Science and Comedians

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Hello, and welcome to the very first Infinite Monkey Cage, a programme about science.

I'm Brian Cox, physicist.

And I'm Robin Ince, English and Drama, BA.

Robin, could you just tell the listeners why Robin Ince, BA, English and Drama and Comedian, is presenting a science show?

Basically, I think because I am what I would classify as a keen idiot, which I imagine some of the other Radio 4 audience are, which is that we're very interested in science, but at the same time, we don't know much about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector of the standard model.

And to be honest, we're slightly scared of it.

Well, don't worry about it.

By the end of the series, you will be fluent in spontaneous symmetry breaking in the electroweak sector of the standard model.

And just to reassure listeners, this show is also available in the form of a graph.

Over Over the next few weeks, we'll be talking about everything from the search for alien intelligence, science conspiracy theories, religion versus science, overlapping magisteria, non-overlapping magisteria, slime mold communities, and hopefully, if we've got time, the sub-aquatic ape theory, which is my favourite theory, with professors, PhDs, and people off the telly, because they don't put enough professors on the telly.

But in this week's monkey cage, we're joined by anatomist and broadcaster Dr.

Alice Roberts.

Ellie.

And it says here: someone whose early career showed so much promise but has gone drastically downhill since then.

That's a bit harsh harsh in the script.

I'm just going to be a neurosurgeon.

Apologies for that.

No, no, what you've done there, Brian, is

you've misread that one.

That's not referring to Doxaris Roberts.

I can't believe we only wrote this script.

We wrote this script one hour ago and already you've forgotten the meaning of this script.

And cosmologist and comedian Dara Overine.

And the shocking thing was, I actually recognised myself from the description of someone whose career started promisingly and has gone hideously wrong.

I cannot be described as a cosmologist, by the way.

Let's get that straightforward from the start, because I never actually worked as a cosmologist.

But you did study it.

I did, I did, yeah.

I studied.

I did four years of a theoretical physics and mathematics degree with a specific leaning towards differential geometry and cosmology.

So why is it that there are so many comedians that seem to have started life as scientists?

You know, as Ben Miller, Dave Gorman, Richard French, Harry Hills?

I have a theory that the way you come up with ideas in comedy isn't dissimilar to the way you come up with ideas in mathematics, because you compare things to other things, basically.

You compare the properties of one thing to the properties of another thing, and

from that, hilarity/slash mathematical illumination lies, right?

Depending on what are the two things you're comparing, right?

I nation to ask civilization

or a very good joke.

But there is also the other thing that, even though there are people who have a science background, there are also a lot of comedians who don't have a science background, they're very passionate about science, but then actually trying to do stand-up comedy about science.

You must have difficulty when you try and tackle cosmology in stand-up.

Well, I don't, as a rule, try to tackle cosmology in stand-up that often.

I'm a little bit close to it To actually be able to bring that.

What's all this about?

I mean, the best stance in comedy is to be the intelligent alien.

To have, unfortunately, had the door opened a little bit for you by way of doing a degree means that I'm a little bit too close to it.

Now, Alice, see, I always think, because I think that's why physics is hard in any way to do in comedy, is because it's kind of counter-instinctual, and most people have no background in it at all.

Whereas evolutionary biology, see, I think that's quite an easy one to do gags about.

So, I mean, do you have, when you're doing a presentation?

The journey of mankind out of Africa.

That's just funny.

No, I'm talking about the other.

Is the purpose of this show to classify all the sciences depending on how easy they are to make jokes about?

Yes, that is exactly it.

I didn't realise that.

That's good.

I'm on board with that project.

That's what you want to do.

So, Alice, do you, I mean, this is what I love: is finding out when I've sometimes been to conferences, there are gags that I don't understand at all.

And you must have, when you're doing a lecture, do you have your kind of opening gag?

This will get people into the idea of mitochondrial leave.

Watch out.

I've had some very, very funny answers to things when I've been marking medical student exams over the years.

And there was this one bit where I was asking them what the

feature that stabilised the ankle was.

And somebody wrote down Spanish Ape.

And I was really foxed by this.

And then eventually a colleague said, oh God, I know what it is.

And I said, well, have you been lying to them?

And he said, no, I said that the two bones at the ankle grip onto the talus, which is the top bone of your foot, and they form a sort of spanner shape.

And obviously, the student had just written this down.

and it kind of, you know, it's like esoteric knowledge.

And of course, what's nice about anatomy and the stuff that I do is it's not actually esoteric, it's quite accessible.

Well, that's what I found difficult is when I found out that the song about the headbone connect to the neck bone actually does have some inaccuracies in it, which is one of the reasons that I didn't do very well in anatomy.

