nm0240: i've lectured to you lot most of you welcome namex welcome namex er 
about real ecology now it may come as a surprise to a lot of you that there are 
a lot of other real ecologies it is my belief that there are a lot of other 
real ecologies all over the place but they happen not to be on this planet but 
on other planets other aqueous planets around in the galaxy 
nm0240: i don't think it's important that you should know about these because i 
think it highly unlikely as my slide three from the end will say that we're 
actually going to meet them or recognize them if they are actually here but i 
think it's a very good biological exercise and an exercise for your er 
understanding of this ecology to see it in a broader context and see what else 
might have happened i professionally design ecologies for science fiction 
authors and i have to des-, i have to invent credible ones and credible means 
running by rules that everyone can see want to 
come round 'cause you know you can't see the slides 
sm0242: no i'm fine 
nm0240: you're fine yeah er this is a history of life on Earth four-and-a-half-
thousand-million years ago the Earth was formed very soon after its formation 
as you now know life appeared which suggests that life is pretty easy to make 
well fine we ought to be able to know what pretty easy means and to that 
purpose we use some mathematics now i'm delighted that as a reproductive 
biologist i find that mathematics is just as sexy as being in the Biology 
department but i want to talk just for a moment about ways of thinking Chip 
Delany science fiction author wrote a book called Empire Star in the nineteen-
seventies and in this he invented a way of thinking about thinking that namex 
and i like and this is from the Collapse of Chaos book he says simplex thinking 
is what most people do most of the time if you say 
to someone what's the most important thing about such and such and they answer 
you they're a simplex thinker if you say hang on Alec what's the most important 
thing in your life and he says just a minute there isn't a most important thing 
it depends where i am sometimes it's this and sometimes it's that and you have 
several axes on which you can go and you can find interesting things off those 
and most of you i'm pleased to say because we've been trying very hard to make 
you do this are complex thinkers but few of you are multiplex thinkers and a 
multiplex thinker according to Chip Delany is someone who not only takes into 
account what is and the different axes but also what could be the whole range 
of possibilities around what is and i suspect i'll be doing a lot of talking 
with you individually about this but i'm talking about the fa-, space of 
possibilities around what actually happens if you go to an historian an 
American historian and you 
say tell me about Abraham Lincoln and what happened in the theatre and he says 
the bullet the calibre of the bullet was so and so the the assassin was called 
such and such this is what happened that's simplex if he says but the same time 
there were twelve other people trying to assassinate him and the security 
arrangements had been bunked up and the theatre had this you think okay that's 
pretty complex but if he then goes on to say but if Abraham lin-, if it had not 
been Abraham Lincoln who had been elected but somebody else this would have 
happened if Abraham Lincoln had not been shot then this is what i think would 
have happened to American history that's a bit of multiplex thinking i'm going 
to suggest to you that what we are talking about here is multiplex thinking 
about ecology and it's difficult and enormous fun as so many difficult things 
are now don't pretend to understand everything about biology and you don't need 
to when namex and i went 
to Neufchâtel we saw in the museum there this which i thought was a myth the 
roi des rats the king of the rats you've heard about it in in your er fairy 
stories rats found with all their tails tied together sometimes three sometimes 
fifty most of them starving some of them having been eaten by others now 
whether this is a peculiar cult that does this has been and has been doing it 
since nineteen-twen since er sixteen-twenty i have no idea but it is a terribly 
puzzling thing and i have no idea where to begin to ask questions about it so a 
lot of things that really happened that i don't have any i can't put it in any 
context at all that's called science you have contexts of ways of working and 
you know what to exclude that's a frog at the bottom of a seven-four-seven and 
for me exemplifies ambition [laughter] even though there's lots i don't know 
about i'm nevertheless going to try and take on 
what are other ecologies like even though i don't understand our ecology 
because i have one trick and the trick i invented back in the sixties and it 
seemed very persuasive to people and it goes like this here again is the 
history of our planet oldest rocks about four-and-a-half-thousand-million years 
ago and they've got life traces in i'm going to suggest to you therefore that 
because of our changed minds about chemistry life is downhill to chemistry and 
if you like i'll show you a B-Z reaction but i'm not going to do it now you've 
seen it before haven't you the the this self-complicating chemical reaction 
