Jeeves and the Greatest Show on Earth

“I say Jeeves, cluster round.”

“Sir?”

“Close on me, if that’s the right expression?”

“A military phrase, sir, employed by officers requiring the presence of their subordinates.”

“Right Jeeves. Lend me your ears.”

“Equally appropriate, sir. Mark Antony . . .”

“Never mind Mark Antony Jeeves. This is important.”

“Very good sir.”

“As you know, Jeeves, when it comes to regions north of the collar stud, B Wooster is not rated highly in the form book. Nevertheless, I do have one great scholastic triumph to my credit. And I bet you don’t know what that was?

“You have frequently adverted to it sir. You won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at your preparatory academy.”

“Yes Jeeves, I did, to the ill-concealed surprise of the Rev Aubrey Upjohn, proprietor and chief screw at that infamous hell-hole. And ever since then, although not much of a lad for mattins or evensong, I’ve always had a soft spot for Holy Writ as we experts call it. And now we come to the nub. Or crux, Jeeves?”

“Very appropriate sir, or ‘nitty gritty’ is these days often heard.”

“The point is, Jeeves, as an aficionado, I have long been especially fond of the book of Genesis. God made the world in six days, am I right?”

“Well sir . . .”

“Beginning with light, and a firmament sandwiched between the waters, God moved swiftly through the gears,  making plants and things that creep, scaly things with fins, our feathered friends tootling through the trees, furry brothers and sisters in the undergrowth and finally, rounding into the straight, he created chaps like us, before taking to his hammock for a well-earned siesta on the seventh day. Am I right, Jeeves?”

“Yes sir, if I may say so, a colourfully mixed summary of one of our great origin myths.”

“But now Jeeves, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Drones was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”

“That’s the baby. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hairy banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now Jeeves, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last week at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Drones Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste). Try that on your pianola.”

“If I might take the liberty, sir, you appear to be labouring under a misunderstanding. Mr Darwin does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and we are descended from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees are modern apes, which have been evolving since the time of the shared ancestor, just as we have.”

“Hm, well I think I get your drift, Jeeves. Just as Aunt Dahlia’s pestilential son Thomas and I are both descended from the same grandfather. But neither of us looks any more like the old reprobate than the other, and neither of us has his sidewhiskers.”

“Precisely sir.”

“But hang on, Jeeves. We old lags of the Scripture Knowledge handicap don’t give up that easily. Aunt Dahlia’s guvnor may have been a hairy old gargoyle, but he wasn’t what you’d call a chimpanzee. I distinctly remember. Far from dragging his knuckles over the ground, he carried himself with an upright, military bearing (at least until his later years, when the port had gone round a few times). And the family portraits in the old ancestral home. We Woosters did our bit at Agincourt and there were no apes on the strength, during that “God for Harry, England and St George” carry-on.”

“I think, sir, you underestimate the time spans involved. Only a few centuries have passed since Agincourt. Our shared ancestor with chimpanzees lived more than five million years ago. If I might venture upon a flight of fancy sir?”

“Certainly you may, Jeeves. Venture away, with the young master’s blessing”

“If you walk one mile back in time to reach the Battle of Agincourt . . .”

“Sort of like walking from here to the Drones?”

“Yes sir. On the same scale, to walk back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, you’d have to walk all the way from London to Australia.”

“Goodness, Jeeves, all the way to the land of cobbers with corks dangling from their lids. No wonder there are no apes among the family portraits, no low-browed chest-thumpers to be seen once-more-unto-the-breaching at Agincourt..”

“Indeed sir, and to go back to our shared ancestor with fish . . .”

“Wait a minute, Jeeves, hold it there. Are you now telling me I’m descended from something that would feel at home on a slab?”

“We share ancestors with modern fish, sir, which would certainly have have been called fish if we could see them. You could safely say that we are descended from fish, sir.”

“Jeeves, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Fink-Nottle . . .”

“I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir?  To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins . . .”

“Let me guess, Jeeves, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?”

“A considerable underestimate sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again sir.”

“Jeeves, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.”

“I have one in readiness sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour of your return from your club last night.”

“Attaboy Jeeves. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.”

“No sir that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.”

“Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jeeves, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?”

“I beg your pardon sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, ‘a change’, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.”

“Like a misprint in a book, Jeeves?”

“Yes sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say ‘Mutation proposes, selection disposes.’

“Rather neat that, Jeeves. Your own?”

“No sir, the pleasantry is anonymous. But the meaning remains.

 “So Jeeves, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We look at something that works, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.”

“Yes sir.”

It can’t have come about by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.”

“In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s memorable feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.”

“What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jeeves? Which, by the way is pretty likely.”

“The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole . . .”

“That’ll do Jeeves, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the starting gate. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?”

“To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. It happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitively great. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed.”

But it only looks designed, Jeeves?

“Yes sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence is prolonged enough to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event.”

“Jeeves, that’s a doozra of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in. So I wasn’t too far wrong when I called it ‘evaluation’ instead of evolution.”

“No sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen for breeding. Mr Darwin realised that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.”

“Or tigers, Jeeves. Tigers are very fast, Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Drones only last week.”

“Yes sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had every opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large felids.

“By Jove Jeeves, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are more likely to get their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.”

“Yes sir.”

“But this is amazing Jeeves. This really makes sense. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything  else.”

“Precisely sir.”

“But Jeeves, wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says, that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, I know what it is like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.

Very true sir.

So, well, dash it, I mean to say Jeeves, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?

Why indeed sir?

Jeeves, this is amazing. Incredulous.

Incredible sir.

Yes, incredible. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up Jeeves. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick and the binoculars Aunt Dahlia gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies and the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me Jeeves?

No indeed sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a suggestion sir?

Suggest away Jeeves, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.

Well sir, if you would care to follow up on what I have been saying, I have a small volume here which you might care to peruse.

Doesn’t look very small to me, Jeeves, but anyway, what is it called?

It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by.  . . .

Never mind who it’s by, Jeeves, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gent’s bespoke headwear if you please. I have some intensive marvelling to do.