I’ve just re-read the email Keith Richards sent to me way back in July 2009, when he’d received the first batch of ~50 essays by the scientists. This is what he wrote:
“What I’m left with at the end of working closely with these papers is the conviction that your original conception is bang on: exciting things are happening . . . I’ll see what ideas I come up with for organising the collection. There are obvious topics (the brain, evolution, etc) but there are also less obvious ones that might be more revealing . . . I think we need to strike a convincing balance between scientific optimism and the sadder tone of quiet doubt in the face of human venality and incompetence. In short, I want to negotiate Pope’s “glory, jest and riddle of the world” in terms of what we have here.”