invented by Belousov and Zhabotinsky and refined and made robust by Winfree and 
me have you seen it have i shown it to you now i should have brought it down 
but it there isn't time in this lecture we'll do it perhaps i'll come down 
before lunch and and show it to you er it is n-, unlike all the chemistry you 
did at school all the 
chemistry you did at school had to finish in two hours yes God is not limited 
like that and nearly all of the chemistry that God does like ozone layers and 
clays takes millions of years and is very recursive it it is autocatalytic even 
something as simple as reacting hydrogen and oxygen together requires 
autocatalysis unless there's some water there it doesn't work and there are 
twenty-seven molecules on the way from H and O to water things like H-thirteen-
three-O and lots of missing electrons it's a very very complicated recursive 
reaction even something that appears so simple and the living recursive 
reactions are it seems quite easy to get going the last three issues of nature 
have had big steps on the way what i want to talk about however is something 
different i want to say that many different creatures prokaryotes at this time 
invented photosynthesis now you know that three-quarters of the history of our 
planet has been prokaryote eukaryotes with nuclei 
only appeared about a thousand-million years ago and that's to say if you say 
an Earth-like planet to a science fiction author what you're talking about is a 
planet with almost no life on the land just a few seaweeds er no not much 
oxygen in the atmosphere take the point for three-quarters of its life Earth 
has been like that and only in the last six-hundred-million years or so has 
there been this great efflorescence of the er er has Earth been polluted by 
life [laughter] now bear in mind this biggest distinction these are my cheek 
cells and on them are bacteria these are the nuclei of the cheek cells there is 
a contrast for you between a prokaryote a reasonable-sized proka-, a reasonable-
sized eukaryote that thing that happened about a thousand-mill no probably 
longer two-thousand-million years ago the getting together of several 
prokaryotes into a symbiosis didn't happen only once 
actinomycetes are another go several protozoa like giardia are other attempts 
to do this it isn't something that happened only once photosynthesis isn't 
something that happened only once therefore and this is the argument if you ran 
evolution again on this planet you'd get photosynthesis you'd get life because 
it's downhill to chemistry that's one kind of argument but having got chemical 
systems with the properties of living systems you will then get photosynthesis 
because there have been at least twelve attempts there are twelve attempts 
still with us never mind how many were oh great were tried and failed er sorry 
i can't go backwards on this machine now we have a picture of an ecology and i 
want to take you away from having this kind of picture the picture of man 
managing it of all the organisms being so beautifully together i'm not talking 
about that i'm talking about the real 
ecology as it is systems which rely on eating each other's babies we're talking 
the real nasty world here and in the real nasty world there are lots of 
attempts at photos-, photosynthesis there are lots of attempts at many of the 
things that have happened during our evolution er we don't have to worry about 
the origin of life i think and i can argue this with you separately it's an 
hour's lecture by itself [laughter] the whole idea of it being a miracle is in 
the past because of reactions like this one the B-Z reaction you shake it up 
but it does it again you shake it up it have you not seen this oh well i'll 
bring it down after the talk and namex can film it as well er now one of the 
things that's been invented a lot of times is sex [laughter] this is God saying 
to Noah never mind the other amoeba and you know why don't you because amoeba 
porn flicks only have one actor [laughter] yes er [laugh] er sex 
has been invented many independent times the ascomycete fungi the red algae 
have all got odd variations it seems to be very important and we don't 
understand why i think in general the argument for sex despite Graham Bell has 
not been well argued but it's happened a lot of times another thing that has 
happened a lot of times is that creatures eukaryotes have become multicellular 
there's an example with volvox but there are other examples er the the 
multicellular seaweeds the animals are all different attempts at going 
multicellular so and this is the argument the default is that if i ran the 
system again you would get oxygen in the atmosphere because something will 
invent photosynthesis you would get eukaryotes because the symbiosis is driven 
by the presence of oxygen people try and cuddle up to mitochondria which are 
using a lot of oxygen because it's er a much more comfortable place than where 
there aren't any mitochondria and where 
there's a lot of oxygen in the water and cuddling up to mitochondria you're 
very soon in-, having a eukaryote cell that will happen again if you ran 
evolution again on this planet therefore here's the jump on other aqueous 
planets it's going to happen i hope you take that argument something that 
