Joe was one of my best ever students. he thirsted for knowledge of beer. He devoured the literature, attended class compulsively, asked perceptive and passionate questions, and was superlative in the experimental brewery, producing beers of sublime excellence. He also has the word “beer” tattooed across an ample belly in huge gothic script. This says everything really. I cannot imagine the winemakers on campus – seemingly as many women as men – adorning their guts with “Pinot Noir,” even in henna. Perhaps a subtle little tattoo located somewhere tasteful and sophisticated.

Plenty of these winemakers take my beer classes. They accept the well-intentioned teasing, for the most part (as do the chemical engineers, who proudly identify themselves when I go round the class at the start of term, before I remind them that they have no soul and have no grasp of the beauty inherent in biological systems). After about four weeks, as we finally reach yeast and fermentation, I delight in telling the viticulture and enology students that had this been a wine class, we'd have reached the fermenter on day one: “Heck, you just crush a few grapes and you're ready to toss in the yeast – if you bother even to do that. You might always just leave the contaminating microflora to get on with it.”

I flew to Heathrow from India, via Frankfurt. the four-hour holdover in the German airport had not remotely bothered me. I hate tight connections, and, besides, I was able to indulge in some sausages and weissbier while peaceably reading my newspaper, a faint buzz of conversation surrounding me.

Later the same day, I found myself for the first time in several years in central London. Strolling toward Hyde Park Corner in the dusk of early evening, it occurred to me that the traffic heading toward the West End was much heavier than I recalled from when I was a more regular visitor and living just a short train ride away. As I walked, there was suddenly the most stupendous whooping, and I turned to see two girls, probably late teens, hanging (in every sense of the word) out of the windows of a stretch limo and gyrating maniacally.

I thought little of it – surely an aberration – and continued my stroll, eventually pitching up at The Crown on Brewer Street, close to Piccadilly Circus. It was a hostelry I knew of old, and, in truth, little within had changed, with the exception of the display on the bar. There was row upon row of taps for dispensing kegged beer, but just a solitary handle for pumping traditional English ale from the cask. I had a pint of the latter, a worthy drop of Charles Wells Bombardier.

The brewing of beer is substantially more complicated than is the making of wine. The brewing scientist in me says that it is not too challenging a task to tread a few grapes, and then leave them alone while the native yeast does its thing and converts the grape sugars into wine. A bit of cleaning up here and there and then, voila, wine. I am, of course, being utterly cynical, and retain my admiration for the skill of the winemaker in taking the right grape from the right locale and turning it into a delightful product.

Yet, I still insist that the complexity and skill of the succession of folks who grow barley and hops and then turn them into beer is perforce greater: The whole journey toward a bottle of beer is far more exacting than is the making of wine. There are many more steps. And most brewers insist that the product meet stringent specifications, both in terms of flavor profile and in the levels of a diversity of analytical measurements. Some of the molecules that contribute to flavor are specified to parts per billion levels. The barley and hops are no less prone to seasonal variation than is the grape. But brewers overcome these fluctuations so as to achieve a consistent beverage, whereas the winemaker will tolerate them and the attendant variation (and sometimes, unpredictability) in the finished drink.

It's exactly analogous to the operation of a Boeing 777.

The history of beer is certainly no shorter or less illustrious than that of wine or, indeed, that of other beverages that evolved at a similar time by the “spontaneous” fermentation of a diversity of materials: from moistened grain (beer), through grapes (wine), to honey (mead), and milk (kvass).

In all instances, these products, with their hedonic attributes and the entry they allowed to an altered state of consciousness, had a profound social and economic impact. Furthermore, as we saw in Chapter 2, for wine and as is almost certainly more likely the case for beer, they featured as prime causative factors in the advent of static societies. They were a fundamental part of the diet and were undoubtedly recognized as being altogether healthier to drink than water alone. Alcohol is a great killer of pathogenic microbes but more than that, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, George Armelagos, found evidence for the bacterium Streptomycedes in relics from ancient Sudan and has suggested that beer at the times was likely a significant source of the “natural” antibiotic tetracycline. Beer is almost a wonder food: nutritionally enriched, hedonistically satisfying, and medically protective.

Climate, of course, played a substantial role in dictating the beverage of choice. In northern and western Europe, then, it was probably honey that constituted the first alcoholic beverage base, before the days of cultivation of the cereal grasses.