This is the problem with a lot of 30s songwriters.

It's not a mnemonic for an exam, that particular song.

I don't think that's how it was invented.

It wasn't passed from anatomy students to anatomy student.

Because why would you put a chorus in?

If you've got annemonic, old, why would you have a bit that goes dem bones dem bones in the middle of it?

But that was one of the problems I think that was marked down for racism in the modern age.

Slow you up during a viva if in the middle of it all you had to pause maybe with the rib cage and go

and then start again.

It's all right.

Well, we talked about the fact that because sorry, we're not mainly going to be talking about how science and comedy mix, but it's just because of the first one, and we were just intrigued

as to because

I presume we talked about the fact that bonobos are a fantastic ape to create humour from because they're the only ape with a fashion sense.

Not merely the fact that they rub genitals together to ease a fight situation, but also if they find a dead rat or a cockroach, they place it on the head and march around.

And that's true, they parade around, showing off their hat.

So that's why, again, my physics, I think it's much harder.

This was television, because there's three people just staring at you completely blankly.

I just want to report that because it's raising.

Yeah, anyway, Alice, you

recently discussed about the out of Africa theory, the fact that the whole of humanity actually began from Africa.

Now, it's the amazing human journey, isn't it?

It's a great human journey.

The incredible human journey.

The incredible human journey.

I found it great and amazing.

Can I make it quite clear?

I said to the BBC, you can't call it the incredible human journey because the incredible journey is a story about, I think, two dogs and a cat trying to find their way through.

Yeah, that would be fantastic if it was two dogs.

Basically, what you're saying is that humanity's family moved and humanity followed them.

Did you think that these programmes have been in any way controversial?

Because I know that you got a lot of letters.

I mean, did you expect that anthropology, the human journey, would be a controversial programme?

I don't think so, because we were presenting something which is very much the consensus view that most anthropologists agree about, but it was quite strange actually.

And it almost seemed that some of the criticism of it or some of the responses people were bringing about it were more to do with the fact that they felt uncomfortable with the idea that humans had actually evolved, which I found quite shocking.

Because I kind of started off with the, you know,

that's kind of a given.

At what point?

Because we're all hearing this debate going on and on and on and on and on, and people who just went essentially ram their fingers in theirs and go, la la la la la la la la la.

And at what point do you have to go, fine, go for it, knock yourselves out.

The rest of us are going to carry on looking up stuff and finding stuff and learning things.

You know, is it important this particular debate or is it just is it just time wasting at this stage?

I don't think it is time wasting.

And I think that it's still important to engage with people, even if they're starting off from the point of view of really not wanting to believe you.

And I think that if you lay the evidence out on the table, and certainly when it comes to the evolution of our own species, we've got such a lot of evidence out.

And also, we've got a lot of evidence from different branches of science.

And you kind of think, I can't believe that people can look at all of the evidence I've kind of laid out here and not engage with it and start to think, maybe there is something to it after all.

Maybe the fact that you've got a story coming out of genetics and fossils and archaeology and it all seems to be coming together, surely there's something in it.

Oh, but it'll never come together as there are two chapters at the start of a book which explain this very neatly.

Plus, how often do you need to hear the words?

Well, you say it's only a theory

without having to go through the definition of what a theory means.

I mean, of all the sciences, the paleontology is one of the ones.

I mean, somewhere between when I was in school and when I grew up, the brontosaurus died out again

because it was around.

And I remember being in all the little books of Dinosaur when I was a kid, and then when I became an adult, I had to buy the book for my own kid.

Suddenly, no brontosaurus anymore.

Well, the brontosaurus is gone.

The brontosaurus is gone.

Yeah,

the Brontosaurus is gone.

Know that.

The only animal to have become extinct twice.

Feathers is a new one.

It was feathers.

Dinosaurs never had feathers.

In my day, dinosaurs didn't have any feathers.

And now they do that.

I've got a friend who works on feathered dinosaurs in China.

He's shown me a feathered dinosaur about the size of a chicken.

It looked a bit like a chicken.

I'm sure it wasn't just a chicken that suggested to look like a dinosaur, though.

It was fossilised to a start.

But I really like the idea.

He said, Do you know that some of the Tyrannosaurus Rex family actually had feathers?

That's the best, that's aged, because that's now my favourite dinosaur.

Because my favourite used to be, you know,

when we were, at least three of us, when we were young, they still didn't know why dinosaurs had died out.

And there was a Maverick scientist who had the belief that there was a plant which had special properties which would help basically help the dinosaurs go to the toilet.

And the plant died out, and then the dinosaurs actually died out from constipation.