happens many times here i call a universal universal meaning wherever life 
starts that is on every aqueous planet you're going to get photosynthesis 
flight well what i call the four Fs photosynthesis sorry about that flight fur 
fur on plants fur on bumblebees fur on mammals and mating [laughter] right now 
before the Burgess Shale some seven- thou-, seven-hundred-million years ago 
there were a lot of Ediacarian Ediacaran creatures do you know about this 
people told you about the history of life no perhaps not which probably have 
resulted in today's coelenterates lots and lots of two layered 
creatures whether [laughter] they're two layered and they're easy to make and 
it's the easiest way to go multicellular if you're a i don't know i don't know 
i think it's just simply that these are easy but i have some nice hydra i don't 
have any upstairs because they'd die in the atmosphere of this place i brought 
some from home i've taken some over to the film people we've got some lovely 
ones the same ones as these but they die in this place these are hydra some of 
you will have seen them around the place they're really rather pretty they are 
probably a simple animal to make and that general pattern has appeared several 
times now i want to take about the Burgess Shale i hope you all know about 
Burgess Shale i hope you know that six-hundred-million years ago or thereabouts 
many many body forms different body forms were tried and i'm going to go 
through them in a moment it isn't that we have a tree of 
life that branches it's that we have lots and lots of little bushes and lots of 
grass things start and you they don't continue into the future and here are 
some of the things that didn't continue into the future from there from there 
tail fins Amiskwia lots of goo-, well preserved soft-bodied creatures some hard-
bodied creatures Marrella it probably a very odd trilobite and we had other 
trilobites for a long time but we don't have any now Nectocaris with a looking 
like an arthropod in front and a chordate with the tail fin at the back lots of 
body plans tried out there's a beast Anomalocaris few of them survive to now a 
polychaete Canadia and that's one that we do have representative of now 
Hallucinogenia you probably know as a fairly ordinary trilobite but they got it 
the wrong way up because when you find a fossil it 
doesn't say this way up on it [laughter] often and this Pikaia the world's fir-,
first known chordate okay that's a thing rather like amphioxus Branchiostoma 
which some of you may know amphioxus Branchiostoma but you should ask yourself 
the question what would have happened if Anomalocaris had lived and this thing 
had been killed because they were equally well designed presumably and these 
worlds with i be talking to you now with a pair of tentacles in front like this 
and all of you sitting there writing with tentacles you know [laughter] yes and 
we wouldn't notice any difference and i could have i would be saying as 
Anomalocaris i wonder what would have happened if that funny little thing with 
the myotomes had lived instead of us okay think about insteads complex thinking 
now also realize that very nearly all of what we know is lies to children 
people explained the rainbow to you by saying well you see 
raindrops are like er prisms and that but raindrops aren't like prisms they're 
spheres and when two people are looking at rainbows we've talked about rainbows 
before they're looking at different rainbows realize that most of what you know 
about evolution has that status it's lies to children i realized that most 
strongly when i was in Australia and in a a rainforest a temperate rainforest 
now you know i'm very full of how many sperms two-hundred-million at a time how 
many cod eggs forty-million in her life only two of them survive to breed under 
a tree i found this which is i didn't know what they were for about they're 
stick insect eggs now it so happens that all stick insect eggs pretty near look 
like seeds look there it look at that absolutely like a little bean isn't it or 
snails there's something here look like s-, look at that little snails that 
look at that one now what advantage can it be to the creature to l-, to 
have eggs that look like seeds or little snails and at that time and and till 
two years ago i think it's the case that people genuinely didn't know they 
didn't know why stick insect eggs took so long to develop they take about six 
months so only a few of them get to stick insects er all of them not just the 
one not just the Indian stick insect the the parthenogenic one these are all 
sexual forms and their eggs take six months to develop and until people were 
walking about after there had been the big fires two-and-a-half years ago in 
Australia they didn't realize what this was all about when the trees started to 
the the fire had burned everything above ground er what was happening the trees 
seemed to be a-, had deep roots and they'd put up little green shoots and these 
little green shoots were all covered in baby stick insects people said gosh 
what's happened there and they found out where the stick insect eggs were and 
where they were coming from they were coming from ants' nests because ants bury 
and store 
