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.

So there is a kind of terrible irony that at the point that we are best able to understand, and appreciate, and value the richness of life around us, we are destroying it at a higher rate that it has even been destroyed before. And we are losing species after species after species, day after day, just because we’re burning the stuff down for firewood. And this is a kind of terrible indictment of our understanding. But, you see, we make another mistake, because we think somehow, this is all right in some fundamental kind of way, because we think that this is all sort of “meant to happen.”

Now let me explain how we get into that kind of mindset, because it’s exactly the same kind of mindset that the Kakapo gets trapped in. Because, what has been a very successful strategy for the Kakapo over generation after generation for thousands and thousands of years, suddenly is the wrong strategy, and he has no means of knowing because he is just doing what has been successful up till then. And we have always been, because we’re toolmakers, because we take from our environment the stuff that we need to do what we want to do and it’s always been very successful for us …

I’ll tell you what’s happened. It’s as if we’ve actually kind of put the sort of “pause” button on our own process of evolution, because we have put a buffer around us, which consists of—you know—medicine and education and buildings, and all these kinds of things that protect us from the normal environmental pressures. And, it’s our ability to make tools that enables us to do this. Now, generally speaking, what drives speciation, is that a small group of animals gets separated out from the main body by population pressure, some geographical upheaval or whatever. So imagine, a small bunch suddenly finds itself stranded in a slightly colder environment. Then you know, over a small number of generations that those genes that favour a thicker coat will come to the fore and you come back a few generations later, and the animal’s got a thicker coat. Man, because we are able to make tools, we arrive in a new environment where it’s much colder, and we don’t have to wait for that process. Because we see an animal that’s already got a thicker coat and we say we’ll have it off him. (Laughter.)