Visit of Randal Keynes to University of Birmingham

On July 4th 2012, it was my pleasure to host a visit by honorary graduand Randal Keynes, with his wife Zelfa and mother Anne, to the University of Birmingham. Their day here included lunch with the Vice-Chancellor and others, a trip to the Special Colletions and Archives, along with Alice Roberts to see a first edition Origin of Species (thanks to Sue Worrall), and a visit to the Lapworth Museum of Geology (thanks to Ivan Sansom).

Randal received an honorary doctorate at the School of Biosciences graduation ceremony and the day concluded with a photo shoot of Darwin-descendent Randal alongside Huxley-descendent Adam Tickell, plus strawberries and champagne in the VC's office.

Here is a video record of selected snippets from the day:

 

Unfortunately I was not allowed to film the graduation ceremony, nor does the University seem to realise that "information wants to be free", so the only way to get footage of the ceremony is to fork out for a DVD!

At the graduation ceremony, Randal gave a speech in which he highlighted the links between the Lunar Society of Birmingham, his ancestors (Erasmus and Charles Darwin), Joseph Priestley and the birth of the scientific method. Randal was introduced with a speech from University orator Professor John Raine, which John wrote with help from Randal and myself. A hypertext-linked version of the speech follows.

Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Graduates, Graduands and Guests, 

The concept of conservation is one that associates equally with the natural environment of plants and animals and with the human-created world of architecture and buildings. Most conservationists usually work in one arena or the other, but today before us stands an individual whose contribution spans both and who can therefore properly be described as a conservationist in the most comprehensive and generic of senses. 

Randal is from a renowned lineage of English families – notably the Keyneses, the Adrians, the Darwins and the Wedgwoods. Born on July 29th 1948, he is a great nephew of the eminent economist, John Maynard Keynes; and he is also the great-great-grandson of naturalist Charles Darwin. In 1839 Charles Darwin had married Emma Wedgwood, descendant of Josiah Wedgwood the 18th century founder of industrialised pottery manufacture, and who, along with his friend Erasmus Darwin and other prominent Midlands figures, were founding members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham which played such an important role in science for the Industrial Revolution. 

Randal’s father was the eminent Cambridge physiologist Professor Richard Darwin Keynes and his father, Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes, was a distinguished surgeon and scholar whose work in developing blood transfusion saved thousands of lives in the First World War. On the other side of his family, Randal’s mother, Mrs Anne Pinsent Keynes, whom we are delighted to welcome here in the Great Hall with us today, is also of very distinguished lineage. Her mother, Hester, was Lady Adrian, a renowned penal reformer, and her father, Lord Adrian, was a Nobel Prize-winner in 1932 for his discoveries about the workings of the nerve cell. 

And Anne’s grandmother was Birmingham’s own Dame Ellen Pinsent – who is 1911 was the first woman to be elected to the City of Birmingham Council, and a pioneer in the education of children with special needs. She, for one, would have been delighted that last year Ofsted found the special school named after her in South Birmingham – The Dame Ellen Pinsent School – to be ‘outstanding’. Dame Ellen was awarded an honorary MA by this University in 1919, while her husband – Anne’s grandfather - Hume Chancellor Pinsent – a solicitor in this city, was Treasurer of this University until his retirement in 1913. 

It is also a great pleasure today to welcome Randal’s wife Zelfa Hourani. Unfortunately their two offspring – Soumaya and Skandar – are otherwise engaged today. Soumaya works as an economist and Skandar is at university (and is widely known, having played the character of Edmund Pevensie in the three Nania films – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian; and Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 

But back to Randal. As a boy, he spent many of his summer holidays with his Darwin-side grandmother at her home in the Suffolk countryside, and it was there that he gained some of his earliest insights on his family ancestry as she talked of the holidays she had spent as a child with her grandmother at the Darwins’ home of Down House, just south of London. But it was some years later before Randal’s imagination was stirred to discover more about his Darwinian heritage. Indeed, for most of his adolescent years, Randal had found the pressures of his ancestry somewhat oppressive. When it came to university, for example, he broke away from the family tradition of reading science at Cambridge to study philology and anthropology at Oxford. 