seeds and little snails now the stick insect didn't know that it didn't think 
i'm going to get the ants to do this for me but it turned out that ones that 
the ants could mistake for seeds or snails got and then if they ate the odd 
stick insect egg it didn't matter did it it was the tree that was paying for it 
all right now that's a bit of ecology which i was completely ignorant about for 
a long time therefore it says to me i'm ignorant about most of adaptation of 
ecology on this planet nevertheless i can talk about things on other planets 
because i can make a distinction i've talked to you about universals now i'm 
going to talk to you about the things that have happened in our evolutionary 
story which are the opposite of that parochials P-A-R- O-C-H- I-A-L only in 
this parish only local things that are simply here once only and won't happen 
again and the classic one is this fish that came out of the water whose 
descendants were 
the reptiles the amphibians the birds and the mammals all of whom cough because 
this fish is enormously badly designed its airway crosses its foodway there 
were lots of other fish out there in the sea whose airway didn't cross their 
foodway who had dorsal lungs and a separate pathway but it happened that this 
one came out i'm sure if you ran the er f-, evolution again for a start you 
wouldn't get fishes but you might get something like that and you probably 
would get things coming out on land because twenty-five different groups of 
animals have invaded the land so that's a universal certainly some groups would 
invade the land but no no stupid not that way i said she's telling him and i 
was asked at a science fiction convention by one of these ladies in a long 
dusty dress how do you know that it's her that's telling him i waited just the 
right amount of time and said experience [laughter] [groan] and i didn't think 
they had an answer to that [laughter] 
the other thing about this fish the other parochial thing as well as the very 
bad bit of design that its airway crosses its foodway and ours does because it 
did is that it mixes up its genital tract and its excretory system there are a 
lot of things out there the the teleosts and the elasmobranchs which have them 
pretty well separated different holes anyway but we mix them up and this fish 
mixes them up therefore its descendants who became extelligent like us have 
dirty books we wouldn't call them dirty books if we didn't think there was 
something dirty about sex because we mix up our excretory system with our 
sexual system yes that's unlikely to happen again aliens aren't likely to have 
novels that we would like reading you see the point [laughter] now that fish 
had very peculiar limbs it probably had eight digits it wasn't the fish that it 
that you start off from that it used to be thought to 
be the origin of the land vertebrates when i was a kid and it probably had 
eight but most of its descendants refined it to five digits the pentadactyl 
limb and you can do a lot of different things with it it's one invention it's 
very versatile but you won't find it anywhere else universals will happen in 
some form every time you run carbon based watery planets parochials won't 
happen anywhere else er they'll happen sporadically i suppose and they'll have 
their own parochials not ours but mixing up parochials and universals is what 
most people get wrong when they invent alien ecologies here's one way of mi-, 
me-, messing up an ecology oh this i thought i wondered if it was my Monica 
Lewinsky one it is [laughter] er he's missed with some you notice er the too 
many people who invent alien planets give them butterflies of course when i 
have pictures of butterflies they're screwing butterflies 
but that's because i'm me and because i have most pictures like that and they 
have flowers i don't think flowers will happen elsewhere i think angiosperms 
and insects is one particular parochial thing that's happened here we don't 
have well we kind of do there are millipedes that help mosses get sex and there 
are some underwater ones that are a bit interesting and it it somewhere between 
a which reminds me i haven't put in two slides that i should have done 
[laughter] [gasp] we ought to ask for a list of universals okay i can give you 
that later and a list of parochials now is intelligence and particularly 
extelligence the culture that we pass on from generation to generation is this 
a universal or a parochial well we've only it's only us that have done it some 
other creatures have done it a bit and i was going to have pictures of of 
bonobos and er orangs i think i did not but if you're going to have 
intelligent life on a planet oh that says those with brains seem okay those 
with testicles i'm not too sure of [laughter] right are you going to get 
intelligence extelligence on a planet well on this planet we have octopuses 
dolphins mantis shrimps a lot of sporadic creatures that are a good deal more 
intelligent than their near relative it seems to me that intelligence is a 
universal but extelligence i don't know the trouble is that too many people 
that's the least politically correct slide i had but there are some that are 
close er there are people make mistakes get things the wrong way round for 
