Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch

`What's he talking about, Stibbons?' said Ridcully, not taking his eyes off the cloud.

`There are a number of wars in the next couple of hundred years, sir,' said Ponder. `Big ones.'

`Darwin's fault?

'Er, sir.'

`Just "er", Stibbons?'

`"Er" is a very precise term in this context, sir. It means we don't have time for a big debate. But certainly the wars are bigger and more frequent than the ones that took place in the world of The Ology.' `Bad thing, then?' said Ridcully, who liked his philosophy succinct. `Er again, sir, I'm afraid,' said Ponder.

`Care to expand?'

`In short, sir, more people will die in wars, far fewer will die of disease and medical problems of all kinds. And humanity survives the snowball. The first humans left the planet in converted weapons of war, sir.'

`That's monkeys for you, Stibbons,' said Ridcully. He looked up at the cloud of pure Auditor.

`No, we're not ashamed,' he said. `Humans get a chance to go on.' `They won't have earned it!'

`Strange that this concerns you,' said Ridcully.

`Do you know the terrors that will confront them?' the Auditor demanded. `And the terrors that they will bring with them?'

`No, but I doubt if they're worse that the ones they've met already,' said Ridcully. `Anyway, you don't care about them. You just want them to die quietly. Don't you?'

The Auditor shimmered. Ponder wondered how many Auditors had come together to create it. It seemed, now, to be hesitant, unsure It said: `I want ... I ... '

... and exploded into fog which, itself, faded away.

`Not learned quite enough, then,' said Ridcully, and sniffed. `Well, let's send Darwin back and go home, shall we? I'm sure we've missed at least one meal. Where's• Rincewind?'

+++ Hiding in the Minerals Gallery +++ said Hex.

`Impressive. I didn't even see him move. Oh well, I dare say you can pick him up later. Let's go.'

`What did it mean by the terrors they bring with them?' said the Dean.

`Well, they're still monkeys,' said Ridcully. `Still screaming at one another, trailing all that evolution behind them, wherever they go.' `Darwin said something like that, sir. In The Descent of Man,' said Ponder.

`Good chap, Darwin,' said Ridcully. `Would have made a good wizard.'

`Did you know they put his statue in the canteen, sir?' said Ponder, a little shocked.

`Did they? Good idea,' said Ridcully brusquely. `That way, every sensible person sees it. Ready, Hex.'

And the Central Hall was empty again, apart from the fossils.

Charles Darwin awoke. For a moment so brief that a blink ended it, there was a sense of complete disorientation. But then he sat up, feeling unaccountably exhilarated, and looked around at the tangled, busy bank, with its birds and flitting insects, and thought: Yes. That's right. That's how it is.

The Darwin family motto: cave et aude.

Watch, and listen.

The greatest school of magic on the Discworld. But surely you know this?

The N'tuitiv tribe of Howondaland created the post of Health and Safety Officer even before the post of Witch Doctor, and certainly before taming fire or inventing the spear. They hunt by waiting for animals to drop dead, and eat them raw.

See The Science of Discworld (Ebury Press, 1999, revd 2000).

See The Science of Discworld II (Ebury Press)

So called because it starts from the phenomenon of design and deduces the existence of a cosmic designer.

According to Isaac Asimov, the most practical and dramatic victory of science over religion occurred in the seventeenth century, when churches began to put up lightning conductors.

It is old enough to use the elongated s's parodied in Discworld as is. We have resisted temptation except in this footnote. Though 'manifestation of design' does have a bit of a cachet.

That is to say, the Richard Dawkins of our leg of the famous Trousers of Time, who is, in a very definite way, not in holy orders.

For detailed and thoughtful rebuttals of the main contentions of the intelligent designers, plus some responses, see Matt Young and Taner Edis, Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004), and William Dembski and Michael Ruse, Debating Design (Cambridge University Press, 2004). And it's only a matter of time before someone writes How Intelligent Is the Designer?

Only the camera obscura, a room with a pinhole in the wall. Paley first wrote about the eye in 1802, whereas genuine photography dates from 1826.

'A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, volume 256 (1994), pp. 53-8.

'They themselves refer to this programme as the 'wedge strategy'.

Phase space, in a given context, is the space of everything that might have happened, not just what did. See The Science of Discworld.

Actually, foot.

Well, let's not exaggerate. You can publish papers on it without risking losing your job. It's certainly better than publishing nothing, which definitely will lose you your job.

Indeed, in the Back to the Future movie sequence, it was a car. A Delorean. Though it did need the assistance of a railway locomotive at one point.

Provided it is fired by someone who has been in the pub since lunchtime.

Actually this is the ambiguous puzuma, which travels at near-lightspeed (which on the Disc is about the speed of sound). If you see a puzuma, it's not there. If you hear it, it's not there either.

As one does. Palaeontologists have just announced that they have found remarkably well-preserved fossils in an East Anglian quarry, showing that giant hippos weighing six or seven tons - roughly twice the weight of modem hippos - wallowed in the rivers of Norfolk 600,000 years ago. It was a warm period sandwiched between two ice ages, probably a few degrees warmer than the present day (you can tell that from insect fossils) and hyenas prowled the banks in search of carrion.

See The Annotated Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott and Ian Stewart (Basic Books, 2002).

Yes, they did - in The Science of Discworld II.

A rare meteorological phenomenon discussed briefly in The Science of Discworld II

This is a mathematician's way of saying that you can put a black hole anywhere you want. (Or, like a gorilla in a Mini, it can go anywhere it wants.)

??? Michael Brooks, `Time Twister', New Scientist, 19 May 2001, 27-9.

Jason Breckenridge, Rob Myers, Amanda Peet, and Cumrun Vafa.

??? See Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality: the origins of the curious mind (Cambridge University Press)

In 1865 FitzRoy did exactly the same. having been turned down for a promotion. Narrativium at work?

Now considered to be thirteen, plus a fourteenth on the Cocos Islands. (Look, people write and complain if we don't point this kind of thing out.)