This ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.*2
That was Soul-2, the kind of soulfulness that science courts and loves, and from which it will never be parted. The rest of this article refers only to Soul-1. Soul-1 is rooted in the dualistic theory that there is something non-material about life, some non-physical vital principle. It’s the theory according to which a body has to be animated by an anima, vitalized by a vital force, energized by some mysterious energy, spiritualized by a spirit, made conscious by a mystical thing or substance called consciousness. It is no accident that all those characterizations of Soul-1 are circular. Julian Huxley memorably satirized Henri Bergson’s élan vital by suggesting that a railway engine works by élan locomotif (incidentally, it is a lamentable fact that Bergson is still the only scientist ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature). Science has already battered and wasted Soul-1. Within fifty years it will extinguish it altogether.
Fifty years back, we were only beginning to come to terms with Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper in Nature, and few had tumbled to its poleaxing significance. Theirs was seen as no more than a clever feat of molecular crystallography, while their last sentence (‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material’) was just amusingly laconic understatement. With hindsight we can see that to call it understatement was itself the mother of understatements.
Before Watson/Crick (one contemporary scientist said to Crick, when Crick introduced him to Watson, ‘Watson? But I thought your name was Watson-Crick’) it was still possible for a leading historian of science, Charles Singer, to write:
Despite interpretations to the contrary, the theory of the gene is not a ‘mechanist’ theory. The gene is no more comprehensible as a chemical or physical entity than is the cell or, for that matter, the organism itself…If I ask for a living chromosome, that is, for the only effective kind of chromosome, no one can give it to me except in its living surroundings any more than he can give me a living arm or leg. The doctrine of the relativity of functions is as true for the gene as it is for any of the organs of the body. They exist and function only in relation to other organs. Thus the last of the biological theories leaves us where the first started, in the presence of a power called life or psyche which is not only of its own kind but unique in each and all of its exhibitions.
Watson and Crick drove a coach and horses through all that: blew it ignominiously out of the water. Biology is becoming a branch of informatics. The Watson/Crick gene is a one-dimensional string of linear data, differing from a computer file only in the trivial respect that its universal code is quaternary not binary. Genes are isolatable strings of digital data, they can be read out of living or dead bodies, they can be written on paper and stored in a library, ready to be used again at any time. It is already possible, though expensive, to write your entire genome in a book, and mine in a similar book. Fifty years hence, genomics will be so cheap that the library (electronic library, of course) will house the complete genomes of as many individuals of as many thousands of species as we want. This will give us the final, definitive family tree of all life. Judicious comparison, in the library, of the genomes of any pair of modern species will allow us a fair shot at reconstructing their extinct common ancestor, especially if we also throw into the computational mix the genomes of its modern ecological counterparts. Embryological science will be so advanced that we’ll be able to clone a living, breathing representative of that ancestor. Or of Lucy the Australopithecine, perhaps? Maybe even a dinosaur. And by 2057 it will be child’s play to take down from its shelf the book that bears your name, type your genome back into a DNA synthesizer, insert it into an enucleated egg, and clone you – your identical twin but fifty years younger. Will it be a resurrection of your conscious being, a reincarnation of your subjectivity? No. We already know the answer is no, because monozygotic twins don’t share a single subjective identity. They may have uncannily similar intuitions, but they do not think they are each other.
Just as Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century destroyed the mystical ‘design’ argument, and just as Watson and Crick in the mid-twentieth century destroyed all mystical nonsense about genes, their successors of the mid-twenty-first century will destroy the mystical absurdity of souls being detached from bodies. It won’t be easy. Subjective consciousness is undeniably mysterious. In How the Mind Works Steven Pinker elegantly sets out the problem of consciousness, and asks where it comes from and what’s the explanation. Then he’s frank enough to say, ‘Beats the heck out of me.’ That’s honest, and I echo it. We don’t know. We don’t understand it. Yet. But I believe we will, some time before 2057. And if we do, it certainly won’t be mystics or theologians who solve this greatest of all riddles but scientists – maybe a lone genius like Darwin, but more probably a combination of neuroscientists, computer scientists and science-savvy philosophers. Soul-1 will die a belated and unlamented death at the hand of science, which will in the process launch Soul-2 to undreamed-of heights.
* * *
*1 Crystal-ball gazing is a notoriously error-prone indulgence but, for what it’s worth, this was my contribution to Mike Wallace’s 2008 edited book The Way We Will Be Fifty Years from Today.
*2 Quoted in Martin Rees, Before the Beginning, p. 103. I used the same quotation in the first essay in this collection – but it bears repetition.
IV
MIND CONTROL, MISCHIEF AND MUDDLE
FOR ANY READERS STILL wondering why Richard Dawkins ‘makes such a fuss’ about religion, the title of this section hints at some of the reasons; the seven pieces that follow offer a more definitive answer from the apocalyptic horseman’s mouth.