example they portray aliens let's build an extraterrestrial okay but just a 
minute those legs and feet can only have been on this planet it's a pentadactyl 
limb unless you get fish and that very same fish coming out of the water you're 
not 
going to get a leg like that with a knee and an ankle got it you're going to 
get joints joints in limbs are universal but that particular pattern of limb is 
a parochial yes so and i bet his airway crosses his foodway looking at him yeah 
and this one too people don't use enough imagination like that and okay human 
beings are cheap to be aliens [laughter] if you want them on er but that's the 
only reason why you should use human beings er he's supposed to be half Vulcan 
and half human well i ask you what progeny would you get with a cow who is your 
cousin namex [laughter] as compared with something on the on the other si-, er 
no jokes about sheep er [laughter] we what progeny would you get with a 
bacterium who is closer related to you than something from another planet we've 
had stories invented by other people which say what are the homeoboxes in D-N-A 
in the these different aliens and that's such parochial thinking as if you've 
got to have D-N-A there are about a hundred-and-fifty different compounds you 
can use to be your hereditary material but homeoboxes come on the same sequence 
being used that's Pine Lawn Fertility Clinic and you have an owl and a pussycat 
now we get some difficult ones but i haven't ever had that and er that is as i 
mean that's so much easier than Vulcans and humans got the point and there are 
people who believe that aliens are just like humans and of course Gary Larson 
has it have you seen cars with fishes on have any Christian people who put a 
fish on their car well here's a spaceship look with [laughter] a fish with four 
eyes this comes from selfish gene thinking it comes from the idea that we are 
our D-N-A made flesh that the way in which you make different kinds of creature 
is simply to fudge the D-N-A and and there have been a lot of science 
fiction stories for example these Tom Easton's tun-, very tongue in cheek about 
the gengineers the people who take a the genes for the pouch of a kangaroo and 
put it into a stork genome and get airmail [laughter] you can't do that you 
can't mix and match genes pick and mix and above all you can't lose the physics 
by having jellyfish flying up into the air or by writing it into the D-N-A any 
more than you can write into the D-N-A and when you made your sodium chloride 
crystal make it octagonal you're limited by the real world but some people 
don't believe that you can't have a reptile that big you can't have a human 
being with haemocyanin in the blood instead of haemoglobin 'cause it doesn't 
work and we wouldn't develop like a human being if we had haemocyanin and 
anyway you can't get something as much like a human being or at least an 
American as that [laughter] on another planet we won't get 
molluscs we won't get fishes if we ran it again on Earth to find something like 
us on another planet is unbelievable so science fiction authors take great care 
to invent quite different kinds of creatures and then the artists give them 
pentadactyl limbs and airways that cross foodways Gary Larson as always gets it 
right wonderful just wonderful so much for instilling them with a sense of awe 
[laughter] but look you this one up here's got his arms akimbo even though he 
hasn't got proper arms and you know it it he gets it right he's a good 
biologist is Gary Larson once again wonderful story Close to Critical by Hal 
Clement you're in a sulphuric acid atmosphere much like Venus' atmosphere he's 
got all the chemistry right everything's right they don't have eyes it's 
terrific but they do have knees and elbows and i-, knees and elbows won't be 
found anywhere else there 
are some that get it right i l-, i like this one i like the idea the artist had 
of showing that this is a friendly alien 'cause it's got its hand on the guy's 
shoulder and the guy is old and isn't minding it's a nice trick that's another 
nice alien yeah this one is much less likely in some ways than this these are 
rather poor E-T kids today all they want to do is go to Earth and become film 
stars [laughter] and of course the other famous one Alien and they're m-, mummy 
Bobby Joe's playing in the turkey [growl] [laughter] that's all our fears put 
together E-T is all our cuddlies put together it's nothing to do with what 
might be out there nor are these Star Wars lot and i'm going to take some time 
now just five minutes to go through have i have i shown you those funny owls 
before no 
yes some of you are nodding some of you yes you're you're nodding let me make 
this point 'cause namex's here and of course namex's here and of course namex 
probably has er namex has seen those funny owls yeah but they're good aren't 
they er that's some editing for you i think namex [laughter] the the oddity for 
human beings is this we conduct we don't conduct our own development like other 
creatures do what we do and i hope you've seen have i shown you that cartoon 
before yeah there's a mum there's a baby teaching her mother to fetch just like 
a dog and rewarding the mother with smiles because we have a very integrated 
