciplining their own
children-and enjoying the love and creative involvement that follow from it.
But it will explicitly not be part of this deal that parents should be allowed to
offend against the child's more fundamental rights to self-determination. If
parents do abuse their privileges in this regard, the contract lapses-and it is
then the duty of those who granted the privilege to intervene.
Intervene how? Suppose we-I mean we as a society-do not like what is
happening when the education of a child has been left to parents or priests.
Suppose we fear for the child's mind and want to take remedial action.
Suppose, indeed, we want to take pre-emptive action with all children to
protect them from being hurt by bad ideas and to give them the best possible
start as thoughtful human beings. What should we be doing about it? What
should he our birthday present to them from the grown-up world?

My suggestion at the start of this essay was: science-universal scientific

education. That's to say, education in learning from observation, experiment,
hypothesis testing, constructive doubt, critical thinking-and the truths that
flow from it.

And so I've come at last to the most provocative of the questions I began
with. What's so special about science? Why these truths? Why should it be
morally right to teach this to everybody, when it's apparently so morally
wrong to teach all those other things?

You do not have to be one of those out-and-out relativists to raise such

questions-and to be suspicious that any attempt to replace the old truths by
newer scientific truths might be nothing other than an attempt to replace one
dogmatism by another. The Supreme Court, in its judgement about Amish
schooling, was careful to warn that we should never rule out one way of
thinking and rule another in, merely on the basis of what happens to be the
modern, fashionable opinion. `There can be no assumption', it said, `that
today's majority is "right" and the Amish and others are "wrong"'; the Amish
way of life `is not to be condemned because it is different'.''

Maybe so. And yet I'd say the court has chosen to focus on the wrong issue
there. Even if science were the `majority' world view (which, as we saw
earlier, is sadly not the case), we'd all agree that this in itself would provide
no grounds for promoting science above other systems of thought. The
`majority' is clearly not right about lots of things, probably most things.

But the grounds I'm proposing are firmer. Some of the other speakers in
the lecture series in which this essay first had an airing will have talked about
the values and virtues of science. And I am sure they too, in their own terms,
will have attempted to explain why science is different-why it ought to have a
unique claim on our heads and on our hearts. But I will now perhaps go even
further than they would. I think science stands apart from and superior to all
other systems for the reason that it alone of all the systems in contention
meets the criterion I laid out above: namely, that it represents a set of beliefs
that any reasonable person would, if given the chance, choose for himself.

I should probably say that again, and put it in context. I argued earlier that
the only circumstances under which it should be morally acceptable to
impose a particular way of thinking on children is when the result will be that
later in life they come to hold beliefs that they would have chosen anyway,
no matter what alternative beliefs they were exposed to. And what I am now
saying is that science is the one way of thinking-maybe the only one-that
passes this test. There is a fundamental asymmetry between science and
everything else.

What do you reckon? Let's go to the rescue of that Inca girl who is being told
by the priests that, unless she dies on the mountain, the gods will rain down
lava on her village, and let's offer her another way of looking at things. Offer
her a choice as to how she will grow up: on one side with this story about
divine anger, on the other with the insights from geology as to how volcanoes
arise from the movement of tectonic plates. Which will she choose to follow?

Let's go help the Muslim boy who's being schooled by the mullahs into
believing that the Earth is flat, and let's explore some of the ideas of scientific
geography with him. Better still, let's take him up high in a balloon, show him
the horizon, and invite him to use his own senses and powers of reasoning to
reach his own conclusions. Now, offer him the choice: the picture presented
in the book of the Koran, or the one that flows from his new-found scientific
understanding. Which will he prefer?

Or let's take pity on the Baptist teacher who has become wedded to
creationism, and let's give her a vacation. Let's walk her round the Natural
History Museum in the company of Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennett-or, if
they're too scary, David Attenborough-and let's have them explain the
possibilities of evolution to her. Now, offer her the choice: the story of
Genesis with all its paradoxes and special pleading, or the startlingly simple
idea of natural selection. Which will she choose?

My questions are rhetorical because the answers are already in. We know
very well which way people will go when they really are allowed to make up
their own minds on questions such as these. Conversions from superstition to
science have been and are everyday events. They have probably been part of
our personal experience. Those who have been walking in darkness have seen
a great light: the aha! of scientific revelation.

By contrast, conversions from science back to superstition are virtually

unknown. It just does not happen that someone who has learnt and
understood science and its methods and who is then offered a non-scientific
alternative chooses to abandon science. I doubt there has ever been a case, for
example, of someone who has been brought up to believe the geological
theory of volcanoes moving over to believing in divine anger instead, or of
someone who has seen and appreciated the evidence that the world is round
reverting to the idea that the world is flat, or even of someone who has once
understood the power of Darwinian theory going back to preferring the story
of Genesis.

People do, of course, sometimes abandon their existing scientific beliefs in

favour of newer and better scientific alternatives. But to choose one scientific
theory over another is still to remain absolutely true to science.

The reason for this asymmetry between science and non science is not-at least
not only-that science provides so much better-so much more economical,
elegant, beautifulexplanations than non-science, although there is that. The
still stronger reason, I'd suggest, is that science is by its very nature a
participatory process and non-science is not.

In learning science we learn why we should believe this or that. Science

doesn't cajole, it doesn't dictate, it lays out the factual and theoretical
arguments as to why something is soand invites us to assent to them, to see it
for ourselves. Hence, by the time someone has understood a scientific
explanation, they have in an important sense already chosen it as theirs.

How different is the case of religious or superstitious explanation. Religion

makes no pretence of engaging its devotees in any process of rational
discovery or choice. If we dare ask why we should believe something, the
answer will be because it has been written in the Book, because this is our
tradition, because it was good enough for Moses, because you'll go to heaven
that way ... Or, as often as not, don't ask.

Contrast these two positions. On one side, there is the second-century

Roman theologian Tertullian, with his abject submission to authority and
denial of our personal involvement in choosing our beliefs. `For us,' he wrote,
`curiosity is no longer necessary after Jesus Christ nor inquiry after the 122
This is the same man, I might remind you, who said Gospel. of Christianity:
`It is certain because it is impossible.' On the other side, there is the twelfth-
century English philosopher, Adelard of Bath, one of the earliest interpreters
of Arab science, with his injunction that we all make ourselves personally
responsible for understanding what goes on around us. `If anyone living in a
house is ignorant of what it is made ... he is unworthy of its shelter,' he said,
`and if anyone born in the residence of this world neglects learning the plan
underlying its marvellous beauty ... he is unworthy ... and deserves to be cast
out of it."'

Imagine that the choice is yours: that you have been faced, in the formative
years of your life, with a choice between these two paths to enlightenment-
between basing your beliefs on the ideas of others imported from another
country and another time, and basing them on ideas that you have been able
to see growing in your home soil. Can there be any doubt that you will
choose for yourself, that you will choose science?

And because people will so choose, if they have the opportunity of scientific
education, I say we as a society are entitled with good conscience to insist on
their being given that opportunity. That is, we are entitled in effect to choose
this way of thinking for them. Indeed, we are not just entitled: in the case of
children, we are morally obliged to do so-so as to protect them from being
early victims of other ways of thinking that would remove them from the
field.

Then-suppose someone asks-'How would you like it if some Big Brother

were to insist on your children being taught his beliefs? How'd you like it if I
tried to impose my personal ideology on your little girl?' I have the answer:
that teaching science isn't like that. It's not about teaching someone else's
beliefs, it's about encouraging the child to exercise her powers of
understanding to arrive at her own beliefs.

For sure, this is likely to mean she will end up with beliefs that are widely
shared with others who have taken the same path: beliefs, that is, in what
science reveals as the truth about the world. And yes, if you want to put it this
way, you could say this means that by her own efforts at understanding she
will have become a scientific conformist: one of those predictable people
who believes that matter is made of atoms, that the universe arose with the
Big Bang, that humans are descended from monkeys, that consciousness is a
function of the brain, that there is no life after death, and so on ... Butsince
you ask-I'll say I'd be only too pleased if a big brother or sister or school-
teacher or you yourself, sir, should help her get to that enlightened state.

The habit of questioning, the ability to tell good answers from bad, an
appetite for seeing how and why deep explanations work-such is what I
would want for my daughter (now two years old) because I think it is what
she, given the chance, would one day want for herself. But it is also what I
would want for her because I am too well aware of what might otherwise
befall her. Bad ideas continue to swill through our culture, some old, some
new, looking for receptive minds to capture. If this girl, lacking the defences
of critical reasoning, were ever to fall to some kind of political or spiritual
irrationalism, then I and you-and our society-would have failed her.

Words? Children are made of the words they hear. It matters what we tell
them. They can be hurt by words. They may go on to hurt themselves still
further, and in turn become the kind of people that hurt others. But they can
be given life by words as well.

`I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing,' in the words of
Deuteronomy, `therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.'24
I think there should be no limit to our duty to help children to choose life.2'
The number 666 is not a number to take lightly. If the biblical book of
Revelation is to be relied on, it is the number that at the Day of judgement
will mark us for our doom. `Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding
count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man, and his number
is six hundred, three score and six."

But why, if I dare ask it, precisely 666? Why is the number of the beast
also `the number of a man'? And why, according some other ancient
authorities, is the correct number not 666 but 616? I believe a curious passage
in Plato's Republic holds the answer.

In Book VIII of the Republic, Socrates discusses how the Guardians

should regulate the supply of newborn children, and he draws attention to a
potential problem with meeting quotas: `Though the Rulers you have trained
for your city are wise, reason and perception will not always enable them to
hit on the right and wrong times for breeding; some time they will miss them
and then children will he begotten amiss.' Fortunately, he says, it can all be
worked out by mathematics:

For the number of the human creature is the first in which root and square
multiplications (comprising three dimensions and four limits) of basic
numbers, which make like and unlike, and which increase and decrease,
produce a final result in completely commensurate terms.'

The meaning is not as clear as we might wish. However, classical scholars

generally agree that the number Socrates is trying to specify here-which has
come to be called `Plato's number'-is the number of days that is the minimum
needed for gestation. This number was believed by the Greeks to be 216
days, or seven months (while normal gestation is 276 days, or nine months,
which is 216 + 3 x 4 x 5).

Now, 216 has various special properties. To start with, it is six cubed. The
number six is supposed to represent marriage and conception, since 6 = 2 x 3,
and the number two represents femininity and three masculinity. The number
six is also the area (a square measure) of the well-known Pythagorean
triangle with sides three, four, and five. And six cubed is the smallest cube
that is the sum of three other cubes: namely, the cubes of three, four and five.
That's to say, 216 = 6' = 31 + 4' + 51.