That was in the early 70s.

That was one of the theories.

But feathered Tyrannosaurus, Rex wins, brontosaurus models getting thrown out.

Waste of time that was for that whole week.

People cling to say say that science is dogmatic, that science tells you exactly.

They don't realize that like, I mean, that physics itself threw out all physics twice at least in the last century.

Yeah.

And just went, oh God, we've been wrong with this all along.

Let's go with the new paradigm.

And it does it all the time.

New ideas come through.

How do we as a culture educate people to respect the scientific method, to to understand that that's the best view we have at the moment based on the current evidence?

And whilst it may change, it's very difficult to get to a better view by, as you say, just belief or reading it in a magazine.

I think that there's two problems you face, right?

And Daifida, I don't work in these industries, so they're not problems I necessarily face, but two problems that you face, he says, pointing to Alice and to Brian here, which is that people inherently dislike people who are smarter than they are.

And that goes back to school.

And people like their own opinions and like the fact that there are many things in which their opinions are extremely valid and dislike being told there are topics in which your opinion doesn't actually count for anything.

And people don't like to hear that.

We live in a culture where people are constantly expressing their opinions and things.

I have a right to my opinion.

I have a right to my opinion.

My opinion should be heard.

My opinion should be regarded as equally valid as anyone else's opinion.

And there are certain topics in which that is nonsense.

There was a thing on the Daily Mail website.

And the Daily Mail website, this isn't actually a comment of the Daily Mail website, bizarrely.

They had a thing about a story that processed meat can cause greater incidence of colon cancer.

This is the idea that you've eat too many sausages, basically, that

some certain certain percentage increase in the risk of colon cancer over the course of your life, right?

And it was a perfectly reasonable study mapped out and they alerted people to the findings of this.

And underneath it, there was a quiz saying, do you think sausages cause cancer?

And underneath the story which said sausages cause cancer, 80% of people have said, no, sausages don't cause cancer.

And you're kind of going, well, I'm sorry, there's literally nothing you can do in that situation.

Do you think people have just turned to the quiz though rather than actually reading it?

Possibly they read out out just a little bit.

Oh, quiz is fun.

People were googling sausage and quiz, and I remember

scroll down to find the button they could press rather than that.

I just think, this isn't Jed word.

You're actually, your opinion isn't right.

It can be dangerous, can it?

Particularly, childhood vaccinations, for example.

That's a very dangerous thing to have an opinion on.

You need to trust the experts.

It's like getting on a plane and saying, I don't think the wings should be like that.

I just don't like those wings.

I want cubic wings.

You trust the aerodynamicist.

Or you don't go to the cockpit on a plane and say, I think I could do this better.

Can I do that?

The power of that.

You don't get that, do you?

You don't get aeronautical.

You're doing medicine, don't you?

Where are the aeronautical classes?

I think science is the art, I suppose, of teaching yourself to look at evidence and remove your prejudice.

And it is very difficult.

But is that because common sense is overrated?

Because common sense, I think, may be.

I think science is

that we've learnt as a species to

remove our filters as far as we can.

Science is the art of looking at evidence dispassionately, and you have to be taught it because you react to things.

We're all irrational at heart, I suppose.

We're irrational beings.

And so I think that's the value of science.

I think there is an element of people complaining about scientists being, and even this discussion, I'm sure that people will hear this and go, oh, look at that, how smug.

They all agree with each other.

Where's the other dissenting voice?

And that's not necessarily because two of us aren't scientists at all.

I certainly come from a very humble position of knowing just how much work those who actually work in science do to keep up with all this kind of information and how long it takes to train for this.

And that drives me down there

on behalf of people who do all this work that somebody can just make up stuff.

So it seems to me the consensus, at least around this table, that science is valuable.

So given the importance, how much would you guess that we actually spend on scientific research in this country, given that it underpins our economy, our future as a civilization?

How much would you guess?

What does that include when you say

what does that include?

All the universities, the medical research council, the physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, space exploration, CERN, absolutely everything.

I mean, there's a famous example of when the Apollo program was on and people asked American citizens how much we're spending going to the moon.

It was like half of our GDP, you know, billions and billions and billions.

And in fact, it was a tiny percentage.

So, I mean, how much do you, if you had to guess, I mean, I suppose,

I mean, yeah, how much would you think the whole, the whole lot costs?

Four, five.

They go for ten.

Yeah, I'd say ten, twelve.

Really?

It's 0.4%

of GDP.

It's about

six, six and a half billion pounds a year, which pays for everything.

And then the proposal is that funding decisions for scientific projects should be 25% based on impact.

So, what do you think impact is?

