Jonathan Kingdon was born in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1935. As a biologist he is largely self-taught. He received his formal artistic training at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and the Royal College of Art in London. Kingdon is a senior research associate at the Institute of Biological Anthropology and department of zoology at the University of Oxford. His latest book, Lowly Origin (Princeton University Press), tackles the question of why our ancestors stood up on two legs. The millennium issue of American Scientist named Kingdon鈥檚 East African Mammals (Academic Press, 1997) as one of the 鈥�100 books that shaped a century of science鈥�.
What was it like growing up in Tanganyika?
Well for a start I didn鈥檛 go to school. My mother taught me first of all to draw and then to read and write. She had stopped being an art teacher to marry my father. So in a sense she was a frustrated teacher. But she had this little boy who was quite willing to absorb anything she could throw at him. I think she enjoyed teaching me to draw and I enjoyed being taught. She got me doing little essays on the experiences we had together.
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I went to secondary school in England, but every summer I would fly back to Africa. That was something I lived for 鈥� just running wild for a couple of months. My father would arrange for me to accompany game wardens and go hunting, those sorts of things. So I grew up with a great deal of first-hand experience of camping and living in uninhabited parts of Tanganyika. I didn鈥檛 really think of it as biology as such. It was just what I lived for 鈥� the experience of going out, hunting and watching birds. Birdwatching was my great early passion.
Where did you get your scientific training?
I had no formal training. I had not been through any course in anthropology or biological anthropology of any sort. I learned it all in the first place in the bush, and in the second place just reading avidly so that I could interpret what I had seen. My first job was at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. I was teaching painting and graphics, and some sculpture and art history. I taught right across the spectrum.
After I had been there a couple of years Julian Huxley arrived, and I was the guide for a field trip that we were doing. I had to stand up on the launch or in the bus when we were travelling around and tell people what they were seeing. At the end of the trip Julian said, 鈥淵ou should do something with that knowledge, there aren鈥檛 many people like that鈥�, and that struck a chord. That definitely was instrumental in my starting East African Mammals. I used to send him sections of the manuscript and he wrote back meticulously, in very small, fine handwriting. He was a great encouragement.
At various points in your career you have spent time with African tribes. What has that taught you?
I have enduring memories of an incident in Tanganyika when I had a Hadza guy walking in front of me. He had a quiver full of poisoned arrows. There were swarms of tsetse flies, and we were all getting bitten like mad. He pulled an arrow out and scratched a tsetse fly bite with the tip, then put it back into his holder. That tells you about the precision of people who live like that. They can use a poison arrow to scratch themselves with complete confidence while they are walking and they don鈥檛 even break their stride. That is not the sort of thing you write up in your thesis; it is just something that gives you respect for the precision with which they live.
How does your art help you in your scientific research?
Any drawing poses questions and problems that you have to solve. I wanted to understand anatomy, largely because I wanted to improve my capacity to represent what I was seeing. Drawing was a way of exploring. Scientists have lots of techniques. They make histograms, graphs and tables. These techniques are no different to drawing. Drawing is just as scientific. For example, in Leonardo da Vinci鈥檚 drawings, you see his struggle to understand how water flows in eddies and how a human fetus sits within the pelvic girdle; how it displaces the guts and the liver and so on.
If I had my way I would allow every child in the world to have the experience of holding a series of skulls and just contemplating them. The reality of it is so inescapable when you can feel the weight of that skull in your hands. You know, you absolutely know, that once upon a time it had living eyes and a living nose. You know that those teeth were covered by lips that could smile or grin or grimace. You know that a beautiful shell-like piece of cartilage used to be an ear. You know these things, not from a textbook, not from a zoo, but from intelligence. You know it absolutely first-hand.
Do you think a knowledge of art can help in mathematics and physics too?
I think art and the sciences are all ways of enquiring into the extraordinariness of existence. I think that we need, above all, to infuse any sort of education we give to children with that kind of enquiring passion. Not just a passion for knowledge but a passion for being able to articulate something about why you are where you are. To have some sense of satisfaction in saying where you came from and where you might be going. I think all scientific knowledge should ultimately appeal to the child鈥檚 fresh vision of the world. We should try to keep that vision when we do science. After all, there is far more waiting to be discovered than has ever been discovered up to this point in history.
You are most famous for your work on modern mammals. Why did you decide to write a book about the evolution of upright walking in humans?
When I look at somebody walking across the landscape, I think, 鈥淲hat an extraordinary thing the human being is.鈥� But there is as much mythology involved in the literature on bipedalism as there is solid science. I just got bored, or irritated, by the barrenness, the lack of any kind of environmental context for what people were writing in this area. They all seem to be totally divorced from the Africa I know, the ecological settings that I know.
Although these are obviously different today from what they were then, many of the individual components can be identified. There have been catastrophes and there have been fluctuations, from extreme glaciation to interglacials, and so on. Nonetheless, there is ecological continuity in Africa. That is ignored for the most part by people who insist on looking at teeth, bones and genes. By and large they do not look at the landscape. If they do look, they do not have a mental construct of the continuity of the landscape.
I felt that was a big absence in so much of what I was reading. So I constructed my book on a completely different basis. I am pursuing this not as a textbook for my students, nor as a best-seller or something highly dramatic. I am pursuing it because I really want to understand myself how we came to walk on two legs. And in doing so I think I am representative of millions and millions of people.
Can you give an example of that ecological continuity?
You cannot spend any time watching animals in their landscape without considering their evolutionary history. I was in the field watching secretary birds with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. The mountain is a million years old; the secretary bird, or something very like it, has been stalking that landscape for 35 million years. We think of Kilimanjaro as this vast enduring mass of land. But the real enduring component is not the mountain. That will move and disintegrate, and one day where Kilimanjaro is now will be a flat plain. But unless we extinguish them there will still be secretary birds. That sort of perspective comes from living in Africa.
People seem remarkably willing to believe in myths and pseudoscience today despite what science has achieved. Why do you think this is, and is it a problem?
I feel passionately that children should have an education that encourages them to ponder their existence on this Earth. Myths and legends are a distraction. We need to continue to ask serious questions about where we come from and where we are going. Religion once upon a time tried to do that in a very serious and earnest way in the face of very little information at all. I respect the people who invented these myths much more than the people who follow them. But we have a huge amount of information now 鈥� real concrete material. We need to formulate new visions of our meaning and ourselves. The myth-makers lived in a time when there was no information so they had to fall back on symbolic stories, and often they are wonderful stories representing deep truths. But as time goes on, like Chinese whispers they become more and more distorted.
What do you think of the direction in which modern scientific research is heading?
We are more preoccupied with a couple of guys hopping around on the moon and we know more about that sort of thing than we know about our own abilities to get up and walk. I am trying to remind people that some of the most fundamental questions about our own existence are not being addressed.
We should be doing research for the right reasons. Not as an adjunct to military research or to medical research or in the interests of a beneficiary. I think science actively needs cleansing of all its applications. Because when you do something for the wrong reasons you actually formulate it in a way that is appropriate to that particular slant. You should try and understand tropical rainforests, for example, as the culmination of life on Earth. That pure science approach seems to be something that we are getting further and further away from. It is a great disservice to science.