It seems to have been this last property of the important number that Plato
was trying to describe. But since there was no word in classical Greek to
express `cubing', the best he could do was to employ the clumsy expression
`root and square multiplications (comprising three distances and four limits)'.

So, where is the connection to 666, the number of the beast? Note, if you
will, the following coincidences:

• Revelation says, `For it is the number of a man'; Plato says, `For the
number of the human creature is ...'

• Revelation gives the number as 666; Plato gives it as 6 x 6 x 6.

• The alternative number of the beast is 616; the alternative way of

expressing Plato's number is 216.

The Republic was written four hundred years before the book of
Revelation. John the Divine, the probable author of Revelation, wrote in
Greek and, although relatively uneducated, he would very likely have had at
least a passing acquaintance with Plato's ideas. I suggest John simply
misunderstood Plato's numeric formulation and took the three sixes in the
wrong combination. Other authorities then corrected the last two digits, to put
back the 16 to make 616.
Some years ago there was a competition in the New Statesman to produce the
most startling newspaper headline anyone could think of. Among the winning
entries, as I remember, was this: `Archduke Ferdinand Still Alive: First
World War a Mistake'.

A mistake, a war in which twenty million people died? It seems, of course,

preposterous: a bad-if clever-joke. And yet historians now almost universally
agree that the First World War was a mistake. Not in the sense implied by
that headline, that it was fought for the wrong reasons. No, a mistake in the
sense-perhaps even more depressing-that there were no reasons for war at all:
except, that is, for the drive to war itself. The great powers had got
themselves into a fierce arms race, and Germany was being made to feel
increasingly encircled; yet rather than seeking obvious remediesreversing the
arms race, or resorting to more positive diplomacy-the generals and the
statesmen pushed on towards the cataclysm as if they were no longer masters
of their fate.

In recent history there have been, as we know, disturbing parallels. In the

late years of the twentieth century, the great civilizations of the world-the
very nations that gave us our literature, music, painting, our ideas of peace
and of democracy-were once again locked into a unending cycle of hostility.
Once again there was a grim competition for superiority in arms, in trade, in
attitudes, in righteousness. We called it a Cold War-no one was being killed.
But let no one doubt that it was war. Year by year more money was being
spent on armaments than at any time during the hot wars of the past. As a
direct consequence of this misuse of resources, thousands of people daily
starved.

There were, it is true, lulls in the hostility. Moments of hope. Moments

when, against the odds, it seemed that world leaders might be coming to their
senses. But soon enough they took up where they left off, as if hurrying to
join step in the long march to oblivion.
 In Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht wrote of the seemingly unstoppable
energy of war. Says Mother Courage:

Well, there've always been people going around saying the war will end. I
say, you can't be sure the war will ever end. Of course it may have to pause
occasionally-for breath, as it were-it can even meet with an accident-nothing
on this earth is perfect. A little oversight, and the war's in the hole, and
someone's got to pull it out again! That someone is the Emperor or the King
or the Pope. They're such friends in need, the war has really nothing to worry
about, it can look forward to a prosperous future.'

Brecht wrote of war as if it were a kind of monstrous, living force. And,

indeed, to many others writing in the twentieth century, it has seemed that
war is a kind of autonomous, selfperpetuating, and self-serving agency. Do
we need reminding, then, that wars are made by human beings?

I hope I may be allowed to talk a bit about matters of psychology.

Professional psychologists have not always, it is true, had anything sensible
or relevant to say about what has been so obviously the greatest issue of our
time. But in recent years new ideas have emerged. And, surprisingly enough,
one of the most fertile areas has been `games theory'.

Games theory, as John von Neumann originally conceived it, is the theory
of how rational people should behave in any game where the interests of the
players are conflicting. But while games theory deals essentially with
rationality, one of the startling results has been to show just how irrational
rational behaviour may become. For there are situations where, because of
factors inherent in the situation itself, sensible players pursuing apparently
sensible short-term goals always end up with exactly the opposite result of
that which they intended. In psychology, this has led to the notion of what's
called a `social trap'.

Let us take an artificial situation to illustrate the kind of thing I mean.

There is a notorious game called the `pound auction'. Suppose that someone
says he is going to sell a £1 coin to the highest bidder. And he starts by
asking for bids of 10p. It sounds good value, and no doubt most of us would
come in with a hid. But there is a snag. For the auctioneer announces that he
is going to take the money not just from the highest bidder but from the next
highest as well. Well, that's a shame ... still, we'll put up with it. So we bid
1Op. Someone on the other side comes in with a bid of 20p. Now what are
we going to do? If we leave it there we will have lost out. Not only will we
not get the £1, we will lose our 1Op all for nothing. So we bid 30p. A pound
for 30p-still not a bad deal if we can get it. But now the other contestant is in
exactly the position we were-he's going to lose out unless he continues. So he
ups his bid to 40p. So we up ours again, so he ups his. You might think the
auction is bound to stop when either we or the other bidder reaches a full £1.
But not at all. For suppose the auction has reached a point where our rival has
bid 90p and we have hid £1. Unless he now goes over £1, he is going to lose
everything, while he can at least cut his losses by bidding £1.10. So we bid
£1.20. And so on, onwards and upwards-while both of us get deeper into
debt. The fact is that from the moment we entered this game, both sides were
trapped.

Now the problem, as you will see, arises precisely because it is built into
the situation that our gain is his loss, and vice versa. And the parallel to an
arms race between nations is all too obvious. The very weapons which give
one side a sense of security threaten the other-and naturally, and even
rationally, the other side retaliates in kind.

Yet, surely, you might think, what goes up can come down, and a vicious
spiral can in principle become a virtuous one. Why is it then that these traps
are so hard to get out of-why cannot the whole thing just be stopped or even
put into reverse?

All the evidence suggests that stopping, let alone reversing, is in fact very
difficult. The reason is quite simple, namely, that it requires cooperation
between two sides who are defined by the very situation as antagonists. If we
take the pound auction, it's obvious that if at a stage where one side has bid
10p, the other 20p, both were to stop and agree to split the profits, both would
be better off. But the problem is exactly that. It requires agreement between
two participants who by the very nature of the game are in an unbalanced
relationship. Someone is always in front: someone always thinks he stands to
gain more by winning the race than pulling out of it; what's more, each side
can of course blame the other for the costs incurred so far.

Cooperation requires trust and generosity. Many people assume that the
chief obstacle to cooperation is hatred of the enemy. But surprisingly, a
peculiar feature of the games-playing approach to human conflict is that it
does not place any great emphasis on hatred. Hatred can, of course, make a
conflict less easy to resolve. But hatred is in no way a necessary feature of an
arms race. Indeed, it is important to realize just how fast and far a conflict can
proceed without, as it were, ever an angry word being spoken.

Before the First World War, for example, the Germans did not hate the
British, nor the British the Germans-far from it, they were in most respects
firm friends; and the hatred that emerged was secondary-a consequence of the
war rather than its cause. Similarly in the 1980s, at least at the level of
professional war-planners, there was as a matter of fact very little outright
enmity. Why should there have been? For in a curious sense the American
and Soviet war-planners, in spite of being formal adversaries, were in fact
allies with a common interest in the theory of deterrence and the problem of
how to win a no-win game. The `toys' they played with were only
incidentally weapons designed to hurt other human beings-as if that, too, was
some kind of unfortunate mistake. `Hatred', as the American games theorist
Anatol Rappoport put it, `needs to play no role in the war-planners'
involvement with the wherewithal of omnicide because it is no longer
necessary to hate anyone in order to kill everyone.'

Yet while `hatred of the enemy' may not be a necessary feature of the drive
to war, it is surely a facilitating factor, providing if nothing else a social
context in which the war-planners can pursue their deadly games. Hatred,
moreover, is a distorting emotion which when present is bound to block any
rational analysis of how to achieve genuine security. It is in this area that I
believe psychology still has to make its greatest contribution.

Why do people dislike other people? The obvious answer, you might think,
is that we dislike others who either have or might cause us harm. But a
surprisingly different answer has come forward. We tend to dislike people
not because of anything they have done to us, but because of the things we
have done to them. In other words, hostility and hatred are selffulfilling: we
develop our hostile attitudes as a consequence of our own actions, we learn
by doing.

If I hurt someone else, you might think that it would make me feel tenderly
disposed to him or her. But research, especially on children, shows quite the
opposite. A child who hurts another, even by accident, is more likely than not
to think the worse of the victim-to invent reasons, in short, for why it served
him or her right. And while adults generally have more sophisticated feelings,
the same holds true. It is as though people need to rationalize their own
actions after the event, and the only way to explain how we have caused harm
to someone else is to persuade ourselves that in some way or another they
deserved it.

We see it in a burglar who despises the householders he steals from. We

saw it frighteningly in Vietnam, where American soldiers developed ever
greater hatred for the peasants the more they killed and maimed them. And so
all the way through to the behaviour of whole nations: the Nazis loathing the
Jews because the Jews suffered at their hands, the Israelis hating the
Palestinians because they are weak and poor.

More disturbing still, the acts of antagonism that lead to hatred do not even
have to be real acts: they can be purely imaginary. If, say, I merely plan to
hurt someone else, the very idea of the pain that I might cause him may lead
me to devalue him. What, then, if the hurt I am planning is an act of ultimate
destruction-nuclear obliteration? No wonder, perhaps, that Ronald Reagan
saw the Russians as the `focus of evil in the modern world', when every day
he-Reagan-must have lived with the idea of turning Russia into Hell.

Let us note here one of the many paradoxes of nuclear weapons. No one
can doubt any longer that their use would be an act of suicide. When the
President of the United States imagined killing Russians he must have
imaginde too killing his own countrymen and killing his own self. But when
to kill someone even in imagination leads to hatred, the man with his finger
on the button must slowly have been growing deep down to hate himself.
 Yet there is another side to it, another side to this `learning by doing'. What
psychologists have found is that just as hostility can be selffulfilling, so can
friendship, so can love. In fact, perhaps it is not surprising that just as we
need to find reasons to explain our own hostile actions, so we need reasons to
explain our acts of generosity.

And so it happens that someone who is persuaded, even tricked, into being
kind to someone else actually comes, as a result of his own actions, to value
that other person more. A child, for example, who is encouraged by his
teacher to make toys for poor children in hospital begins to reckon that the
recipients deserve his help. The millions of people who gave money for
starving Ethiopians in the mid-eighties almost certainly came to care about
them as human beings. Does the same principle carry through right up to the
behaviour of whole nations? The fact is, we do not know. Why not? We do
not know because it never has been tried.