On graduating he decided upon a DPhil, to explore the anthropological connections between some ideas in Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Icelandic writings. But when an attractive job came up in the Ministry of Defence he decided instead to join the civil service where he went on to pursue the significant part of his career. As well as working at the MoD in London, he had secondments to Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’ and so, last week he will no doubt have particularly appreciated the reconciliation of former foes epitomised in that historic handshake. 

He also served for a spell with the Parliamentary Ombudsman and in 1992 he was awarded an OBE for his work at the MoD during the Gulf War. It was while a civil servant that he began to devote more and more of his spare time to aspects of conservation. He became active in the Victorian Society, campaigning for the protection and restoration of our outstanding Victorian and Edwardian architectural heritage. And his campaigning took on a personal dimension in the 1980s, when the neighbourhood in which he lived, just east of Kings Cross station, became the subject of clearance proposals to make way for the new channel tunnel rail link into central London. Randal was at the forefront of a well-organised campaign – and which also involved debate in Parliament – that led to the line being re-routed into the adjacent St Pancras station, now the marvellous ‘St Pancras International’ with its fabulously restored Gilbert Scott-designed hotel on the front. Meanwhile, Randal’s previously condemned neighbourhood was sympathetically regenerated – and the full story of its rescue and conservation can be read in a soon-to-be-published book, King’s Cross: A Sense of Place, which includes a chapter by Randal. 

Since then, his attentions have turned to another piece of architectural heritage – again one in which Randal could claim a personal interest – Charles’ Darwin’s Down House in North Kent – where the great naturalist had spent the last forty years of his life, undertaken many of his studies of natural life and written his ‘Origin of Species’. Here, the conservation challenge has been to withstand the pressures for property development over the very landscape where Charles Darwin had conducted so many of his investigations of animals, insects and birds and where he had built his evidence base for his Theory of Evolution. To this end, Randal has provided the case which the Government has now put to UNESCO to make Down House and its surroundings a World Heritage Site for the history of science. More than this, Randal has played a leading role in gathering together and researching all the surviving material about Darwin’s life and work at Down House. 

His own family home had itself been something of a treasure-house of Darwinian material and, in his adult years, he took on the task of sifting systematically through his father’s inherited pieces. In doing so, in a chest of drawers, he happened upon a writing case that had belonged to Charles Darwin’s daughter, Annie, containing her pale yellow ribbon stitched with small glass beads, her goose-feather quills with which she wrote, her sealing wax, a thick lock of her fine brown hair, a fold of paper on which was written ‘April 23rd 1851’ - the date of Annie’s death at the age of just ten - and a leaf from a pocket book with a map of the churchyard in Malvern where she is buried. The story of that personal tragedy and the experience that influenced Darwin’s revolutionary understanding of humankind’s place in nature, has been painstakingly researched by Randal and crafted into his biography ‘Annie’s Box’, first published in 2001, and described by one literary critic as ‘ the best non-fiction book I have read all year’. 

And of course Randal’s research on Darwin and his commitment to conservation has had to encompass the Galapagos Islands – which unlike Down House, already enjoys the status of being a World Heritage Site. Even so, the archipelago is still facing extreme dangers as a result of rapid growth in eco-tourism and immigration from the Ecuadorean mainland. Randal is a member of the Board of Directors of The Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands – an international scientific organization that leads the science for the conservation of their uniquely valuable wildlife. He travels there frequently and is focusing particularly on communicating the Island’s story and its inestimable importance to the world. 

He is also a Board member of the Charles Darwin Trust which promotes the use of Darwin’s inspiration in science education. He works hard helping young people around the world to grasp the legacy of Darwin through his life in science and, in the Darwin bicentenary year, he took part in the national Evolving Words initiative, which here in Birmingham culminated in poetry recitals by children from inner city neighbourhoods. He has also provided invaluable support to the Rap Guide to Evolution, a Wellcome Trust-sponsored celebration of Darwin’s life and legacy through the unlikely medium of Hip Hop! 