bringing up the parents are brought in by the child to help with the bringing 
up our extelligence is given to children here's a bit of extelligence Red 
Riding Hood bit of extelligence that we're getting wrong breasts and 
confectionery we're 
showing people naked bodies now which i think ought to be discreetly veiled and 
and exposed only at the proper time we're there's a very nice comic called Elf 
Quest the taste of fresh blood shared with our forest brothers i guess those 
kids are less likely to become vegetarian and this fox that i shot about five 
minutes after the this was taken because he's blind in one eye he's got no 
teeth but people get upset because they think about the fox they heard about in 
the nursery the fox in the waistcoat the fox who was sly and cunning he isn't 
that i say to you you know what k-, adjectives do you have for the fox it's 
always sly and cunning in the West if i asked an Inuit audience they would say 
brave and fast because the fox is the hero in their stories i'm trying to 
expose to you the way in which your brains have been made and your prejudices 
about the organisms we have on Earth have been made so that when you see 
the Star Wars bar scene and you see the alien who looks like a fox if you're of 
Western mind you'd think ooh i wouldn't trust him but of course if you're an 
Eskimo you'd say he's the one i'd go to if there's any trouble he's the hero so 
when you're designing aliens it's very important to get it right to to avoid 
the things that you've learned about kinds of animals now you've all learned 
that owls are wise and when we look at this daft owls just don't come into it 
you don't like seeing owls that are daft because it seems to you wrong that 
they should be you've populated your mental universe with different kinds of 
things have you seen i don't know if you've seen this cartoon 
sm0244: yeah 
nm0240: Andrew is hesitant remembering his fiasco with the car of straw have i 
shown you that one the car of straw yes yes 
sm0245: yeah 
sm0246: yeah 
nm0240: yeah so you know about straw one was a car of wood bricks a 
car of bricks isn't going to go very well is it but the whole one two three 
business is built in to the way we think and will not be built into the way 
aliens think but i guess aliens will have will use their local version of 
nature they u-, their local kinds of creatures if they have an extelligence 
because it's the kind of thing that mothers tell children in the nest anyway 
whether they will have puberty rituals this is a Jewish kid at its bar er his 
bar mitzvah whether they will have puberty rituals which i think are one of the 
really important ways in which we developed ourselves we evolved ourselves by 
choosing those of us who were acquiescient who said yes to what the elders told 
us to do i'm going to put you down here i'm going to tie you up but don't tie 
you i just put ropes over your hands and feet and your terror keeps you down 
there your terror of me because when i get a a branding iron and heat 
it in the thing to put on your cheeks you don't leap up and run away you're 
proud to get your cheeks branded or your little penis circumcized or whatever 
and the ones that weren't proud and jumped up and ran away didn't breed so our 
ancestors our male ancestors were those who were obedient to authority this is 
a view of our evolution our extelligent evolution which doesn't only explain 
Einstein you know once upon a time there was a nerve cell then more and more 
and more nerve cells they got cleverer and cleverer and then we got Einstein it 
also explains Eichmann why he can say look how effectively i killed all those 
Jews they didn't worry at all i put them they thought it was a shower room and 
gas came out of the the showers and he expected not to be punished for it 
because he'd been doing what he was told i recommend you read a book called 
Obedience to Authority by Milgram published in the middle seventies he got pe-, 
he wore a white coat 
and he told people to torture other people and they did so the deep business is 
if you're going to invent another ecology another ecosystem you must get out of 
most of the assumptions that you make without being conscious of it about this 
one like that there are going to be vertebrates like that they are going to be 
flying forms yes of course there are going to be flying forms but they're not 
going to be our flying forms or even like them there might even be a different 
chemistry here he is saying ammonia ammonia [laugh] in the desert now the 
question is have they visited us [laughter] it says i am not a scale i am a 
Martian you are standing on my testicles [laugh] er i don't know but the point 
is this i do know that if they had visited us and they didn't want us to know 
we wouldn't know if they're capable of 
crossing between solar systems they're going to be so much better at disguise 
for all we know we have one here see the point now too many people and you've 
seen this before but i cannot overuse this too many people have the Hindu view 
they say ah we're going to put things on other planets well we're going to put 
herbivores and we're going to put carnivores and we're going to put grass and 
we're going to put lakes let's dra-, draw some herbivores and some carnivores 
and the slides i've left out are a picture of a heavy planet alien which has 