I was talking a few years ago to Ervin Staub, a Hungarian psychologist

who has been responsible as much as anyone for this idea of `learning by
doing'.' I asked him: just suppose that the United States were to have found
itself, by accident as it were, being generous to the Russians. Suppose the
disaster at Chernobyl had been so overwhelming that the Russians had
required the kind of aid that only the United States could give. Is it possible
that such an unthought-out act of charity by the United States would have
marked the end of the Cold War? Professor Staub's answer was that he had
indeed hoped that it would happen: that out of darkness might have come an
unexpected light.

I do not often have the privilege of speaking in a church. But when I do I

confess that the echo of the place gets to me, and I find myself wanting to
quote passages of scripture. So let me remind you now of that ambiguous and
somewhat frightening injunction from St Matthew's gospel: `Unto everyone
that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath
not shall be taken away even that which he hath.'3

For a long time I did not understand it. But now I think I do. For in that
parable of the talents, Jesus was perhaps talking first and foremost about
human love: `Unto everyone that hath love shall be given the power to love,
but from him that hath not shall be taken away even the power which he
hath.' Consider the story in this light.

Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and
made them another five talents. And likewise he that had received two he also
gained another two. But he that had received one went and digged in the earth
and hid his lord's money . . . `I was afraid,' said the wicked servant, `and went
and hid thy talent in the earth.''

When we find ourselves living in a 'world in peril', it may be because we

have hidden our talent for loving each other in the earth.
Colonel Ghadaffi's daughter would have been four years old. As the year
1987 broke she might have been enjoying the North African sun, laughing at
the sea, wriggling her toes into the sand ... A shame, then, that she had been
killed by a bomb. How much of a shame? It depends on how you calculate it.
But shall we say forty-five seconds, at the most?

As with other years, there were many reasons for disliking things said and
done by politicians in 1986. But the one that stuck with me was that argument
between Mr Norman Tebbit and the BBC about the precise time that ought to
have been devoted on the television news to the killing of Ghadaffi's little
girl.

In 1984, I, along with most of the British population, saw the pictures of
Mr Tebbit himself being dragged in pain from the ruins of a Brighton hotel.
No one, so far as I know, protested then that the pictures were being used for
propaganda; nor subsequently did anyone complain about the time given to
the plight of Mr Tebbit's injured wife. To have done so would have been
petty and immoral. Here were pictures that the British public-and the IRA-did
well to see. Bombs kill, that was the lesson; and the killing, even of political
enemies, is wrong.

If nothing else, a sense of fair dealing might therefore have prevented Mr

Tebbit from grudging the public a minute's exposure to the contemplation of
someone else's pain. Mr Tebbit, knowing what he did from personal
experience, might even have been moved to pity. But no, when Tripoli was
bombed, the chairman of the Conservative Party was alarmed for nothing else
than his own party's skin. He counted the BBC out, he counted the ITV in; he
timed the agony-and found the baby's death sixty-one seconds too long.

Henry VI was criticized for having spent too much money on his chapel at
King's College, Cambridge. Later, Wordsworth wrote:
The words, if not the context for them, apply exactly here. To calculate the
costs of a child's life in terms of its political advantage to oneself-or to an
enemy-is ethically degenerate. Why? Because it involves a shift in perception
that good people ought never to allow: from the child as a being who has
value in herself, to the child as a mere term in someone else's sum.

Immanuel Kant, as a philosopher, wrote this:

When the question is whether a thing be beautiful, we do not want to know

whether anything depends or can depend, for us or for anyone else, on the
existence of the object, but only how we estimate it in pure contemplation.2

And the same is true, he thought, for acts of morality and immorality. There
is indeed only one ethical imperative: that we should regard all other human
beings as ends, and never as means to our own ends.

Kant's code was strict; and none of us in the real world live up to it. But
when we fail, is there at least some way that we can begin to atone for the
immoral act? Psychologically, and arguably philosophically as well, the
remedy-such as it iscan lie only in confronting like with like: we must, in
short, pay for our neglect of another person's intrinsic worth by a deliberate
humbling of our own.

Other cultures knew it. Two and a half thousand years ago, Lao-Tzu wrote:

Shakespeare, in Richard II, had Bolingbroke rebuking the killer of King

Richard:
 Imagine now a society where the newsreaders on the BBC would-by
direction of the government-wear the signs of mourning at each and every act
of cruelty initiated or condoned by the UK: a society where the Sun would
shout `FORGIVE US!' when we torpedoed the Belgrano, and where the
Prime Minister on the steps of Downing street would cry `Lament!'.

It will not happen here. Yet such a society might, I think, come closer to a
state of grace. What is more, it would win the propaganda battle, too. For the
truth is that, while to act in one's own self-interest cannot be moral, to act
morally can often be in one's self-interest. A paradox? Yes, the paradox of
morals-and one that can only be confirmed, and not explained.
Ian Kershaw, in his biography of Hitler, quotes a teenage girl, writing to
celebrate Hitler's fiftieth birthday in April 1939: `a great man, a genius, a
person sent to us from heaven'.' What kind of design flaw in human nature
could be responsible for such a seemingly grotesque piece of hero-worship?
Why do people in general fall so easily under the sway of dictators?

I shall make a simple suggestion at the end of this essay. But I shall not go
straight there. The invitation to talk about `Dictatorship: The Seduction of the
Masses' in a series of seminars on `History and Human Nature' has set me
thinking more generally about the role of evolutionary theory in
understanding human history. And I've surprised myself by some of my own
thoughts. I'll come to dictatorship in a short while, but I want to establish a
particular framework first.

The usual reason that's given for paying attention to evolutionary

psychology is that, by exposing and explaining human nature, it can show us
the constraints that have operatedand still do-on the historical development of
human culture. I'll quote, if I may, from the manifesto I myself wrote for the
Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics:

Evolutionary theory leads us to expect that, to the extent that human beings
have evolved to function optimally under the particular social and ecological
conditions that prevailed long ago, they are likely still today to be better
suited to certain life-styles and environments than others. What's more they
can be expected to bring with them into modern contexts archaic ways of
thinking, preferences and prejudices, even when these are no longer adaptive
(or even positively maladaptive).

The emphasis, you'll see, is on how nature and culture conflict. `We're
Stone Age creatures living in the space age', as the saying goes. And the
implication is that the modernizing forces of culture have continually to fight
a rearguard battle against the recidivist tendencies of human nature. Almost
every evolutionary psychology textbook ends with a sermon on the
importance of getting in touch with our `inner Flintstone' if we are not to
have our best laid plans for taking charge of history thwarted.

This idea of human nature and human culture pulling inexorably in

different directions is of course hardly a new one, although arguably we can
give it more of a scientific base than in the past. It was anticipated by
Hobbes, by Rousseau, and of course by Freud. Denis Diderot put it strikingly
in his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, in 1784:

Would you like to know the condensed history of almost all our miseries?
Here it is. There existed a natural man; an artificial man was introduced
within this man; and within this cavern a civil war breaks out which lasts for
life.'

It's not new ... and I'm beginning to realize that in large measure it's not
true. Indeed the very opposite is true. If we take a fresh look at how natural
and artificial man coexist in contemporary societies, what we see in many
areas is evidence not of an ongoing civil war but of a remarkable
collaboration between these supposed old enemies. We see that Stone Age
nature and space age culture-or at any rate modern industrial culture-very
often get along just fine.

So much so, that perhaps it's time we shifted our concerns, and started
emphasizing not how human nature resists desirable cultural developments
but how it eases the path of some of the least desirable. For the fact is-the
worry is, the embarrassment is-that human nature may sometimes be not just
a collaborator, but an active collaborateur, with the invader.

True, once we do focus on collaboration, for the most part we'll find the
result productive and benign. Think of the major achievements of modern
civilization-in science, the arts, politics, communication, commerce. Every
one has depended on cultural forces working with the natural gifts of human
beings. Our incomparable mental gifts: the capacity for language, reasoning,
socializing, understanding, feeling with others. Equally our incomparable
bodily gifts: our nimble fingers, expressive faces, graceful limbs. We have
only to look at our nearest relatives, the ungainly lumbering chimpanzees,
whose minds can scarcely frame a concept and whose hands can hardly hold
a pencil, to see how near a thing it was. Tamper with the human genome ever
so little, and the glories of civilization would topple like a pack of cards.

Would you like to know the condensed history of almost all our satisfactions?
Here it is. There existed a natural man; an artificial man was introduced
within this man; and within this cavern a creative alliance is formed which
lasts for life.

That's the good news. But what about the bad? Think of the worst
achievements of civilization: war, genocide, capitalist greed, religious
bigotry, alienation, drug addiction, pornography, the despoliation of the earth,
the dreariness of urban life. Every one of these, too, has come about through
cultural forces working with the natural gifts of individual human beings. Our
incomparable talents for aggression, competition, deceit, xenophobia,
superstition, obedience, love of status, demonic ingenuity. We have only to
look at chimpanzees to see how nearly we could have avoided it.
Chimpanzees are hardly capable even of telling a simple lie.

Would you like to know the condensed history of almost all our miseries
[again]? Here it is. There existed a natural man; an artificial man was
introduced within this man; and within this cavern a perfidious conspiracy
arises which lasts for life.

Yet, you may want to object that this way of putting things makes no sense
scientifically. What justification can there be for talking, even at the level of
metaphor, of natural and artificial man being `at war', or `collaborating', or
`forming alliances'-as if human nature and human culture really do have
independent goals? Don't theorists these days think in terms of gene-culture
co-evolution: with human beings being by nature creatures that make culture
which in turn feeds back to nature and so on, in a cycle of dependent
interaction-for which the bottom line always remains natural selection?

Indeed, isn't much of human culture, including many aspects of

civilization, best thought of as part of the extended human phenotype,
indirectly constructed by the human genes that it helps preserve-rather as,
say, a beaver's dam is indirectly constructed by the beaver's genes? No one
talks about an `alliance' between a beaver and its dam (let alone a war).

Yes, except that I need hardly say that any such view of human culture-as
on a par with the beaver's dam or even the tool-making traditions of
chimpanzees-ignores precisely what it is that makes human culture special. I
say `precisely what it is', and no doubt everyone would want to be precise in
different ways. But what I mean here is that once a culture becomes the
creation of thousands upon thousands of semiautonomous individual agents,
each with the capacity to act both as an originator of ideas and as a vehicle
and propagandist for them, it becomes a complex dynamical system: a system
which now has its own developmental drive-no longer ruled by natural
selection, but ruled by whatever principles do rule such complex systems.

We are only just beginning to understand what these principles are.

