[Chris:] Now I'm ha I'm handing round a summary of last week's lecture, which I hope will make more sense of it, and I have here, if anybody wants to borrow it, a Xerox of chapter three in Dorkins' book where he explains the Blind Watchmaker, and the manual for the disk. Now for copyright reasons, if you want to do the Blind Watchmaker, and I'd very much like you to, you've gotta borrow the disk from me, okay? So if you want it, my advice is take the Xerox or read the book. When you've read it come and ask me for the disk and I'll lend it to you. Erm, I've also got a rather smaller number of copies of ev Evolvematic notes if you wanna do Evolvematic, which I also demonstrated briefly. So if you wanna do Evolvematic I've got the notes for that
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Ya, explained in the handout that's coming round, okay? Thanks very much. So everybody got a handout did they? Right. I've also got more copies of the reading list which I've forgotten to bring with me but which I have got er upstairs and they're pinned to my door, if anybody needs another reading list, okay? But I forgot to bring those with me. Erm, let me remind you that at twelve o'clock today er I've booked S O one eight. Who's coming to S O one eight? Erm, for fun, you have a story and you're allowed to play
[speaker002:] Alright then. [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Er, I'll tell you a story and I'll let you play a game. S O one eight. Okay, that's at twelve o'clock. Now what I want to do. Let me just explain, if you can't make it, or if you don't want to do it, I will er re-do it all again in the lecture next Friday at eleven. Next Friday at eleven I will go over it all again in the lecture. So er, however, I think you'll get much more out of it if you come today and do it first. If you do it first, you're gonna really understand what I'm going on about. But er in other words don't worry if you don't understand everything today when you do do it because we'll go over it next erm next week in the lecture and we'll be going over it in classes as well.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Some of you have done a prisoner's dilemma. Now if you've done a prisoner's dilemma you don't have to come. You've already done it okay? Now what I want to do in this lecture is to finish off the er introductory part of my, of my remarks and take us up to the point where beginning at twelve o'clock the real part, the real er core of this course begins when we start to look at social theory. Now, you'll recall that last week I was talking about Darwin's basic concept and I tried to explain it to you and to illustrate it to you. One of the big problems about erm teaching people what Darwin really said is that people's concept of evolution by natural selection is er contaminated by ideas which were actually originated, not by Darwin, but by the founder of British sociology, Herbert Spencer, whose dates were nineteen twenty to nineteen O three. As you'll see, a contemporary of Darwin who actually lived a little bit longer than he did. It was Spencer, and not Charles Darwin, who formulated the slogan, and that's all it is, survival of the fittest. It was not Darwin. Darwin erm was prevailed upon to use it and did so occasionally, but rather reluctantly, and rightly so. I say rightly so because Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution was fundamentally different from Darwin's, even though it's often confused with it. Herbert Spencer believed that there was a cosmic metaphysical er life force, if you like, and that evolution to higher, more complex and more integrated entities was a fundamental aspect of physics, biology and sociology. So he applied it erm more or less universally, not just to biological evolution and as Darwin had. He applied it to er the evolution of the cosmos as a whole and indeed to society, and believed that there was an ine inevitable onward and upward tendency of evolution from simple to complex, from isolated to unified, from erm stupid to more intelligent and so on. And standing on the pinnacle of course of this process of evolution erm er who were living in the most advanced societies and so on. There's a bust of Spencer in the library actually near the, opposite the erm, enquiry desk. Erm, you can go down and have a look at him there. Erm, well Spencer was a great great great bloke from many points of view but er unfortunately his ideas of er evolution were er mixed up as it were. Erm, one of the worst consequences of this was this awful phrase, survival of the fittest. Now, erm, what's wrong with this if you think about it, is that er it's hard to know what fitness and fittest means and although I'm now gonna spend about ten minutes talking about it, this will be the last time you'll hear me mention the word fitness, and I strongly advise you to do the same, for reasons which I will now n now explain. The trouble with the slogan, survival of the fittest, is that it gives the impression that evolution is all about creating a kind of super race, you know, like you saw in Nazi propaganda films, you know, blonde erm muscly beasts as it were, who were the th the sort of pinnacles of, of, of creation. The idea that evolution made organisms fitter in the sense of sporting sense of fitness or personal health. If you think about it, even in terms of sport, the whole concept of fitness is very very ambiguous. For example, erm, you... [tape jumps] sumo wrestling but would that make you fit for sprint racing? Of course it wouldn't. There's nobody in this room who couldn't win a sprint race against a sumo wrestler now, without any practice, even in stockinged feet you could do it. And yet I don't think there's anybody in this room who could last a minute in a ring with a sumo wrestler because obviously being fit for sumo wrestling is quite different from being fit for sprint running, you need a completely different physique. So even in terms of sporting meaning of fitness, it means completely different things in different contexts, and it certainly means er different things in terms of evolution. For example, er, males are fitter than females, er human males, in the sense of sporting achievement and this is why all sporting events that we rely on athletic prowess have to be segregated. You can't you know have Olympic sports for males and females because males would always win. Now, from Trivers and actually it would be better on the, on the proper thing wouldn't it? Let's try and get it on the board, which somebody has written on and I told them about that and asked them to clean it, but, bring a spray can of white paint next time. Erm, excess male mortality in humans as a function of age. Straight out of Trivers. As you can see, males die more than females throughout their, throughout their lifespan. That's more of that. Erm, here's a more detailed one. This is excess mortality of er rates for males and females age one to four for different years of the twentieth century. You can see that modern health care has made no difference, so you can't say it was anything to do with health care. In fact, if anything, little boys die more than little girls, even more now than they used to in the past, so it can't be anything to do with health care in case
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, yeah, these are all straight out of Trivers. Erm, ratio of injuries to deaths er for all accidents as a function of age and sex, and again, you can see males have, males do a lot worse than females and I think there's one more, no sorry that's the lot. Erm, the facts are, and this is all in Trivers if you want to look up erm if you want to look it up in more detail, that males die more readily than females, from all causes that affect both sexes and some that even don't and you'd be astonished about, like for instance, you gather from John book on the myth of he heterosexual... [tape jumps] you're not allowed to buy in this country, you have to import it from the U S. It's a kind of censorship er on the part of the, part of the erm British publishing industry. But that book gave the astonishing statistic that in nineteen ninety, or nineteen eighty eight in the U S, more men died from breast cancer in the U S than women died from heterosexually contracted AIDS. I mean I didn't know that many men died of breast cancer but apparently they do. Not as many as women die of course but men even die of breast cancer. So the point I'm making to you is, is this. That if evolution was all about survival of the fittest, and if men are physically fitter in the sense of sporting prowess, which they unquestionable are, how has evolution produced the situation in which men have less life expectancy than women do from every point of view this far? Well, the answer to that of course is that what reduces erm male life expectancy is the very same thing that promotes their reproductive success, namely the direct and the indirect effects of testosterone. The male sex hormone testosterone er makes males bigger, er they've bigger bones, more muscle and so on, this gives them their sporting prowess and this is why of course er you've had all these... [tape jumps] better as a result. It produces that effect but it also makes er males more aggressive, more likely to take risks, which explains the accident figures, more likely to become involved in violence. It increases their resting metabolic rate by about five percent... [tape jumps] engine is running about one twentieth faster all the time, so perhaps this is why it wears out quicker. They've got less fat to insulate them from cold. They're generally bigger so when they fall they fall heavier. All this kind of thing. It all adds up to making males survive less well than females. However, the other consequence of it is it promotes their reproductive success and you can erm you can see that it is indeed an effect of testosterone if you... [tape jumps] castrated live longer than uncastrated males, and the earlier they're castrated, the longer they live. So they can expect to live more or less as long as any, as, as, as any woman does. So erm, if you think about it, you could say well okay, if the evolution is all about survival of the fittest and if fitness means surviving longer