got six legs and horns and a trunk a trunk and it's a very good picture of an 
alien very well designed and it's got eyes that don't work like ours and it's 
altogether a very good one but it's got a trunk and the trunk is an odd thing 
to think about is it a parochial or is it a universal i want you to realize 
that it's not simply did it happen several times here let me give you the 
argument about a 
trunk and as i haven't got a slide to put on i'll put that there and then i can 
wave my arms think about a giraffe what think about a giraffe walking you've 
all heard the Kipling business about how did the giraffe get its long neck yeah 
how did the elephant get its trunk that's deeply embedded in your psyche get 
away from it think of what the giraffe really is the giraffe is a s-, a pacing 
animal pacing is something that most mammals don't do the two legs on the same 
side at once yes like llamas but unlike cheetahs greyhounds all the dogs even 
the bears who use their bottom muscles their back legs to get to locomote what 
the giraffe does is goes along with his legs like a man with a pair of crutches 
the the back muscles and the bottom muscles are very small the back legs are 
very small his front legs are what are taking him along the giraffes that 
escape from lions are the ones with the longer front legs now that also takes 
them 
up into eating higher things but if they've got long legs and not a long neck 
they have a problem what's the problem 
sf0248: they can't get 
nm0240: they can't get water without kneeling now the okapi is an amateur 
giraffe with long front legs and a short neck and it has to kneel to drink now 
if you kneel somebody gets you what the giraffe has done it's got its long neck 
and if you see a giraffe drinking it does this and it can just about get down 
now what the giraffe has done the elephant has done the elephant leaves its 
head behind the tube for eating the giraffe has got its head on the end of the 
tube for for drinking but the giraffe and the elephant have solved the same 
problem how to drink without kneeling and as soon as you see that you see it's 
a universal problem and that this heavy planet alien is likely to have a trunk 
'cause it's a way of getting water without kneeling yes and it is contrary to 
this philosophy that you 
tell me about these things you send the the your blind servant off and they say 
it's a leaf it's a wall and you say aha it's an elephant i can't be told 
anything like that about a another ecology i can't really be told it about this 
ecosystem i don't understand it well enough if somebody comes along and says 
there's some stick insect eggs that take a long time to hatch and here is a 
giraffe and here is a such and such i'm not going to be able to make sense of 
that ecology and as always it's much more like the one i follow on with go on 
you have to construct what you understand and it probably isn't helpful having 
the idea of a an elephant in the background either let's be rude about this one 
this is the people who say ah well we want er some intelligent people let's use 
Mr Spock let's design an alien which is terrifying let's design an alien which 
is cuddly they're the things we know about if you go to another planet and you 
think here is the so and so these are the 
molluscs these are the which is what they're doing you probably won't get it 
right and i might just as well stop there i i will show you the B-Z reaction if 
you haven't seen it i'll go up and get it from my room now er i make a lot of 
money by designing er aliens and alien ecologies for science fiction authors 
have any of you read any of my things read a-, any of the West of Eden series 
by Harry Harrison how many of you read science fiction namex er few of you but 
er you don't know the the er West of Eden series that's a world where the k-, 
the meteorite didn't hit and er Legacy of Heorot and The Dragons of Heorot is 
my is my best one er David Gerrold's Chtorr worlds i counted up the other day 
if someone had asked me to guess i'd have thought i had about a dozen books but 
i counted up and it's much nearer fifty i counted forty-one without too much 
trouble so i've done a lot of this fun inventing other ecosystems which to my 
untutored eye would probably 
work so i'm going to go now get this B-Z reaction and we can have a play with 
it 
nm0240: there's the heavy planet alien okay and you can see universals and the 
question is is the trunk a parochial 'cause it only happens once answer no it's 
a universal because here's two elephants one of whom is being a giraffe 
[laughter] i'm very lucky to get that shot er in er the zoo in Israel in near 
Tel Aviv and i that's why you should always take your camera with you er having 
done that we should now do the B-Z reaction 
nm0240: Belousov in nineteen-fifty-six tried to get a paper published in Nature 
which said i'm i tried this iodine starch system and a very strange thing has 
happened which according to the second law of therm-, thermodynamics shouldn't 
be able to happen it's gone blue and then brown and then blue 
and then brown and then blue and then brown and you see chemistry should only 
go in one this the the orthodoxy was chemistry should only go in one direction 
