CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hey! Hello!
Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello!
And welcome to QI, the show-off show that sits at the front of the class,
shouting, "Me, sir! Me, me, me, sir, me!"
while other quiz shows are snogging behind the bike sheds.
Tonight, we're celebrating genius
with four of the most brilliant minds in the country,
the Einstein or entertainment, David Mitchell!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The Da Vinci of drollery, Dara O'Briain!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The Galileo of gags, Graham Norton!
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
And the Morecambe of wise, Alan Davies!
CHEERS AND APPLAUSE
But before our SWAT team of swots
done their white coats and clever clogs,
we should hear their buzzers, and Dara goes...
BELL
University College Dublin, O'Briain!
David goes...
BELL
Peterhouse, Cambridge, Mitchell!
Graham goes...
BELL
University College, Cork, Norton!
And Alan goes...
PING!
Can I have a P, please, Bob?
LAUGHTER
Oh, that's...
APPLAUSE
That's completely unfair because Alan is a graduate of the University of Kent,
and he holds an honorary doctorate, so, Alan, could you press your buzzer again?
BELL
The doctor'll see you now!
LAUGHTER
Now, a very difficult first question, so I'm going to give you a bit of help.
What I'd like you to do, you should have a bit of tissue somewhere near. ALAN: I can't see anything! No!
Have you got tissues anywhere? Yeah.
I want you to stick a piece of tissue up your left nostril as if you had a nosebleed or something.
It's weird, OK. Left nostril, very good.
You've all passed that test. Well, two of you have.
I'm going for real penetration.
I can feel that up there.
If it came out your ear, that would be a worry. All right, now say something intelligent.
LAUGHTER
Er...
A squared equals B squared plus C squared.
That's very good! If...
Pythagoras's theorem, you know.
Yeah, excellent!
Well, no, what this is about,
do you breathe through your left nostril, your right nostril or both?
My arse. Oi!
I've always suspected one works better than the other, but I've never kept a note of which it is.
Well, some people do keep notes of how people breathe.
Does it not alternate? You're right, Dara O'Briain, it does alternate.
It has a periodicity of four hours.
You swap from being mostly left to mostly right, and what's completely weird
is that you answer questions on different types of subject better
according to which side you're breathing through.
Am I going to asphyxiate at about half past 12?
You might, that's a good point! You can breathe through your mouth if you want to.
Should we be keeping notes of when our...you know,
of what shift work our nostrils are on?
Oh, the left will be in charge from one till four, that's when I should be doing maths-based things,
like my tax return.
If I'm going to write a poem, I'll wait till the more creative right nostril comes on at about 4pm.
Breathing through the right nostril, you should be better at visual and spatial tasks. GRAHAM: So, now?
Yes, you should be good at visual and spatial things.
If you block the right one, you should be better at verbal things.
I know it sounds mad, but you've probably
heard of the study in '89 called Unilateral Nostril Breathing...
Oh, that old thing!
..by Block, Arnott, Quigley and Lynch.
So why don't all sports people constantly block their left nostrils?
Well, you've probably seen what a lot of sports people do.
They put a piece of Elastoplast, plaster, the anti-snoring thing,
and they do that so they're both open at the same time so they get maximum, I guess.
And often they snort drugs as well.
They don't! When we watch a sports person with one of those things on,
they're not only at their best at sport, they're also at their most verbally dextrous? Indeed!
And visually and spatially because both are wide open. Otherwise they can't even go, "Mine!"
No, what have you got? What have you found? I think I lost the end.
Ohhh!
Oh, dear. It'll reappear, won't it?
Somewhere, yeah, eventually.
You'll cry it out at some point.
Are these going on eBay?
They could do - do you want to sign it? All right, yeah.
I think I've already left my mark.
Blocking the right nostril makes you more emotionally negative,
according to another study, a higher score on the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory.
So if you wish to feel slightly more cheerful, don't block the right nostril. So that's why now...
Now you're quite happy. You're quite bouncy and happy, aren't you?
Oh, now... There, you see, you've blocked the right nostril.
It's terribly sad.
LAUGHTER
Keep them in, I'm going to ask you a question that will test your visual-spatial.
Left? In the left, keep them left, OK.
It seems the quickest way to improve verbal reasoning is to shove a tissue up your left nostril.