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] why doesn't evolution select all males without testes? Hmm, the answer's obvious. A male without testes would live longer than a, than a male with them, undoubtedly, on average five to seven years longer, and erm generally be more healthy in terms of avoiding a lot of problems that, that they might have had through being male. But, of course, such a male could never reproduce and natural selection is ultimately a question of reproductive success, not of fitness, and in fact from now on you will find me avoiding the term fitness and instead talking about reproductive success, and you'll find that all the best literature, like Trivers' book, does the same thing. So from now on, let's forget the concept of fitness, which was Herbert Spencer's and not Darwin's. Let's just remember that it's wrong. Let's not use this awful slogan the survival of the fit fittest for all its social Darwinist terms. Because it's, it's completely wrong and misleading, and let's instead talk about the ultimate bottom line in evolution which is reproductive success. Natural selection selects for reproductive success. Of course, organisms have to survive and may need to be, to have erm fitness in the sporting sense in order to have reproductive success. This is certainly true. But, such survival or strength or erm or sporting prowess, will only be selected if i if it promotes ultimate reproductive success. That's its final aim as it were. It's a secondary matter by comparison with reproductive success. And that all, is all natural selection is. Ultimate natural selection, and this is Darwin's idea, not Spencer's. Darwin's idea was organisms which have heritable praise for superior reproductive success will, by definition, leave more offspring behind it. And that's basically all it boils down to. So the reason why males die more readily than females, and this is true for nature by the way, not just human levels, it's a practical universal effect that the males die more readily than females, that males are ultimately selected for reproductive success for erm survival as such. Everybody, everybody clear on that matter. Okay. One of Darwin's big problems and to some extent... [tape jumps] Darwin didn't know about genetics. He had ideas of his own but they were all wrong. He had a theory... [tape jumps] but it's wrong. Er, the truth about genetics was discovered more or less the same time Darwin put forward his theory in the early eighteen sixties by who was er erm... [tape jumps] carried out erm experiments in sweetpeas in the monastery garden and apparently sent a copy of his paper to Darwin. The, the letter was found among Darwin's effects unopened. Er, if only Darwin had opened it, Darwin would have saved himself an, all, load of old trouble. So the moral of this folks is, always open your junk mail, even if it's from Czechoslovakia. The only mail I get from Czechoslovakia is a junk mail actually, it's all about some wine club that I never want to belong to, but erm, if Darwin had only opened it, er don't throw it away, it could be, it could be th it could be the paper from that will save you infinite trouble. Well, erm, Darwin didn't know about genetics and the result of this was he had big problems. One of his big problems was, his theory, as we've seen, demanded genetic variation, and in order to, to provide the raw material for natural selection to work on, it demanded mutations. So Darwin had a concept of mutation which was a random genetic change. Erm,... [tape jumps] was, or so his critics said, that er his theory just would not work and the kind of argument that they produced against him, and poor old Darwin really didn't have an answer to this, and i it seemed a very very severe problem at the time was look, supposing that er I'm a mutant... [tape jumps] you might think. I'm a mutant, okay? L S E mutant lecturer gives lecture on mutations. Erm, it's kind of er you know, erm, it's a headline in the Sunday Sport or something. You see, I've never been in the Sunday Sport. My colleague has, and everybody rather, rather resents him for that. It's quite an achievement being in the Sunday Sport. Anyway,wh what'd I say? Yes, supposing I'm mutant and I have, I have a mutation which promotes my reproductive success one hundred percent. This is a very good mutation to have, okay? However, Darwin's critics said because of sexual reproduction I will only pass half that mutation on to my offspring because even then everybody knew that half of an organism's inheritance in genetic, in erm sexual reproduction comes from the other parent. So therefore they argued, my children will only get half the mutation, or half the effects of it, fifty percent increase in reproductive success. Their children will have half again, twenty five percent increase in reproductive success. And in only seven or eight generations, it's dropped to less than one percent. How, said his critics, can Darwin explain how a mutation, even if it's terribly advantageous to an organism, could ever get fixed as it were, in, in evolutionary terms. It looked as if blending inheritance, which at that time was believed in, was going to rule out the possibility that erm that such things er could occur. Well, of course, Darwin really had no answer to that and today we today we do because nowadays we know how evolution works, and erm what we now know that Darwin did not know, is that the genetic code is based, this is just an illustration from a standard book, you can find this in more or less any, any book. Er, this is actually from I think a scientific American one. We now know that erm that the genetics is based upon a an organic polymer called D N A, short for acid, a polymer is just the one molecule with repeating making long in principle. The, it consists of two strands which are made of sugar phosphates and which spiral round each other, and the strands are linked together like, like the, the rungs of a ladder by bases, and there are four bases, and and always pairs up with and er and always pairs up with so that the pattern of bases on one of these sugar phosphate strands always has a corresponding pattern on the other. What happens in er in genetics and how the genetic code is passed on, is that er this double strand of er this double strand is unzipped as it were, and it is just like a kind of zip fastener in that the teeth are the corresponding bases. It unzips, producing two separate strands which can then be copied, and this is basically how genetic information is passed on. Within a cell what happens is this... right... [tape jumps] a cell, what happens is that erm D N A is copied on to something called erm R N A, which is a kind of template, messenger R N A, it's a kind of copy and it's a single strand, corresponding to one of the strands on the original D N A with the same base structure. And it passes through elements in a cell called and as it passes through a the genetic information on the on the R N A D N A is read off and proteins are produced, so the is a kind of read head which reads out the genetic information. The information it reads is a code which has now been broken and this is the code. This is the genetic code here. Erm, bases are read three at a time. In fact er U here stands for, in D N A replaces er in R N A replaces in D N A. It's a little detail. What happens is, as the R N A strand goes through the the genetic code is read out three bases at a time and this is a, is a table which reproduces all the three base combinations you can have, and shows you which amino acids they code for. An amino acid is a chemical sub-unit of a protein, and ultimately everything that happens in a cell it produces some kind of protein, so you can see that erm the triplet or produces erm which is one of the, one of the er... [tape jumps] amino acids and so on and there are also punctuation marks U A A or U A G means stop, as does U G A, so when, when a R N A template running through a gets to a sequence which reads, where was it now, U A A it stops reading because it knows it's got to the end of the gene. That is the way er genetics works. As I said, this is just a very simple fine schematic description for you and you can look at the details anywhere. Erm, we don't really need to concern ourselves with it in detail, thank God, because genetics is a terribly complicated business and awfully technical and I don't understand a, a tenth of it, and we don't really need to. An excellent new book that's come out and you can easily buy because it's only six nine nine, and is... [tape jumps] book, erm kind of bedtime reading. It explains how the genetic code was broken, erm how they discovered about genes and so on, very up to date, scientifically completely correct and a good read. So, if you want to read up the background to all this, this is th one of the best books and one of the most recent... [tape jumps] on the reading list, it's on the reading list on the second page or something. Do you wanna ask a question, or are you just stretching?
