Dawkins and PZ Myers in discussion – trip to London

I’ve been really lucky recently in that talks and debates by authors and scientists I admire have fallen on either my holidays or days I just haven’t had to work in those days

Sarah had spotted this one, and for £4 I couldn’t pass it up. I also hadn’t really been down to London much since Sarah moved to Leeds, and I do miss it in many ways.

I spent the afternoon at the British Museum (I desperately wanted to go to the Natural History Museum again but number of times I have been there outnumbers the visits I have made to the British Museum by 20 to 1, so I had to restrain myself) and whilst the Rosetta Stone was predictably awash in flash photography, I did find the Islamic gallery and a few other more secluded areas of interest.

I also hired an audio guide, but for the sole purpose of setting the language to Arabic to do some listening practise. Now, however smart and clever I may make that sound, it actually backfired on me because I was listening so hard to translate I didn’t really take in the galleries as well as I should have.

After getting kicked out the museum at closing time I made my way over to the Institute of Education and met up with Sufian Ahmed who I’ve tweeted with back and forth at these events before but not actually hooked up in person with until now. Meeting fellow tweeps in the real world is always fun.

We got pretty good seats, but as the second half of the audience started to file in, a group of protesters forced there way into the auditorium and took to the stage chanting about spending cuts, job losses and protested against Richard agreeing to lecture at A.C Graylings new £18’000 per year private college. It was all a little surreal really, and it took rather longer than I expected for the police to escort them out so the evening could begin. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about what they did, and this is not the post to ponder it over in either. But regardless of my position of their ethical and social stance, they aggressively forced (one member of staff was physically overpowered by thea sob) their way into a room that they had no right to be in. Peaceful protest, this was not.

Camera phones were obviously everywhere and amusingly Sarah messaged me to say she had seen me on YouTube before the discussion was even finished!

So after the rather poor warm up act Dawkins and PZ took to the armchairs and basically chewed the biological and religious fat for 30 minutes before opening up to questions.

It was nice as ever to hear Dawkins, and he was certainly wittier than I have ever heard him before, but the real treat was PZ. The guy is extremely likeable and despite being fairly quietly spoken, articulates himself unapologetically and with good humour.

The discussion began speculating about life on other planets and on the necessity of a DNA like replicating molecule and enzymes molecules that can build proteins. They also discussed the predictable probability of what sort of features life might evolve based on how many times things like eyes, echolocation etc have independently evolved on earth. This is rather fascinating as it gives somewhat of a hypothesis on what real alien life could be like, as opposed to what science fiction so often postulates.

PZ said that he personally thinks intelligent life would be extremely unlikely to have evolved elsewhere, again due to the fact that self awareness has developed only once so far on earth.

The conversation eventually moved on to the perception people have of them as angry, strident, fundamentalist, needless to say their thoughts on this were more than a little amusing, especially PZ, as he is more at the cranky end of the spectrum than Dawkins.

PZ May looks like Darwin’s Big Furry Teddy Bear, but when it comes to tackling creationist nonsense and religious encroachment, he is more like a roaring Grizzly. Of course it should go without saying that this is metaphoric in that he unapologetically challenges religion with strong words. Not that he goes around ripping people’s faces off and scavenging food out of Forrest park bin bags.

As ever with these things the questions were hit an miss, but they both did a good job of making the most of them. I had a good time and it took my mind off of work for a day, which is simultaneously a good and bad thing!

Now I really need to win some money so we can go to Australia next April for the Four Horsemen all on the same bill.

dD