Chancellor, there are, as indicated, significant connections between Randal’s family and this great University and City of Birmingham. Indeed, his ancestors in the Lunar Society were part of a select group of individuals that could perhaps be said to have provided the genesis for the modern world here in the heart of England. Charles Darwin’s statue is, of course, to be found in the line of distinguished individuals that form the frieze over the entrance to this Aston Webb building, and our special archive collections here include a first-edition copy of his ‘Origin of Species’. But irrespective of such historical connections, the contribution of Randal Keynes to conservation, to education and to outreach, locally, nationally and internationally, itself deserves to be recognized and marked by this University – an institution that shares with him a commitment to diligent research and to respecting, protecting and making best use of important heritage. 

So to you, and to the University, I present Randal Hume Keynes, deemed worthy to be awarded the degree of Doctor of the University, Honoris Causa.

Adam Tickell on Thomas Henry Huxley at Great Read at Birmingham event

Professor Adam Tickell, PVC for Research and Knowledge Transfer, University of Birmingham, speaking at the launch of the Great Read at Birmingham initiative, September 22nd 2011

Video and text of the speech

Dear students,

I am sure that you have enjoyed the two excellent talks from our external speakers. First let me introduce myself. My name is Adam Tickell and I am Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research here at the University of Birmingham, which means it is my job to ensure that the academics that lecture you produce the very best research that they can, on top of their excellent teaching.
Now, I know that Mark Pallen later in the term is going to tell you about Charles Darwin, who formulated the Theory of Evolution.

But it is worth stressing that Darwin was a retiring person who left the defence of his theory in the rough and tumble of Victorian society to others.

His most famous, and robust, advocate was a remarkable man called Thomas Henry Huxley, who was so vociferous in his defence of Darwin’s theory that he earned the nickname Darwin’s Bulldog.

Many of you will have heard of Huxley’s famous encounter in 1860 with the Bishop of Oxford, with the famous gibe about whether Huxley was descended from an ape via his grandmother or grandfather. In fact, that gibe was probably never uttered and one of the things you should learn in your three years is the importance of going beyond what is written in textbooks and newspapers and even academic publications and evaluating the evidence for yourselves!

But whatever the truth of that encounter, Huxley was a remarkable individual. Although he left school at the age of ten, he was a voracious reader and taught himself science, philosophy, history and German. An adventurer medic, who served as surgeon’s mate on the delightfully named HMS Rattlesnake, as it surveyed northern Australia and New Guinea. An expert on invertebrate comparative biology, authoring several papers that clarified some tricky taxonomy.

In 1854 Huxley took up a Chair of Natural History at the Royal College of Mines (now part of Imperial College), where for over thirty years he made valuable contributions to science and education in Britain. Huxley’s numerous achievements include his prescient classification of birds with dinosaurs (only recently recognized as correct), a treatise on the physical geography of the Thames valley, a classic book on crayfish and a biography of the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Huxley helped secularize schools, opened up adult education and transformed the academic activities of universities, viewing them as factories of new knowledge rather than storehouses of old. He even coined the word “agnostic”.

Huxley also left behind a treasure trove of aphorisms:

“After all, it is as respectable to be modified ape as to be modified dirt”

“Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once”

“Science is organized common sense”

“The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

From his biographer Edward Clodd, comes the greatest tribute of all: “It was worth being born to have known Huxley”!

But why, you may ask I am bigging it up so much for Huxley?

First, he is important in the history of ideas. Great ideas, like the theory of evolution, need to be argued over and Victorian society was, by no means, receptive to an explanation of life on earth that didn’t rely on God. Huxley’s advocacy of Darwin’s theory was powerfully influential.
Second, Huxley is important to the history of this University. Although the University on this campus dates back to 1900, before that, where the Birmingham Central Library now stands, there was something called the Mason Science College. This college was founded in 1875 by Sir Josiah Mason, a Birmingham industrialist and philanthropist, who made his fortune in making key rings, pens, and nibs. Mason College had several notable alumni before its incorporation into the University of Birmingham, including two prime ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and a Nobel Prize winner Francis Aston.

But the key point is the foundation stone of Mason College was laid in 1880 by none other than Thomas Henry Huxley. So there is direct link between the institution in which you are enrolling and Darwin’s Bulldog! In Huxley’s honour, each year the university holds a Huxley Lecture, a tradition which goes back over a century. And of course, Darwin himself is built into the very fabric of our buildings, as a statue above the main entrance to the Aston Webb building.

