Turncoat by Douglas Adams Im often asked if Im not a bit of a turncoat. Twenty years (help!

!) ago in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, I made my reputation making fun of science and technology: depressed robots, uncooperative lifts, doors with ludicrously overdesigned user interfaces (whats wrong with just pushing them?), and so on. Now I seem to have become one of technologys chief advocates, as is apparent from my recent series on Radio 4, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Future. (I wish we hadnt ended up with that title, incidentally, but sometimes events have a momentum of their own.) Two things: First of all, I wonder if we dont have too much comedy these days. When I was a kid I used to hide under the bedclothes with an old radio Id got from a jumble sale, and listen enraptured to Beyond Our Ken, Hancock, The Navy Lark, even the Clitheroe Kid, anything that made me laugh. It was like showers and rainbows in the desert. Then there was Im Sorry Ill Read That Again and a few short years later the full glories of Monty Python. The thing about Python that hit me like a thunderbolt, and I really dont give a toss if this ends up in Pseuds Corner, was that comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldnt be expressed any other way. From where I was sitting in my boarding school in deepest Essex, it was a thrilling beacon of light. Its curious to me that the Pythons came along just as those other great igniters of a young imagination, the Beatles, were fading. There was a sense of a baton being passed. I think George Harrison once said something similar. But nowadays everybodys a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi. Creative excitement has gone elsewhere--to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate. So this is my second point. Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock bands, we now start up start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And when one idea fails, theres another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as fast as rock albums used to in the sixties. Theres always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether its with a person or an idea or a cause, even if its one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a

false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: These scientists, eh? Theyre so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know theyre meant to be indestructible? Its always the thing that doesnt get smashed? So why dont they make the planes out of the same stuff? The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldnt think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didnt really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium, theyd be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb? In other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behaviour, you should try living with it) that didnt rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant. My turn toward science came one day in about 1985 when I was walking through a forest in Madagascar. My companion on the walk was the zoologist Mark Carwardine (with whom I later collaborated on the book Last Chance to See), and I asked him, So come on then, whats so special about the rain forest that were supposed to care about it so much? And he told me. Took about two minutes. He explained the difference between temperate forest and rain forest and how it came to be that the latter produced such bewildering diversity of life but was at the same time so terribly fragile. I fell silent for a few moments as I began to realise that one simple piece of new understanding had just changed the way I saw world. I had just been handed a single thread I could now follow into the tangled ball of a bewilderingly complex world. For the next few years I hungrily devoured everything I could lay my hands on about evolutionary science and realised that nothing Id ever understood about it at school had prepared me the enormity of what was now swimming into my view. The thing about evolution is that if it hasnt turned your brain inside out, you havent understood it. Then to my surprise I discovered that it was converging with my growing interest in computers. There was nothing particularly profound about that enthusiasm I just unashamedly love playing with gadgets. The connection lies in the counterintuitive observation

that complex results arise from simple causes, iterated many times over. Its terribly simple to see this happening in a computer. Whatever complexities a computer produces modeling wind turbulence, modeling economies or the way light dances in the eye of an imaginary dinosaur it all grows out of simple lines of code that start with adding one and one, testing the result, and then doing it again. Being able watch complexity blossom out of this primitive simplicity is one of the great marvels of our age, greater even than watching man walk on the moon. Its much more difficult to see it happening in the case of the evolution of life. The time scales are so vast and our perspective so much complicated by the fact that its ourselves were looking at, but our invention of the computer has for the first time let us get a real feel for how it works just as our invention of the hydraulic pump first gave us an insight into what the heart was doing and how the circulation of the blood worked. That is also why its impossible to divorce pure science from technology: they feed and stimulate each other. So the latest software gizmo for transferring an mp3 sound file from one computer to another across continents is, when you peer into its innards and at the infrastructure that has given rise to it and that it, in turn, becomes part of, is, in its way, every bit as interesting as the way in which a cell replicates, an idea is formed within a brain, or a beetle deep in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest digests its prey. Its all part of the same underlying process that we in turn are part of, its where our creative energies are being poured, and Ill happily take it over comedians, television, and football any day. Douglas Adams, October 2000 Reprinted 2003 in The Salmon of Doubt