Parrots, the Universe and Everything
A Talk by Douglas Adams

There is another animal we went to find, it is in even worse trouble now. And this is the Baiji, the Yangtze River Dolphin, which is an almost blind river dolphin. The reason it’s almost blind, is that there is nothing to see in the Yangtze River. (Laughter.)

Thousands and thousands of years of agriculture along the banks of the Yangtze River have washed so much mud and silt and so on into it, that the river has become completely turbid. Which is a word I didn’t even know the meaning of until I saw the Yangtze River, and basically you can’t see anything in it. So these animals, dolphins as I said, gradually they abandoned the use of sight. Now—as we all know—marine mammals also have this other faculty available to them, which they can develop, which is that of sound. And so what the Yangtze River Dolphins did was over thousands of years, as their eye sight deteriorated, so their sonar abilities became more and more and more sophisticated, and more powerful and more complex.

And it’s very interesting, you can actually watch—if you feel like it—the development of a Baiji foetus, and you’ll see that right at—as you may or may not know—there is a certain amount of truth in the idea that the development of the foetus recapitulates stages in the evolutionary development of an animal. And you see, right at the beginning of the development of the foetus, its eyes are in the normal dolphin position, which are kind of relatively far down on the side of the head. And gradually, as the generations have gone by, its eyes have kind of migrated up the side of the head, and you see this happening as the foetus develops. Because gradually, over the generations, its only light is coming directly from up above and there is no ambient light and then, as that too dies out, so the eyes gradually atrophied. And, instead, the sonar abilities take over. And these animals developed incredibly sensitive, and incredibly precise abilities to navigate themselves around in the water just using sonar. And all is well and good.

Until the twentieth century when man invents the diesel engine. And suddenly all hell breaks loose beneath the surface of the Yangtze, because it’s suddenly full of noise. And so, suddenly these animals find themselves trapped by something that they—that nobody had any means of foreseeing—that the thing they now rely on has been completely overwhelmed by the noise pollution that we put in the oceans. So suddenly these animals that used to be so sophisticated in their ability to find their way around, are sort of bumping into things, bumping into boats, bumping into ships’ propellers, finding themselves ensnared in fishermen’s nets and so on, because we basically screwed up the next of their faculties. And it’s a very curious feeling, I remember sort of sitting on a boat on the Yangtze River and looking, well trying to look into—you couldn’t look into cause it’s turbid and you remember what turbid means—and realising that all this noise down there means that … It’s very curious to think that there may have been a dolphin somewhere near me—I didn’t know, I mean by this stage, this was ten years ago, there were only two hundred left in a structure of water of about two hundred miles long, so you had no idea if there was one anywhere near you—but it’s curious because you think if you and another person, another creature, are kind of in the same world, then you must be feeling roughly similar. But one of the things you begin to realise when you look at different animals is that because of their evolutionary history, and because of the forms they have developed into, and the ways they have developed of perceiving the world, they may be inhabiting the same world but actually a completely different universe. But actually a completely different universe because you create your only own universe from what you do with the sensory data coming in. So, you realise that you’re here, and there is a dolphin there, and you’re comfortable, and the dolphin may be actually in a species of hell. But has no means of communicating that with you because we’ve kind of taken charge, and there is no way of kind of communicating with the management, there’s a problem. (Laughter.)

So, I suddenly became very interested in what it must actually sound like in the Yangtze River. Now, we’ve gone to record some BBC Radio programmes while we are there, so as well as Mark Carwardine the zoologist, we also had a sound recordist from the BBC. So I said to him, “Could we actually drop a microphone into the Yangtze so that we can see what it actually sounds like in the river?” And he said, “Well you should have said that before we left London.” (Laughter.) And I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, cause I just could have checked out a waterproof microphone but, you know, you didn’t mention anything about recording under water.” And I said, “No, I didn’t. Is there anything we could do about it?” And he said, “Well there is, there is actually one technique they teach us at the BBC for recording under water in an emergency. (Laughter.) Do either of you have condoms with you?”

And we didn’t. Wasn’t that kind of trip. (Laughter.) But we decided we’d better go and buy some. And so we went into the streets of Shanghai trying to buy some condoms, and I just want to read you a little passage about this. (Laughter.)

The Friendship Store seemed like a promising place to buy condoms, (laughter) but we had a certain amount of difficulty in getting the idea across. We passed from one counter to another in the large open-plan department store, which consists of many different individual booths, stalls and counters, but no one was able to help us.

We first started at the stalls which looked as if they sold medical supplies, but had no luck. By the time we had got to the stalls which sold bookends and chopsticks we knew we were on to a loser, but at least we found a young shop assistant who spoke English.