The first, ‘The “Alabama Insert” ’, is a great set-piece demolition of creationism and reassertion of evolution by natural selection, and of the indispensable importance of scientific method. Originally delivered as a spur-of-the-moment defence of beleaguered educators faced with an attempt by the governing authorities to inhibit the teaching of genuine science, it should give pause to anyone who doubts the political force of creationism in present-day America.
From cool forensic analysis to the distillation of fury. The next piece, ‘The guided missiles of 9/11’, begins with deceptive calm, proceeding through passages of apparently technical description, then rises through a rapid crescendo of increasingly bitter irony to the punchline: the lethal force of irrational belief in a personal afterlife. Darts come no more pointed than this.
‘The theology of the tsunami’ shifts tone again, this time from anger to exasperation. In December 2004 a huge tsunami, generated by a powerful earthquake under the Indian Ocean, destroyed thousands of lives and livelihoods in South-East Asia. This account of the incomprehension of many religious people in the face of such undeserved suffering, the responses offered by religious leaders, and an ensuing exchange of correspondence on the Guardian letters page encapsulates several key elements of Richard’s objection to religion, not least its misdirection of money, time, emotion and effort. Pointing out that an agonized ‘Why?’ was simply the wrong question (or rather, that it had a perfectly good answer in the geological rather than the theological realm), and that a more constructive response would be to ‘get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering’, predictably won few plaudits among those unaccustomed to so bracing a challenge.
Lectures and letters loomed large among the candidate pieces for this collection: no accident, I think, for both offer immediacy of communication, whether to one person or to many simultaneously. The published open letter to an individual, of course, economically does both. ‘Merry Christmas, Prime Minister!’ t
akes the form of a seasonal greeting to David Cameron, at the time head of Britain’s governing coalition. Making the case for a genuinely secular state in which, while individuals are free to adopt their own faiths, government remains scrupulously neutral, it robustly defends attachment to cultural myths, deriding the ‘rebranding’ of Christmas as a ‘Winter Holiday’, while pointing out the enduringly divisive effects of faith-based education and the inappropriateness – indeed, wickedness – of ‘faith-labelling’ of children. If we teach about religion rather than teaching a religion; if we understand our attachment to myth as what it is; if we are honest about where we get our ethics from and where we don’t; then we’ll all have happier Christmases.
Richard Dawkins is sometimes criticized for not taking religion seriously enough, for resorting too readily to dismissal rather than entering into genuine engagement. Leaving aside the evident seriousness of his excoriating attacks on the physical, psychological and educational harm wrought by religion, it is for its eagerness to interrogate the phenomenon of religion soberly, extensively and reflectively that I wanted to include here a substantial part of his 2005 lecture on ‘The science of religion’. Readers of The God Delusion in particular will recognize some of the themes, argument and illustrations presented, but I make no apology for these echoes; they fully merit recapitulation as a demonstration par excellence of the scientific lens applied to the cultural phenomenon. Here we see a patient, careful teasing out of the ‘why’ of faith and practice, showing the power of Darwinian natural selection as an explanatory tool, even – perhaps especially; certainly fittingly – when applied to belief systems that deny its efficacy. And one sentence sings out to me from this piece to epitomize the scientific method as practised by Dawkins, the demanding rigour of his approach to investigation: ‘I am much more wedded to the general idea that the question should be properly put than I am to any particular answer.’
From a carefully refined question to a brisk and definitive answer: the next piece (also originally a lecture) disposes of the contention that ‘belief’ in science is itself a form of religion by reasserting the foundations of evidence, honesty and verifiability on which scientific investigation is based. It then moves on to more positive ground with a powerful reassertion of the virtues of science, explaining what science has to offer the human spirit in its hunger for explanation, its capabilities for astonishing feats of investigation, discovery, imagination and expression. Indeed, it suggests, let’s teach science to children in their religious education classes – offer them not parochial superstition but the genuinely humbling visions of reality’s own magic.
The section ends with a similarly positive and imaginative proposal in ‘Atheists for Jesus’: that we find a way to take what is good in religion out of religion and integrate it into the compassionate ethics of a secular society. Why should we not use our evolved big brains, our tendency to learn from and copy admired role models, in attempting a ‘positive perversion’ of Darwinian adaptation to spread ‘superniceness’? Could there be an ‘unselfishness meme’?
G.S.
The ‘Alabama Insert’
PROLOGUE
Creationists believe that the biblical account of the creation of the universe is literally true; that God brought into existence the Earth and all its life forms in just six days. According to creationists, this event took place less than ten thousand years ago (they base their calculation of the age of the universe on the number of generations listed in the Bible – all those ‘begats’ strung together).
Creationists have succeeded in persuading large swathes of the general public that their theory is at least as scientifically respectable as the Big Bang/evolution alternative. Recent Gallup polls indicate that about 45 per cent of US citizens currently believe that God created human beings ‘pretty much in (their) present form at one time or another within the last 10,000 years’.
