I worship at just one cathedral. And perhaps that seems a bit limiting. But consider this. For this cathedral is a vast and beautiful place, full of amazing stained glass windows telling all manner of stories about the greatest and the smallest, all amid vaulted spaces and pillars composed of every conceivable material known to existence. I particularly like its carvings, which depict all the many fantastic beings one might ever think of, in both this world and the next. And indeed the world after that. For my place of worship is the 'Cathedral of Science'. Never heard of it? Does such a place exist? And does its beauty, scale and power surpass all else? Well, Yes, inevitably. For the Cathedral of Science is the Universe.
I was once described, whilst on a punting party on the river in Oxford, as a 'born again scientist'. Everybody laughed so much that it stuck. After all, it was more or less true. The thing is, once upon a time, I believed in a god, and went to church and had faith in what trusted others had told me. But I freed myself from these religious ideas in my teens - that is, after a good long struggle between my mental cortex and my primitive brain stem. And I never looked back. Never? Sure I did - early religious training leaves a deep watermark, hard to wash out, and it took quite a time to really emerge free from its neural stains. Now though, I look back in easy freedom, happy that I have had the experience, and drawing on it as a means of understanding those who are still within its grasp.
From here on, I was free to ask as many questions as I could, and the discovery that there was no god or supernatural force turned out to be the single, most momentous, and indeed most meaningful discovery I could ever have imagined.
But enough of this, at least for the purposes of this brief 'about me'. In 1971, I was offered a place at The Queens College, Oxford, to do either Zoology (my choice by default) or a new course called Human Sciences. I opted for the latter and began to explore further.
The idea of this course (certainly as far as I and a number of the other students was concerned) was to revolutionise the thinking about human behaviour, and put it up on the same standing as the physical and biological sciences. And we had some powerful people to assist us in this quest - Walter Bodmer, Desmond Morris, Richard Dawkins, and the eminent Niko Tinbergen (Nobel prize winner for his work on animal behaviour), as well as Sir Evans Pritchard and Edwin Ardener in anthropology. And it was while chatting to Professor Tinbergen at the end of a seminar, that the idea of a 'science of meaning', rather than a human or social science, came to me.
The thing is, I had been having trouble identifying the central focus of all the various -isms, -ists and -ologies that make up the social or human sciences. Because, like the tower of Babel, it was a great mix of mutual unintelligibility. Which was odd given that its subject was centralised in the human brain - surely a centralised theory was in order here? So I talked about all of this to the professor. In particular, I suggested to him that really, what we all should be after, was the nature of meaning (which is a master category for all our hopes, plans, needs, fears and purpose). So I argued that the central aim of the social sciences should be just that - a 'Science of Meaning'. Niko agreed, and told me he thought it was a good idea. He was really enthusiastic that I should pursue it, and also to do the work on humour that I had mentioned to him in order to showcase the general focus on meaning. And given such a reaction - from a thinker as good as Tinbergen, my path was set. Okay, it was already set, but now it had the approval of somebody I really respected, which helped a lot, because the way forward was hugely daunting, and possibly rather daft.
Continuing my course at Oxford became a slightly surreal exercise after this. I knew where I wanted to go, and studies in population genetics, animal behaviour, demography, statistics, social anthropology and so on were great if I wanted to become a social or human scientist, but they offered no real help in my new found quest to chart the contours of human meaning. It was useful, and indeed interesting to follow these many different sciences, and I am glad I did. But honestly, they only served to underline to me the necessity of tackling the central problem of the social sciences - not the brain, but what's in the brain, and not just in the human brain, but in the processor of any intelligent life anywhere in the universe. Meaning 'Meaning'.
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