We tried to explain to her what it was we wanted, (laughter) but seemed to reach the limit of her vocabulary pretty quickly. So, I got out my notebook and drew a condom very carefully, (laughter) including the little extra balloon on the end.

She frowned at it, but still didn’t get the idea. She brought us a wooden spoon, (laughter) a candle, a sort of paper knife and, surprisingly enough, a small porcelain model of the Eiffel Tower (laughter) and then at last lapsed into a posture of defeat.

Some other girls from the stall gathered round to help, but they were also defeated by our picture. At last I plucked up the bravado to perform a delicate little mime, (laughter) and at last the penny dropped. (Laughter.)

“Ah!” the first girl said, suddenly wreathed in smiles. “Ah yes!”

They all beamed delightedly at us as they got the idea.

“You do understand?” l asked.

“Yes! Yes, I understand.”

“Do you have any?”

“No,” she said. “Not have.”

“Oh.”

“But, but, but …”

“Yes?”

“I say you where you go, OK?”

“Thank you, thank you very much. Yes.”

“You go 616 Nanjing Road. OK. They have there. You ask ‘rubberover’. OK?”

“Rubberover?”

“Rubberover. You ask. They have. OK. Have nice day.” (Laughter.)

She giggled happily about this with her hand over her mouth.

We thanked them again, profusely, and left with much waving and smiling. The news seemed to have spread very quickly around the store, (laughter) and everybody waved at us. (Laughter.) They seemed terribly pleased to have been asked.

When we reached 616 Nanjing Road, which turned out to be another, smaller department store, and not a knocking shop as we had been half-suspecting, our pronunciation of ‘rubberover’ seemed to let us down and produce another wave of baffled incomprehension.

This time I went straight for the mime that had served us so well before, (laughter) and it seemed to do the trick at once. The shop assistant, a slightly more middle-aged lady with severe hair, marched straight to a cabinet of drawers, brought us back a packet and placed it triumphantly on the counter in front of us.

Success, we thought, opened the packet and found it to contain a bubble sheet of pills.

“Right idea,” said Mark, with a sigh. “Wrong method.” (Laughter.)

We were quickly floundering again as we tried to explain to the now slightly affronted lady that it wasn’t precisely what we were after. By this time a crowd of about fifteen onlookers had gathered round us, some of whom, I was convinced, had followed us all the way from the Friendship Store. (Laughter.) One of the things that you quickly discover in China, is that we are all at the zoo. If you stand still for a moment, people will gather round and stare at you. (Laughter.) The unnerving thing is that they don’t stare intently or inquisitively, they just stand there, often right in front of you, and watch you as blankly as if you were a dog food commercial. (Laughter.)

At last one young and pasty-faced man with glasses pushed through the crowd and said he spoke a little English and could he help?

We thanked him and said, yes, we wanted to buy some condoms, some rubberovers, and we would be very grateful if he could explain that for us.

He looked puzzled, picked up the rejected packet lying on the counter in front of the affronted shop assistant and said, “Not want rubberover. This better.” (Laughter.)

“No,” Mark said. “We definitely want rubberover, not pills.”

“Why want rubberover? Pill better.” (Laughter.)

“You tell him,” said Mark. (Laughter.)

“It’s to record dolphins,” I said. (Laughter.) “Or not the actual dolphins in fact. What we want to record is the noise in the Yangtze that … it’s to go over the microphone, you see, and …”

“Oh, just tell him you want to fuck someone,” said the sound recordist. (Laughter.) “And you can’t wait.” (Laughter.)

But by now the young man was edging nervously away from us, suddenly realising that we were dangerously insane, (laughter) and should simply be humoured and escaped from. He said something hurriedly to the shop assistant and backed away into the crowd.

The shop assistant shrugged, scooped up the pills, opened another drawer and pulled out a packet of condoms.