Nobody believes any longer that Hegelian laws dictate the course of human
history. Few believe in the Marxist version (though perhaps more should-
Engels's remarkable book Dialectics of Nature anticipated in several ways
modern ideas about complexity and chaos). Even Adam Smith's hidden hand
of capitalism has been relegated to the nursery. But that there are laws of
development, theorists are increasingly confident. And certain central
concepts are becoming established. Probably the most important, simple, and
easy to understand is the idea of `attractors'.

Attractors are just that-basins of attraction, places where complex systems

tend to end up as if they were drawn there. They are semi-stable states of
equilibrium in a sea of instability-like whirlpools in the wide ocean tending to
catch within them anything that strays into their fields of influence (although
they do not, of course, literally pull). Weather systems, economies, fashions,
ecosystems, dripping taps, traffic flow along motorways-all tend to settle into
discrete attractor states.

Now, the existence of attractors does not, of course, mean that, strictly
speaking, the system that exhibits these attractors has its own goals (certainly
not consciously formulated). An economy headed for recession doesn't
exactly `want' to get there. Nonetheless, it will seem to anyone caught up in
such a recession, or it might be in an artistic movement, a religious crusade,
or a slide towards war, that he is part of something larger than himself with
its own life force. While being one of the players whose joint effects produce
the movement, he does not have to play any intentional part in it. Indeed,
even in fighting it he may ironically promote it, or in embracing it oppose it.

In short, nature and culture can be thought of as having independent

tendencies and independent energies. Diderot's natural man, as an individual,
will go his own way; but there will be emergent forces at the group level
creating the movement towards the cultural attractor where Diderot's artificial
man is at home.

So, now's the point: whether natural man intends it or not, his going his
own way is likely to have interesting and possibly quite unpredicted
consequences at the cultural level. And this is because-as complexity theory
makes clear-the determination of which particular states are in fact attractors,
and how easily transitions occur between them, is often highly sensitive to
small changes in the properties of the elements that comprise the system.
Adjust the stickiness of sand particles in the desert ever so slightly, and
whole dune systems will come into being or vanish. Adjust the saving or
spending habits of people in the market by a few percentage points, and the
whole econ omy can be tipped in or out of recession. So: adjust human nature
in other small ways, and maybe human society as a whole can be
unexpectedly switched from Victorian values to flower power, from
capitalism to socialism, from theism to atheism, and so on? (Well, no:
atheism is probably never an attractor!)

There. That is my preamble. And I'm ready now to address the subject I
was asked to: the question of the attractions of dictatorship.

As Plato noted, the political landscape contains several distinct, relatively

stable forms of government. He named them as: Timarchy, Oligarchy,
Democracy, Tyranny, and of course his own Ideal Republic (which was itself
a form of benevolent dictatorship.) Moreover, as if foreseeing complexity
theory, Plato drew attention to the critical influence of human personality in
rendering these states more or less stable: because, as he said, `Societies
aren't made of sticks and stones, but of men whose individual characters, by
turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole'.3

Now, as Plato also noted, some of these attractors are nearer neighbours
than others (because they are relatively similar in character), and some have
higher transition probabilities between them (because there are, as it were,
downhill routes connecting them). I may surprise you-though not for long-
when I say I think democracy and dictatorship are close in both respects.

Dictatorship, let's be clear, does not mean any kind of authoritarian regime.
It involves, as the title of this seminar suggests, `the seduction of the masses'.
Dictatorship emerges where an individual or clique takes over power, usually
at a time of crisis, on behalf of and often with the support of the people, and
substitutes personal authority for the rule of law. As Carl Schmitt defined it:
`dictatorship is the subordination of law to the rule of an executive power,
exceptionally and temporarily commissioned in the name of the people to
undertake all necessary acts for the sake of legal order'.4

What makes dictatorship, in this sense, close to democracy is quite simply

that both are popular forms of government: people love them. Indeed,
sometimes dictatorships command the people's love beyond anything that
democracy can normally muster. The Nuremberg rallies, the huge
outpourings of love and admiration for Mao Tse Tung, even the lingering
adoration shown in some quarters for fallen dictators such as Slobodan
Milosevic, testify to the way people genuinely take to their hearts those who,
even while oppressing them, claim to represent them.

It means that the transition from democracy to dictatorship can feel (at
least to begin with) like a continuation of democracy by other means. A
government of the people for the people by the people has become a
government of the people for the people by something else. But it will not
necessarily feel as if power has been given up, because in a sense it has not:
the something else is also there by the people's will. In the case of Hitler, for
example, `the Fuhrer's word was supposed to be law not because it was the
will of a particular individual but because it was supposed to embody the will
of the German people more authentically than could any representation'.'
 The transition therefore may not be resisted as perhaps it should be. But
that is by no means the full story. For there may he a positive energies as
well, tending to drive society towards the beckoning attractor of dictatorship.
And they may arise, I believe, from a wholly familiar (if little understood)
aspect of individual human psychology: the everyday, taken-forgranted, but
insidious phenomenon of suggestibility-the tendency of human beings, in
certain circumstances, especially when stressed, to surrender their capacity
for selfdetermination and self-control to someone else.

Suggestibility shows up as a human personality trait in two main ways. To

start with, there is the simple tendency to conform, to adopt the wishes and
opinions of the majority as one's own. The power of conformity was
famously illustrated in Solomon Asch's experiment where he showed how
group pressure can distort a person's judgement even about such a simple
matter as the length of a line. Conformity has been shown to be a powerful
force in contexts ranging from shopping behaviour (so that people want to
buy what lots of other people buy) to mate choice (so that, yes, people want
to have sex with the person lots of other people want to have sex with). We
all do it, we can't help it. On the whole it doesn't get us into trouble.

But besides this, and more obviously dangerous, is the tendency to yield to
authority, to identify with the wishes and opinions of a leader. This, too,
shows up, for example, in shopping behaviour (people want to buy what the
top people buy) and again in mate choice (people want to have sex with the
person a top person chooses to have sex with). It plays a central role in the
strange, but generally innocuous, phenomenon of hypnosis. It is seen more
worryingly in examples of the so-called Stockholm syndrome, where
individuals who find themselves in the power of a captor or abuser come to
identify with and bond with the person into whose power they have fallen. It
was demonstrated most dramatically in Stanley Milgram's obedience
experiments, where he showed how easily ordinary people will take orders
from an assumed expert even when it involves hurting another person.

Now, though these various forms of suggestibility have long been

established as facts of human nature, from the evolutionary perspective they
have seemed something of a puzzle. Recently, however, theorists have gone
part of the way to solving this puzzle by thinking about suggestibility in the
context of the evolution of cooperation.

Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd have shown, with a theoretical model,
that if human beings do indeed show both these forms of suggestibility-that's
to say, if they have a psychological bias to copy the majority (which Henrich
and Boyd call `conformist transmission'), and a bias to copy successful
individuals (which they call `payoff-biased transmission'), then these two
factors by themselves will be sufficient to account for the spread of
cooperation as a stable feature of 6 human groups.

It's not hard to see, informally, why. Imagine two groups, A and B, in the
first of which everyone cooperates, and in the second they do not. Assume
that individuals in group A generally do better for themselves than those in
group B because cooperation leads to more food, better health, and so on.
Then, when individuals in group B have occasion to observe the relative
success of those in group A, payoff-biased transmission will see to it that
they tend to adopt these cooperative individuals as role models and begin
cooperating themselves. And then, once enough individuals in group B are
doing this, conformist transmission will take over and sweep the whole group
internally towards cooperation.

To put this still more simply: if people follow the winners, and people
follow the crowd, then they will end up following the crowd following the
winners. And, hey presto, everyone's a winner!

Since being one of the winners does bring obvious benefits to individuals
and their genes, it seems clear from this model why both these forms of
suggestibility should in fact have been bred into human nature by natural
selection. Suggestibility, far from being a design flaw in itself, will have been
one of the basic adaptive traits that has underwritten the development of
human social and economic life. But if this is indeed our Stone Age heritage,
how does it play now? If not necessarily in the space age, then in the age of
nation states and mass politics?

I would say that this is the very package of traits that, as Plato put it, `by
turning the scale one way or another, determines the direction of the whole',
and continually threatens to make democracy unstable and dictatorship a
particularly likely end-point.

The fact is that democracy, for which one of the essential conditions is the
exercise of individual choice, is dreadfully vulnerable to the block vote. And
what suggestibility will tend to do is precisely to turn independent choosers
into block voters. If people follow the charismatic leader, Hitler, Mao, and
people also follow the crowd, then they will end up following the crowd
following the charismatic leader. And hey presto, everyone's a servant of
dictatorship.

Yet what creates such charisma in the first place? In the situation that
Henrich and Boyd have modelled, the thing that makes suggestibility an
adaptive strategy is that the leaders, around whom the process crystallizes,
have genuinely admirable qualities. However, it is easy to see how, once
suggestibility is in place, there is the danger of a much less happy outcome,
perhaps rare until the advent of modern propaganda, but always latent. This is
that a leader's charisma will derive from nothing else than the support he is
seen to be getting from the crowd. So that a figure who would otherwise
never be taken seriously can become the subject of runaway idolatry. Just as
a film star can become famous for little other than being famous, a leader can
become popular by virtue of little other than his popularity.

Wherein lay Hitler's mesmerizing power? Maybe it was due to some of the
personal qualities that Kershaw identifiesrhetorical skill, raging temper,
paranoia, vanity. But maybe it was due to nothing other than the luck of
being the focus of a critical mass of zealots at a critical time.

Remember that shocking newspaper headline (see Chapter 22): `Archduke

Ferdinand Still Alive: First World War a Mistake'? Perhaps we could have
capped it with this: `Second World War a Mistake: Hitler a Twerp'. A twerp.
But nonetheless, to that young girl and so many others of her compatriots
whose own breath created the twisting wind that sent him skywards, `a great
man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven'.
 It can happen with ideas as well. Take the case of Soviet Communism. J.
M. Keynes wrote: `How a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised
so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through
them, the events of history must always remain a portent to historians of
opinion." A portent to students of human nature, too.
Chapter 1. On Taking Another Look

First published in John Brockman and Katinka Matson, eds., How Things
Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind (New York: William Morrow, 1995),
177-82.

1. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890), ch. 6.

2. Richard L. Gregory, The Intelligent Eye (London: Weidenfeld &

Nicolson, 1970), 55.

Chapter 2. One Self

Lecture for the Dutch arts organization, De Balie, Amsterdam, December

1997. Published in Social Research, 67 (2000), 32-9.

1. Gottlob Frege, `The Thought: A Logical Inquiry', in P.F. Strawson, ed.,

Philosophical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 67.

2. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, vol. i of Remembrance of Things Past,

trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus,
1981), 5.

