What keeps my father going is the thought that one day he will be vindicated

In the Montblanc/Spectator Art of Writing Award last year, readers were invited to submit a short essay on the subject of immortality. Here is the winning entry.

My father is old. He does not believe in God. He was 90 in December, an event celebrated with a family lunch at a hotel of his choosing. It was a very happy day, for both he and my mother are physically and mentally fit, but I was aware that he resists death. He will not go gentle into that good night, not because he is frightened of dying, but because he is afraid of the loss of his ideas.

For half a century my father has pursued ideas about the evolution of modern man. He believes that our species is the result of isolation on an island in the Indian Ocean. The sea, he maintains, has been left out of evolutionary theory. He has never found a publisher for any of his extensively researched writings, and they have long been the subject of affectionate family mockery.

One of his theories concerns a bipedal mammal which survived the cataclysm of 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs were apparently dealt a lethal blow by an asteroid landing in the Gulf of Mexico. This mammal lived chiefly on reptile eggs, and thereby bequeathed to us our particular facility with ball games, our otherwise primitive hands becoming perfect for throwing and catching.

This is typical of my father’s ideas. At first they provoke a little gentle ridicule, then dismissal. Some time later, however, they often prove to be not quite so eccentric after all. His theory of the bipedal egg-throwers is a good example. Until very recently it was thought that mammals of that period were the size of shrews. Then, many years after my father first proposed his theory, a number of fossilised mammals from the same period were found in China. One of these was as big as a small pony and appears to have been capable of walking on its hind legs.

What keeps my father going, prevents him from becoming bitter, is the hope that one day, after he has passed away, someone else will vindicate his ideas. He takes comfort from all the other great thinkers, explorers, archaeologists and scientists who were vindicated after their deaths. Like Don Marcelino Santiago Tomas Sanz de Sautuola and his friend Don Juan Vilanova of Madrid University.

Don Marcelino was a wealthy Spanish aris tocrat and an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. So when fossilised animal bones were found in a cave on his estate, he decided to do a methodical excavation. One morning, as he prepared to depart for a day’s work in the cave, his small daughter Maria pleaded with him to let her come too. He told her she would be bored, but she persisted, and was allowed to accompany him. Of course, she did get bored. As he knelt on the cold earth floor of a great dark cavern, meticulously scraping in the light of an acetylene lamp, she took another lamp and wandered round the chamber. Soon after, she gave a cry: ‘Papa, papa! Mira, toros pintados!’ ‘What do you mean? Painted bulls? Where?’ ‘Papa, look up!’ she commanded him.

He had hit his head on the low parts of the roof several times, but he had never looked up. Now he saw that just above his head the whole ceiling, perhaps 60ft long and 30ft wide, was covered in what at first seemed like a vast painted relief of great animals, glowing in reds, browns and blacks. He was looking at a work of art painted 15,000 years earlier.

The following year, in 1880, after a scholarly investigation, Don Marcelino and Don Juan Vilanova published An Account of Certain Prehistoric Discoveries in the Province of Santander. It was greeted with ridicule, followed by dismissal. Fiercest and most influential in his condemnation was Emile Cartailhac, professor of prehistory at Toulouse University. The cave paintings of Altamira were a hoax.

Don Marcelino never contested the judgment. All Spain, he said, knew him to be a man of honour. If they could not take the word of an honourable man, then that was up to them. Vilanova did fight back, but Cartailhac remained adamant, even publishing a book to reinforce his argument.

By 1893 Don Marcelino and Vilanova were dead. In 1902 Maria, who was first to see the paintings of Altamira, received a visitor. It was Professor Cartailhac, president of the Prehistoric Society of France. He told her that recent excavations in the Perigord had uncovered paintings similar to those at Altamira, this time accompanied by incontrovertible evidence of their antiquity.

‘I have therefore written a paper to be published in L’Anthropologie. It is entitled La Grotte d’Altamira — Mea Culpa d’un Sceptique.’ Then there was Gregor Mendel. For seven years Mendel grew peas in his garden, tended and watched them. From the peas he deduced the basic laws of heredity. His work is the foundation of modern genetics. In 1866 he published his results in the Journal of the Brno Natural History Society. They met with silence. He sent some reprints to various learned societies, including the Royal Society, but again there was no response. He died in 1884, and it was not until 1900 that someone discovered his work in a pile of old papers.

Another great man, a German teacher called George Grotefend, deciphered the cuneiform script on Mesopotamian clay tablets which were more than 3,000 years old. He wrote a paper on his work in 1802 but his scholarship was considered flawed. No one would publish it. Ninety years later Grotefend’s paper was found, published and acknowledged.

Alfred Russel Wallace, travelling around the islands of the Malay archipelago, conceived the idea of ‘the survival of the fittest’ as the key to evolution. He published his ‘Essay on the Law that has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’ in 1855. In 1858 he wrote to Darwin about further ideas that had come to him. He said he hoped they ‘would supply the missing factors to explain the origin of species’ and asked Darwin if he might help in finding a publisher.

Darwin immediately abandoned the book on which he had been working, and suggested that he and Wallace jointly present their work to the Linnaean Society a month later. In the event, Darwin did not appear, and Wallace’s paper elicited little response. But the following year Darwin published The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. It sold out within weeks. One might have expected some resentment from Wallace, but he had, it seems, a generous spirit.

When Einstein wrote his paper on the theory of relativity in 1905, it made no headlines. After all, he had not even been able to get a teaching job, but was working in the Swiss patent office. It took about ten years for E=MC2 to become famous. or my father, ideas, whether expressed in equations, in language, in art or music, are the only immortality. Nothing else is found beyond the grave. Which is why I have written down my father’s ideas and bound them into a book, in the hope that one day perhaps someone will come upon the faded texts. At first he or she may mock the contents; then perhaps they’ll think again and espouse them, and see them accepted. Then my father will have become one of the immortals.