[speaker002:] No, no, stretching
[Chris:] Stretching, okey-dokey. Erm... [tape jumps] ah right okay. So wh what I'm saying is erm, our modern view, the consequence of this is our modern view of evolution and I can't think of a better way to illustrate it than this, is that organisms ultimately are, can really been seen, rather like this. This is one of the simplest organisms that we know about. This is something called a T four bacteria. Bacteria is just Greek for and er this is a virus which infects the human gut bacterium. Y you have alo millions of these things in your gut and you need them to help you digest your food. If your bugs get sick a possibility is they're gonna get sick because they're being attacked by one of these things, and it's a virus, terribly small of course. It looks a bit like er the lunar module that landed on the moon. It has a, a, a, a head which is a kind of protein capsule, inside which the D N A is curled up. There's er a collar and a what they call a which is a protein tube and then it has various spikes at the end that make it stick on to the outside of the bacteria. And what happens is, they float around and when they come in contact with a bacterium, they stick into the wall and the D N A tube is inserted through the bacterial wall into the psychoplasm of the bacteria, and the D N A is just pumped into it as if from a hypodermic syringe. Inside the bacterium the D N A of the erm... [tape jumps] C of the T four bacteria then starts hijacks the cellulum material, like the you saw before, in the cell, and instead of making the things that the cell wants to make, it starts to make bits of the of the T four bacteria. The head is made, erm, the tail, all the bits are made and eventually they, they all stick together like a kind of Lego, and the result is a new bacteria is made and this goes on until eventually the cell, there are so many inside the cell, that erm the cell just ruptures, when there're about two hundred or so, the cell is now bulging with T four bacteria, it ruptures and releases a whole blob of new ones to start the cycle all over again. Now, you may think that er you and I are very different from a T four bacteria but personally, and I on can only speak for myself, I can't speak for you of course, but personally I'm prepared to accept that basically I'm really nothing more than a very very complicated and much bigger T four bacterial. As far as evolution is concerned, I, and this is really the essence of our modern view, I am really nothing more than the packaging of my genes, because after all this is what evolution acts on. Evolution ultimately selects for the erm reproductive success of individual organisms, and you can see very clearly in the case of the T four bac bacterial that it is really nothing more than the temporary protein packaging of its D N A. Now admittedly, the T four bacterial is a very simple organism, it can't leap about so it doesn't need senses or a brain to direct it, or muscles or anything like that, it can't repair itself or change itself once it's been made, therefore it doesn't need to digest food, er to, to have an immune system or anything like that to repair itself or put itself to rights, it doesn't need anything like that. Erm, it's a very very simplified organism. Because it reproduces inside another cell in this parasitic way, erm, it doesn't have to find a mate or even bother to split in half to reproduce by asexual means. It's, it's a very simple organism, but basically what it's there for is to ensure the future of T four genes, and this is what i it's doing, and presumably natural selection has er selected it in such a way that it is an optimum design as far as, as far as doing this er is concerned, because it would be in competition with mutant T fours who did it in different ways, and presumably this is the kind of T four that seems to succeed. And I'm certainly prepared to admit that from the point of view of erm evolution, I too am er little more than a biodegradable package er for my genes, because, after all, if natural selection really were about fitness and perfecting the organisms, in terms of making the organism more perfect, more fit, more survivable, why don't we live forever, or, or almost forever? After all, evolution has been going on now for about four billion years as far as we know and there aren't very many long-lived organisms. There are some, like erm, oak trees live five or six hundred years if they're lucky, pines can live for a thousand years, giant tortoises for two hundred, well these are quite impressive figures, but let's face it it's not very long, erm, compared with the time that evolution has been at it. Why hasn't evolution produced organisms that practically last for... [tape jumps] selecting for is reproductive success. Reproductive success, we now know, and Darwin didn't of course, means passing on your genes. That is what a T four bacteria is for and that's what I am for, and I would suggest y ultimately what you are for as well, and this is why in the end erm nature will cast us aside. We're just the kind of biodegradable packaging. The mistake that the social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer made, and that popular opinion still makes about evolution, is the kind of mistake that aliens might make if they landed in a Safeway supermarket car park. I mean a real Safeway, you know, the ones you see in the U S... [tape jumps] where everything you know, even the trolleys, are seven times bigger, erm n n not like they are, you know, the aliens land in the car park of the Maple Valley Safeways in Washington State, and, and observe people coming out of it with enormous piles of shopping. Er, what do they think? They think people are buying cartons and bottles and tins and packets. They might be astonished to find, soon after, that those very same cartons and bottles and tins have perhaps been thrown out in people's, in people's... [tape jumps]. Well, of course, you and I know that the reason you go to Safeways to buy things is not to get the packaging, not usually, what you're interested in is what's inside the packets. We consume what's inside the packets we buy in our groceries, we consume the contents of the bottle, what's in the carton, we throw it away. It's no, no, no further use to us. It seems to me that's an analogy with natural selection. If you conceive the, the organism has a temporary packaging as a kind of protein coat around its, its genes, which T four bacteria clearly is, then once the genes have been passed on, the packaging is no further use and can be discarded. So it seems to me that the existence of death, the fact that organisms don't live forever, and they certainly are not perfected in terms of personal fitness or survivability, because they get diseases and they die... [tape jumps] suggests to me that our modern insight into evolution acting on individual genes is, is correct. Namely, that organisms evolved to be the biodegradable packaging of those genes. I know this is a bit of an affront to our high opinion of ourselves as human beings, er, of course many people regard it that way, but erm my view is that er we can't expect science necessarily to tell us things we want to hear.... [tape jumps] human fantasy and... [tape jumps] for our benefit. Had Darwin known about this you see Darwin could have turned on his critics and said, look, in the first place you're quite wrong about genetics, there is no or at least there doesn't have to be because mutations occur as errors or changes in the base sequences in, in the genetic code. This is our modern concept of a mutation. To go back to my earlier diagram, what happens erm in a, in a mutation, let me find the right one, is that the change occurs in, in these in these bases. One of these base pairs erm another combination is substituted, either by, by er some kind of error in or by the influence of something like erm bac background radiation or some kind of chemical effect or something like that. A mutation means a single based change in the genetic code which may or may not have er ultimate consequences for the organism. Since erm sexually reproducing organisms are and I've tried to keep technical jargon in this course to a minimum, but one term we'll have to learn is diploid, you can't do without it. Diploid means that you get two complete sets of all your genes in sexual reproduction, one from each parent. It's just Greek for two-ply, that's all it is. It's a Greek word meaning two-ply, as in a two-ply bug, a bug with two, two er wires in it. Erm, we are two-ply, diploid, in a sense that we get one set of our genes from one parent and another complete set from the other parent. Now, if one parent has a mutant, has a mutation, supposing I, let's go back to me being a mutant which I was rather enjoying, erm, I'm the mutant with a gene which increases my reproductive success by one hundred percent. Darwin's critics were wrong when they said that all my offspring would inherit half of it. On the contrary, half my offspring will inherit all of it. I will hand on that gene complete to half my offspring, because all my offspring will get half my genes. Therefore the chances are, and this is statistical, it's a statistical chance, in general I can expect any mutation in me to be passed on to half my offspring complete. It won't be dilute, therefore part of my offspring will find their reproductive success enhanced by one hundred percent... [tape jumps] offspring will find their reproductive success enhanced by one hundred percent.... [tape jumps] other words, if we think of a mutation as a change in a single gene, then mutations are not diluted. They're handed on complete to every generation and they have their effects in every generation. And, as you can see, if I did have a m a mutant gene that promoted reproductive success by a hundred percent... [tape jumps] what natural selection means, enhanced reproductive success.?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] ... [tape jumps] always say this because, you know, developments happen all the time, but as far as we know, genes are handed on as complete discrete enti entities, in units... [tape jumps] is what discovered. breeding experiments erm showed this. I mean, he didn't know about genes and he was rather lucky that he chose to study the aspects of things he did. But we now know that what discovered was individual genes and, as far as we know, individual genes are always handed on complete and intact.... [tape jumps] about this myself because I think it's complex. Sometimes I think both genes are used, sometimes only one, not the other, and I'm not sure that anybody knows exactly how, how and why that works out but erm