Let's see how they've worked. Consider...
an N-dimensional hypercube and connect each pair of vertices
to obtain a complete graph of two to the power N vertices.
Colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black.
What is the smallest number, the smallest value of N
for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single coloured
complete sub-graph with four vertices which lie in a plane?
Six!
That is exactly what people used to think.
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE That's amazing.
That's absolutely extraordinary. Further up there, further!
Yeah, until 2003, most graph theorists thought the correct answer was probably six.
I can only apologise. But...
Come in here with your old graph-theory knowledge, how dare you!
It's so difficult, when you've got a busy showbiz lifestyle, to keep up with the graph theory?
It's probably only eight or nine hours a day you're devoting to it now.
Well, I have to say, I've got Graham's number. Six?
Have you got Graham's number? Er, no. Ah!
We don't have that sort of relationship. You've not got that sort of relationship!
There is such a thing, which is relevant to this, Graham's number.
But it's bigger than six. < Of course it is. It is so...
It is really big. Try and think of a really, really big number. 17.
Do you know what? It's even bigger than that!
This number, all right...
Now get hold of this idea - this number is so big that all the material in the universe, right,
couldn't make enough ink to write it out.
It's called Graham's number, named after Ronald Graham,
and weirdly enough, scientists know that it ends in a seven, which is really strange.
Why would it end in a seven?! Turn it into an eight and then it's a bigger number!
I didn't say it was the biggest number ever, it's just this is Graham's number, which is huge.
You could have Norton's number. Yeah, Graham Norton, I made it an eight at the end.
You can remove your tissues, incidentally, now. I think I'll miss it now. Oh, will you? OK.
I'm worried about what might come out when I pull it.
This problem, this graph problem, it seems - imagine the cube with lots of different dimensions
where each corner is connected with red or black lines to every other,
what is the fewest number of dimensions so that you end up with
at least one single coloured square with the same colour diagonals?
Until 2003, they thought it was six. Now it's been shown that there must be at least 11. It may be 12,
but it's somewhere between 11 and Graham's number, that enormous number.
There's quite a lot of room for error, isn't there? That's not really an answer, is it?
The greatest mathematical minds in the world just don't know what the answer is.
I don't understand the question. Neither do I. They don't either, to be honest,
and they're really hoping nobody checks.
What they do know is it ends in a seven.
Now, what music can you play to your children to make them brainier?
I won't be lured into saying any of the major classical composers
because that's what's sold to parents of small children,
that if you play them Mozart or Beethoven or something, it makes them smarter. Absolutely right.
We had a little forfeit lurking behind the screen that said Mozart
because people seem to have it in their heads
that they read somewhere once in some newspaper that...
There's little Mozart. Oh, God, you could slap him!
Oh, now!
Spoilt little brat!
He was on the tour, he was touring at that age. He was dragging his arse.
He was doing the clubs, basically,
albeit they were clubs run by the crown heads of Europe.
Yes, the Bourbon Club and the Hohenzollern Club. There is no evidence at all
that playing Mozart to a baby makes it more intelligent.
I thought you were supposed to play natural sounds because
the noises of contemporary life are destructive and create behavioural difficulties.
That's why you mustn't have the television on until they're four or something like that.
Really? I hadn't heard that one. That is not how parenting works, my friend!
You train them to like television as quickly as they possibly can.
There was no ADHD until TV was invented, they're kind of coincidental.
They're happy with HD, my friend.
But is there music that makes them cleverer?
Well, no, there was some study which has since been debunked
by many other studies which claimed that the IQ went up, but it was only done to students, not to children.
You can't test any of these things on children, because you'd have to have a control group,
a baby that you're not playing Mozart to in the hope that the child is stupider.
And that's a tough sell to parents, "We'd like to
"test your child by denying him any intellectual stimulation and hoping that he turns out dumb in the end."
But not if you said, "We'll look after it 24 hours a day for the next six months to test this."
Yeah, and we'll give you money. Ah!
Presumably, if you just play your child educational songs,
like One Potato Two Potato, they'd at least learn that. That's true.
And could count potatoes.
An important life skill. Growing up in Ireland, that was vital.
"One, two - that seems to be it, we'd better go to America."
Finished!
Do you know about the English Mozarts? Do they mean anything to you?