Chapter 3. What is your Substance?

Broadcast on BBC2 television, autumn 1982.

1. Walter H. Pater, 1873, The Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873),

119.

2. Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1955), 137.

Chapter 4. Speaking for Our Selves

Originally commissioned, but not published, by the New York Review of
Books; later published in Raritan, 9: 1 (1989), 68-98.

1. For the statistics cited on MPD, see F. W. Putnam et al., `The Clinical
Phenomenology of Multiple Personality Disorder: Review of 100 Recent
Cases', Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 47 (1986), 285-93.

2. DSM-III is Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (Washington, D.C.:

American Psychiatric Association, 1980).

3. Among the autobiographical accounts, by far the best written is Sylvia

Fraser, My Father's House (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988). Many short
case histories have been published in the clinical literature. J. Damgaard, S.
Van Benschoten, and J. Fagan, `An Updated Bibliography of Literature
Pertaining to Multiple Personality', Psychological Reports, 57 (1985), 131-7,
provides a comprehensive bibliography. For a more sceptical treatment, see
Thomas A. Fahy, `The Diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder: A Critical
Review', British Journal of Psychiatry, 153 (1988), 509-606.

4. David Hume, `Of Miracles' (1748), in Essays and Treatises on Several

Subjects (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1809), ii. 115-38, at 121.

5. See Daniel Dennett, `Why We Are All Novelists', Times Literary

Supplement, 16-22 September 1988, 1016-29.

6. Eugene Marais, The Soul of the White Ant (London: Methuen, 1937).
Douglas R. Hofstadter has developed the analogy between mind and ant
colony in the `Prelude ... Ant Fugue' flanking ch. 10 of Giidel, Escher, Bach
(New York: Basic Books, 1979). The `distributed control' approach to
designing intelligent machines has in fact had a long history in Artificial
Intelligence, going hack as far as Oliver Selfridge's early `Pandemonium'
model of 1959, and finding recent expression in Marvin Minsky's The
Society of Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).

7. The social function of self-knowledge has been stressed particularly by

Nicholas Humphrey in Consciousness Regained (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1983), and in The Inner Eye (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). For a
suggestive discussion of `active symbols' as something not unlike our notion
of a Head of Mind, see Douglas R. Hofstadter, `Prelude ... Ant Fugue', and
Metamagical Themas (New York: Basic Books, 1985), esp. 646-65.

8. C. S. Peirce, `What Pragmatism Is', Monist (1905), reprinted as `The

Essentials of Pragmatism' in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler
(New York: Dover, 1955), 258.

9. Heinz Kohut, `On Courage' (early 1970s), reprinted in H. Kohut, Self

Psychology and the Humanities, ed. Charles B. Strozier (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1985), 33.

10. Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979); The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

11. S4OS-Speaking for Our Selves: A Newsletter by, for, and about People
with Multiple Personality, P.O. Box 4830, Long Beach, Calif. 90804,
published quarterly between October 1985 and December 1987, when
publication was suspended (temporarily, it was hoped) due to a personal
crisis in the life of the editor. Its contents have unquestionably been the
sincere writings and drawings of MPD patients, often more convincingand
moving-than the many more professional autobiographical accounts that have
been published.

12. Frank W. Putnam, `The Psychophysiologic Investigation of Multiple

Personality Disorder', Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 7 (March 1984),
31-9; Scott D. Miller, `The Psychophysiological Investigation of Multiple
Personality Disorder: Review and Update', in B. G. Braun, ed., Dissociative
Disorders (Chicago: Dissociative Disorders Program, 1988), 113; Chicago;
Mary Jo Nissen, James L. Ross, Daniel B. Willingham, Thomas B.
MacKenzie, and Daniel L. Schachter, `Memory and Awareness in a Patient
with Multiple Personality Disorder', Brain and Cognition, 8 (1988), 117-34,
and `Evaluating Amnesia in Multiple Personality Disorder', in R. M. Klein
and B. K. Doane, eds., Psychological Concepts and Dissociative Disorders
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1994).

13. On incipient MPD in children, see David Mann and Jean Goodwin,
`Obstacles to Recognizing Dissociative Disorders in Child and Adolescent
Males', in Braun, ed., Dissociative Disorders, 35; Carole Snowden, `Where
Are All the Childhood Multiples? Identifying Incipient Multiple Personality
in Children', in Braun, ed., Dissociative Disorders, 36; Theresa K. Albini,
`The Unfolding of the Psychotherapeutic Process in a Four Year Old Patient
with Incipient Multiple Personality Disorder', in Braun, ed., Dissociative
Disorders, 37.

14. For a fascinating discussion of how individuals may mould themselves

to fit `fashionable' categories, see Ian Hacking, `Making Up People', in
Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, eds.,
Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1986), 222-36.

15. W. S. Taylor and M. E Martin, `Multiple personality', Journal of

Abnormal and Social Psychology, 39 (1944), 281-300.

Chapter 5. Love Knots

First published in the Guardian, 11 February 1987.

1. Donald Attwater, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1965).

2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th edn. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia

Britannica, Inc., 1929). The subsequent extracts come from the same edition.

3. John Donne, `An Epithalamion, Or Marriage Song on the Lady

Elizabeth and Count Palatine being Married on St Valentine's Day', Poetical
Works, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933),
113.

Chapter 6. Varieties of Altruism

First published in Social Research, 64 (1997), 199-209.

1. W. D. Hamilton, `The Evolution of Altruistic Behaviour', American

Naturalist, 97 (1963), 354-6.

2. Robert L. Trivers, `The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism', Quarterly

Review of Biology, 46 (1971), 35-57.

3. W. D. Hamilton, Narrow Roads of Gene Land: The Collected Papers of

W. D. Hamilton (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1996), i. 263.

4. Trivers, `The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism'.

5. Steven I. Rothstein, 1980, `Reciprocal Altruism and Kin Selection Are

Not Clearly Separable Phenomena', Journal of Theoretical Biology, 87
(1980),255-61.

6. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1976), 96; also The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1982), 155.

7. Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in

Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1996).

8. Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies (1863), ch. 5.

Chapter 7. The Uses of Consciousness

An abbreviated version of the James Arthur Memorial Lecture, American

Museum of Natural History, New York, 1987. Parts are taken from Nicholas
Humphrey, The Inner Eye (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).

1. Denis Diderot, Elements of Physiology (1774-80), in Diderot:

Interpreter of Nature, trans. and ed. Jonathan Kemp (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1937), 136.

2. Ibid. 139.

3. Charles Darwin, 'B Notebook' (1838), B232, in Paul H. Barrett, ed.,

Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 187.

4. Diderot, Elements of Physiology, 136.

5. J. B. Watson, Behaviorism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1928), 6.

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.

Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).

7. Diderot, Elements of Physiology, 139.

8. L. Weiskrantz, Blindsight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

9. Diderot, Elements of Physiology, 136.

10. Ibid. 134.

11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan

Paul, 1922), 189.

12. Denis Diderot, Promenade of a Skeptic (1747), in Diderot: Interpreter

of Nature, trans. and ed. Jonathan Kemp (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1937), 28.

13. See the brilliant discussion of self-reference in Douglas R. Hofstadter,

Godel, Escher, Bach (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

14. Donald R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1958).

15. Cited by A. V. Hill, The Ethical Dilemma of Science (New York:

Rockefeller Institute, 1960), 135.

16. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Pt. I, 294.

17. Diderot, Elements of Physiology, 138.

18. David Premack and Ann Premack, The Mind of an Ape (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1983).

Chapter 8. Farewell, Thou Art Too Dear

Broadcast on BBC2 television, autumn 1982.

1. W. H. Auden, `Writing', in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (London:

Faber & Faber, 1963).

Chapter 9. How to Solve the Mind-Body Problem

First published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (2000), 5-20.

Commentaries and my reply appear in the same issue of the journal.

1. Denis Diderot, On the Interpretation of Nature (1754), XXX, in The

Irresistible Diderot, ed. J. H. Mason (London: Quartet, 1982), 66.

2. Ibid. XLV, 68.

3. David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1996).

4. Colin McGinn, `Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?', Mind, 98

(1989), 349-66.

5. J. W. von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, 11 April 1827, trans.

John Oxenford (Bohn's Standard Library, 1850).

6. Diderot, On the Interpretation of Nature, XXIII, 46.

7. Compare the discussion of the same problem by J. Scott Kelso,

Dynamical Patterns: The Self-Organisation of Brain and Behavior
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 29.

8. A. S. Ramsey, Dynamics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1954), 42.

9. Peter Munz, `The Evolution of Consciousness: Silent Neurons and the

Eloquent Mind', Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 20 (1997),7-28.
10. Colin McGinn, `Consciousness and Cosmology: Hyperdualism
Ventilated', in M. Davies and G. W. Humphreys, eds., Consciousness
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 155-77, at 160.

11. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown,

1991).

12. Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989).

13. Isaac Newton, `A Letter from Mr. Isaac Newton ... Containing his New
Theory about Light and Colours', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, 80 (1671), 3075-87, at 3085.

14. Daniel C. Dennett, `Quining Qualia', in A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach,

eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), 42-77.

15. F. Crick and C. Koch, `The Unconscious Homunculus', Neuro-

Psychoanalysis, 2 (2000), 1-10.

16. Susan Greenfield, `How Might the Brain GenerateConsciousness?', in

Steven. Rose, ed., From Brains to Consciousness (London: Allen Lane,
1998), 210-27, at 210.

17. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens (London:

Heinemann, 2000), 9.

18. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ed. D.
Stewart (Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge, 1813), Pt. II, ch. 17, p. 265, and ch.
16, p. 249.

19. Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1992).

20. Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Pt. II, ch. 17, p. 265,
and ch. 16, p. 249.

21. Ned Block, `On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness',

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18 (1995), 227-47; John R. Searle, The
Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); see also my
discussion in Nicholas Humphrey, `Now You See It, Now You Don't', Neuro-
Psychoanalysis, 2 (2000), 14-17.

22. V. S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, `Three Laws of Qualia: What

Neurology Tells Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness',
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (1997), 429-57.

23. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764), ed. D. Stewart
(Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge, 1813), 112.

24. Humphrey, A History of the Mind.

25. Nicholas Humphrey, `The Thick Moment', in J. Brockman, ed., The

Third Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 198-208.

26. Denis Diderot, Elements of Physiology (1774-80), in Diderot:

Interpreter of Nature, trans. and ed. Jonathan Kemp (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1937), 139.