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] I was hoping not to mention this, but since raised it, we'll have to. Erm, some genes are different in that some genes are called dominant and some genes are called recessive. Now this is not all, all genes, just some genes.... [tape jumps] genes. If you, if you get a recessive gene from one of your parents that have a corresponding dominant gene in the other, then only the dominant gene is expressed in your body. However, if you get two copies of a recessive gene from both parents, then the recessive gene will be expressed. Now this is important because another criticism th th that Darwin's critics made was, hey look, sometimes people inherit things that're very bad for them. A very good example would be haemophilia in, in Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria had a gene of haemophilia. She passed it on to about half her offspring. By astonishing good luck they all married. The British royal family is now clear of haemophilia, they don't have it at all. So they go on marrying into their tiny little self-perpetuating group as much as they like, they're not gonna b suffer from haemophilia.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] Er, yeah, I will say what I was going to say. Erm,th the Russian royal family have er got it. Now, people said, how could Darwin explain how something like haemophilia could keep going? Or, of course, what Darwin didn't know bu but discovered was haemophilia keeps going because it's recessive. It hides as it were behind dominant genes which are normally okay. It only shows itself if by mischance you get two haemophilia genes, two recessives, at that point in your, in your erm... [tape jumps] you're in very serious trouble. But that doesn't happen very often and natural selection of course will then select out individuals with two recessive genes but since those don't show up very often, it's a rather weak effect.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] It's a sex link as you say. Erm
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] Mentioning the white chromosome reminds me of another thing I wanted to say, because erm another variant of this incorrect criticism that people made of Darwin about blending, and you still hear this today, and people should know better, especially the social sciences, is, oh, single genes cannot influence behaviour. Even if you had a single gene which is terribly important, erm because human beings are complex everything they do is affected by large numbers of genes... [tape jumps] a number of examples that contradict that. By far the best one is one suggested by, by the white chromosome as being male. There is indeed a single gene male which has recently been and it acts as a switch. And what happens is that if an embryo has the single gene for being male, it happens to have a white chromosome not surprisingly, it turns on thousands of other genes that then make the embryo into a male, but, but that single gene has to be there to act as a switch and that's... [tape jumps] that gene is also present in alligators and crocodiles... [tape jumps] so the point I'm making is it is just wrong to say that, that all these discoveries about genetics cut no ice with human evolution, because human things cannot be influenced by single genes. I'm afraid that is not true. The situation is this. If, if you have, if both your copies of that gene are recessive then it... [tape jumps] if only one is recessive and the other is dominant, it doesn't both dominant... [tape jumps] only just beginning to find out, but you're quite right, it is contrary. There is recent evidence, for instance, that there is... [tape jumps] want erm different things from what females... [tape jumps]
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] The package does seem to be put together in, in, in one way that seems to be fundamentally fair. And that is, when, I can't remember what it's called, and erm... [tape jumps] when the sex cells are made exactly half of an individual's genes go into each, and when sex cells er come together in a fertilized exactly half of each parent's genes are fitted together, so that's completely fair, well almost completely fair, because there are a few genes outside the nucleus that only get... [tape jumps] they're, they're in a rather minority. So it looks as if er nature has kind of erm struck a bargain in this respect, that each parent can contribute exactly half, but I think it's, we're only just beginning to find out about what happens then and my guess is about internal conflict between genes because I strongly suspect that there must be a lot of that going on because, as I think you've rightly seen, if we take this view of evolution as selecting for individual genes, then we would expect conflict even within the gender.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] I think w I think how it works it, it's, it's, it's, I don't think you can say it's the right package. I think th th that's a kind of er value judgment, all I can say is
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well wh I think all you can say is, you end up with a, with a package of genes which you got from your parents. You may be okay, you may not be okay, you've got two recessives per human figure, you're not... [tape jumps] er, all one can say is genes are kind of heaped together and natural selection doesn't really care. What natural selection does seem to care about as far as sex is concerned is that there is constant re-combination and this is a question of sexual that we'll touch on later. It looks as if sex evolved because it's in the interest of genes to constantly be re-combined... [tape jumps] self interest not always in company with the same others... [tape jumps] may want to be er mixing themselves up, so they launch themselves in continually different combinations, and this presumably each gene... [tape jumps] what, what, what is happening is a constant filtering process all the time, by means of which natural selection is working on basically random changes in the... [tape jumps] final point I want to make and that's
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] Yes, genes, yes.
[speaker002:] or are they
[Chris:] Yes, for every, for every individual gene you get from your mother, you get a corresponding individual gene from your father
[speaker002:] At the same place, place on the perimeter
[Chris:] At the same place on the perimeter. But, but, genes themselves are spread all over the perimeter, so you might well find that er genes there's more of them
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] than others, yes, yes, but genetics is a complex issue. I dare say knows more about this than I do. Ask her. I just wanna finish with one point. There's one final point I want to make because this acts as a kind of prelude to what we're gonna do now down in S O one eight, and to the main start of the course, and that's this. I now want to prove to you that this kind of evolution I've been talking about, evolution by natural selection, at the level of individual genes, cannot produce social cooperation. The argument goes like this. Supposing we start off with, erm, we had to explain the origins of cooperation. Supposing we start off with a species of selfish individuals. Now we, we define cooperation as altruism here and we'll go over this again. I'm just quickly introducing... [tape jumps] altruism as any behaviour that promotes the reproductive success of the beneficiary at a cost to the reproductive success of the altruist. Now, imagine what happens if a gene for altruism... [tape jumps]. What will happen in a population of selfish organisms? By definition the gene must promote the reproductive success of the selfish organisms at a cost to itself... [tape jumps] but a gene for altruism could evolve in a population of selfish individuals... [tape jumps] a population of altruists, in whom a gene for selfishness appears by random mutation. By definition, the altruistic majority must promote the reproductive success of the selfish... [tape jumps] the reproductive success of the selfish organism, the mutant, will be far greater than the altruist, and within a few generations... [tape jumps] of selfish individuals. It would... [tape jumps] to find altruism in the way we could find... [tape jumps] but social cooperation or self-sacrifice or altruism could evolve by natural selection. Does everybody see that? Q E D, we seem to have proved that what happens all around us cannot namely altruism and cooperation. What we will now do is go down to S O one eight and we will discover the answer to this, or we will begin to discover the answer to this. First by erm having a story and then by playing a game, and in playing that game before us the answer to this deep problem will emerge. We will see how cooperation evolves. S O one eight, for those of you who don't know, is in the basement of Saint Clements building. Are any of you experienced map users? Right, okay. If anybody wants Blind Watchmaker I have it here, ditto Evolvematic. Yes.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, in terms of this definition it has to be because that's the only, that's the bottom line of evolution, and it's the only quantitative measure we can ever have, it's the only... [tape change] When you're ready, there's no hurry.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, good idea. I dunno whether you wanted a mark for this. I gave you one. Erm, just one little slip, you put eighteen fif nineteen fifty nine, it was eighteen fifty nine wasn't it, the Origin of Species? That was just a slip. An excellent, very clearly and very correctly expressed. Excellent essay. Well done. A minus, okay?