Impact is a that business, let's say, automatically understands the implications of it and can sell it.

That's what I'm presuming impact means.

Or not necessarily business, but let's say that it is a very specific, it's a new type of MRI machine, something very

commercial or very obviously marketable.

How do you measure that?

Because I mean, is it impact in terms of number of lives saved or amount of money that that technology then generates?

I think how quickly it can be put into production or

sold.

Thinks an awful lot of scientific ideas come from a place which is much more blue skies where actually we cannot predict what the impact is going to be.

This is assuming that you're going to be able to predict exactly what the impact of some kind of scientific discovery is going to be before you'll decide whether to fund it.

Presumably, the parallel to this would be if they said to comedians, not that we're publicly funded,

but if they said to comedians, if you could just do jokes about topics we already have,

because we like these topics, but these topics have worked in the past.

If you could just do new jokes about these exact topics again and again and again, or it's the immediacy of the laugh would be the graph.

I mean, that routine was great, but we we were seeing that that was nine seconds before the laugh, and I feel it would actually benefit the audience more.

If they could get a laugh within the first four seconds, that means the routine could be over within nine minutes and then they can leave.

Whereas the way we're looking at the moment, we're waiting for twenty three, twenty four minutes, but you get the conclusion of your set.

So therefore, what we need is a far more immediate laugh and therefore an immediate exit.

But Dari wouldn't even get to the point of trialing trialing any new material because he wouldn't have the funding to do it.

No, he wouldn't.

I mean, the process that you go to at the start of a show, where you basically sit in a room and go bananas and throw ideas at a wall and then go in front of an audience with a sheet of paper and go, Is this something?

Is there anything in this?

That's all gone, presumably, under this current scheme.

I still find it fascinating the whole way that science tries to get funding.

And because I'm not a science, I don't necessarily have a great comprehension of it.

So I've attempted to learn more this week, but I went to eavesdrop at the Prose from Dover Laboratory.

Oh, Maurice, you're back early.

I think I may have had a breakthrough with our gel electrophoresis.

Oh, Desmond Musta use.

Well, it just means that we.

I'm afraid the Research Council has refused to renew our funding.

What?

Damn it!

Do they not see the importance of sizing and quantification of proteins during purification or protein expression experiments?

No, no.

They're funding a self-irning shirt.

Not Thompson over at UCL.

I'm afraid so.

They saw him on the One Show with Adrian Chiles.

Why can't we be on the One Show?

And why do our funding applications always fail?

It's as if success is in inverse proportion to long-term importance.

Go on.

Well, if S success is a product of P populist appeal and the inverse of long-term importance.

So one over I.

Correct.

And factoring in a telegenic front person like Thompson, let's call it the Vordeman effect, V, we have P times one over I to the power of V.

May I?

Oh, yes, of course.

Ah, oh, that's good.

Interesting.

Now, what's A?

Attenborough, we know that if he's just had a series on, all funding moves away from the arts and humanities to sciences.

My God, Maurice, we may have discovered the formula for successful funding applications.

Steady on, old man.

We'll need exhaustive trials, and for that, we'll need funding.

So in order to fund further research into successful funding application, we'll need to be successful in our application for funding.

Damn.

Hold on, Desmond.

If we're unsuccessful and the Research Council turns us down, we'll be in an even stronger position to apply for funding in order to discover exactly why they refused us funding.

Which Which could take decades, but which will need funding.

A strong argument then for being unsuccessful in our application.

Precisely.

Let's not apply at all.

That will guarantee that we're unsuccessful and ensure further funding.

Us beating the Research Council at its own game.

Excellent.

This is very exciting.

By the way,

we have to be out of here at four.

The lease on the lab runs out then.

Right, oh.

And they want our microscopes back.

What time's the job centre open?

I've got no idea.

I've got a job in a pub.

Ooh, bar work.

Well, that seems perfectly logical logical to me.

Obviously, level of celebrity plus product equals likelihood of funding.

Well, you know, I mean, it sounds funny in a way, but actually, there is a genuine amount of concern in the research sector, the university sector, about his proposals.

So I went to speak to the current science minister, Lord Drayson, to put our concerns to him.

What's he like?

I've always wondered.

He's lovely.

I think whilst our sketch is meant to be funny, as a working scientist, there is often a feeling that you listen to what the government says, which is quite often in some difficult to understand management speak about, you know, are you saying I'm speaking management?

No, but

you're not the person that talks to us.

It gets filtered down through like

people who've been trained in the art of management.

And then what scientists tend to do is try to work out, try to optimise their strategy in order to get the money for the research that they're going to do anyway.

Well,

scientists are very good at that.

Well, this is a great opportunity, right?