Chapter 10. The Privatization of Sensation

An abbreviated version of my keynote lecture at the Third Tucson

Conference on Consciousness, 1998, published in S. R. Hameroff, A. W.
Kaszniak, and D. J. Chalmers, eds., Toward a Science of Consciousness III
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 247-58; also in C. Heyes and L.
Huber, eds., The Evolution of Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2000), 241-52.

1. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn.

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 28.

2. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ed. D.

Stewart (Charlestown: Samuel Etheridge, 1813), 265.

3. Nicholas Humphrey, A History of the Mind (London: Chatto & Windus,

1992); Anthony J. Marcel, `Phenomenal Experience and Functionalism', in A.
J. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 121-58; Richard L. Gregory, `What Do
Qualia Do?', Perception, 25 (1996), 377-8.

4. Humphrey, A History of the Mind, 73.

5. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. P.

H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Pt. 11, ch. 32.

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M.

Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), Pt. I, S 272.

7. Daniel C. Dennett, `Quining Qualia', in A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach,

eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988), 42-77; however, compare Dennett's more nuanced position in
Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown, 1991).

8. Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1979).

9. Humphrey, A History of the Mind; Nicholas Humphrey, `The Thick

Moment', in J. Brockman, ed., The Third Culture (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995), 198-208.

10. Euan Macphail, `The Search for a Mental Rubicon', in C. Heyes and L.
Huber, eds., The Evolution of Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2000).

11. Gottlob Frege, `The Thought: A Logical Inquiry', in P. F. Strawson,

ed., Philosophical Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 27.

12. Rudyard Kipling, `A Smuggler's Song' (1914).

Chapter 11. Mind in Nature

First published in the Guardian, 10 December 1986.

1. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt,

1890), i. 8.

2. Jonathan Schull, `Are Species Intelligent?', Behavioral and Brain

Sciences, 3 (1990), 417-58.

3. Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 88-9.

Chapter 12. Cave Art, Autism, and Evolution

First published, with commentaries and a reply, in Cambridge Archaeological

journal, 8 (1998), 165-91; reprinted in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6
(1999), 116-43. Nadia's drawings are reproduced with kind permission of
Lorna Selfe and Academic Press.

1. E. H. Gombrich, `The Miracle at Chauvet', New York Review of Books,

14 November 1996, 8-12, at 8.

2. Steven J. Mithen, quoted by Tara Patel, `Stone Age Picassos', New

Scientist, 13 July 1996, 33-5, at 33.

3. Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious, trans. Ralph

Manheim (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 86.

4. Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of

Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997), 374.

5. Steven J. Mithen, `Looking and Learning: Upper Palaeolithic Art and

Information Gathering', World Archaeology, 19 (1988), 297-327, at 314.

6. Gombrich, `The Miracle at Chauvet', 10.

7. Lorna Selfe, Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an

Autistic Child (London: Academic Press, 1977; Lorna Selfe, Normal and
Anomalous Representational Drawing Ability in Children (London:
Academic Press, 1983); Lorna Selfe, `Anomalous Drawing Development:
Some Clinical Studies', in N. H. Freeman and M. V. Cox, eds., Visual Order:
The Nature and Development of Pictorial Representation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 135-54.

8. Selfe, Nadia, 127.

9. Jean Clottes, `Epilogue', in Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel

Deschamps, and Christian Hilaire, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996), 114.

10. Ibid.

11. See Uta Frith and Francesca Happe, `Autism: Beyond "Theory of
Mind"', Cognition, 50 (1994),115-32.

12. Amitta Shah and Uta Frith, `An Islet of Ability in Autistic Children: A
Research Note', Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 24 (1983), 611-
20.

13. Frith and Happe, `Autism'; see also L. Pring, B. Hermelin, and L.
Heavey, `Savants, Segments, Art and Autism', Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry, 36 (1995), 1065-76.

14. Selfe, Nadia, note to Pl. 33.

15. Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 16.

16. Selfe, `Anomalous Drawing Development', 140.

17. Selfe, Normal and Anomalous Representational Drawing Ability in

Children, 201.
 18. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

19. Steven J. Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1996).

20. Ibid. 163.

21. J. M. Keynes, `Newton the Man', in Newton Tercentenary Celebrations

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 34-7.

22. Nicholas Humphrey, `Species and Individuals in the Perceptual World

of Monkeys', Perception, 3 (1974), 105-14.

23. Elizabeth Newson, `Postscript' to Selfe, Nadia, 129.

24. Jean Clottes, `Thematic Changes in Upper Palaeolithic Art: A View

from the Grotte Chauvet', Antiquity, 70 (1996), 276-88.

25. Paul G. Bahn, Paul Bloom and Uta Frith, Ezra Zubrow, Steven Mithen,
Ian Tattersall, Chris Knight, Chris McManus, and Daniel C. Dennett,
Cambridge Archaeological journal, 8 (1998), 176-91.

26. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1985), 12,

27. Selfe, Nadia, 8 and 103.

28. Stephen Wiltshire's case is described in Oliver Sacks, `Prodigies', in An

Anthropologist on Mars (London: Picador, 1995), 179-232.

29. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little Brown,

1992); Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

30. Allen W. Snyder and Mandy Thomas, `Autistic Artists Give Clues to
Cognition', Perception, 26 (1997), 93-6, at 95.

31. See Sacks, `Prodigies'.

 32. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960), 18.

33. Selfe, Nadia, 8.

34. Geoffrey Miller, `How Mate Choice Shaped Human Nature', in Charles
Crawford and Denis Krebs, eds., Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
(Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1998).

35. Steven J. Mithen, report in New Scientist, 9 May 1998, 16.

Chapter 13. Scientific Shakespeare

First published in the Guardian, 26 August 1987.

1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

2. Thomas Maude, Wensley-Dale ... A Poem (1772), stanza 23, note;

probably apocryphal.

Chapter 14. The Deformed Transformed

Based on a radio talk, `The Mother of Invention', originally broadcast on

BBC Radio 3, November 1979.

1. W. Derham, Physico-Theology: Ora Demonstration of the Being and

Attributes of God from His Works of Creation, 6th edn. (London, 1723), 321.

2. W. Ikle, D. N. Ikle, S. G. Morland, L. M. Fanshaw, N. Waas, and A. M.

Rosenberg, `Survivors of Neonatal Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation at
School Age: Unusual Findings on Intelligence Testing', Developmental
Medical Child Neurology, 41 (1999), 307-10.

3. Narinder Kapur, `Paradoxical Functional Facilitation in BrainBehaviour

Research: A Critical Review', Brain, 119 (1996), 1775-90.

4. Geoffrey Miller, `Sexual Selection for Indicators of Intelligence', in The

Nature of Intelligence (Novartis Foundation Symposium 233) (Chichester:
Wiley, 2000).

5. S. W. Gangestad and J. A. Simpson, `The Evolution of Mating:

TradeOffs and Strategic Pluralism', Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 23
(2000).

6. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 2nd edn. (London: Murray,

1861), 149.

7. Derham, Physico-Theology, 268.

8. Editorial on `Irritant Woods', British Medical journal, 16 October 1976,

900.

9. Nicholas Humphrey, `The Social Function of Intellect', in P. P. G.

Bateson and R. A. Hinde, eds., Growing Points in Ethology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 303-17, at 311.

10. Nehemiah Grew, Cosmologica Sacra (1701), Bk. 1, ch. 5, sect. 25,
quoted by Derham, Physico-Theology, 292.

11. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, II. i. 12-13.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), in A Nietzsche Reader,

ed. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 100.

13. Martin Amis, Night Train (New York: Harmony Books, 1998).

14. See Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life (London: Wiley, 1996), 61.

15. In the simplest case, as I've outlined it, we will be looking for evidence
of the original genetic traits being replaced by invented and culturally
transmitted ones. However, in reality this picture may have become blurred
somewhat in the longer course of human evolution. The reason is that there is
a well established rule in evolution, to the effect that when the same kind of
learning occurs generation after generation, invented or learned traits tend
over time to get `assimilated' into the genome, so that eventually they
themselves become genetically based (the `Baldwin effect', see Chapter 11).
We must be prepared, therefore, for the possibility that a genetic trait has
been replaced by a learned one as a result of the Grew effect, but that this
new trait may nonetheless itself today be largely genetic.

16. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (London: Cape, 1967).

17. Anyone who has watched pigmy chimpanzees in sex play, or for that
matter anyone who has ever fondled a pet cat, will realize that tactile
stimulation can be pleasurable enough even through a hairy pelt. And anyone
who has observed cheetahs or lions hunting on the savannah or gazelles
outrunning them, will realize that it is possible for hair-covered animals to
keep up a sustained chase without suffering major problems of overheating.
But, in any case, it is not even clear that the net result of hairlessness for
ancestral humans would have been to reduce the danger of overheating, since
one of the prices that has to be paid for hairlessness is a black-pigmented
skin, to prevent damage to the body's biochemistry from the ultraviolet light
that now falls directly on the body surface: and black skins of course absorb
more infra-red radiation and so tend to heat up faster in sunlight (besides
cooling faster at night).

18. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, ed. Steve Jones, Robert

Martin, and David Pilbeam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
49.

19. Ian Tattersall, Becoming Human (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998),
148.

20. D. N. Farrer, `Picture Memory in the Chimpanzee', Perceptual and

Motor Skills, 25 (1967), 305-15.

21. New evidence that chimpanzees have picture memory is contained in

Nobuyuki Kawai and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, `Numerical Memory Span in a
Chimpanzee', Nature, 403 (2000), 39-40.

22. Daniel Povinelli, Folk Physics for Apes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000) 308-11.
 23. A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, trans. Lynn Solotaroff
(London: Cape, 1969), 59.

24. Jorge Luis Borges invented perhaps an even more startling example in
his story 'Furies the Memorious' (Ficciones, 1956). `He knew by heart the
forms of the southern clouds at dawn on 30 April 1882, and could compare
them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he
had seen only once, and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the
Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were
not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations,
thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his
halfdreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never
hesitated, but each reconstruction had required another whole day. He told
me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since
the world has been the world." ... I suspect, however, that he was not very
capable of thought. To think is to forget differences, generalise, make
abstractions. In the teeming world of Furies, there were only details, almost
immediate in their presence.' ('Furies the Memorious', in Jorge Luis Borges,
Labyrinths, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 92.)

25. Jonathan W. Schooler and Tonya Y. Engstler-Schooler, `Verbal

Overshadowing of Visual Memories: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid',
Cognitive Psychology, 22 (1990), 36-71.

26. This is the field of `cognitive archaeology'. The sort of thing that can
be done, for instance, is to follow the design of stone tools, and look for
evidence of when their makers first begin to think of each tool as being of a
definite kind-a `hammer', a `chopper', a `blade' (compare our own conceptual
expectations of `knife', `fork', and `spoon'). See Steven J. Mithen, The
Prehistory of the Mind (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996).