Equilibrium lies at the heart of many of our models of the way the world works. Arguments within a diverse range of disciplines proceed from the premise that the normal state of being is a harmonious one. But that premise is not secure. Disharmony and conflict may be far more than aberrations from a normal state; they may be at the heart of the system. The essays in this volume explore the theme of disharmony and conflict, and the alternative proposition that a variety of systems are fundamentally informed, not just by a tendency towards harmony and equilibrium, but also by conflict.

These essays were first delivered as the 20th Darwin College lecture series. They explore conflict at a range of levels and scales, from the workings of genes and chromosomes at one extreme, and the evolution of galaxies within a ‘multiverse’ at the other. Between these two extremes, they focus upon an intermediate scale, that of human society. In this introduction, we draw out some of the themes that have recurred in the course of these diverse contributions.

An evolutionary imperative

Conflict has a resonance with one of the central ideas of Darwinian evolution, the struggle for survival. This resonance is a recurrent theme of essays by Haig, Wrangham and Cunliffe, in their respective contributions on genomic conflict, the evolution of great apes, and the deep history of the human species.

A few years ago, astronomers and astrophysicists did not agree on the age of the universe. Some said it might be 10 billion years old, others said 20 billion. You might think that we were completely clueless, not to know by a factor of two how old the universe is. But you have to consider that no-one was arguing the universe might be a trillion years old, or a quadrillion years, or a hundred years old. We were only within a factor of two of each other, and this was a pretty good thing. We knew we were nearing agreement. In fact the most recent data indicate an age of 14 billion years, plus or minus one or two. In the universe, quantities of time, size, temperature and distance come in such a vast range that factors of two between friends are not important.

Introducing powers of ten

In this chapter, we're going to cover that whole vast range. But if we're going to get through the entire universe in a few pages, factors of ten are the smallest differences we should worry about.

100 = 1

We'll start here, the number 1. This needs no introduction. The number 1 has no zeros to follow it, so we can write it as ten to the zeroth power. That zero tells us how many zeros follow the 1, if you're going to write it out. This fact turns out to be very important later on.

This is a lecture about the power of simple ideas in mathematics.

What I like doing is taking something that other people thought was complicated and difficult to understand, and finding a simple idea, so that any fool – and, in this case, you – can understand the complicated thing.

These simple ideas can be astonishingly powerful, and they are also astonishingly difficult to find. Many times it has taken a century or more for someone to have the simple idea; in fact it has often taken 2000 years, because often the Greeks could have had that idea, and they didn't.

People often have the misconception that what someone like Einstein did is complicated. No, the truly earth-shattering ideas are simple ones. But these ideas often have a subtlety of some sort, which stops people from thinking of them. The simple idea involves a question nobody had thought of asking.

Consider, for example, the question of whether the Earth is a sphere or a plane. Did the ancients sit down and think ‘now let's see – which is it, a sphere or a plane?’? No, I think the true situation was that no-one could conceive the idea that the earth was spherical – until someone, noticing that the stars seemed to go down in the West and then twelve hours later come up in the East, had the idea that everything might be going round – which is difficult to reconcile with the accepted idea of a flat earth.

Between the solitary and the social

Death is a solitary, individual and incommunicable event, perhaps the most private and intimate moment in the cycle of human life. Whether it marks, in religious terms, an exchange – whereby the dissolution of the body is contiguous with an entry into a new spiritual existence and, thus, the return to divinity – or whether, in the more secular encoding of what Sigmund Freud calls ‘the death drive’, it merely initiates the return to that tensionless, undifferentiated state of the inanimate that is beyond, grounding and prefiguring biological and social human existence, in either case the finality of death is generally acknowledged as the one certainty in any given life. It is the powerful fact against which, and in relation to which, all mortal existence is measured. At the same time it is impossible to know in advance what the experience of dying will be like, as it is also impossible to transmit any precise and definitive knowledge of this event to those who survive the death of another. In that sense death is also the powerful limit of all mortal knowledge; its ground and its vanishing point.

Yet dying, burial and commemoration are always also public matters. As cultural anthropology has shown, death, in that it removes a social being from society, is conceived as a wound to the community at large and a threatening signal of its own impermanence.

