Faith, hope and the Darwin man=20
Richard Dawkins argues in his new book
that all living things owe their design
not to God but to evolution. He explains
why to Quentin Letts=20
Taking his DNA into his own hands, the Darwinist proselytiser Richard
Dawkins this week left his nest at New College, Oxford, and flew to the
United States for a two-week lecture tour. The science author's itinerary
includes California, Illinois and Georgia. More awkward, he will also be
speaking in Tennessee, site of the 1925 "Monkey Trial" of a biology
teacher called John Scopes who was charged with illegally teaching the
theory of evolution to his pupils.=20
Seventy-one years on, Tennessee is again split by the issue. Dawkins, 55,
is heading there just as a state senator, David Fowler of Chattanooga, is
agitating for a Bill to allow schools to fire teachers who present Darwinism
as fact. They do so at the expense of the creationist belief that God made
Earth in one bound. Dawkins, the soft-spoken, unconventionally
handsome Oxford don, is dealing with an issue that goes to the jugular of
American Christian conservatism.=20
staying with friends before starting his tour, a jet-lagged Dawkins
pondered the opposition his ideas may generate. It would not be the first
time. His best-known books, The Selfish Gene and The Blind
Watchmaker, have wounded Christians and drawn accusations from
opponents that he is a "complete creep" and a "fundamentalist" against
religion. Some of this can be put down to academic envy of the success of
his books and his media profile, but anyone who puts a suction pump to
the spiritual well of society, especially a society in desperate need of
morality, must come in for scrutiny.=20
Dawkins's new book is called Climbing Mount Improbable, a poetic
cadence somehow suggestive of Lake Wobegone, Garrison Keiller's
distant hill country where the men are strong and the women steadfast.
Dawkins chose the title from a line in his 1991 Royal Institution Christmas
Lecture for Children, when the metaphor was illustrated by a
plaster-of-Paris model. On one side of the plaster mountain was a steep
precipice, on the other an undulating slope, while on the peak sat a replica
of a complete organism.=20
"The steep side was meant to reflect the creationist point of view. The
gentle slope was evolution," explained Dawkins. "You can get up a
mountain, no matter how high, provided you take the gentle slope. It is
impossible the other way =AD even though that is what the creationists would
have us believe."=20
The new book is a further exposition of his Darwinist ideas, written again
in a cool, clear prose understandable even to scientific nincom poops.
There is work on the evolution of the eye, an organ considered by
scientists to be the temple of biological achievement but which has long
been a favourite of creationists. Until now they have used it in their "now
try explaining your way out of that one" arguments. Elsewhere in his
research Dawkins and a computer scientist collaborated to make a
computer gradually create a spider's web and snail shells. There is also a
chapter on "kaleidoscopic embryos", examining genetic symmetry.=20
It is an odd thing to meet a man who truly has no belief in God, no hope
of an afterlife or of divine remission for good behaviour. Yet Dawkins is
polite, and happy to accept that it makes social sense for man to live
within rules and behave in a civil fashion.=20
"One of the messages of The Selfish Gene was that we should learn
about Darwinism because it is so horrible," he says. He does not go to
church, nor does he pray, yet he retains an appreciation for beauty and is
awed, in a very human way, when he tries to ponder infinity, the bounds
of the universe. "It is one of the respects in which science is good for the
soul." Soul? He corrected himself quickly. "I use soul in a poetic way, in
the sense of awe and mystery, the sort of thing that causes a tingling in=
the
spine. But I do not believe there is anything apart from the brain."=20
Some of the past controversy has occurred because this shy scientist
delivers his beliefs with cold clarity. When Dawkins states his disbelief in
the miracle of divine creation he does not preface his remarks with a
"look, I'm awfully sorry if this upsets you". His background as an Oxford
don has instilled in him a reliance on verbal concision and intellectual
tension. To those of us in the cheap seats it may seem brutal, but to
Dawkins it is simply the way things are done; nothing personal, even if it
threatens a world in which we can only apply to God to make sense of
Dunblane, a world sometimes so harsh that many of us need faith to
continue.=20
In his youth Dawkins had religious feelings ("of course"), but in his early
teens, as he busied himself in the science labs at Oundle, he started to
exercise a curiosity in the philosophical side of biology. By his second
year at Balliol this had started to evolve, if that is the term, into his=
belief
that all creatures descend from a single ancestor which existed three and a
half billion years ago.=20
It is the sort of creed that can land you in court in Tennessee. "In biology
we are now back to the first self-replicating molecule," he says. "We
understand in principle what happened, although the physicists are still
wrestling over how we got a universe at all. We are just that tiny fraction
of a second away from the first moment." Perhaps that fraction of a
second was when the Almighty made His move, I suggest, mentally
holding aloft a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern. "I don't find it a
convincing line of thought," he says calmly. "It raises more questions than
answers. The whole point of Mount Improbable is that you cannot have a
spontaneous creation of complex organisms."=20
The night before we met, comet Hyakutake had passed overhead, the
brightest to zoom past Earth in 20 years. Dawkins watched it from a New
Jersey field, and the following day was still excited by the experience.
Comets are the very stuff of his world, visible proof of an extraterrestrial
power that can be plotted and predicted, but which remains without our
grasp. In Climbing Mount Improbable Dawkins describes how, when
Halley's comet last passed in the Eighties, he took his two-year-old
daughter Juliet out in the midnight dark to point her face at the comet's
dim glow.=20
Into the bundle's baby-soft ear, still warm from the cot, the doting father
whispered, on a "quixotic whim", what it was that Juliet saw: a comet that
would next sweep past in the middle of the 21st century, when he would
be long dead but when she might still be alive, an old woman, to view it a
second time and thus continue the Dawkins line. In that one moment, for
all his clinical analysis, an avowed heathen showed that at heart he is=
really
a big old softie.=20
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Brian Harper | =20
Associate Professor | "It is not certain that all is uncertain,
Applied Mechanics | to the glory of skepticism" -- Pascal
Ohio State University |
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