27. This seems too recent? It does seem surprisingly recent. Not much time
for a genetic trait to spread through the entire human population. I think the
best way to understand it is, in fact, to attribute at least part of the change to
non-genetic means-to the snowballing of a meme; see also the discussion in
Chapter 12.

28. It is for just this reason that modern-day computer programmers, when
updating a complex program, generally prefer to suppress obsolete bits of the
old program rather than excise them-with the interesting result that the latest
version of the program still contains large swathes of earlier, obsolete
versions in a silenced form. The software for WordPerfect 9.0, for instance,
almost certainly has long strings of the programs for WordPerfect 1.0 to 8.0
hidden in its folders. We do not know whether the DNA of Homo sapiens
sapiens still contains long strings of the DNA of earlier human versions
hidden in its folders (perhaps as what is called junk DNA)-Homo erectus,
Homo babilis, Australopithecus, etc. But, since what makes sense for
modern-day programmers of software has almost certainly always made
sense for natural selection as a programmer of DNA, we should not be
surprised to find that this is so.

29. C. Holden, `Probing Nature's Hairy Secrets', Science, 268 (1995),

1439.

30. B. L. Miller, J. Cummings, E Mishkin, K. Boone, E Prince, M. Ponton,

and C. Cotman, `Emergence of Artistic Talent in Frontotemporal Dementia',
Neurology, 51 (1998), 978-82.

31. Eugene Marais, The Soul of the Ape (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

32. J. Klepkamp, A. Riedel, C. Harper, and H.-J. Ktretschman,

`Morphometric Study on the Postnatal Growth of the Visual Cortex of
Australian Aborigines and Caucasians', Journal of Brain Research, 35 (1994),
541-8.

33. There would seem to be two possibilities. One is the one I have been
pushing, namely that in normal brains there is active inhibition of memory,
which has been put there as a designed-in feature in order to limit memory. In
this case, if there are particular individuals in whom the influence is lifted,
this will likely he because the specific genes responsible for the inhibition are
not working, or the pathways by which these genes work are damaged.
 But the alternative possibility, which I have also allowed for above, is that
in normal brains there is competition for resources between memory and
other mental functions such as language, so that, far from being a designed-in
feature, the limits on memory are merely a side effect of the brain trying to do
several jobs at the same time. In this case, if the influence is lifted, this will
more likely he because the competition from the other mental operations is
reduced or eliminated.

Which is it? Most theorists, apart from me, would favour the competition
explanation. I do not say they are wrong. It is certainly true that, with the
artistic patients with dementia, their skills emerge only when their language
falls away. Autistic savant children almost always have retarded language;
and if their language begins to improve, their abilities for drawing or
remembering usually decline (as in fact happened to Nadia). Even in normal
children who have eidetic imagery, this tends to disappear around the same
time as language is developing. All this does suggest that heightened memory
in such cases is due to the lack of competition from language-and that the
diminishment of language has come first.

Several researchers have in fact argued that the `islands of exceptional

ability' in autism are a direct result of brain resources being freed up because
they are not being used in the ways they would be normally. For arguments to
this effect, see the review by Rita Carter, `Tune In, Turn Off', New Scientist,
9 October 1999, 30-4.

All the same, I am not sure. For a start, some of the evidence just cited
could equally well be given the reverse interpretation, namely that the lack of
language is due to an over-capacious memory-and that it is actually the
heightening of memory that comes first. But the best evidence that, in some
cases anyway, it all begins, rather than ends, with heightened memory comes
from those rare cases such as S. in whom the release of memory occurs
without any accompanying defects in language.

34. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist, 63.

35. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2000).

36. Ibid.

37. See, for example, the discussion of mistakes by Daniel Dennett, `How
to Make Mistakes', in John Brockman and Katinka Matson, eds., How Things
Are (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), 137-44.

38. CNN radio news report, New York, 1 August 1998.

39. Matthew 19: 30.

40. Lord Byron, The Deformed Transformed (1824), 1. i. 313-21.

Chapter 15. Tall Stories from Little Acorns

First published in the Guardian, 1 July 1987.

1. E A. Keynes, Gathering Up the Threads (Cambridge: W. Helfer & Sons,

1950)

2. W. H. Auden, `Writing', in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (London:

Faber & Faber, 1963).

Chapter 16. Behold the Man

Inaugural lecture, New School for Social Research, New York, November
1995; partly based on chs. 13 and 14 of Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Searching:
Human Nature and Supernatural Belief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995),
published in the USA as Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for
Supernatural Consolation (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

1. Jerry Fodor, Representations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981),

316.

2. Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928),

opening paragraph.
 3. Advertisement for the Perrott-Warrick Fellowship, Darwin College,
Cambridge, 1991.

4. Biblical accounts of Jesus's life cannot of course be trusted to be

historically accurate: they were written many years after the supposed events,
and in any case they were the work of men who had an obvious interest in
embellishing their stories. We cannot expect to be able to subject the reports
of Jesus's miracles to the kind of cross-examination we might want to give a
more reliable history. Nevertheless, it is a valuable exercise to consider what
we shold make of this testamentary evidence if we had reason to take it at
face value.

5. See accounts in Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (London: Gollancz,

1978); Paul Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation (Buffalo, N.Y.:
Prometheus Books, 1986).

6. See Smith, Jesus the Magician, 90.

7. Ibid. 92-3.

8. Origen, Against Celsus, quoted ibid. 83.

9. Luke 4: 23.

10. Mark 6: 5.

11. Smith, Jesus the Magician, 141.

12. Matthew 13:58.

13. John 4: 48.

14. Matthew 27: 40, 42.

15. Ernst Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 18.
 16. Romans 1: 3.

17. Isaiah 7: 14.

18. Micah 5:2.

19. Numbers 24: 17.

20. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version (London: Viking, 1991);
A. N. Wilson, Jesus (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992); also sources cited in
Smith, Jesus the Magician, and Kurtz, The Transcendental Temptation.

21. J. Mayo, 0. White, and H. J. Eysenck, `An Empirical Study of the

Relation between Astrological Factors and Personality', Journal of Social
Psychology, 105 (1978), 229-36.

22. H. J. Eysenck and D. K. B. Nias, Astrology: Science or Superstition?

(New York: St Martin's Press, 1982).

23. Wilson, Jesus, 73-86.

24. Luke 2:48, 49.

25. Nicholas Humphrey, `Folie a Deux', Guardian, 8 April 1987. (The

boy's name has been changed to preserve anonymity.)

26. Uri Geller, quoted by David Marks and Richard Kammann, The
Psychology of the Psychic (Buffalo, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980), 90; see
also Uri Geller, My Story (New York: Praeger, 1975).

27. Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue: An Autobiography (New York:

Macmillan, 1952), 36.

28. Arthur Koestler, quoted by Adam Smith in New York magazine, 27

December 1976.

29. Uri Geller, quoted by Merrily Harpur, `Uri Geller and the Warp
Factor', Fortean Times, 78 (1994), 34.
 30. Cited by Martin Gardner, Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 163.

31. A good review is given in Robert Buckman and Karl Sabbagh, Magic
or Medicine? An Investigation of Healing and Healers (London: Macmillan,
1993).

32. Uri Geller, quoted by Marks and Kammann, The Psychology of the
Psychic, 92.

33. Ibid. 107-9.

34. Psalm 22: 1, 9-10.

35. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. David Magarshak

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 446-7.

36. See the final chapter of Humphrey, Soul Searching.

Chapter 17. Hello, Aquarius!

First published in the Guardian, 16 October 1986.

Chapter 18. Bugs and Beasts Before the Law

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, November 1986.

1. E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of

Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906; reprinted, with a foreword by Nicholas
Humphrey, London: Faber & Faber, 1987).

2. No one, I gather, has challenged Evans's facts relating to the trials as

such, although he has been caught out in one or two minor historical
inaccuracies. J. J. Finkelstein, `The Ox that Gored', Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 71 (1981), Pt. 2, 47-89) concludes that `a
considerable part of the evidence is beyond suspicion'. Nonetheless,
Finkelstein among others has raised scholarly objections to Evans's `style',
and in particular to some of his more sweeping historical and psychological
pronouncements.

3. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals,

1987 reprint, 156.

4. Ibid. 107.

5. Ibid. 114.

6. Ibid. 115.

7. Ibid. 117.

8. Ibid. 118.

9. Ibid. 112.

10. Ibid., Appendix C, 260 (my translation).

11. Ibid. I 11.

12. Ibid. 48.

13. Ibid. 154.

14. Ibid. 150.

15. Jean Racine, The Litigants, trans. W. R. Dunstan (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1928).

16. Act III, lines 124 ff.

17. I refer in particular to W. W. Hyde, `The Prosecution of Animals and

Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times', University of
Pennsylvania Law Review, 64 (1916), 696-730; Finkelstein, `The Ox that
Gored'; Esther Cohen, `Law, Folklore and Animal Lore', Past and Present,
110 (1986), 8-37; see also Jean Vartier, Les proces d'animaux du moyen age
a nos fours (Paris: Hachette, 1970).

18. See, for example, Rosalind Hill, Both Small and Great Beasts (London:
Universities' Federation for Animal Welfare, 1955); Linda Price, `Punishing
Man and Beast', Police Review, August 1986; James Serpell, In the Company
of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Ted Walker's reading of Evans in
1970 inspired an extraordinary poem, republished in Gloves to the Hangman
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1973).

19. Hyde, `The Prosecution of Animals and Lifeless Things'.

20. E. Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas

(London: Macmillan, 1906).

21. Cohen, `Law, Folklore and Animal Lore'.

22. In relation to supernatural cures for natural plagues, I would quote the
great ecologist Charles Elton: `The affair runs always along a similar course.
Voles multiply. Destruction reigns. There is dismay, followed by outcry, and
demands to Authority. Authority remembers its experts and appoints some:
they ought to know. The experts advise a Cure. The Cure can be almost
anything: golden mice, holy water from Mecca, a Government Commission,
a culture of bacteria, poison, prayers denunciatory or tactful, a new god, a
trap, a Pied Piper. The Cures have only one thing in common: with a little
patience they always work. They have never been known entirely to fail.
Likewise they have never been known to prevent the next outbreak. For the
cycle of abundance and scarcity has a rhythm of its own, and the Cures are
applied just when the plague of voles is going to abate through its own loss of
momentum.' From C. Elton, Voles, Mice and Lemmings: Problems in
Population Dynamics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942).