We bought nine, just to be safe. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

So a couple of days later we were standing on the banks of the Yangtze, on a very [desperate?] drizzly grey day. And we put the microphone in this little sort of pink thing, (laughter) and dropped it into the water. And, I don’t usually do impressions but I’m going to do for you an impression of what it sounds like under the surface of the Yangtze River. And it’s something like this “pfffffffffff”. The Yangtze River ladies and gentleman. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

And, I suddenly realized what an appalling thing we’ve inflicted on these poor animals, that live in a world of super sensitive sound and hearing. And this was why these animals were now desperately endangered because having removed one way of life from them we were now removing a second. The problem is we’re about to remove a third, I said that when I was there it was ten years ago, there were two hundred of these left, today there are twenty. And because the Chinese are building these giant dams to dam the Yangtze at one of the most beautiful and most spectacular sites in all world, the Three Gorges, and they’re damming it there which means that the Yangtze Dolphin will at that point definitely go extinct.2

And it’s terribly sad. The peculiar thing about dams is that we keep on building them and none of them ever do any good. It’s not quite true, because unfortunately there are—in the history of dam-making—two that did work, one is the Hoover and the other is the one up in the pacific northwest, the Coulee Dam. And every other one doesn’t work. And for some reason we never manage to be able to quite stop us … we always think we just build one more. I think must have some sort of beaver genes deep in our … (Laughter.) But the sad thing as I say is that the Yangtze River dolphin is definitely and without doubt bound for extinction.

[edit]The Human
And, it’s very peculiar to me that we are living at the moment in an extraordinary age, an extraordinary renaissance, because we’ve got to the point when we suddenly understand the value of information, as we never have before. We call the age we live in that of information. And we’ve discovered that information is the most valuable resource we have. And as you’d know we’ve just spent billions of dollars—quite rightly—in trying to understand the human genome, and that’s just one species, that’s just us. And we’ve come to understand and realize how incredibly valuable this information is.

And we’ve never understood kind of how it all worked together before, because before we had … let me put it this way. In the past we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. And it’s led to extraordinary discoveries, extraordinary degrees of understanding, but the problem with taking things apart to see how they work is even though it gets you down to the sort of fundamental particles, the fundamental principles, the fundamental forces at work, we still don’t really understand how they work until we see them in motion.

One of the things that came about as a result of our understanding of these fundamental principles, is that we came to invent this thing called the computer. And the great thing about the computer is that, unlike every previous analytical tool—and there are a bit … it’s funny how many of these have to do with glass, when we first came across glass, which is a form of sand, and we invented lenses, and we looked up into the sky, and by studying the sky we began to discover fundamental things about gravity, and we also discovered that the universe seems to consist—terrifyingly enough—almost entirely of nothing. The next thing we did with glass was we put them in microscopes, and we looked down into this very very very solid world around us, and we see the fundamental particles there, the atoms—made up of protons and neutrons with electrons spinning around them—and we also discover that they seem to consist frighteningly almost entirely of nothing. And that even when you do find something it turns out that it isn’t actually there, it isn’t actually a thing there, merely the possibility that there may be something there. (Laughing.) It kind of doesn’t feel as real as this (hits podium with his hand). (Laughing.)

So the next thing we do with sand was silicon, as we create the computer. And this finally enables us to start putting things together to see how they work. And it allows us to see actual processes at work, and we begin to see how very very simple things lead inexorably—by iteration after iteration—to enormously complex processes emerging and blossoming. And to my mind one of the most extraordinary things of our age—I mean those of us who were around will remember, you know, seeing man walking on the moon for the first time—but I think the most dramatic and extraordinary thing that we have seen in our time is being able to see, on computer screens, the process by which enormously simple primitive things, processes, instructions, repeated many many times over, very very fast, and iterated over generations of instructions, produce enormously complex results. So that we can suddenly start to create, just out of fundamentally simple primitive instructions, we can create the way in which wind behaves in a wind tunnel, a turbulence of wind, we can see how light might dance in an imaginary dinosaur’s eye. And we do it all out of fundamentally simple instructions. And as a result of that we have finally come to an understanding of the way in which life has actually emerged. Now, there are an awful lot of things we don’t know about life. But any life scientist will tell you that, although there is an awful lot we don’t know, there is no longer a deep mystery. There is no longer a deep mystery because we have actually seen with our own eyes the way in which simplicity gives rise to complexity.

When I say there is no mystery it is rather as if you imagine taking a detective from the 19th century, teaming him up with a detective from the late 20th century, and giving them this problem to work on: that a suspect in a crime was seen one day to be walking down the street in the middle of London, and the next day was seen somewhere out in the desert in the middle of New Mexico. Now the 19th century detective will say, “Well, I haven’t the faintest idea. I mean it must be some species of magic has happened.” And he would have no idea about how to begin to solve what has happened here. For the 20th century detective, now he may never know whether the guy went on British Airways or United or American or where he hired his car from, or all that kind of stuff, he may never find those details, but there wont be any fundamental mystery about what has happened.

So for us there is no longer a fundamental mystery about life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information. And is information that gives us this fantastically rich complex world in which we live. But at the same time that we’ve discovered that, we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point that we’re hit by an asteroid.


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