Darwin's ideas, Dawkins' memes and Dennett's cranes

Chancellor, members of the university, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

These are rites of passage, and a certain solemnity is meet and proper. In our assembly here, we have formed another link in an unbroken human chain joining us to the first universities - Padua, Bologna, Paris and Oxford.

Those universities were born at the dawn of the thirteenth century, when brawn work first began to give way to brain work; when the struggle to be rational first began to hot up. They were already old when this country was born. They were even old when Sir Issac Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the same chair that the celebrated Stephen Hawking now holds.

So it is right for us to dress up and acknowledge that majestic past, but you must excuse me if I cannot maintain the proper solemnity. I am afraid I get terrifically excited about what is also being acknowledged here today - the future, the potential!

Twenty odd years ago, when I first came to Wollongong as a lecturer in biology, you could say that this university had potential. That was because it was hard to say that it had anything else. Potential was really all it had. Everything else, including me, was ragged and rough around the edges.

For me, it was my first real job, one that my mother appreciated more than I, and one that all parents here can empathise with ñ to see their offspring settled in any job no matter how strange, for an academic job was an odd thing in my average Aussie family.

One of my first tasks was to go out and sell the idea of going to university to the local high schools. And here I learned a hard lesson in life. Despite my spruiking, most students then were just not that interested. They thought that uni was not for them, that it was only for the rich, that getting an education didn't really matter. A fine example of: The more things change, the more they are the same. And although I knew they were wrong, I didn't have the words to answer them. That was because then I didn't know the difference between skyhooks and cranes, and that difference makes all the difference in the world.

And the difference between skyhooks and cranes is what I want to talk about today.

The idea of skyhooks and cranes belongs to Daniel Dennett who wrote the marvellous book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, a book all scientists should read. They should not only read it, they should use it to beat off the attacks on the idea of a scientific understanding of the world that are becoming so common today. Common enough for some to talk of a coming dark age, an age of antiscience, of cults and mysticism, astrology and crystal power, channelling and Sheng Fui.

As you might gather, I like this book.

Dennett argues that the antiscientific approach to the world always has a skyhook lurking somewhere, a skyhook being the mythical thing that holds aeroplanes up in the air. Antiscientists, those who rely on a belief in some ultimate supernatural force or purpose in the universe, always resort to a skyhook to stop their world from crashing down. They cannot accept that the grandeur of the universe, the stunning diversity of life in this particular corner of it, and especially the incredible creature that is Homo sapiens could have come about naturally, that is, without some sort of divine intervention, some skyhook.

But just as Newton showed that the physical universe could operate quite satisfactorily without a god, Charles Darwin showed that the incredible complexity of the living world could also come into being, could evolve and change, through the simplest mechanism, natural selection. He showed that evolution by natural selection was, to use Dennett's word, a crane: a process that, by selecting that which is good, and winnowing out that which is bad, improves itself, lifts itself up. It needs no plan, no guidance, no divine intervention.

Of course, by good and bad, I am talking about fitness to the organism's environment, not some ethical sense of the word.

Cranes not only build living things, but since living things do the building, cranes build themselves, passing on the information on how to do it through genes.

Darwin's discovery changed our view of living things so profoundly that there can be no turning back. Since the publication of his Origin of Species more than a century ago, scientists have pushed his idea relentlessly and inexorably towards embracing man and his works.

This is because once, long ago, cranes built a special crane. Man is a crane with ideas. Now, as the zoologist Richard Dawkins argues, the information about how to build a crane need no longer be passed on through the genes, it can be passed on through ideas themselves, or, as Dawkins calls them, memes.

By creating memes, the living world has created a newer, faster way of creating cranes. Culture, civilisation, universities and science itself are all products of it, and they are all themselves cranes.

Education is a crane. But it is more than that, it is the greatest crane of all. Your degree is a crane. It is very simple, but it is what I wanted to say to those students all those years ago. That is what I say to you today.

Darwin, Dawkins and Dennett! You, as science and education graduates, are one with them. Go forth, use their cranes, build some more.