23. `Indeed, practice provides the strongest argument for connecting the
two phenomena, for they exhibit a correlation of time and space. Both animal
and witch trials seem to have become increasingly common in Switzerland
and the adjoining French and Italian areas during the fifteenth century, and
the coincidence is all the more striking because of the almost total absence of
any earlier tradition of secular animal trials in Switzerland. Not surprisingly,
Switzerland also witnessed the emergence of a hybrid type of process: the
trial of an individual animal by a secular court on charges of supernatural
behaviour.' Cohen, `Law, Folklore and Animal Lore'.

24. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1985), 12.

25. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals,

142 and 288.

26. Ibid. 296.

27. Plato, Laws, Bk. IX, quoted by Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and
Capital Punishment of Animals, 173.

28. Ibid.

29. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Bk. 2, ch. 6.

30. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1773), Epistle IV, I. 49.

31. W. B. Yeats, `The Second Coming' (1921).

32. Sigmund Freud, remarkably enough, seems to have believed the

opposite. When a death occurs, he wrote, `Our habit is to lay stress on the
fortuitous causation of the death-accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in
this way we betray an effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance
event.'

33. London Evening Standard, 1 April 1986.

34. After this chapter was broadcast as a talk in 1986 and Evans's book was
reprinted in 1987, there was a flurry of new interest in animal trials. In
particular, Julian Barnes lifted a long section from the Appendix to the 1906
edition of the book for his own use in his novel A History of the World in
10'12 Chapters (London: Cape, 1987), and Leslie Megahey made a feature
film about the trial of a pig, The Hour of the Pig (BBC Productions, 1994).

35. Cited in Joseph Hemingway, History of the City of Chester (Chester:

Fletcher, 1831), i. 360-1. `It is given by Mr. Willett, in his History of
Hawarden Parish, who says it is a correct translation from an old Saxon
manuscript.'

Chapter 19. Great Expectations

Keynote lecture at the International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm,

2000.

1. Howard Brody, `The Placebo Response: Recent Research and

Implications for Family Medicine', Journal of Family Practice, 49 (2000),
649-54; Robert Buckman and Karl Sabbagh, Magic or Medicine: An
Investigation of Healing and Healers (London: Macmillan, 1993);
Christopher C. French, `The Placebo Effect', in P. Hixenbaugh, R. Roberts,
and D. Groome, eds., Gateways to the Mind: The Psychology of Unusual
Experience (London: Edward Arnold, 2001); Anne Harrington, The Placebo
Effect (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Irving Kirsch,
How Expectancies Shape Experience (Washington, D.C.: American
Psychological Association, 1999); J. M. S. Pearce, `The Placebo Enigma',
Quarterly Journal of Medicine, 88 (1995), 215-20; Esther M. Sternberg, The
Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (New York:
W. H. Freeman, 2000); Margaret Talbot, `The Placebo Prescription', New
York Times Magazine, 9 January 2000; Patrick D. Wall, `The Placebo and
the Placebo Response,' in P. D. Wall and R. Melzack, eds., Textbook of Pain,
4th edn. (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1999), 1-12.

2. Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Healing (London: Warner Books, 1995), 52.

3. Ibid. 53.

4. Buckman, and Sabbagh, Magic or Medicine, 246.

5. E. Ernst and K. L. Resch, `Concept of True and False Placebo Effects',

British Medical Journal, 311 (1995), 551-3, at 552.
 6. Weil, Spontaneous Healing, 771 (my italics).

7. Sternberg, The Balance Within.

8. G. Zajicek, `The Placebo Effect Is the Healing Force of Nature', Cancer

Journal, 8 (1995 ), 44-5, at 44.

9. Arthur K. Shapiro and Elaine Shapiro, `The Placebo Effect: Is It Much

Ado about Nothing?', in Anne Harrington , ed., The Placebo Effect
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 12-36, at 31.

10. Randolph Nesse and George C. Williams, Why We Get Sick (New
York: Times Books, 1994).

11. Randolph Nesse, `What Good Is Feeling Bad?', The Sciences,

November 1991, 30-7.

12. Ian P. Owens and Ken Wilson, `Immunocompetence: A Neglected Life

History Trait or a Conspicuous Red Herring?', Trends in Evolution and
Ecology, 14 (1999), 170-2; B. C. Sheldon and S. Verhulst, `Ecological
Immunology: Costly Parasite Defences and TradeOffs in Evolutionary
Ecology', Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 11 (1996),31 7-21.

13. E. Svensson, L. Raberg, C. Koch, and D. Hasselquist, `Energetic

Stress, Immunosuppression and the Costs of an Antibody Response',
Functional Ecology (in press).

14. V. A. Olson and I. P. E Owens, `Costly Sexual Signals: Are

Carotenoids Rare, Risky or Required?', Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 13
(1998), 510-14.

15. L. Raherg, M. Grahn, D. Hasselquist, and E. Svensson, `On the

Adaptive Significance of Stress-Induced lmmunosuppression', Proceedings of
the Royal Society, B, 265 (1998), 1637-41.

16. A. P. Moller, P. Christe, and E. Lux, `Parasitism, Host Immune

Function and Sexual Selection', Quarterly Review of Biology, 74 (1999), 3-
20.

17. Peter Salovey, Alexander J. Rothman, Jerusha B. Detweiler, and

Wayne T. Steward, `Emotional States and Physical Health', American
Psychologist, 55 (2000), 110-21; and other articles in the special issue on
Happiness, Excellence and Optimal Human Functioning, ed. Martin E. P.
Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, American Psychologist, 55 (2000),
1-169.

18. Shlomo Breznitz, `The Effect of Hope on Pain Tolerance', Social

Research, 66 (1999), 629-52.

19. Ibid. 647.

20. Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Searching: Human Nature and Supernatural

Belief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995); published in the USA as Leaps of
Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation (New
York: Basic Books, 1996).

21. Patrick D. Wall, Pain: The Science of Suffering (London: Weidenfeld

& Nicolson, 1999).

22. Stephen Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (London: Vintage,

1994), 207.

Chapter 20. What Shall We Tell the Children?

Oxford Amnesty lecture, 1997. Published in Wes Williams, ed., The Values
of Science: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1997 (Oxford: Westview Press,
1998), 58-79, and in Social Research, 65 (1998), 777-805.

1. Christopher Cherniak, `The Riddle of the Universe and its Solution'

(1979), reprinted in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds., The
Mind's I (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

2. Vladimir Mayakovsky, `1' (1912), in Mayakovsky and his Poetry, trans.

George Reavey (Bombay: Current Book House, 1955).
 3. Statistics from sources quoted in Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Searching:
Human Nature and Supernatural Belief (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995).

4. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 1996

(Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1996).

5. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1976), ch. 11.

6. Jesuit divine (apocryphal).

7. Donald B. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture (Baltimore, Md.:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 119.

8. `Home Schools: How Do They Affect Children?', APA Monitor,

December 1996.

9. Court ruling, Iowa, 1985, cited by James G. Dwyer, `Parents' Religion

and Children's Welfare: Debunking the Doctrine of Parents' Rights',
California Law Review, 82 (1994), 1371-1447, at 1396.

10. John F. Schumaker, Wings of Illusion (London: Polity Press, 1990),

33.

11. See, for example, the review by Jerome Kagan, `Three Pleasing Ideas',
American Psychologist, 51 (1996), 901-8.

12. Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish Culture, 218.

13. Richard Dawkins, `Viruses of the Mind', in Bo Dahlbom, ed., Dennett

and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 13-27.

14. Johan Reinhard, `Peru's Ice Maidens', National Geographic, June 1996,
68-81, at 69.

15. Supreme Court ruling, 1972, cited by Dwyer, `Parents' Religion and
Children's Welfare', 1385.
 16. Supreme Court ruling, 1986, cited ibid. 1409.

17. Cited by Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (New York: Random
House, 1996), 325.

18. Cited ibid.

19. Supreme Court ruling, 1972, cited by Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish
Culture, 120.

20. See the extended discussion by Dwyer, `Parents' Religion and

Children's Welfare'; also James G. Dwyer, `The Children We Abandon:
Religious Exemptions to Child Welfare and Education Laws as Denials of
Equal Protection to Children of Religious Objectors', North Carolina Law
Review, 74 (1996), 101-258.

21. Supreme Court ruling, 1972, cited by Kraybill, The Riddle of Amish
Culture, 120.

22. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics (2nd century), ch. 7.

23. Adelard of Bath, Astrolabium (12th century), quoted in David C.

Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992)

24. Deuteronomy 30: 19.

25. 1 am indebted for several of the ideas here to James Dwyer, whose
critique of the idea of parents' rights stands as a model of philosophical and
legal reasoning.

Chapter 21. The Number of the Beast

First published in New Scientist, 25 June 1989.

1. Revelation 14: 17-18.

2. Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P.Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1955), 315.

Chapter 22. Arms and the Man

Based on an address given at the festival `A World in Peril', organized by

Professions for World Disarmament and held in Southwark Cathedral,
London, on 25 October 1986. Published in New Blackfriar's Journal, 68
(1987), 35-40.

1. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage (1938), trans. Eric Bentley (London:

Methuen, 1962).

2. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other
Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. Matthew 25: 29.

4. Matthew 25: 16-18, 25.

Chapter 23. Death in Tripoli

First published in the Guardian, 14 January 1987.

1. William Wordsworth, `Tax Not the Royal Saint' (1822).

2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), Bk. I. i. 2, from Philo

sophies of Beauty, ed. and trans. E. F. Carritt (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1931).

3. Lao-Tzu (6th century sc), trans. Ernest Crosby.

4. William Shakespeare, Richard II, V. vi. 39-48.

Chapter 24. Follow My Leader

Talk given at the Institute of Historical Research, 6 June 2001, in a seminar

on `Dictatorship: The Seduction of the Masses'.
 1. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000).

2. Denis Diderot, Supplement to the Voyage of M. Bougainville (1772), Pt.

IV, in Diderot, Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings, trans. J. Stewart and
J. Kemp (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1937), 187.

3. Plato, The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1955), 314.

4. Carl Schmitt, quoted by Andrew Arato, `Goodbye to Dictatorships?',

Social Research, 67 (2000), 925-55, at 933.

5. Arato, `Goodbye to Dictatorships?', 943; compare Heidegger's speech as

rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933: `Not theorems and rules ought to
be the rules of your Being. The Fiihrer himself personifies German reality
and its law for today and the future.'

6. Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd, `Why People Punish Defectors',

Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208 (2001), 79, and `The Evolution of
Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences',
Evolution and Human Behavior, 19 (1998), 215-41; see also Joseph Henrich
and Francisco J. Gil-White, `The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred
Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural
Transmission', Evolution and Human Behavior, 22 (2001), 165-96.

7. John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth

Press, 1926), 3.