[speaker002:] Okay, great.
[Chris:] I thought that was really good, well done.
[speaker002:] Fine, thanks a lot.
[Chris:] So, that's the other one.
[speaker002:] Yeah, cos I haven't, I mean there's a lot of reading to catch up on, so I figured... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] Let's just have a look at the erm, let's do the who've we got, Bill? Malcolm, we haven't got Malcolm have we?... [tape jumps], isn't it? What's your surname again Tracy?, that's right. I've got you down as here for the last three. Right, so who's performing today?
[speaker002:] I am.
[Chris:] Right, you are expert. Well, we're not supposed to start till five past, so let's give them a couple more minutes just in case they're caught in the lift or something. Reed, sorry I haven't got Reed either have I? No. Right.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]... [tape jumps]
[Chris:] I think this is better cos I think the Friday one is fuller. So I think we've done the right thing. Erm, what's your surname again? , that's right. okay. So I've mentioned everyone, I haven't overlooked anybody have I?... [tape jumps]. Oh no, as I was saying to Reed the other day, er Reed has joined our class by the way. Let me introduce you because you weren't here when we did the introductions, were you? Let me introduce you to the class. This is Tracy, this is Alex, this is Bill, this is Theresa, this is Katherine and this is Hayley, and there are one or two others who aren't here yet who may turn up. Now, Reed is er joining us just for this term, isn't it? And er we've allocated all the class papers so erm that means you escape unless you really do want to do er a class presentation. You could perhaps team up with somebody else if you wanted to, so if you see someone and we're just going through the order in which they appear. So, so you missed er least week's, that was number one, that's number two.... Hi, come on in, take a seat. That was Susan, wasn't it? And Malcolm wasn't it? No, not Malcolm, Jake. Jake wasn't it?
[speaker002:] Trust your instincts.
[Chris:] you can have one of the other chairs. Did anybody leave that scarf behind last night because I found it on my chair.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Oh, it was Friday was it? Oh, it was the evolution. Yeah, could be, could be. Okay, it's just about five past so we can probably start with a clear conscience. If anybody else comes, they're late. So we're doing dreams. Theresa.
[speaker002:] [student reading or speaking too quietly to hear]
[Chris:] all, I mean you've said just about everything I think. I mean, that was a very full and complete account. You obviously did a lot of work for that. What did you read?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] The introductory lectures, was it?
[speaker002:] Yeah and then I read [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] It is a big book, you're absolutely right. Er, well, well done, that was absolutely excellent. I mean, you erm you really did, did cover, cover just about everything. Erm, what about examples though? That was one thing that was missing. I mean, I'm n this is no criticism because you, you couldn't er, you'd have taken up the whole hour if you'd included examples. But did any examples occur to you? I mean, have you had dreams of your own that you thought this related to in any way?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Now, why was that?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, you have a recurrent dream, okay. Well look, we won't embarrass you by asking you to tell us what it is, but what we will do
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Unless you want to. Well, erm, er, is it, is it a very short one?
[speaker002:] Yes
[Chris:] Alright, tell us the dream.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Because you've missed something. And that's the dream.
[speaker002:] That's the dream.
[Chris:] Now do you wake up from this dream in a state of anxiety? Does it wake you or do you just
[speaker002:] No, it doesn't wake me.
[Chris:] It doesn't wake you. So it's not an anxiety dream. You don't wake up thinking, oh my God, I've failed the exam, no. Well, okay. This is an example of a dream. Now what would Freud call the dream as Theresa has told us it?
[speaker002:] The manifest.
[Chris:] Right, that's called the manifest content. Now does everybody understand that? Because this is quite an important distinction to make. That's the manifest dream. That's the dream as Theresa dreamt it and as she recounted it to us. Okay. Now, erm, if er Theresa was interested in analyzing this dream er how should she have gone about it? What's the next step? Having, having got the manifest content, what, what does Freud's theory of dreams tell us we need to do next?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] In, in what sense?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, and what would we do with those elements, what
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, and how would we do that?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, er,wh what we want to do, what we want to do is to relate this manifest content that you've told us to what, what's the other thing?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] To the latent content, right. Now the, the, what connects the two things together because we assume there is a latent content in, in this dream? What's, how do we establish the connection between the manifest content of the dream and the latent?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, that's the key word I was looking for. Associations. Jake, was that what you were gonna say?
[speaker002:] Erm
[Chris:] Because you looked as if you were winding up to say something.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, that's right, yes. That's another way of saying it. What the, the links between the manifest and the latent content are what in the technical jargon of psychoanalysis we would call free associations. In other words, they're ideas that occur to you. So if you were, if you were having an analysis shall we say Theresa, you reported your dream to the analyst. What the analyst would say to you in trying to help you to resolve this dream would be, well, report what you think of in connection with the manifest content. In other words, friends at the school and the idea, as you said at the very beginning of your paper, is to report without any kind of erm censorship or judgment. You would just say things that pop in to you mind and er it's essential of course, if you're gonna do dream analysis properly, that you must obey that rule. If you deviate from it, and it's terribly easy to deviate from it by rejecting certain thoughts, oh that's silly, that's not relevant, that's too obvious, that's objectionable, erm, that's too Freudian, you know, if you say that kind of thing to yourself you get nowhere. Because you see what is, now n why won't you get anywhere? What's the, what's,w why isn't this kind of process easy? Why can't? Because it
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] You do, and you have to assume it's right, whatever comes up. You have to assume it's correct. It's very difficult, you never lose the feeling of resistance to it. I mean, I've been analyzing every dream I can remember now for the last twenty one years and er I think I've got rather good at dream interpretation I must admit. Erm, but even today er with every dream the same feeling comes and you just have to resolutely ignore it and say well, you know, that's what I thought. In other words, what you've gotta try and distinguish is what you're thinking. In free association what you think about your thoughts and what you think about your thoughts. As Theresa says, we usually try and censor them, try and say no, you know, leave that out, erm, it's as if you had a kind of er censor sitting in your mind telling me, er telling you telling you er er, but it works with me too, erm what you can and cannot say. You know, as if erm, as if there were some censor present who, who, who wanted to make judgments. Now, in analyzing dreams that is the single and in a way the only problem. But you can overcome that problem and assemble enough free associations. You can usually then begin to see some kind of crazy logic in them. If you let them lead you where they want to go, they lead back to this latent content and then you begin to recognize er the latent thoughts. Now, as you said in your paper, the latent thoughts are often very very different from the, from the er manifest thoughts,th they're way away from them. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if, if you analyzed this dream you discovered it had nothing to do with being at school and nothing to do with taking exams. Do you know what I mean? The, the, the, you know would, it's quite possible that the, that the manifest content i has completely misdirected your attention and the latent content is really something else. For example, and I'm not saying this is, this is so, but it's not unusual in that kind of dream if it's recurring in the present, to find that really it's about the present and not about the past. So it seems to be about school anxiety and exam anxieties and so, but those are very common kinds of dreams, but, but very often when you you find they're actually about the present, they're about some recurrent anxiety or conflict in the present which is masquerading as if it were in the past because your associations of what's going on are connected with the past er one way or another. I mean, for example, I mean I'm not saying this is an association but you might find in your dream, if you look to say I'm back at school, then your association would be but I am at school now, the London School of Economics, do you see what I mean? Th th that kind of thing can easily happen, so school now, I E L S E, is represented as the school you went to when you were a kid. I mean,th that's a typical kind of association, that, that it's a link, you can see the link is in the word, but the effect is to, is to misdirect your attention. Manifestly you think you're, you're, you're thinking about one school, whereas in reality you're thinking about quite a different one. Now I'm not saying that is the basis because only you could supply the, the, the free associations. While we're on this question, one of the few things that er Theresa didn't say, although perhaps she might have said it when I wasn't, I don't think she did but one of the few things she didn't say is why Freud disapproved of the typical kind of dream book you find in any book shop. Er, the meaning of your dreams revealed, you know, you see this kind of, yeah, now why did he disapprove of that kind of analysis? What was wrong with that approach?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] That's right. That's the, that's the key point that and were making, that only you or only the dreamer can interpret their own dreams. So, it's no good er me looking up in some book Theresa's dreams if I could decipher it like some kind of code in which every single thing in the laten in the manifest content represented something latent for what we're trying to then kind of decode as in a code book because er that's not valid, at least it's not valid in general terms. It's a good analogy in terms of Theresa's private thoughts. She's got a private code book but the point is that only she knows how the symbols, how the manifest and latent relate to each other, because only she can make those associated links. It's, you can't in general lay down generalized associative links and say every time somebody dreams about erm an examination it represents anxiety about their future career or something. I mean, it might represent that, but it might not. It could easily stand for something else. If, for instance, the dream associated an exam with er with, with some peripheral aspect of taking examinations which erm had nothing to do with any kind of test. It's quite possible.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, now why is that Bill? You're quite right. There is a ch lecture on dream symbols so why, despite this excellent point that J M Hayley made, does he still mention symbols?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, that's it.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] That's right, as, as, as Theresa said at the beginning, one of the prime characteristics of dreams is this kind of visual erm symbolism and in the course of analyzing thousands of dreams of course which he did in his practice, Freud found that very often certain fundamental things that people tend to dream about quite a lot tend to appear in lots of people's dreams with similar kinds of er representations, and among the most notorious and obvious of these were things related to sex. Now, Freud wasn't saying that every time you dream about an umbrella you're, you're dreaming some kind of sexual wish, erm, but what he's saying is that umbrellas and other things that can erm become erect or open out often do represent but you could conceivably have an umbrella dream in which the umbrella, through your private associations, stood for something completely different, it's quite, it's quite possible. So we're not saying that every time somebody dreams about an umbrella it means erm that,wh what he was saying is er that kind of visual symbolism often does stand for in this case erm the male genital, but it need not. It's just a kind of recurrent symbolic erm language and, of course, people develop symbols. I mean, for instance, in my dreams er cars have taken on a very distinct personal symbolism that has really nothing to do with what you might think, because of personal experiences of mine, and I now know that whenever I dream about cars it always always has this but that's because of something that happened to me and because of my personal erm kind of experiences, so cars have become a dream symbol. But erm, the, so although he, he, the point I'm making is although it was who says he mentioned symbolism, or became aware of it, it's er, it doesn't conflict with the point th that, that we were making earlier, that the only person who can interpret their dreams is the dreamer ultimately. There's no quick and easy way. Susan, did you want to
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, let's, let, let's pursue that for a minute. I mean, people sometimes you know, give the impression, oh erm, Freud thought all dreams were about sex. Is that true? No. Why not?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, absolutely.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, in the first place you don't of course, because the, the manifest content may be totally innocent. It's only when you pursue the associations with the manifest content and ask yourself what does that make me think of, that you start to think of things that you then realize leads to a latent content, which may be sexual in, in, in nature, but why er, even if, as Theresa rightly says, we d we have to say it's crude and misrepresentational for that all, all, all dreams are about sex. There's no doubt if you analyze a lot of dreams, that an awful lot of them are as a matter of fact. Now why is it?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, and there might be another reason as well. I mean,th that's kind of you're you're seeing it from above as it were, why they should be forced out of the manifest if there's some other reason? And here you might think of other kinds of dreams that are so-called typical dreams, like for instance erm, er, has anybody had this dream where you want to go to the bathroom but can't find it? Has anybody had that kind of dream?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, now this is a typical dream, it, Freud lists it, there is a chapter in the Interpretation of Dreams called typical dreams. How do you think he interpreted this dream? Because it's a very common one.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, that's er, that's er, right,the the these are both the same kinds of dreams. Er, to answer your question, really we need to remind ourselves what's, what according to Freud is the function of dreams? What are dreams for? What's their ultimate purpose? Theresa did mention it.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, yeah, right, to, to maintain the state of sleep. That's th th that was one of Freud's fundamental findings. Now, the kind of dream that and we are very thirsty, and you want to go to the bathroom or something, is a dream whi which is the result of a kind of compromise. On the one hand, says Freud, there's a strong desire to go on sleeping, but on the other hand there's this stimulus, I'm terribly thirsty or you know I, I, I, I really do need to go to the bathroom pretty badly, and there's an inner conflict in your mind. One thing, you need to go to the bathroom or, or to get a drink, says wake up and go and do it, the other thing,th th the desire to go on sleeping, says you know, well don't wake now, I want to go on sleeping. So the dream becomes a symbolic expression of this conflict and what very often happens is the there's a kind of compromise in which you go off and look for the bathroom or the drink of water or whatever it is you want, but the dream keeps postponing you finding it, in order to lengthen the dream and the state of sleep, so you go on sleeping for a bit longer. Another example of, of a similar thing er that you mentioned towards the end of your paper was where an external stimulus interferes with dreams. For example, er, I had last year in the in the class a student said that they missed an exam. The reason was they set their alarm, they were terribly conscientious about setting their alarm clock so they'd wake up in the morning to go to the exam, and er it was a very loud alarm clock so not the kind of thing you could sleep through, but come the morning of the exam the alarm went off and the student started to dream that they were out hearing church bells or something, you know they're walking around hearing all these church bells, thinking isn't it nice, you know, it's Sunday morning, oh I could go on sleeping. So the very thing that was supposed to wake them up, the noise of the alarm bell, was turned in the dream into a wishful of now I can go on sleeping, okay there's a bell, but it's Sunday morning, you know, the bells are ringing, the church bells are ringing, I can go on sleeping, so they went on sleeping and they were late for the exam. So, I mean, there's an example of where there was a conflict and obviously it wasn't just the desire to sleep. My guess is there was also a desire to avoid going to the exam. So there was a rather more, perhaps a deeper
[speaker002:] [cough]
[Chris:] than usual, but that's how, that's how Freud would interpret that kind of dream. Do you think that's convincing?... Do you think that explains your, your water or bathroom search dreams?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] But you don't wet the bed?