McFly?
LAUGHTER
Very, very popular.
High quality, high quality. No, there were two chaps, one was Thomas Linley.
He beat Mozart by playing a concerto at an earlier age even than Mozart did.
At 14, both boys played together, they looked to be future stars, but unfortunately,
Linley fell into a lake while boating and was drowned when aged 22.
Pushed in by Mozart.
But because there no recordings, it's all very impressive to say he played a concerto aged whatever.
It might have been rubbish, do you know what I mean?
No, people travelled, and they were the sensation of the age.
The other was Samuel Wesley but he banged his head and suffered
from mild brain damage for the rest of his life.
Tripped by Mozart.
Yeah, there seems to be a pattern emerging.
So there's no evidence that, in fact, playing Mozart to children makes them more intelligent.
If you can't dumb the kids up, how about dumbing them down?
Why are exams so much easier for youngsters these days?
BELL Dublin, O'Briain! Yes, Dara.
Thank you very much.
Firstly, are they actually easier these days, or are they simply marked more generously?
It is just one of these things, this may be a national thing you do,
but you've a tendency to presume that you have a very stupid generation of kids in this country.
Then you set them a series of exams, they all get As, and you go, "Proof!"
That proves they're stupid, yes! It is a horrendous Catch 22 if you're a 17-year-old.
My problem with exams, though, is that more and more people get As,
so whether that's because they're getting more intelligent or the exam's getting easier, or both,
it still is defying the point of the exam.
The point in exams is to tell people apart, not just to go, "You're all great academically!
"Everyone can be professor of Latin!
"Share the professor of Latin's salary between you!
"And starve!" You're right, it should be done by a percentile. Which is how it used to be done.
And that's the point of our IQ test, and what's interesting about the IQ test
is that each year it gets better by 0.3%,
so 3% every ten years, children get smarter, so they have to normalise.
So if you go back to your great-great-grandparents,
they would be, under the Mental Health Act of 1983, retarded.
Well... Because they would have an IQ of 70.
My great-grandfather signed his marriage certificate with a cross so...
Was his name Xavier? I don't think it was!
Well, perhaps he should have used a pen.
I think Mensa is at the root of all this, surely.
They say without irony, Mensa, on their website, "It's Latin for table,"
which Mensa is, but that's not why it's called Mensa.
It was originally called Mens, which is the Latin for mind,
but they realised their magazine looked like some special-interest gay porn!
So they added an A. Already, I'm not being filled with confidence that this is being run by geniuses!
"It represents the round-table equality of Mensa.
"Everyone's equal, there's no elitism at Mensa." Erm...
I'd like to set up a society for people who have an IQ of under 70
and then go and try and sell them pyramid schemes.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
The only thing that you might say is quite interesting about this, it's called the Flynn effect,
the fact that people are getting the better at it. Under American law,
if you have an IQ of 70 or less, you cannot be executed for a capital crime.
You're considered retarded, and therefore Flynn has often had to go...
People might have an IQ of 72, which means they're going to die,
and he will say, "Yeah, but this was taken when he was a child,
"and revising upwards the 100 norm, he's actually 68 or something, so he is technically retarded,"
and he can save lives by doing that.
Quite easy to throw an IQ test, I'd have thought.
Yeah, but they're taken as children. They're not smart enough to throw an IQ test!
That is really planning a murder, if you're seven, going, "I'll put a circle here...
"In 15 years, you're dead!"
It's kind of the reverse of the sort of eugenicist argument that
the Americans are using, where they're letting the stupid live.
But anyway, young people find IQ tests easier than their parents
because apparently they're exposed to more problem solving in their life.
Maybe geniuses are born, not made, and if so, how would you create a genius?
Is there a way of ensuring a genius?
Breeding two geniuses together...
Well... ..and then giving them a high-fibre diet,
exposed to lots of vitamin D from the sun...
You mention eugenicists earlier. Tell me what eugenics is, then.
Yeah, tell us about your theory of eugenics!
I'm not sure, is it sort of generally trying to breed people to be brighter and stronger and better at things,
and stopping people from breeding if you think they might have stupid or feeble...?
People farming! Nazism.
People husbandry, isn't it?
As Alan said, Nazism, of course, is a thing that...