It's the science minister speaking here.

And And I'm telling you, just do excellent science.

That's what it's about.

It really is.

The government sees that the success that we've had in the past is because we've focused on excellence.

It's about the quality of the science.

So the most important thing that all scientists need to focus on is the quality of what it is that they do.

I look at the science budget, and I think perhaps you do as well, and I won't put words into your mouth, but I look at it and think it's ludicrously low.

Not in Britain, but just in general.

I mean, let's say Britain's around the average.

Then these levels of funding

set against figures like 6.4% of UK GDPs physics-based, or like the studies of the economic impact of Apollo, which is something very near to my heart.

I mean, the Apollo programme was one of the reasons I went into science.

The numbers are astonishing.

You have, for example, for every dollar spent, $14 came back into the US economy.

That's the chase study of the impact of Apollo.

Or CERN.

I mean, the World Wide Web, which Tim Berners-Lee says could not have been invented anywhere else, has made an incalculable contribution to the world economy.

How am I to understand the fact that we spend, as a world, so little on scientific research when it delivers so much to our civilisation?

Well,

I agree with everything that you've said.

And I think that, for me, the most pragmatic argument for why this economic impact in research assessment is so important is that future science ministers who come after me

need to be able to make a stronger case in government to say exactly what you've said and be able to point to the data and being able to stand in front of the Treasury and say, Look, it's indisputable proof from this economic assessment, from the impact assessment that we do of scientific research, that the more we invest in science, the better impact that we have for our country.

And those two, therefore, are linked.

If we want to be able to spend more on science in the future, which we absolutely need to be able to do, we have to show the way in which that happens.

So, Alice, you were shaking your head at points there, but it seems reasonably sensible.

I mean, what what the science minister is saying is that he wants to be able to make an argument to the treasury, presumably.

I always wondered why it's not possible to just go to the treasury and say, look, right, science is really good.

It delivers economic impact, but you can't it appears you can't talk in those words.

So he's saying that the scientists themselves need to provide the data that tells the treasury that our whole civilisation is built on science.

But you were already providing examples of how science did that without having to bring in a whole new bean counting mechanism.

When he says the best benefits for society, I want to know is being a non-scientist, how many scientists are working deliberately for the detriment of society, how many are looking for funding.

Yeah, funding.

Because I mean that that's the main science scientist we know.

You can't discount the amount of good work evil scientists have done in just moving, say, weapon systems along or armies with scubas on their back, or funneling out of volcanoes to put rocket systems into.

I mean, that kind of stuff.

A lot of work was done by bad people.

Ebolavaris Licorice, which didn't get funding for the British government, but has done very well abroad.

And of course, Werner von Braun.

Well, von Braun is a very interesting example, actually, because he was the father of Apollo.

So the whole wonderful adventure of going to the moon was built on the back of the V-2 rocket.

Yeah.

So, you know, let's not discount evil too quickly in this situation.

But the

measure the impact of evil as well, maybe.

Apparently, you can, absolutely.

Gosh, probably more easily, to be honest.

That's a slogan, election slogan, isn't it?

Evil for evil is a force for good.

All the stuff there where you've gone on and, you know, and it's really underfunded.

And And the other thing, actually, which would have been fantastic for our GDP, has been evil, even better than science.

If we can combine the two.

Perhaps scientists should look at, as they're filling out,

as they're writing their hypothesis down, they should go, well, what would an evil me do?

This is what I would do here, but maybe evil me would take a different, maybe just need that little different viewpoint on it.

Assessing the evil, evil people have a tendency to be much more goal-oriented, much less blue sky.

So the next time Brian puts a sort of grant application in, if he attaches a little photo of himself on the front, stroking a long-headed white cat.

It's going to have a much better chance.

If it's a two-headed cat, look what I made, Bobby, then it's even better, isn't it?

On the level of evil, I think we've actually got to the end of the show.

We started off as a force for good.

We've actually ended up promoting evil.

Darren O'Brien and Alice Roberts, thank you very much.

Next week we'll be discussing UFOs, science conspiracies and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence with Seth Szostak, who is indeed from SETI, that is their job to find extraterrestrial intelligence, and John Ronson, who has been out in the deserts with Robbie Williams to find UFOs.

So he's got his own personal take on UFO hunting.

If you know what infinite monkey cage means, because we're still a bit uncertain, get in touch with us.

We're not going to tell you how, because that's exercise number one.

Goodbye.

If you've enjoyed this program, you might like to try other Radio 4 podcasts, from Friday night comedy and daily drama from the Alchers to a range of news, discussions, and documentaries.

For a full list of available podcasts, visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio4.

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