Tell us about Life on Earth by David Attenborough.

I read the book Life on Earth when I was quite young. I knew about paleontology, classifications and things like that, but this book took a different approach – it was the evolutionary story, starting off with nothing, and ending up with primates. I don’t think the book has been bettered since, and that’s because it just seems to be the most interesting way to talk about life, through a narrative. Subsequently, other authors have tried introductions to biology by looking at different regions in the world, different behaviours and so forth but it is the evolutionary tale that makes a story worth reading.

Evolution as progress?

I guess that’s the criticism of the book; it gives the sense that evolution is progression, which of course it isn’t. People argued about whether it was or not at the turn of the 20th century, but we know now that evolution is neutral. In fact, I’ve wanted to write a book for a while now, looking at the 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel who was an ultra-Darwinist and really pushed the idea of evolution as progress. He was very influential and actually still is, despite being wrong. He is even quoted in school textbooks, which is rather alarming.

How do modern humans contribute to the evolutionary narrative?

It’s not really something Attenborough looked at, but Darwin actually started off in his The Origin of Species, talking about how humans changed nature through domestication. Modern methods of artificial selection such as GM are just an extension of this same process. GM doesn’t worry me, though. It’s just a more efficient way of doing things than artificial selection, with less unpleasant side effects. With GM, in fact, the idea is that the farmer should be using less fertiliser, less pesticide, and so on. The sooner we get into GM and the sooner I can have GM decaffeinated coffee rather than chemically decaffeinated coffee, the better.

Tell us about your second book, William Harvey’s On the Generation of Animals.

William Harvey was a very intelligent man around in the 17th century who wrote this book on embryology and comparative conception. The reason I chose this book is because Harvey was working at a time when there was virtually no background information or knowledge, and no microscope – he was simply a fabulously intelligent person with the skill to observe. He would take his enquiries as far as they would go with the technology available, and I’m sure that if he had had a microscope then he’d have worked it all out. In a way, though, the working it all out is the less interesting bit. The interesting point in science, the fun bit, is when you are just about to get there. As soon as it all falls into place, it’s suddenly not very interesting any more.

What are ‘the exciting’ areas in science at the moment?

Well the biggest area to work on is really neuroscience. I have just written a book, in fact, called Beyond the Zonules of Zinn, which is about our understanding of the human mind. I wrote it because I see so many books about the brain, and they all jump straight in with the vast and complex issues, like what consciousness and alertness are. But so much that the brain does is much simpler. The main segments in the human brain are the same as those in a cod’s brain, for example, only much bigger. The human brain is doing really simple things for the vast majority of time. People spend very little time using the conscious mind – anything that the brain can do without thinking consciously, it will do. The classic example is when you get up to go to work; you brush your teeth, you have a shower, you get to work, and sometimes think: My god, I haven’t thought consciously yet the whole time I’ve been awake.