[speaker002:] Oh no, no
[Chris:] Well, yes, I mean that's what happens. With children, I mean, you sometimes find that children have that kind of dream, they do find a bathroom and then they do wake up in a wet bed. Er, I don't think it's so common wi with, with adults who are supposed to have better control over these things, but it certainly sometimes happens with children. And in, and in that case, of course,th that illustrates the other prime finding of Freud about dreams. Dreams exist to safeguard sleep, but what's the ultimate, what was Freud's ultimate finding about dream, the kind of essence of his dream theory? Expressed in the, in every dream is what, says Freud?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, expression of a wish, says Katherine. Erm, do you think that's convincing, Katherine?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Right, right
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] That's an anxiety dream.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Did you have that dream more than once, or just once?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] But it's still
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] No. Er, most people have that kind of anxiety dream. Some people have them quite a lot. Now, it's easy to see, if we're talking about the kind of dreams that Reed was telling us about, erm, that there's a simple wish with these dreams and in the end you wake up and you go and gratify the wish in that case. Okay. But erm, what about anxiety dreams like Katherine's? Surely this contradicts the Freudian theory cos how could er a horrifying dream like that still, still makes her feel anxious? How could that possibly be the fulfilment of a wish? Surely this contradicts Freud's central finding, doesn't it? What d'ya think? Do you ever have anxiety dreams?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yeah, so d do you think this is credible?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] How do you think Freud would account for them, if he wanted to defend his theory? How, how could he explain such a dream as Katherine's, do you think?... Anybody?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, in a, in a sense that's er that's, that's the answer. The, you reminded us of er another aspect of dreams, that, that, that one notices if you actually do a bit of dream interpretation yourself, is what called, what Freud called day's residues. Now a day's residue is some association which relates the manifest content usually to what happened to you that day, and often i they're very oft it's often that the day's residue is built into the manifest dream, so it's quite obvious, you had this dream because of something that happened to you on that day. Very often day's residues are among the first associations th that will occur to you. However, if you pursue the associations and begin to delve into the latent content, what you often find is that those day's residues, which are specific to that day, as Theresa was saying, relate to more general erm situations, or indeed to things that actually happened in the past which that particular aspect of that particular day might remind you of. So you trace the, the, the, in other words the day's residue becomes just part of the associations which leads back often to things which didn't necessarily happen today, or which may even have happened in the past. And, er, so the, so Freud's theory doesn't necessarily require that, that any source of anxiety should be traced to today's events, what it what it does say is that very often today's events shape the manifest, and sometimes the latent, content of the dream quite a lot. However, his, his explanation for Alex's and Katherine's point about anxiety dreams would be that the, the anxiety dream is, is one in which dreams fail in their function. If we say, you see, that the function of the dream is to safeguard sleep, and to fulfil wishes, then it's clear that in the real world not all wishes are fulfillable and it may well be that, that the latent thoughts, in some cases, is so alarming and so disturbing, that they cannot be sufficiently disguised and will lead to a state of waking, and that waking proves of course that the dream has failed in its function of safeguarding sleep. In other words, an anxiety dream is a kind of aborted dream, a dream that attempted to disguise a er disturbing latent content but could not succeed in the end. So the anxiety breaks through and you wake up. I think Theresa was first.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, in that sense, in that sense, the unconscious thought was expressed but the, but the point was,i the anxiety as it were got the better of the dream, didn't it, if you woke up? Because ideally if, if, if a dream was really gonna work it would disguise the anxiety under some reassuring manifest content that would stop you feeling anxious and therefore waking, wouldn't it?
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, this, this kind of thing happens to people who've been in traumatic situations, like erm er prisoner of war camps, severe accidents and stuff like that, and Freud himself of course saw quite a lot of these cases after the First World War. Er, does anybody know what his theory of these was? Well, let me just quickly answer Alex's point before I come back er to, to, to erm and Jake. Erm,Fr if, if you look into these dreams, what very often happens is, or what people report, is that whilst they're experiencing the, the traumatic situation, whatever it may be, being in a prison camp or something, their dreams are often fairly straightforward, they're to do with simple wishful things like being rescued, escaping, getting. After they have been released then these anxiety dreams start. And wh what tends to happen is the dreams are, are, are repetitive, although they often vary in small details, and the idea is, or this was Freud's, Freud's idea, and basically it's the same as his explanation of anxiety dreams, that, that what is happening here is that the mind has got a very disturbing latent content that it can't forget. It's trying to forget it, and trying to turn it into a more reassuring manifest content, so it starts to dream about it, but the latent thoughts are so disturbing it never succeeds and consequently the whole dream work, this process of disguising the latent content, just doesn't get anywhere at all, except for a few minor details. And so the whole memory comes back and er the individual just cannot be rid of it. So in other words that kind of dream represents an extreme example of erm of an aborted dream, but the very fact that it's repetitive and you keep having them, Freud would say, is, is a demonstration of the fundamental idea,th that the dream attempts to try and put the past right as it were, you try and dream about it, but you fail all the time. Er, I think it was Hayley first.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Yes, yes
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, of course, sometimes anxiety dreams can be a fulfilment of, of wishes because people can enjoy anxiety. I mean, this is why Hollywood you know can make a lot of money out of some pretty horrifying movie, the th the kind of thing I couldn't go to see er cos I get the willies, I can't bear that kind of thing, but some people enjoy being frightened don't they? I mean, being frightened er spooky kind of you know thing in a lot films can be exciting for some people. And some dreams, I'm not saying Katherine's is, I'm sure it isn't, but, but some people, some people's anxiety dreams are of that kind. Th they're being frightened because they enjoy being frightened and there's a kind of perverse wish fulfilment in that. And that, that certainly happens. Jake, what were
[speaker002:] Something interesting happened to me that I never really thought about, erm, but I used to get these dreams where I used to dream that I'd be either falling off a cliff or driving a car and getting into an accident and like or driving off a cliff. And I used to wake up like two feet off my bed, like I dunno my, my body
[Chris:] What, you were levitating?