There were people, quite respectable antecedents and liberal points of view before Nazism
who believed that eugenics may be a good idea.
Lots of them, yeah. Bernard Shaw and many others.
I did a game show in America a while ago, and there was a contestant on it, this woman,
and her sort of interesting fact, her fun fact about herself
was that her father had been a serial killer, right?
LAUGHTER And her other fun fact was she hadn't told her husband
that her father was a serial killer until after they were married!
So it's a light-hearted thing, but I'm trying to say to her,
"Do you think maybe your husband would have been concerned about having children
"given that there's a serial killer in you somewhere?"
And she went, "No, no, no, he's been through similar things - his father committed suicide."
And you just thought, "You've a serial killer and a suicidal man,
"and you thought that was a good gene pool to be splashing around in!"
You would give birth to a child who kills himself lots of times.
A serial suicide, it's terrifying!
When you say after she'd married him, how long...
Was it before the speeches?
LAUGHTER
"Dad's about to say a few words, this might be worth catching."
This may explain why he went with orange.
The only one with plastic cutlery at the wedding reception.
"Why are they wheeling your dad around with a cage over his face?"
I suppose what you'd do, then, you'd have a "Come as a serial killer" themed wedding.
Can we just go back to the past? And on the subject of creating geniuses, who was one of the great geniuses?
Well, Da Vinci.
Da Vinci is exactly the man I was after.
He was known to be a genius in his own time. I mean, they knew how astoundingly great he was.
His brother, Bartolomeo, actually...
Was an idiot.
That's awful!
Bartolomeo married, and he decided he wanted their child to be like
his brother, Leonardo, and oddly enough, it sort of worked.
There's Leonardo dying.
It shows he was kind of worshipped, they realised how great he was.
What's Rodney Bewes doing in the background?
Yeah, it's defo Rodney Bewes!
He does look like Rodney Bewes.
Rodney Bewes is the Highlander, is he?
What a weird, unsettling thing to discover that would be,
in the context of the credit crunch and everything, suddenly to discover that Rodney Bewes was immortal.
I mean, can you imagine on the news, "And today it emerged that
"actor Rodney Bewes has been alive for as long as time"?
Given the things we've been talking about where I'm pretending to know
what you're talking about, I actually really don't know who Rodney Bewes is. Oh!
Do you remember The Likely Lads?
We didn't get that in Ireland, did we? No, we didn't.
James Bolam... I know who he is! And Rodney Bewes. They played a couple...
That's basically him there. Oh, right! >
The chance of me meeting him in the future are very high.
I have to say, the whole point about QI, right, is that the rest of the world talks about cultural things,
reality TV and pop stars and Rodney Bewes, and we talk about Leonardo.
And what you've done by coming on... No, you actually!
We started talking about Leonardo, and we've arrived at Rodney Bewes! That's the wrong direction!
I didn't even know who he was!
Don't blame me!
You're so right!
I'm sorry! I was very unfair on you, Graham.
I was wafting in the rarefied air of Leonardo.
The stink bomb of Rodney Bewes was exploded over there.
To me, Rodney Bewes looks older there than Rodney Bewes in our present time so I think
Rodney Bewes must, in the future, travel back in time
to check Leonardo da Vinci's pulse to make absolutely sure he's dead,
using the futuristic technology of pulse checking.
The others are all going, "What's this weirdo Rodney Bewes doing?"
The one on the right has his head in his hands, "It's so embarrassing."
Why's he holding his hand?
Yes, Leonardo was such a genius he predicted the Likely Lads.
LAUGHTER
He wanted James Bolam and Rodney Bewes has turned up.
That's why he's going, "Oh no, it's Bewes."
The one on the right has definitely got his hand on his head for that reason.
We ordered John Cleese and Connie Booth.
The one on the left is gesturing towards Rodney Bewes as if to say, "Leonardo, who's this dick?"
LAUGHTER
"Seriously? Rodney Bewes?" >
"You brought Rodney Bewes here as a doctor?!"
That's Matthew Kelly anyway, that one.
Oh no! No, don't make it Matthew Kelly.
Oh, Lord. I've now got a horrible feeling that the Brian Blessed on the end has had his head sawn off.
He's had his brain taken out.
AS BRIAN BLESSED: That is no longer Brian Blessed! He's turned into somebody else!
