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 kind of true. Once upon a time, I believed in a god, and went to church and prayed. 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.
From then on, I was free to ask questions, and the discovery that there was no god or supernature turned out to be the single most momentous, and indeed most meaningful discovery I could ever have imagined. But enough of this for now. In 1971, I was offered a place at Oxford, to do either Zoology (my choice by default) or a new course called Human Sciences. I opted for the latter and never looked back.
The idea (certainly as far as I was concerned), was to revolutionise the thinking about human behaviour, and put it 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 albeit lesser known Niko Tinbergen (Nobel prize winner for his work on animal behaviour), as well as Sir Evans Pritchard and Edwin Ardener in anthropology.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 up.
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. Like the tower of Babel, it was a mix of mutual unintelligibility, and yet....it was centralised in the human brain, a very specific place indeed.... So I explained this to him. I reckoned that what I was after was the nature of meaning (which is a master category for all our hopes, plans, needs, fears and purpose). Niko agreed with me, and told me he thought it was a really good idea. He was really enthusiastic that I should pursue it, and do the work on humour that I had mentioned to him in order to showcase the general focus on meaning. Well, with such a reaction from such a thinker as Tinbergen, my path was set. Okay, it was already set anyway, but now it had a rosy hue to its horizon.