Huxley gave a speech at the foundation of Mason College on the topic of “Science and Culture”. The speech makes interesting reading even today, packed full of sound bites and arguing that a scientific education was more important than a classical one. In it, Huxley delights in pouring scorn on the distinction between pure and applied research and suggests that the scientific method, which has proved so successful in the physical sciences, should be applied to the study of society.

My third reason for talking about Huxley is more personal.

Huxley died in 1895, but not before founding a family, that like the Darwin family was marked with a record of high achievement. He and his wife Henrietta had eight children. Like they Darwins they suffered the pain of losing a child in infancy. Two of Huxley’s daughters married the same man, the Pre-Raphalite painter John Collier, although not at the same time! You can see his paintings in the Tate gallery and Bridgman Art Library in London.

The most eminent of Huxley’s sons, Leonard, had six children by two wives. These included Julian Huxley – an evolutionary biologist who was not only the first director of UNESCO and a founder of the World Wildlife Fund, but also a eugenicist who – at least before the horrors of the holocaust – had unsavoury views about the rate at which what he called the lower strata reproduced. Julian was the brother of Aldous, who wrote Brave New World, and Andrew, who won the Nobel prize for his work on the physiology of nerves. One of Leonard’s grand-daughters, Angela Huxley, married a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, thus fusing these two notable lineages.

As I said, Thomas Huxley had eight children. His eldest daughter Jessica was lucky to survive scarlet fever when two years old, a disease which had killed her brother Noel. She grew up to marry Frederick Waller, who was architect to the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester Cathedral.

And now, I’m afraid, you will have to indulge me.

Jessie and Fred begat Oriana.

And Oriana begat Renée, Celia and Elvira.

And Renée wrote novels and married an Irish writer.

And I think you all might be able to guess where this is going when I tell you that the Irish writer was my grandfather Jerrard Tickell.

I have to say, I knew little of this as a child – my abiding memory of my grandmother is of her bringing packets of Rowntrees Fruit Gums when she came for Sunday lunch.

However, in the absence of fruit gums, I am very pleased to help kick off the Great Read at Birmingham initiative, which has so much to do with the legacy of Thomas Huxley and his closest associate, Charles Darwin.

I would like to close by quoting my great-great- great grandfather’s closing from his foundation speech, which calls on us, as his to praise Mason’s “crucial instance of wisdom” in establishing his Science College:

"In conclusion,” Huxley said, “I am sure that I make myself the mouthpiece of all present in offering to the venerable founder of the institution, which now commences its beneficent career, our congratulations on the completion of his work; and in expressing the conviction that the remotest posterity will point to it as a crucial instance of the wisdom which natural piety leads all men to ascribe to their ancestors."

Evolution, education and the University of Birmingham

The Guardian video podcast Teachers TV has just released an interesting documentary The creationism controversy in the classroom on the teaching of evolution in British schools, available via The Guardian website or via iTunes.

I was particularly pleased to see colleagues from the my own university, the University of Birmingham, Jerry Pritchard and Susannah Thorpe, taking a prominent role in the video. And the skulls you see are the same skulls that Susannah let me use in the videos from The Origin of Species in Dub!

In fact, as Jerry has pointed out to me, the links between our university and Darwin's time go deep: Thomas Huxley laid the foundation stone of Mason College, which was the forerunner of our university. Huxley's speech on opening the college makes for interesting reading, stressing the importance of a scientific over a classical education, but curiously, towards the end, making a plea for sociology to be taught at the new institution. The last lines should be brought out at every graduation ceremony:

"In conclusion, I am sure that I make myself the mouthpiece of all present in offering to the venerable founder of the institution, which now commences its beneficent career, our congratulations on the completion of his work; and in expressing the conviction that the remotest posterity will point to it as a crucial instance of the wisdom which natural piety leads all men to ascribe to their ancestors."

Also, each year the university holds a Huxley Lecture--a tradition which goes back over a century (see this reference in Nature from 1915). Curiously none of these historical links feature on the university's web pages!