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] I mean I would open my eyes and see myself like that, wake up and then I'd bounce off the bed and then I'd sit there bouncing and, and but I haven't had that in a long time and wh when I thought now a lot of times, if I think that I leave either the front door unlocked, my house unlocked or the garage door open I go and actually check that in the middle of the night. And I haven't had these dreams in a long time, and I used to never do anything like that. So now I always and so I, I'm thinking that it might be that, that I that erm maybe you know like I used to be anxious about something like that and I used to wake up and the dream used to happen, but now that I've double checked that I know for sure that, that I'm safe you know for the night it doesn't happen any more by cutting off possibility
[Chris:] It certainly sounds like it, doesn't it? as if, if you've done that you somehow you feel that you've got no reason to be anxious any more.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Oh, that's right, a very famous book, yeah
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] Well, that, that, that reminds me of something that might cast some light on Jake's dream. I don't know about these, this person you're thinking of but er a very common reaction, I certainly have this from time to time, it really does irritate my wife cos I usually wake her up, is you know, you're just going off to sleep and you suddenly kind of feel you're falling, does, does that happen? That's quite a common thing I think. I mean I kind of you know, you give a start and unfortunately if you're in bed with somebody else you tend to wake them up, because my wife never does that, she's just too good to be true. But erm, so now I'm blamed for waking her up. But erm, you know, there's a wonderful picture, I don't know if you've seen it, by Salvador Dali, called Sleep, which is a kind of head-like figure, it's a figure which is mainly a head with a kind of sheet draped over it, supported on crutches, lots of crutches, and this kind of represents this, and the idea that if one of the crutches were to move, the figure would wake up. Now erm my, my, there's a poss a possibility that the kind of dream you're reporting is one which is triggered by that kind of reaction, because I don't know whether Theresa read about this, but in Interpretation of Dreams there's a famous example that was provided to Freud by one of his friends of a similar thing. What happened was the man erm went to sleep and while he was asleep something in the room fell on his neck. I don't know how this happened, but er erm a piece of wood or something fell and hit him on the back of the neck and woke him up and he woke up from the vivid dream of being at the time of the French Revolution, of being lead up the guillotine and having his head chopped off. And his point was you know, this was quite a long dream, you know,th i the manifest content, the whole argument of the dream, took some time er and his objection was, how could Freud's theory explain this? Well, erm, does anybody know how Freud explained that dream? Well, his theory was that this guy was a writer or something, a historian or somebody like that, and Freud said it's quite likely that in the past he had had either dreams about a similar dream or conscious fantasies about how he would have felt if he'd been in the French Revolution and what might have happened to him. He'd then possibly forgotten these dreams or fantasies and then when the stimulus of feeling something on the back of his neck happened to him whilst asleep, suddenly the fantasy came back, all as a piece as it were, and it occurred to me that your dream about driving off viaducts might be caused by being asleep, having one of these falling experiences, then relating it to previous thoughts you'd had, you know on the freeway or something, oh my God, how awful it would be if I, if I drove off that bend below, do you know what I mean? It's possible isn't it? It's a possibility that it's related to some existing thought you'd had. You know, how easy it would be drive off and, and kill yourself or something.
[speaker002:] Is it necessary that you had to have had some kind of fantasy before
[Chris:] Yes.
[speaker002:] about the French Revolution? Why, why wasn't it enough that out of every experience that I mean like not much happens to the back of your neck like that, that's one thing that I'd even think about, I mean I'm not any kind of historian, but like, like anything like the back of the neck I would think of a guillotine also.
[Chris:] Right, yeah.
[speaker002:] But is it necessary that he should fantasize about that beforehand?
[Chris:] Well you see, what Freud had to explain here was how he could have had such a long dream when the dreamer reported that he woke up more or less instantly from the stimulus of something hitting him on the back of the neck. Now unless we think that dreams can unravel very fast in the mind, much faster, and there is some evidence that that's true actually, that dreams can in fact happen quicker than you could think of them in conscious time. Nevertheless, I think Freud's view was that er the erm, if it was a really long complicated dream, you were recalling a previous fantasy rather than er necessarily creating from scratch because of this particular stimulus. I dunno. Has anybody ha ever had a dream like that? Not very common I suppose. Erm
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear]
[Chris:] pizzas?
[speaker002:] giant pizzas all over the place
[Chris:] You greedy girl.
[speaker002:] so comfortable
[Chris:] Really?
[speaker002:] and I had to make sure I didn't eat them because they were so comfortable. And the strange thing is my boyfriend was dreaming about pizzas at the same time. And he kept shouting out, feed me, feed me, so I woke up at one o'clock in the morning.
[Chris:] But had, had anybody mentioned pizzas beforehand? Or
[speaker002:] No
[Chris:] I mean was this er a possibility that you ought to have a pizza
[speaker002:] No, we both like pizzas, but to dream about them at the same time, and he's screaming out in his sleep, get me a pizza
[Chris:] Yes, I think you were sharing your dreams.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Well, go to bed on a pizza
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] And it keeps re-occurring
[Chris:] You have a pizza problem.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] Well, it's, it's eleven o'clock. We've gotta call it, call it a day now. Theresa, we are deeply indebted to you. We will leave erm Tracy with her pizza dreams
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[Chris:] erm, you can, you can carry on analyzing your dreams at your leisure. I'll be saying something about them in the lectures, not today but next week, and er now which reminds me, who is performing next week? Let's er, Jake is, right, okay. Oh, and you is it?
[speaker002:] And then me.
[Chris:] And then you. Yeah. Okay. Thanks very much. You'll have to have another go in your dreams Theresa. Well now you, now you've had a class on it, you'll have to go back to it refreshed and try and crack it.
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear] [talk simultaneous] I did this but it's not for a few weeks time for my presentation on Freud, or
[Chris:] Oh I know, right, yeah, right.
[speaker002:] Erm, what I wanted
[Chris:] Do you want to talk to me about that in the tutorial first or would that be?
[speaker002:] That's two weeks time. I can if you want, it's just that I came up with a few things that didn't make sense, they were fairly contradictory things. I just wanted to know
[Chris:] Well look when are we having our next tutorial? Do you want to do this in the tutorial? I mean
[speaker002:] Sure. Tomorrow is... twelfth of November
[Chris:] Yeah, that's right, it is
[speaker002:] just under two weeks. I could do it then
[Chris:] Could you do it then?
[speaker002:] It will only take a few minutes, certainly.
[Chris:] Or do you want it cleared up beforehand? Is it, is that waiting too long?
[speaker002:] No, that's fine
[Chris:] It's not waiting too long?
[speaker002:] When's my presentation? It's not yet, is it? It's number seven, we're only on number three that's fine
[Chris:] Oh yeah, you've got quite a bit of time, number seven. Yes, you're doing it on, is it number seven?
[speaker002:] Yeah.
[Chris:] No it's not, it's number eight.
[speaker002:] Number eight.
[Chris:] Number eight on the twelfth of November, so you've got plenty of time.
[speaker002:] Twelfth of November?
[Chris:] Mhm, oh no, it can't be the twelfth of November
[speaker002:] No, that's the tutorial, it must be much later than that.
[Chris:] Sorry, I'm reading the wrong dates here... That's right, it can't be the twelfth, I must have meant the fourteenth.
[speaker002:] I mean it won't mean me redoing it or anything, it's just a few things that I wanted to
[Chris:] Yeah
[speaker002:] okay, I'll do it then. Thank you.
[Chris:] Yeah, we'll do it then
[speaker002:] [too quiet to hear] Any suggestions on where to get the book book because now once again the Dillons I'll be getting my plane ticket ready to go home and then I also wrote a cheque with this one, one book store out at er erm, I forget the name of it, but it's out at er Finchley Road, it's supposed to specialize in
[Chris:] Have they got it?
[speaker002:] No.
[Chris:] Erm... I'll, oh dear copies either. The things is there's a small possibility it may be out of print cos there's a new edition in the pipeline. I wonder if they've let it get out of print? I will erm, I tell you what, I'll phone the publishers this morning and see if I can get them to, to er, I need to phone them anyway. I could probably get them to send me one or two copies. I could do with one or two. I may be able to get you one.
[speaker002:] Okay, great.
[Chris:] Leave it with me. I will, I'll phone my publishers now and see what I can do
[speaker002:] I'll see you later on in class
[Chris:] Yeah... [sound of a number being dialled on a hands-free telephone] [door knocking] Come in. Oh hi Oliver, do come in. [phone rings]
[speaker002:] [phonecall starts] Good morning Publishers [telephone conversation ends].
[Chris:] [phonecall starts] Er, good morning,cou could you put me through to please?... Oh, hello, it's Christopher here. Do you remember I phoned you a week or two ago about some books I wanted? Now, they haven't come yet, so erm presumably they're in the pipeline are they [phonecall ends]? [tape ends]