Brief Candle in the Dark
Page 47
1Peter Medawar, ‘Two conceptions of science’ (1965), reprinted in Pluto’s Republic.
1Even arrogantly, as when he tried to show that the famous fossil bird, Archaeopteryx, was a fake, arguing that no physicist would accept such poor evidence as biologists do. He was a genuinely distinguished physicist, whose elucidation of how the chemical elements are forged in the interiors of stars should have won him a Nobel Prize – indeed, did win a Nobel Prize for a colleague involved in the same enterprise.
1After this chapter was written, I was contacted by Alan Canon, a virtuoso programmer from Kentucky, who volunteered to resuscitate the Arthromorphs program, and the other programs of my ‘Watchmaker Suite’, so that they will run on modern computers. You can download the latest version of Watchmaker Suite from https://sourceforge.net/projects/watchmakersuite.
1As it happens, my colleague and former pupil Mark Ridley, whose views on evolution are closely similar to mine, has published a book called The Cooperative Gene. That, at least, is the title of the American edition. The original British edition is called Mendel’s Demon.
1Don’t by the way, be confused by the fact that the word ‘epigenetics’ has recently been hijacked as a label for a fashionable and over-hyped idea that changes in gene expression (which of course happen all the time during the course of normal embryonic development, otherwise all the cells of the body would be the same) can be passed on to future generations. Such transgenerational effects may occasionally happen and it’s a quite interesting, if rather rare, phenomenon. But it’s a shame that, in the popular press, the word ‘epigenetics’ is becoming misused as though cross-generational transmission was a part of the very definition of epigenetics, rather than a rare and interesting anomaly.
1This was probably a misprint for ‘stable’, introduced by the human equivalent of today’s hilarious ‘autocorrecting’ software. If so, it happens to be a felicitous one, for either of the two words is appropriate. A rare example, perhaps, of an advantageous memetic mutation.
1I encountered Julian Huxley only once, when he was old and I was young. The Department of Zoology at Oxford had commissioned a joint portrait of its three elder statesmen, Alister Hardy, John Baker and E. B. Ford. Sir Julian was invited to unveil it. As he read out each page of his speech, he put it to the bottom of the pile in his hand. After he read the last sheet and put it to the bottom, he simply started again, reading the top sheet. To the delight of the mischievous students present, he read right through the whole speech twice and was about to embark on a third reading when his wife bustled forward, seized him by the arm and hustled him off the stage.
1Lecture 5, 20 minutes in: http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures/1991/richard-dawkins#/christmas-lectures-1991-richard-dawkins--the-genesis-of-purpose.
1Lecture 5, 18 minutes in: http://richannel.org/christmas-lectures/1991/richard-dawkins#/christmas-lectures-1991-richard-dawkins--the-genesis-of-purpose.
1https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR_z85O0P2M
1‘Whataboutery’ is a new abstract noun now in the process of entering our language (it has a Wikipedia entry, but has yet to make it into the Oxford English Dictionary). It is most often used to downplay a negative point by diverting attention to something else.
1Ishmael in the Islamic version of the myth.
1This is an extract from ‘The Great Bus Mystery’ in Ariane Sherine, ed., The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (London, HarperCollins, 2009).