APPLAUSE
I wanted...
I wanted to discuss the fact that, unbeknownst to him,
when Leonardo died, he had a nephew called Pierino,
who was brought up to be a genius and actually kind of was.
He was sent to Florence and demonstrated great talent,
but sadly he died aged only 22, leaving 20 works behind him. Pushed out of a window by Michelangelo.
Or possibly by Mozart.
Working in tandem.
Yes...
Having stolen Rodney Bewes' time-travelling technology. Exactly, it all makes sense. Yes.
Sort of, yeah.
What can you tell me, quite interesting, while we're on the subject of Leonardo,
aside that Rodney Bewes was his doctor, which I didn't know,
what can you tell me about the Last Supper?
BELL Peterhouse, Cambridge, Mitchell!
Did he sort of paint it... Is the reason it's peeling so badly
is he didn't listen to the people who were experts in that kind of painting?
He said, "No, I'm a genius, I know best" so he slapped it on randomly.
As a result, it's decaying a lot worse than other sort of frescos like that.
In his own lifetime, it started to fall apart.
He painted it onto dry plaster instead of on wet plaster which is what a fresco is.
Then sadly, in Napoleon's time, it was used as a... Dartboard.
..storeroom, virtually as a dartboard, yes. A stabling, it was used as.
Yes, because the door was knocked through the tablecloth, wasn't it?
You should be able to see Christ's legs but they just added a door so it was probably vandalised there.
They must have thought, "It's a bit rubbish, it hasn't been done very well." No, exactly.
All the other fresco painters are going, "The thing about Leonardo da Vinci, he will not listen."
Exactly.
Did he paint people in that he knew?
I'm not sure, in his case. It was obviously a thing that used to be done in Renaissance art.
They're fussing about "I had the pitta bread
"but I didn't have any wine so I don't see why I should pay as much as Peter."
"Luke had that! I'm not paying for that!"
It's interesting because it is a room of people being repelled by Jesus, he is...
Jesus was saying, "This is the last bloody supper I'm going to."
LAUGHTER
Obviously, Leonardo was a fine artist, he didn't actually
make any real contribution to science at all. Or did he?
A flying machine, or was that a forfeit? No, it wasn't a forfeit but it just wouldn't have worked.
Yes, it's a drawing of a helicopter, isn't it?
I did drawings of spaceships when I was about five
and I'd be embarrassed if somebody had said I had invented interstellar travelling.
Then, if he just did some paintings, what's the fuss?
Well, because his curiosity was so wide-ranging.
Machines of war and in anatomy and so on.
But partly, the reason he didn't contribute to science is he did
actually make a few discoveries, is that he wrote a mirror writing diary which was also in code that wasn't
really looked at or interpreted until 1970, by which time almost everything he'd discovered which
might have been considered new 50, 100 years earlier, had already been independently discovered.
So in that sense, he didn't really contribute, but he's considered
the prototypical genius or archetypal Renaissance man.
Submarine? Did he come up with the submarine?
He might have done a drawing about submarines, I'm not sure.
The Beatles.
He just did a wavy line and covered it in blue. And then he did, like, kitchen.
A big fish looking in. A man waving.
Probably no room for a tennis court, practically thinking.
Anyway, if everyone could roll their tongues for me.
Very good. Get a close-up on Graham.
LAUGHTER What the hell?!
I think it's supposed to be an illustration of >
a child of two geniuses may not necessarily be a genius.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE I don't know who says that.
Yes, roll your tongues.
Where does that gift come from? If it is a gift.
Where does that ability... I literally can't do it. A fish.
You asked! Yes I did, and you gave an answer!
You avoided the trap, which was to say from your parents, that it's genetically handed down.
Some people can do it and some people can't.
It isn't related to the fact that, if you come from two parents who can do it, you'll be able to do it.
There are other things that some people can do and other people can't, like asparagus and urine.
Does it make your urine smell?
It makes everyone's urine smell. No, it doesn't. Maybe not ladies. Yes, mostly women don't have them.
Can you put your hand up if you've never noticed the effect
of asparagus in the smell of your urine? ALAN: Weird.
GRAHAM: You've never noticed? DARA: I've never noticed that.
It's instant. You've hardly finished chewing,
and then you're peeing and it stinks.
They used to call it... Other diners are pointing at you.