Energy is vital to our economic and social well-being. Economic growth would be impossible without the ready availability of fuels to provide affordable heat, light and motive and electrical power. Yet the provision of power from fossil fuels poses a major threat to our environment, for we live, most of us now accept, in a globally warming world. Low-carbon technology will be essential in powering tomorrow's world in a sustainable way.

It has been said that extrapolation of the present North American per capita energy consumption to the world's population of 6 billion people would require the resources of several additional Earths to cope with the waste products, in particular the CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. Clearly that is unsustainable. Sustainable development, a concept popularised by the Brundlandt Report of 1987, is generally understood to mean development that enables us to meet our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The UK government has been committed to sustainable development since 1994, and now monitors national progress in achieving sustainability in energy supply and consumption, as well as in other areas of life. ‘National emissions of greenhouse gases’ is one of the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI's) six headline indicators of sustainability.

But would a sustainable energy policy pay for the sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 emissions or for raising coastal defences to cope with rising sea levels?

Is all the world a movie, and are all the men and women in it merely players? In the twenty-first century, in the Western world and many other parts of the globe, the screen is as widespread a medium for narrative as the page was in the nineteenth, or the stage in the sixteenth century. The miniaturisation and accessibility of audiovisual equipment enables people to use moving images much as earlier generations used paper, pencil and pen to record and tell stories. In fact, there are a hundred years of history behind the development of contemporary screen language, and screen literacy is a refined art. How does it work to engage and affect us? Exemplified through close reference to movies and interactive titles from 1922 to 2002, this examination of the workings of screen narrative follows the evolution of the fictive world beyond the 2-D frame from cinema to computer screen – from 2-D to 3-D to 4-D.

Though often featuring actors playing roles, film drama is recorded and delivered through lenses, the camera representing a single viewpoint, mediating the story via an inbuilt observer, narrator or character. Film-makers thus wield the narrative powers of both novelists (who control viewpoint and narrative stance absolutely in their writing) and dramatists (who offer the interplay between characters, observable from a number of perspectives, as the vehicle for narrative) to spellbind their audiences.

Most animals rarely kill their own. Among non-human primates, for example, many species live in social groups and fight with their neighbours. Battles involve loud calls, displays, chases and occasional grapples – just enough for the larger or stronger group to convince its opponent to retreat. Yet although inter-group contests may be intense and frequent, and although they may determine access to critical resources, they hardly ever lead to death. For most primates the goal is to win or to retreat without being damaged.

But humans often aim to kill. So why is our species different? Why do we regularly and deliberately kill our own kind?

At the simplest level there are two kinds of answer: killing is either unnatural or natural. The contrasting positions are encapsulated by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, who have become icons for opposing views of human nature. For Rousseau, we are an essentially peaceful species. For Hobbes, war is our natural state. As we will see, both positions can be criticized.

Rousseau's thinking was dominated by the concept of the ‘noble savage’. He was so impressed by reports of people's spontaneous tendency to care for each other that he claimed conflict was absent in a state of nature. ‘With passions so tame’, he wrote, ‘and so salutary a curb, men, rather wild than wicked, and more attentive to guard against mischief than to do any to other animals, were not exposed to any dangerous dissensions’.

Most people in the world feel powerless. There are three key political questions: ‘What's going on?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What can we do about it?’ But if you ask ‘What's going on?’, people say, ‘I'm not quite sure.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, nobody's told me.’ ‘What can we do about it?’ ‘Probably not very much.’ That sense of powerlessness explains an awful lot of what we talk about as apathy, cynicism and so on, and this is what I want to address. I want to look at some of the sources of power, what they are, how they operate, who controls them, and ask the question, ‘How can we get some influence over the powers that exist in order to improve our own lives?’

The most obvious example of power is power by conquest. Julius Caesar tried to get us into the European Union in 55 BC, and we still use the penny, which was a Roman coin. Margaret Thatcher was not the first Iron Lady – Boudicca killed 7000 Romans and raised the Men of Essex in order to deal with the Treaty of Rome. Power by conquest was the basis of all the great empires of the past. The British Empire is one example – when I was born in 1925, 20 per cent of the population of the world was governed from London. Now we live in an American empire. There are certain consequences of that, which impinge upon the way our politics are conducted.