In fact, we have Darwin built into the very fabric of our university, in that he is one of a handful of figures from the history of Western Civilization to stand above the entrance to the University's most imposing building, the Aston Webb building. But again, I can find no information anywhere on the University's web site as to who decided to put Darwin there and why or who created the statue and how, which is surprising given that the university has badged 2009 the Year of Darwin! 

I guess, in time for Darwin200@bham (ignore typo as to year on web site), our bicentennial Darwin Day, Jerry and I will have to dig into the university's archives and find out more about these links!

Evolution and Poverty: Great is our Sin

Wednesday 15th October is Blog Action Day 2008, with the theme of POVERTY. Although I have missed the boat according to Greenwich Mean Time, as far as my Hawaiian readers go it is still a little after 9pm on the 15th (and Google analytics shows that there have been visits to the Blog from the fiftieth state), so here goes...

In the Rough Guide to Evolution, there is a whole chapter on evolution and politics. Here are a few pertinent excerpts:

The earliest and most notorious extension of evolutionary thinking to politics was social Darwinism – the view that competition between individuals and between nations could, and should, drive social and economic progress in human societies. Inherent to social Darwinism was the suggestion that the richest and most “socially developed” should be allowed to flourish in society, while the poor and the weak should be left to fend for themselves, even if this meant suffering and death...

One key influence was the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus... [but] even stronger influence on social Darwinism was English philosopher Herbert Spencer who, as early as 1851, had attacked what he called the “spurious philanthropists”, who “[b]lind to the fact that, under the natural order of things, society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, …advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation – absolutely encouraging the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident.”

Social Darwinism is generally linked to laissez faire economics and non-interventionist politics. American industrialists readily adopted evolutionary language. John D. Rockefeller said, “The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest”, while Andrew Carnegie claimed that the law of competition “is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore… great inequality of environment, the concentration of wealth, business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race..."

Social Darwinism fails both as hypothesis and policy for a number of reasons. Firstly, it equates evolution solely with competition, when co-operation and altruism are also the products of evolution... A second problem with social Darwinism is that it confuses economic and social success with biological success and what is natural with what is desirable... In fact, a more palatable interpretation of evolution sees natural selection as an enemy of the values of a civilized society. As Thomas Huxley stated in his 1893 lecture Evolution and Ethics: “Let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it."

A third problem with social Darwinism is that it implies a rigid biological determinism in which one’s station in life is set by one’s innate unimprovable abilities. However, even at the height of social Darwinism, evolutionists like Huxley expressed a more enlightened view of the improvability of humans and human societies. 

Huxley wrote in his 1888 essay, The Struggle for Existence:

“…the endeavor to improve the condition under which our industrial population live, to amend the drainage of densely peopled streets, to provide baths, washhouses, and gymnasia … to furnish some provision for instruction and amusement in public libraries … is not only desirable from a philanthropic point of view, but an essential condition of safe industrial development....”  

and he closes the essay with:

 “There is, perhaps, no more hopeful sign of progress among us, in the last half-century, than the steadily increasing devotion which has been and is directed to measures for promoting physical and moral welfare among the poorer classes…” 

The descendants of those that Spencer counted as the “excrement of society” nowadays enjoy levels of health and wealth, education and intellectual achievement far beyond his imagination. However, these improvements have come about not through the effects of natural selection, but because of deliberate efforts to improve the lot of the poorest and most vulnerable in society through the kind of measures Huxley advocated, twinned with modern innovations such as vaccination and contraception.

Of course what I have written above applies to Western societies, where we have seen an astonishing rise in the standard of living since Darwin and Huxley's time. It should not be seen as a Panglossian smugness that all is now right with the world. In developing countries, poverty is just as bad if not worse than it was 150 years ago and the Third World poor are engaged in a relentless "struggle for existence", particularly in the face of infectious diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. But the point here is that change is possible--as Barack Obama puts it: "yes we can to opportunity and prosperity". Poverty is not inevitable and biology does not equal destiny. I leave the last word to Darwin, who, in the Voyage of the Beagle, compared poverty to slavery and dismissed the inevitability of both conditions (my emphasis):

It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;—what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.