You should be doing that in the toilet.
It stinks and he's doing it in here.
They used to call it "housemaid's despair" because the next morning,
if someone had had asparagus, the housemaid would take down the chamber pot like "eew"!
I find it - maybe I'm wrong, maybe -
I find the smell of urine quite distasteful anyway.
No, no. Believe me...
If you've got stinky pee, you need to see someone. I don't.
There's something wrong with you.
You've got a disease!
It presumably doesn't make you go "Argh"?
It just makes me go, "I'll not drink that."
If you peed out Chardonnay, that would be something else.
Best to leave that alone, I feel.
I'll leave you alone because I've just done it into a toilet.
I didn't say I was, you know, I was flavouring stuff.
If you decanted it, that would be different.
When I was a child, Sugar Puffs made it smell of Sugar Puffs to me. Anybody else?
SOME AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes.
Oh, good. Nice not to feel alone!
I had asparagus in the past and it didn't make my wee smell, and it's only in recent years that it has.
That is interesting. And it's an interesting audience, and they have all got
exactly the right little bodies that do the right things.
He's still fuming. I think people are a lot more interested in their wee than they'll admit.
That's certainly true.
People are interested in what comes out of them, I think is a general rule.
Not in an icky way, but there's an element of... that.
I just want to make the point that if you ask someone about their interests,
they'll say walking, cinema, books.
They won't say, "Well, primarily the smell of my own farts, I'm always fascinated by.
"But they don't come all the time so I while away the rest of the time with cinema, books..."
If I could just fart all day and smell it, I would be a fascinated man.
LAUGHTER
You're so right! I think most psychologists would agree with you and say it's true, but unspoken.
Ask anyone on earth when they've just farted and smelt it, who is bored?
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
You know what that means? It means when someone is reading.
They're reading a book and reading a book, if they go like that...
They aren't thinking about the book, they've just let one go.
It's true. It's odd. We laugh at it and yet it's an obsession from the cradle onwards virtually.
Anyway, despite what we're taught, the fact is a lot of these strange
things like tongue rolling don't come from our parents. It doesn't follow you can if your parents can.
Which was the first animal to be cloned?
Well it can't be...
It's not Dolly the sheep then.
No, you're right. You have all been so good at avoiding the honey traps.
No, but I thought it was Dolly the sheep, but it's not.
Not the first animal, no. We have to go back to the 1880s for the first cloning.
Yes, it was a sea creature actually.
An octopus or something? No, it was a sea urchin.
There's one. This was a German called Dreisch who did it in 1885.
But in 1902, another German, Hans Spemann, cloned a salamander.
He used a rudimentary noose to to separate the cells of an embryo,
and the noose was made of the hair of a human baby.
He used it as a lasso just to separate. Isn't that marvellous?
That's fiddly work. It is very fiddly work.
There must have been lots of times where he used to go... SHOUTS
"Could I please have another baby's hair?"
Go back to the baby. "Argh!"
"One Guinea, madam."
All the people trying to keep him calm. "Would you like another...
"NO, I DON'T WANT ANOTHER COFFEE!"
They'll go, "Do you want me to have a go?"
But Dolly, Dolly was in 1996, Dolly the sheep was the one you cleverly avoided. But why Dolly?
Why poor Dolly, do you know? It was named after Dolly Parton because the cell came from the mammary glands.
Correctly correctington.
Well done, sir. Excellent.
APPLAUSE
It would be quite easy to palm off any sheep as being the clone of another sheep.
Do you think there was a point where they go, "We can just get another sheep and say there it is.
"It's genetically identical that one, yes.
"Those two sheep look similar, well, that's because they're genetically identical."
Oddly enough, things can be genetically identical and rather surprising,
because the first cat to be cloned was called Rainbow
and her clone was known as CC. There.
They just didn't put the effort in did they?
They went to all the pet shops for that little faker.
They could at least have sent the guy who they sent to get the kitten with a photo.
Not just get any cat.
The little kitten is called CC.
Points if you can guess what that stands for. Cat clone?
Wittier, or sort of wittier.
Say? AUDIENCE: Copycat.
Points to the audience. Copycat, you see?
Very good.
The operation was known as Operation Copycat, it was part of a larger project to clone a dog.