and the er and this this seemed totally wrong and nobody would publish it it 
took him four years to get it published and when he got it published er another 
paper appeared some time later by Zhabotinsky saying if we have er a system 
with an oxidizing agent like bromate and a reducing agent like malonic acid i 
think he used acetic acid not malonic acid the ho-, and then you have a er er 
something which is an electron donor and acceptor like er a ferrous dye or even 
even if you have ferric chloride it works er the whole solution turns blue and 
then red and then blue and then red and then blue and then red and that can 
last now while i tell you about it that will be about five minutes till it gets 
clear colourless and er what we have here is bromate an oxidizing agent and 
malo-, malonic acid which is a 
reducing agent it's going to give off carbon dioxide we've got this indicator 
which is an electron donor and acceptor goes have we got an overhead projector 
that's the important thing yes we have er that goes blue when oxidized red when 
reduced and this reaction stops itself by producing carbon dioxide so that like 
a forest fire or a fairy ring it can only go in one direction it can't go back 
on itself or a nerve impulse it's got to go one way yes now what we're going to 
find is that this will reduce let's have a look at it on the a few little spots 
of blue will appear oh i need something to measure out one ml excuse me 
om0241: sorry 
nm0240: now when i put one ml of this in it should go blue and then red Art 
Winfree who is er a very well known chronobiologist was working with this 
reaction 
in the early nineteen-seventies and we were both at a meeting together in namex 
as it happened it ought to go blue and we agreed that this is such a beautiful 
system that we ought to get it to work for teachers and the important thing for 
teachers is that the chemicals last for a year they can make it up again but if 
they've left it from last year and it doesn't work they'll get peed off with it 
and they won't think of doing it again so this the stuff has got to l-, to last 
a year see it working 
sm0249: yeah 
nm0240: there are little spots of the liquid are appearing and as soon as a 
spot appears it can only go outwards because it produces carbon dioxide so it 
can't go back on itself until the carbon dioxide has er er 
er evapora-, er s-, has diffused out of the liquid 
nm0240: i debated opposite the president of the Creation Research Society at 
Birmingham University in the Students' Union and all the the these creationists 
were there and he was saying you can't get pattern from nothing you can't get 
complexity from simplicity and i'm saying yes you can here it is doing it and i 
say look it it's very robust you can kill it and it'll do it again sorry it's 
got these things underneath the the er it's going to go rather different to 
this time it's going to do it like er Zhabotinsky's original it's going to all 
go blue i think maybe not 
sm0250: isn't that why creation side of something where the things begin 
nm0240: 
i'm sorry 
sm0250: 
nm0240: they're they're little probably little thermal accidents it's very 
close to the threshold so just by chance if a few molecules are going just that 
little bit er more what i don't understand and what is not understood we have 
the expert on this reaction in our department in Maths is why it starts again 
in the middle but er Art Winfree and i spent a week getting it to be as robust 
as this just mixing four chemicals and working on a but what i the point i'm 
making is that most chemistry is like this most chemistry is recursive most 
chemistry is autocatalytic most chemistry goes on and the things you do in 
school are a very small subset of chemistry which gives you the wrong 
impression about how simple it is look incidentally that in the same dish you 
have different oscillation frequencies yes but isn't it pretty [laughter] i 
thought i'd shown you 
before as a an example of a very simple chemical system and doing its life bit 
it's not bad and er but of course you do realize that the second law of 
thermodynamics is actually not involved here when it goes blue and then red and 
then blue and then red it's not going there and back it's going downstairs the 
oxidizer is oxidizing and the reducing thing is being reduced so we wound up 
the spring to start with and it's going downhill on the tread it's blue on the 
riser it's red okay 
sm0251: how long does it keep going for 
nm0240: half an hour but isn't it pretty and i m-, i've always got some in the 
fridge if you want to show it to your friends take it to the park [laughter] 
you can always er there we go again [laughter] but er as i say Art Winfree 
and i were playing with sta-, iodine and starch and chlorates and iodates and 
er acetic acid and malonic acid and malic acid and er we've had an excursion 
into aspirin for a for a while because salicylates er do fairly odd things but 
if you believe that go-, a God is necessary for making pattern that's to say 
you believe in conservation of complexity read Collapse of Chaos the the er the 
formula for this is in both of those books 'cause when i do something i use it 
to death like so many of these cartoons [laughter] but if you've not seen it 
there we are leave it to you