If you’d dropped a bomb on the Cavonius Centre at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge any time in the last two days then you’d have wiped out most of the senior creative people in the BBC (plus a few academics). They were gathered for the annual media seminar organised by my colleague Joe Smith in collaboration with Roger Harrabin and others from the BBC and IBT, who now has the grand title of BBC Environmental Analyst. The purpose of the event is to get the BBC folks away from their highly-pressured environment and expose them to a spectrum of thinkers from academia and the arts world. I chaired one of the ongoing panels (with the magnificently opaque theme of ‘Things’). My fellow-panellists were a fascinating mix: Edmund de Waal, who is a distinguished potter and Professor of Ceramics at Westminster University; Dilys Williams, the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, at the London College of Fashion (both shown below); Heather Ackroyd, an amazingly inventive artist; and Tony Lake, who until a few weeks ago was Chief Constable of Lincolnshire.

The overall idea of these gatherings is to reflect on interdependence. The theme this year was “Real World: storytelling in an interconnected world”. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of collective agonising about the state of the public debate about subjects like climate change and DNA testing — and on the role of the mainstream media in fostering (or hampering) those debates. The openness and vigour of the debate between the editors and programme-makers and their bosses was impressive. The BBC continues to employ a lot of intelligent and perceptive people.

For me, one of the high points of the seminar was meeting John Lloyd, the producer/writer behind a staggering list of comedy shows. (The photograph shows him with Frances Weil of BBC Vision, one of the organising team.) He was co-chair of the event, and did it with grace, perceptiveness and wit. It’s not often that someone whom one knows only by reputation comes up to scratch. And wonderful when they surpass one’s wildest expectations.

Seen in a lift in Cambridge. I know it’s a corny headline, but I couldn’t resist it.

… 150 years ago, two papers that would change the world were read at the Linnean Society in London. They were “On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties” by Alfred Russel Wallace and “The Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection” by Charles Darwin. Darwin had been working on the idea for decades but a combination of intellectual fastidiousness and nervousness about stirring up public opinion had kept him from publishing. It was the arrival of a letter from Wallace, a self-taught naturalist who was then working in Malaya and had independently come up with the idea of evolution by natural selection, that shocked him into going public. The joint presentation of the two papers on the same day was an ingenious establishment wheeze concocted to ensure that he was not denied primacy.

As a student, I was fascinated by Wallace, and once even contemplated writing a biography of him (which meant that I spent many happy hours in the Darwin papers in Cambridge University Library — now gloriously online). What attracted me was the contrast between the two men. Darwin was a genteel product of great wealth (his wife was one of the Wedgwoods, of pottery fame) and lived in great comfort on substantial private means. Wallace came from a modest background and had financial worries for most of his life.

When one of my sons was reading English at UCL, he was somewhat taken aback to discover that Darwin’s Origin of Species was one of the texts he was expected to study. But in fact it made sense, because it was conceived and written as a popular book, designed to explain evolutionary theory to the contemporary layman. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction which, I think, illustrates his desire to communicate rather than to obfuscate:

In considering the origin of species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory, until it could be shown how the innumerable species, inhabiting this world have been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation which justly excites our admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external conditions, such as climate, food, etc., as the only possible cause of variation. In one limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.