LAUGHTER
It was called Missy, Missyplicity named after a dog named Missy.
The world's first cloned dog from Korea was called Snuppy.
Then they ate it.
LAUGHTER
Anyway, the point is the first animal to be cloned was the sea urchin way back in 1885.
Since then, many other animals have been given the treatment,
including the first cloned cats which look nothing like each other.
No, it doesn't take a genius to know that it's time to look for some general ignorance.
Fingers on buzzers, if you would. How old are you?
LAUGHTER
BELL Norton.
How old do I look?
BELL
How old do I feel?
It just shows you the effect of this game though.
You ask a question, and all four of us think that's something
I definitely know the answer to, but I've been made so uncertain that
I'm not even willing to give my own age, name or address.
How can this possibly be a trap? I am 37.
BELL 37. There we go, no points for that.
ALARM BLARES
But that's not wrong!
DAVID: Don't accept it, you are!
GRAHAM: We should all do it.
BELL 34.
34, eh? 34. ALARM BLARES
You don't want to do this.
BELL Graham Norton, 46.
ALARM BLARES
ALAN: I'm not doing it.
LAUGHTER
Obviously, as the baby that was called Graham, or Dara or David or Alan,
arrived on the planet the number of years ago that you said,
but that's not how old you are whenever I touch you.
If I touch your arm, how old is that arm? Is it as old as that?
About six weeks old, something like that?
DAVID: Is it five years we replace our entire selves?
There are different bits of one, that's right.
DARA: Your cells regenerate. Your red blood cells last only 120 days.
A liver has a turnaround time of 300 to 500 days, 1.5 years.
GRAHAM: Hurry up!
LAUGHTER
Give it a chance to recover.
The entire human skeleton is replaced every 10 years or so, so all of your bones.
Really? That's good, isn't it?
Yeah, it is!
They're replaced in an aged way, rather annoyingly,
rather than a brand new one. So they're replaced with second-hand ones?
Not exactly used, no.
I'm thinking of trading in my eight year-old Mazda for an eight and a bit year-old Mazda.
I'm afraid that's how it goes, yes. It's all rather unfortunate.
An adult's body may turnout somewhere between seven and ten years old
in terms of its cells, though some cells are much younger.
And 98% of the 7 billion billion billion atoms in the human body are replaced yearly.
I think some of my socks are older than I am.
That's a marvellous thought.
I feel I should defer to them.
Yes, you've been around longer than me. Most of the cells in your body aren't your own, they're not human.
This is bacteria?
Yes, they're bacteria. In fact, more than 500 different species,
more than ten times the number of human cells. Isn't that interesting?
On average, all the cells in your body are around ten years old.
How did the Church of England originally react to Darwin's theory of evolution?
They weren't happy about it. They weren't happy about it!
BELL They didn't get it, I don't think.
Nobody really got it for a while.
He delivered it to a meeting of the Royal Society, I think it was, and people just kind of went, "Oh, OK."
That's true of his original paper, but when he published
The Origin Of Species, it was a massive bestseller.
It fact it sold out even before it was printed, and he was a gigantic figure of his time.
He was one of only five people not royal to be given a burial at Westminster Abbey.
They absolutely understood his greatness.
The surprising thing is the Church of England were not that worried at all.
But for many years most churchmen had encouraged people to believe
that a lot of the Bible was metaphorical,
not literally true, but if there's anything
shocking about it to them, it's that it shows nature doesn't care. Yes.
The idea of a linear evolution they thought was fine, that might have been part of God's plan,
but the true understanding of evolution also shows that nature is completely horrific.
That was the major part the Victorians hated because they loved the countryside and birdsong.
This is Alexander's All Things Bright and Beautiful.
And instead they're locked in a vicious struggle for survival where all...
All animals are hungry and afraid and they die before they get old and it's a miserable, hard life.
Unless they live in zoos, where they're quite stress-free.
It is, it's a life they wouldn't expect in the wild.
Maybe, if you let them out of the zoo for a little bit,
and let them back in the circus, just a little bit?
I miss a dog pushing a pram.
LAUGHTER
Cirque du Soleil is all very well, but an elephant counting...
You're pitching yourself in a tailcoat and tights and a top hat,
welcoming everybody to Circus X Factor, Call Me A Nancy! Aren't you?