In November 1995, the Alabama State Board of Education ordered that a one-page insert, labelled ‘A Message from the Alabama State Board of Education’, be stuck in all biology textbooks used in the state public schools. This flysheet formed the basis for a document used in the same way a little later in the state of Oklahoma. The ‘Alabama Insert’ is not exactly sophisticated, but it contains ritual gesturing in the direction of the educated reader. Above all, it says nothing about the religion that undoubtedly underlies it, and it pretends to the virtues of reasonable, scientific scepticism.
When I was invited to speak in Alabama around that time, a copy of the document was thrust into my hand before my lecture. I had also been made aware of the State Governor’s recent performance on television. He had impersonated a shambling ape in an undignified attempt to ridicule the idea of evolution. I had the feeling that the biologists and honest educators of the State of Alabama felt embarrassed, threatened by their own state government, and in need of support. When I asked what they had to lose – why they didn’t just teach evolution anyway – some admitted that they were literally fearful for their jobs, not just because of State interference but because of irate gangs of parents. On an impulse I threw aside my prepared script and devoted my lecture to dissecting the ‘Alabama Insert’ line by line, putting its successive clauses up on an overhead projector, there being no time to prepare slides. It is in a spirit of support for the beleaguered educators of Alabama, Oklahoma and other states and jurisdictions that I reproduce here an edited transcript of my remarks. Lines from the ‘Alabama Insert’ are printed in bold, followed by my responses.
This textbook discusses evolution, a controversial theory some scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans.
This is misleading and disingenuous. ‘Some’ scientists, and ‘controversial’ theory, suggest the existence of a substantial number of respectable scientists who do not accept the fact of evolution. In reality the proportion of qualified scientists who do not accept evolution is minuscule. A few are paraded as possessing PhDs, but their PhDs are seldom from decent universities or in relevant subjects. Electrical and marine engineering are, no doubt, perfectly respectable disciplines, but their practitioners are no more qualified to pronounce on my subject than I am qualified to speak on theirs.
It is true that qualified biologists do not speak with one voice about every detail of evolution. Arguments will be heard in any flourishing branch of science. Not all biologists agree about the relative importance of Darwinian natural selection in guiding evolution, as compared with other possible forces such as genetic drift or higher-level quasi-Darwinian forces such as ‘species selection’. But every reputable biologist, without exception, would accept the following proposition. All animals, plants, fungi and bacteria living today are descended from a single common ancestor who lived more than three billion years ago.*1 We are all cousins. This is not ‘controversial’ and it is not only ‘some’ scientists who believe it, except in the most narrowly pedantic meaning of the words. It is as near being a demonstrated fact as the theory that the alternation between night and day is caused by the rotation of the Earth. This leads into the next statement.
No one was present when life first appeared on Earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.
The words ‘theory’ and ‘fact’ are here being used in a calculatedly misleading manner. Philosophers of science use the word ‘theory’ for pieces of knowledge that anybody else would call a fact, as well as for ideas that are little more than a hunch. It is a theory that ‘mad cow disease’ can be caught by humans as Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease, a theory that might possibly be wrong; people are busy searching for further evidence, one way or the other. Various historical theories have been proposed as to the instigator of the Piltdown Man hoax, and we may never know the answer for certain. This is the common meaning of theory. But it is also technically a theory that the Earth is round, not flat. Just a theory that is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence.
&nbs
p; The fact that nobody was present to witness the origins of life on Earth, or to witness the subsequent pageant of evolution, does not, in itself, bear decisively upon whether it should be considered fact. A murder may be unwitnessed, yet the circumstantial evidence of clues left behind, including fingerprints, footprints and DNA samples, can settle the culprit beyond all reasonable doubt. In science, lots of undoubted facts have never been witnessed directly, but they are more certain than many alleged direct observations. Nobody has lived long enough to see the continents move, but the theory of plate tectonics is overwhelmingly established, supported by a mass of evidence so large as to be beyond even unreasonable doubt. On the other hand, hundreds of eye-witnesses claim to have observed the sun miraculously changing direction at Fatima, at the behest of the Virgin Mary. Such eye-witness evidence cannot demonstrate that the sun really reversed itself, if only because the sun can be seen from much of the world at any one time and no eye-witness outside Fatima reported the event.*2
According to the school of philosophy that is being implicitly invoked here, no ‘fact’ is ever more than a theory that has failed to be falsified after a massive battering of opportunities to falsify. If it makes you happy, I concede that evolution is only a theory, but it is a theory that is about as likely to be falsified as the theory that the Earth orbits the sun or the theory that Australia exists.
The word ‘evolution’ may refer to many types of change. Evolution describes changes that occur within a species (white moths, for example, may ‘evolve’ into gray moths). This process is micro-evolution, which can be observed and described as fact. Evolution may also refer to the change of one living thing to another, such as reptiles into birds. This process, called macro-evolution, has never been observed and should be considered a theory.
Science in the Soul Page 23