But you have to do the elephant's back story,
"This is the elephants last chance at a career in show business."
And the elephant bursts into tears. He's doing this for his dead grandfather,
and then a shot of the elephant staring at a big pile of ivory.
LAUGHTER
You're a sick puppy. Or maybe some piano keys?
LAUGHTER
Get someone to play for him.
Who, me?!
DARA: Yeah, my granddad was in show business as well.
So The Origin Of Species was widely respected by mainstream
churchmen at the time of its publication.
From one controversy to another.
What kind of pet did Charles Cruft have?
Oh, come on! I mean... A cat.
Yes!
Very good.
He did indeed.
He was the scion of a thriving jewellery business in the 19th century and he was a fine salesmen,
and he went into business with a man called Spratt who made dog cakes. Dog cakes!
Well, like a biscuit really.
Oh. A dog biscuit is fine, but a dog cake is mad?!
I thought you meant a cake made out of dog. That would be mad.
Dog biscuit sounds like it's for dogs and dog cake sounds like it's got a lovely layer of dog in the middle.
I went fish cake - dog cake. I see. Now that does make sense, sorry.
But he sort of founded the business
of the large dog show, Charles Cruft.
It got bigger and was hugely successful until he died in 1938 and the Kennel Club took over.
All kinds of problems seemed to come from inbreeding and the sponsors withdrew, the dog food sponsor
Pedigree withdrew, the BBC withdrew, RSPCA and a dog charity all withdrew.
So this year Crufts was broadcast live on the internet for the first time.
Cat shows are much more interesting because cats are shown, obviously,
in a similar kind of way, but in that kind of cat independent way,
where they don't seem to be aware of it.
What you do is you lift up the cat and essentially... Fluff it.
No, you make it do Superman.
All cats in the show just have that cat look of...
Two legs at the back, or whatever.
They just look...disinterested.
The other side of Crufts not being on the television is that
it's a real relief that Crufts isn't on the television, isn't it?
I think if I was to define a terrible idea for a programme,
it would be pretty much Crufts.
Or men playing golf.
Don't you like golf? No, I don't understand why golf's on television.
I love watching golf. I'm absolutely passionate about it.
But what are you watching? The golf.
LAUGHTER
He hits it and then the camera just goes sky, sky, sky, sky, sky,
it's over there somewhere. That's not good television, is it?
APPLAUSE
The founder of Crufts, Charles Cruft, did have a cat, but he didn't care for dogs.
Finally, how many brains did the man with two brains have?
Two. Yes.
LAUGHTER
That's brilliant!
APPLAUSE
It's so cruel!
He's wise enough to spot a double bluff.
This is a technique of the bully.
You hit us and then you go, "What, did you think I was going to hit you?
"I wasn't going to hit you. I've just lifted my hand to stroke you."
HE WHIMPERS
You're so right, that's exactly what we do.
The fact is that Dr Michael Gerschwin has proved that we all have two brains.
Your gut has an enteric nervous system and it's the only part of the body that can operate
perfectly if all connections are cut from the upper brain, from the real brain, the thing we call the brain.
It doesn't have the intelligence and consciousness of the brain, but it operates separately.
In that sense we do have two brains.
How bright would our stomachs be in the animal kingdom?
Would they be cleverer than an octopus?
I doubt it, I think they're just good at one thing and that's preparing poo for exit.
Basically, it's not even the stomach, it's the gut.
It's the greater and lesser intestine, the colon.
Like all of us, The Man With Two Brains actually did have two brains, according to the latest thinking.
The gut does act as a separate brain, so pens down, stop writing.
That's it for our exam today, geniuses. Time to mark your papers.
Well, my goodness, my gracious,
the newcomer with minus 19, Graham Norton.
APPLAUSE
In third place, with minus eight, David Mitchell.
APPLAUSE
In second place with a very respectable minus seven, Dara O'Briain.
APPLAUSE
Which can only mean, with today's geniuses of geniuses of genius
is Alan Davies with four points!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So that's all from QI. My thanks go to Graham, Dara, David and Alan.
I leave you with our genius Leonardo da Vinci's favourite joke.
It was asked of a painter, why, since he made such beautiful figures,
which were of dead things, why his children were so ugly, to which the painter replied
that he made his pictures by day, but his children by night.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk