In my article of 8 February 2010 entitled Mystery as philosophy[display], I deplored the announcement of a book (which I'm not at all keen to read) entitled What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in which they apparently contend that Darwin's idea of natural selection is illogical and unsupported by empirical evidence.
Like countless Darwinists, I was shocked that distinguished academics would dare to write such stuff today. I was aware, though, that their arguments were technically complex, and would require some serious unraveling. Fodor (professor of philosophy at Rutgers) and Piattelli-Palmarini (professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona) are far removed from the arena of crackpot creationists. One had the impression that they were thoughtless renegades rather than declared enemies. In any case, it was clear that it would take a talented heavyweight scholar to bring these deserters to their senses.
Fortunately, Jerry Coyne (professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago) has set himself the task of cleaning up the mess. Click the banner to read his excellent article in The Nation entitled The Improbability Pump. Before his rebuttal of the groundless ideas put forward by the philosopher and the cognitive scientist, there's a bonus: a beautiful review of The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Please allow me to quote Coyne quoting Dawkins quoting the DNA of a tiger:
Dawkins describes selection as an "improbability pump," for over time the competition among genes can yield amazingly complex and extraordinary species. Here's how he describes the evolution of tigers:
A tiger's DNA is also a "duplicate me"program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger's DNA says: "Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first."
Only Dawkins could describe a tiger as just one way DNA has devised to make more of itself. And that is why he is famous: absolute scientific accuracy expressed with the wonder of a child—a very smart child.
Tiger building! What a splendidly imaginative way to produce new stocks of a chemical product known as deoxyribonucleic acid...
I found this funny story in the excellent Pharyngula blog by PZ Myers[access].
The history of Catholicism is filled with magic happenings. In the case of St Francis of Assisi (the fellow who preached to birds), we encounter the phenomenon of a talking cross, shown here:
In the church of San Damiano, the image of Jesus on the cross said to Francis: "Repair my church. As you see, it is falling into a state of total ruin." Francis immediately set about repairing the actual building, but he soon realized that the words of the cross of San Damiano were to be interpreted as a metaphorical order, meaning that it was rather the ecclesiastical institution and its members that were in need of repair. So Francis finally started work on that much bigger task.
Over the centuries, the San Damiano Cross has inspired countless reproductions. The latest copy, some three meters in height, has been hung above the altar of a church in Oklahoma. And the least that can be said is that it's well hung.
This copy was executed by a local artist named Janet Jaime. She has highlighted the abdominal muscles of Jesus to such an extent that a naive observer might imagine that the King of Glory is exhibiting a king-sized erection. Needless to say, this copy has given rise to controversy among Catholic parishioners in the Oklahoma town of Warr Acres, where the church is located. The artist, though, gives the impression that she doesn't understand what the fuss is all about.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the illicit sexual behavior of certain Catholic prelates and priests. The last thing the Church needed was yet another much-publicized sex-oriented incident, particularly when it takes the form of a giant phallus emerging from the crucified body of the Lord. One can't help wondering whether this Oklahoma painting is in fact yet another element of an international conspiracy, orchestrated by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, aimed at screwing Joseph Ratzinger. And, talking about screwing, that awesome Oklahoma apparatus elicits an exclamation of admiration. In a word, as Mary Magdalene might have gasped: Jesus!
The world has learned that the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] was revved up to cruising speed yesterday.
My home in France is not far away from the Franco-Swiss border where the subterranean device of the European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN] is located. If ever the physicists happened to start creating tiny black holes, it's not unthinkable that some of them might stream through the ground and finally burst out into the air through the limestone cliffs of Choranche. And, if they emerged here, these black holes would surely start to gobble up various elements of the landscape, with greater or lesser effects, depending on the volume of the disappearances. If a black hole from the suburbs of Geneva were to hit one of my donkeys, say, then it's likely that the disturbance would only be noticed by me, the remaining donkey and, of course, my dog Sophia... who would no doubt smell the nasty odor of an approaching black hole, and start barking. On the other hand, if a black hole were to take out the entire Cournouze mountain, then this modification of the landscape would surely be noticed by many observers (including me, the inhabitants of Choranche and Châtelus, and countless skiers from the Drôme, driving past on their way up to Villard-de-Lans.
There's a down-to-earth question that puzzles me constantly. What would it feel like if you stepped inadvertently, while out walking, on a microscopic black hole that had just fallen onto the ground after being catapulted here from the CERN? Would you suddenly see your foot disappear mysteriously into thin air? Would you have time to jump aside before losing an entire leg? Would this kind of amputation be painful? I imagine naively that this would be a particularly "clean" kind of surgery, since any excess blood or dangling flesh would no doubt disappear into the hole, leaving the patient/victim with a nice smooth germ-free wound, which would no doubt be heal rapidly.
Enough silly joking about black holes. Let me be serious. The BBC website has produced a few excellent pages that explain the basic principles of the LHC. The stuff concerning the computing aspect of this affair, based upon a gigantic system called the Grid, is amazing. Everything about the LHC is fabulous, and I'm tremendously proud that Europe can get involved in this kind of research.
Recently, I was just as enthusiastic about this whole field of scientific investigation as I am today about genetics. In particular, I've admired the two books of Brian Greene about strings.
It's fascinating to try to compare research work and challenges in two different domains such as genetics and physics ("compare" is an inadequate word). The fields in which Richard Dawkins writes so brilliantly are in fact relatively down-to-earth, almost commonsensical, compared with the LHC universe. Even though there are still countless fuckwits who do their silly best to declare that Dawkins is wrong about almost everything, the truth of the matter is that he's operating in a scientific domain whose concepts and laws are fairly well specified by now. That explains why Dawkins can now amuse himself (as I'm sure he does) by fighting verbal battles with adepts of religion, creationism and quackery in general. I'm not suggesting that he doesn't have any more serious scientific work to do. No, I'm trying to say that, since he's standing on such firm ground, he can afford to take time off from scientific challenges in order to tackle the social and human tasks that consist of educating his fellow human beings.
In the world of physics, on the other hand, the great researchers are not yet in a comfortable position enabling them to get involved in comprehensible discussions with the general public. When geneticists set out to unravel the human genome, they had a clear idea of what they were looking for, and what they would eventually find. But there is no such clarity in the case of the LHC. There's even a distinguished Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Comay who's convinced that the CERN researchers won't find anything at all by means of the LHC: neither the Higgs Boson nor strings. And why not? Simply because such entities, according to Comay, cannot possibly exist! Any dumb nincompoop can enunciate his fuzzy personal reasons for dating the start of the universe, or the age of dinosaurs, or for demonstrating the existence or nonexistence of God. But it's a different kettle of fish when you decide to talk about the Higgs Boson and strings. Even Pope Benedict XVI wouldn't normally be expected to state his profound opinion on such matters. We know beforehand that, no matter what the people at CERN find out about the universe through the LHC, the facts and their conclusions will remain totally incomprehensible for the vast majority of observers.
In fact, that's what's nice about scientific domains that are based upon extraordinary concepts and advanced mathematics. These obstacles filter out the fuckwits. Inversely, the problem at the level of Darwin, Dawkins and DNA (just to name these three pillars) is that everything's so beautifully simple, immediately obvious and totally proven... except to loud-mouthed peanut-brained fuckwits.
In The Washington Post, this is splendid "strident" Dawkins (he hates that adjective), at his anti-papistical best. I love the final paragraph:
No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.
Dawkins is an outspoken Englishman of the finest kind. A nice but weird association has sprung into his mind. When Dawkins is confronted by nasty foes (such as Ratzinger, the "leering old villain in a frock"), he speaks in the intense poetic style of Winston Churchill during the Blitz.
Tom Chivers, the editor of "strategic events" at the Telegraph, has penned an excellent short piece about Richard Dawkins, and the present ire of the great scientist concerning the hosting of this year's Templeton Prize by the US National Academy of Sciences. The title of the perspicacious article by Chivers says it all: Richard Dawkins is more than a 'militant atheist': he's a magnificent writer who changed my life.
I agree with Chivers that it's a little sad to see a great scientist and writer such as Dawkins bogged down at times in the murky domain of religion, where much of his energy and brilliance is squandered in casting pearls before intellectually-mediocre swine (such as Creationists who claim that the world is only a few thousand years old).
To my mind, it's far from obvious that Telegraph readers are the sort of folk who might be capable of digesting Dawkins, and willing to do so. So, I say: "Bravo, Tom!"
Early in the 20th century, when the general public started to hear about statistical thermodynamics, science writers became interested in finding striking metaphors for impossible happenings. They were motivated in particular by the need to say just how unlikely it would be for a glass of water, on the kitchen table, to suddenly freeze... in spite of the theoretical possibility that this could happen.
In 1913, the French mathematician and politician Emile Borel proposed the metaphor of a million monkeys typing for a year and producing by chance a copy of all the books in the world's greatest libraries. Recently, wags have observed that you only have to examine the blog phenomenon to discover that humanity can't expect too much from millions of naked apes armed with keyboards.
In The Blind Watchmaker[pages 47-52], Richard Dawkins proposed a variation of the monkeys-and-typewriters metaphor in which the goal consists of producing a single line of Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. If you use an algorithm that examines periodically the monkeys' output and retains, as a new point of departure, only the line whose letters are closest to those of the target, then the goal is reached quite rapidly. But I always thought it a pity that Dawkins should introduce this twisted version of the metaphor, because it might cause adepts of so-called "intelligent design" to imagine—for a misguided instant—that Dawkins is suggesting that evolution operates with a target "in mind"... which, of course, is nonsense.
In The God Delusion[page 113], Dawkins introduced a new metaphor to illustrate quasi-impossibility: that of the Ultimate Boeing 747, borrowed from the English astronomer Fred Hoyle [1915-2001].
[Click the photo to see a Dawkins video that mentions the Boeing metaphor.]
The basic image is that of a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, which just happens to blow together various bits and pieces in such a way as to build a Boeing 747. People who believe erroneously that evolution is a theory of chance and random constructions consider that this metaphor illustrates the absurdity of imagining that a living animal could be the outcome of the random shuffling of its components. In fact, they're spot on. That would indeed be a stupid way of looking at Creation of any kind, with or without a capital C. Fortunately, Darwin's theory of evolution never calls upon processes of that absurd kind. On the other hand, Dawkins points out that something like the Ultimate Boeing 747 process would have been required—at some eternal instant in the Dreamtime (that precision comes from me, not Dawkins)—in order to create the kind of mysterious entity known as God.
[Click the photo to see the encounter.]
A week ago, in a funereal setting in Melbourne, Dawkins was interviewed by a local journalist named Robyn Williams... who seems to have a sound reputation in Australia. I make that last point because I was rather horrified by the stupid way in which this fellow tried to get the ball rolling. He had invented his own silly and fuzzy little metaphor for impossibility: something to do with the chance that all the people in the audience might find their correctly-numbered seats, by pure chance, if they were to sit down in a random fashion. A lesser man than Dawkins might have asked: "What the fuck does that have to do with Darwin's theory of evolution?" But Dawkins is, of course, an unruffled gentleman... and he put Robyn Williams back on course in a polite and even pedagogical manner. It was a truly beautiful example of the Dawkins style.
A year ago, I wrote my first blog article on Darwin Day[display].
This National Photographic photo must be dedicated grudgingly to the memory of our hero, because Darwin apparently thought that the fabulous marine iguana, symbol of the Galapagos Islands, was ugly. He also dared to straddle the back of a Galapagos tortoise.
That's not the first time we've heard of otherwise intelligent individuals behaving as silly sporting tourists. So, we should be prepared to pardon posthumously the young naturalist for his frivolous behavior. In any case, Galapagos is where the theory of evolution seems to have been conceived. I imagine these islands as a sacred place: our Jerusalem.
In Christian theology, certain great figures have been linked to animals.
The four Evangelists are associated with symbolic creatures: a lion for Mark, an ox for Luke, an eagle for John, etc. It's high time to update theology. I proclaim: Henceforth, our beloved Saint Charles D will be represented by an iguana, our living Saint Richard D by a tortoise.
I've just finished reading a fine book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, written some fifteen years ago by the US philosopher Daniel Dennett. Last year, I had encountered an extract of this work in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins.
A short article by Dennett, entitled Religious no longer a protected class, has just appeared in The Washington Post[display]. He sums up his theme as follows: "Activities that would be condemned by all if they were not cloaked in the protective mantle of religion are beginning to be subjected to proper scrutiny." Dennett points out the existence of a "double standard that exempts religious activities from almost all standards of accountability", and he insists that it be dismantled immediately. He compares the violence done in the name of religion to "crimes of avarice", and he looks forward to the day when clergy who are "telling pious lies to trusting children" and "making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer" might be convicted of fraud.
Dawkins has commented: "What an utterly splendid piece by Dan."
There's a nice and intelligent two-part interview of Richard Dawkins by Riz Khan on Al Jazeera English.
I found this splendid graphic on the Dawkins website:
A devil's advocate might point out that the message of the graphic works in both directions. Reading it from right to left, we might imagine an atheistic researcher in molecular biology who's suddenly transmogrified (I like that verb) by the pope's latest homily. He rips off his white lab coat and dashes crazily in the direction of the nearest store that sells Catholic supplies, so he can purchase a brand-new set of Rosary beads. Then he whips out his iPhone with the aim of finding the closest church. He arrives, panting, on the threshold of a lovely old stone edifice, where a priest rushes out magically to welcome him...
Like my blogger friend Badger[display], I still have the heart of a child. I love far-fetched fairy tales... particularly when it's me who invents them.
Throughout my younger years, the books of the English philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell [1872-1970] were no doubt my main non-fictional reading. Even today, my copy of Russell's big History of Western Philosophy (which I bought in Paris in 1962) is located permanently on a bookshelf just alongside my bed.
Whenever I stroll through London's Trafalgar Square, I recall this photo of the 87-year-old white-maned philosopher standing among the lions at the foot of Nelson's Column at a 1959 rally of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
This evening, it was a pleasure for me to discover this interview on the Dawkins website:
Naturally, I always imagined Russell first and foremost as a philosopher and a mathematician (whom I approached initially through his work in the domain of symbolic logic), and only then as an outspoken freethinker and a nuclear-disarmament campaigner. He impressed me greatly, of course, by describing himself explicitly as an atheist... at a time when this term was hardly fashionable. I tended to interpret this, however, as Russell's way of telling us that he simply didn't have the time or the inclination to be concerned about questions of divinity. That's to say, I imagined him rather as an agnostic, since I never really felt that Russell had provided us with convincing proofs that God did not exist... if indeed such proofs were thinkable.
Today, looking back upon my admiration of Russell, I see him retrospectively as a precursor of Richard Dawkins. Or, rather, I imagine Dawkins as an intellectual descendant of Russell. There is something similar in their elegant style, their power of inquiry and expression, and their profound humanism.
Theoretically, in the USA, the national legislative body has no power to deal with religion. That's to say, church and state are separated, as stipulated in a clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Nevertheless, the nation's official motto is "In God we trust".
Since 1978, an association of freethinkers named the Freedom From Religion Foundation, based in Wisconsin, has been striving to erode the grip of God's trustees. Among other things, they've got around to designing what look like stained-glass windows of a new kind. Here's their Dawkins model:
[Click the banner to display a humongous version]
The word "trust", with financial connotations, can be found in French dictionaries. The presence of this verb on US banknotes lends weight to the view that the power of the dollar is, in some mysterious way, divine. This money is backed by God, as it were. I used to feel the same way about the basic monetary unit of modern Israel, the shekel.
Here in Europe, we've got a lot of work to do before the euro shines divinely like a piece of silver warmed by the hand of God. The underlying problem, of course, is that the mythological pagan creature Europa was not exactly the kind of female who would be welcomed into the home of a normal God-fearing family. As for the idea of "In Zeus we trust", this just wouldn't sound convincing to a serious banker.
I'm intrigued by the power of Richard Dawkins as a writer, and I've often tried to determine the ingredients of his amazing artistry.
First, of course, this erudite Oxford professor has a profound mastery, not only of zoology (his basic field), but of neighboring sciences such as biology and paleontology. Besides, Dawkins is quite at ease in fields such as games theory and statistics, and he's even a competent computer programmer. The second obvious ingredient of Dawkins' success as a writer is his virtuosity in the domain of the English language, which he handles constantly with the sensitivity of a poet. His scientific and literary achievements are reflected in the fact that Dawkins, in Britain, is both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. When appropriate, he can fall deliberately into the casual vernacular of a journalist writing in a popular magazine, just as he can switch on instantly, if need be, the didactic language of a schoolmaster. He can throw a tender personal anecdote into the middle of pages of scientific explanations:
I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. "Two things," she said. "To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us." I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn't true.
Ever since 1976, through ten splendid books, Dawkins has been explaining that many commonly-held beliefs are simply not true. But above all, he has been telling us, more importantly, what is true, especially in the Darwinian domain of evolution.
The first Dawkins book I read was The Blind Watchmaker, which stunned me instantly. That was the first time I had ever heard of the possibility (today, I would say the certainty) that, on the early inanimate planet Earth, a crude mineral self-copying entity composed solely of clay or crystal had evolved into the fabulous DNA replicator that has since become the unique basis of all life on the planet.
Dawkins comes through as a great animal-lover. I'm not talking of the ordinary kind of person who gets carried away (like me) by dogs, donkeys, squirrels, hawks and so forth. No, the love expressed by Dawkins would be better described as awe when confronted with the inbuilt technology found in countless creatures. In the Blind Watchmaker book, he devoted an entire opening chapter to the amazing design of the navigational system of bats.
Several of these delightful creatures are lodged here at Gamone, where they offer me aeronautical shows in the twilight on late summer afternoons... like the fruit bats in my native Grafton.
In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins expresses his utter amazement concerning another creature of which there are ample specimens here at Gamone: the spider. Their web-building operations, as explained by Dawkins, are fantastic.
Towards the end of the same book, we are presented with an even more amazing story: that of the common fig.
Now, insofar as I'm particularly fond of figs (receiving fruit from Madeleine and Dédé, as well as from Bob's tree... while waiting for my own—given to me by Natacha and Alain—to become productive), I had imagined that I probably knew at least a thing or two about this fruit. Well, it turns out that, before reading Dawkins, I was totally and dismally ignorant on the subject of figs. First, what we imagine as the so-called "fruit" is not at all a true fruit. It's rather a strange garden of countless delicate fig flowers. What we see as the fig's skin might be thought of as the "earth" in which these flowers are growing. And the garden has curved, over evolutionary time, into a concave bulb that hides the flowers. Furthermore, inside this closed garden, the fig flowers live and procreate thanks to the complex services rendered by a community of devoted little male and female wasps, whose entire existence and survival are inextricably linked to the fig tree in question. In order to understand what happens in this mysterious garden, I started to draw a few diagrams like this one, which indicates the four principal actors: male and female fig flowers, female wasps and wingless male wasps.
The female wasps (made pregnant prior to their actual birth) stuff pollen from male flowers into their breasts and escape from the fig garden through holes in the "earth" burrowed by males. As soon as a female wasp locates another "garden" with female flowers waiting to be pollinated, she crawls in through the tiny hole at the extremity of the fig, maybe tearing off her wings in the process. Apparently we crunch such microscopic Agaondae wasps every time we bite into a fig, but they can do us no harm. Within the confines of this blog, I certainly don't intend to try to delve more deeply into the fabulous fig story. In any case, Dawkins has already told this story fully and splendidly. I recommend his book to everybody who's sensitive to all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.
Today, November 24, is the 150th anniversary of the publication of a celebrated book:
Its author was Charles Darwin [1809-1882].
On the web, you can obtain free an entire copy of the original edition [display]. Here is the final paragraph of that momentous work:
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
In the most recent book by Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, the entire final chapter is devoted to a line-by-line analysis of the above paragraph. The words of Darwin and, today, Dawkins present a vision of life in which the primordial ingredient is expressed ideally by that great French word: grandeur.
When Badger suggests, in a comment to my First fire article[display], that I might be curling up my toes in front of the fireplace instead of pursuing Antipodes, he has hit the proverbial nail on its head. I have indeed got into the pleasant habit, over the last week, of sitting in front of the fire of an evening and soaking in slowly—as if I were appreciating a fine wine—the powerful words of the Richard Dawkins book that I evoked recently in the article entitled Latest Dawkins book[display]. I found it hard to imagine a priori that Dawkins still had room to produce yet another book on his usual themes of Darwinism and genes, but all I can say is that the master has succeeded brilliantly, surprising me in ways that I would never have imagined.
Insofar as this book simply aims to supply readers with the actual evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution, Dawkins has written it in an almost colloquial style. Here's a humorous specimen: One Australian river turtle, indeed, gets the majority of its oxygen by breathing (as an Australian would not hesitate to say) through its arse.
There's a hell of a lot of good basic stuff about fossils and the way in which they're dated by radioactive "clocks". I don't know whether or not God exists, but the Devil surely does... otherwise I can think of no other reason to explain why Ardi waited up until the Dawkins book had just rolled off the press before making her coming-out. In a way, it's no sweat, because (a) it's easy to fit Ardi into the context presented by Dawkins; (b) it's nice for us lowly disciples to have an opportunity of feeling, if only for a short while, that we possess more information than the master; and (c) we'll be looking forward to a forthcoming book in which Dawkins will give us his reactions to Ardi.
To my mind, the best-written section of this book deals with embryology, and a quasi-magical phenomenon known as epigenesis, which concerns the processes enabling a single cell to "evolve" (nothing whatsoever to do with Darwinian evolution) into a living organism. We know that the single cell soon splits exponentially into countless essentially identical cells. But how do all these cells get their act together in such a way as to coalesce into a creature such as a dog or a human, or a rose bush? If we liken the end product (the creature or the plant) to a symphony performed buy an orchestra, and the cells to a vast set of musicians belonging to the orchestra, where's the conductor who makes sure that every performer is playing the required notes in a perfect manner? For that matter, where's the score? To approach such questions, Dawkins resorts to the fabulous metaphor of flocks of starlings in an aerial ballet:
The amazing conclusion is that each cell in the evolving organism, like each starling in the flock, is in fact doing its own thing. There is neither an explicit score, nor a unique conductor. This idea is hard to grasp. Computer programmers are accustomed to working in the domain of object-oriented programming, where you program a single relatively-simple object equipped with its own methods, whereupon you can instantiate that object as many times as you like, with differing parameters. This computer-based version of cloning provides a good paradigm of the starling phenomenon, or the process that enables ants to build vast and complex subterranean cities. And this is what biological epigenesis is all about.
Everybody knows that DNA can be likened to a string. But living tissues are highly-convoluted three-dimensional structures. So, in embryology, how do simple strings get folded into all the wonderful shapes of living creatures and plants? To tackle this question, Dawkins calls upon the metaphor of paper-folding, known as origami, of which there are many fascinating demonstrations on YouTube [clickhere for an origami rose].
The only negative element in this great new Dawkins book is his insertion of a four-page transcription of a TV interview between Dawkins and a female named Peggy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America. In the context of so much scientific poetry and wisdom, her presence is like a hair in the soup. Read the book, to see if you agree/disagree with me.
Fortunately, most of us are intellectually capable of changing our opinions over time... except, maybe, for politicians who look upon changed opinions as a sign of weakness. The other day, I laughed when I observed Christine's marvelous dog Gamone waiting until our dirty plates were stacked nicely in the dishwasher before she moved in to lick them... much like polite humans wait until everybody is seated and served before tackling their food. Christine pointed out that she was horrified the first time she saw me inviting my dog Sophia to lick clean our plates, as if the dog's saliva were poisonous, infectious. I used to think in that silly way, but nowadays I know that the only way of being infected is to get bitten by an animal with rabies. As for the rest, the dog's saliva contains no harmful bacteria that won't disappear in the dishwasher. Inversely, I'm constantly afraid that my dog might bite into a rodent that has just eaten poison. That's why I prefer to catch mice alive, in the following excellent trap, which I've been using for years:
Whenever I find a mouse snared in the wire-netting cage, I accord him a fighting chance of survival—in a kind of Dalai Lama spirit—by taking the trap and its contents down the road and opening the cage in the presence of Sophia. I look upon what ensues as a kind of physical-alertness exercise for my dog, a little like those books of elementary problems, based upon letters and numbers, that are a popular pastime for elderly folk who prefer this mental stimulus rather than, say, writing blogs. Sophia seems to use her olfactive capacities, rather than her eyesight, to locate the fleeing rodent in the grass. And she soon pounces upon the mouse, generally crushing it beneath her heavy paws... whereupon I take the dead mouse by the tail and hoist it to eternity in the creek bed.
Now what does this have to do with atheism in the modern world? Well, in the same way that Christine has ceased to be disgusted by canine saliva, I've ceased to be anguished by atheism. With the wisdom of my many years spent in France, including in particular the time I've been living alone here at Gamone as a kind of areligious hermit, I've become totally enthralled by atheism... or, rather, by its positive dimension: my profound love of life and scientific knowledge, culminating in a total fascination for all living entities such as dogs, roses and even bacteria (although I haven't got around to domesticating any of the latter, and keeping them as pets). Admittedly, observers might claim that I don't seem to have got up to an acceptable cruising speed as far as admiring and loving my fellow human beings is concerned. But give me time. For the moment, there are attenuating circumstances: I've been watching too many films about the world wars, Hitler, Stalin and company. One day, if I continue my Dalai Lama-like ascension, I'm sure I'll end up accepting humans to the same extent as all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small... such as mice, weeds and viruses. [Don't take me too seriously. Towards the end of that last sentence, I was just joking. But I must be careful. How shall I ever find myself a wife if I start to fall into the trap of using misanthropic language? OK, I heard somebody say that it's already too late. Be that as it may, I should nevertheless take care of my language.]
The truth of the matter is that I had the privilege of growing up in a unique cultural environment—that of Grafton, New South Wales, Australia—which was an excellent breeding ground for future atheists. You see, the municipality was composed, about fifty-fifty, of Catholics and Protestants. Better still, my mother was Catholic whereas my father was Anglican. So, you might say that I had it in my genes to cease believing in God. [No, that last sentence is not really sound genetic talk.] In any case, I was strongly inclined to believe, from an early age, that it was absurd to imagine the peaceful coexistence of a Catholic god and a Protestant god, and this surely meant that both parties were misguided.
As a kid, I must have ridden my bike past this impressive edifice many hundreds of times. It was Saint Patrick's in South Grafton, the official church of my own mother, Kathleen Walker. But neither she nor any other member of my maternal family ever invited me to set foot in that newly-constructed building. I grew up looking upon that church as forbidden territory. As the nun's told my aunt Nancy, my mother was a mortal sinner, since she had married a Protestant. So, I was the offspring of a woman who had sinned, and her iniquity had no doubt rubbed off onto me from the earliest instants of my procreation.
Insofar as I was comfortably accepted into the refined gentlemanly circles of the Anglicans in Grafton, my personal experiences were insipid compared with the delightful tales told by the Irish comedian Dave Allen:
Today, there's a splendid website that deals with both the wonders of atheistic evolution and the stupidity of conventional religions.
Since the publication of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins has become an anti-religious militant. I have the impression that his stance was motivated, less by the traditional conflicts in the British Isles between Catholicism and Protestantism, than by the upsurge of ultra-conservative Judaism and radical Islam. Then, the shock of 9/11 was another terrible indictment of fanatic religion culminating in hatred and horror. The following video is quite long, and some of the images are hard to watch. But they are a striking demonstration of the consequences of madness caused by the God delusion.
This year, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. And it so happens that the world has just been introduced to Ardi, our most ancient identified ancestor with most of her bones available for inspection. So, the time is perfect for another book by Richard Dawkins, presenting the evidence for evolution.
It's utterly amazing that countless Americans, today, still consider stupidly that evolution is a mere theory, in which they refuse to believe. That's to say, they ignore that evolution has become an established element of contemporary science.
I guess I could say that this is the first official certificate I've ever received from an American institution. And I didn't even have to do any hard work to obtain it. Now, this is terribly personal information, like the image of my skull in one of my early blog articles [display], which greatly disturbed my longtime friend Odile. But there's no personal copyright attached to my DNA certificate, and I wouldn't mind at all if this data were to get stolen by all kinds of hackers and scientists with secret plans to clone me.
The Texan folk who tested me have also supplied a nice little map showing how my ancestors moved away from the territory of our African patriarch known as Adam, and finally ended up here in France... where members of the family were called Cro-Magnon long before they got around to adopting a nicer surname, Skyvington. Without wishing to appear snobbish, I'm happy they made that name change, because Cro-Magnons were as common, back at that time, as today's Smiths and Duponts.
My folk are indicated by the arrow marked R1b, which means that they followed a long trail through central Asia before getting here. In fact, it's a mere 25 millennia since they moved away from the territory marked R, located in the vicinity of modern Kazakhstan, and set off westwards towards Europe.
For the moment, I haven't found any genetic cousins (individuals with exactly the same marker values) with a surname like mine, but I'm trying to persuade various Skivington and Skeffington men throughout the world to get tested. This genetic genealogy adventure will be followed up in my specialized Skeffington Genealogy blog [display] whose banner appears in the right-hand column of the present blog. At an anecdotal level, I've mentioned there that I was proud to learn that Richard Dawkins happens to be one of my genetic cousins.
A few evenings ago, I saw an extraordinary 50-minute French-language TV documentary entitled Espèces d'espèces (Kinds of species), explaining how humans are cousins of countless creatures, organisms, plants, bacteria, etc. We have in common the undeniable fact (unknown, of course, to Charles Darwin) that we're all built out of strands of stuff called DNA.
An ingenious underlying element of the movie, which exploits superb graphics, was a novel representation of the "tree" of species in the form of a kind of big spherical cauliflower, which could have been mistaken for the fat brain of some mysterious giant creature. In fact, this "tree" might indeed be imagined, metaphorically, as the brain of a primordial virtual species that we can call DNA. The root of the tree has a lovely name: LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of the myriad DNA-based species that have existed on the planet Earth.
Although this has nothing to do with Darwin Day, that name reminds me, of course, of one of my favorite songs. So let me use that association as a pretext to celebrate Darwin Day by including in this post the famous song of Suzanne Vega... who is certainly one of the loveliest specimens of Homo sapiens I've ever admired.
Getting back to the "tree", we're obliged to admit that Homo sapiens is nothing more than a tiny blob on the outer surface of the cauliflower "cortex". We are neither more nor less important (whatever that might mean) than countless other blobs representing everything from whales, elephants and giant oak trees down to tiny insects and unicellular organisms such as bacteria.
Today, we can't evoke Darwin without thinking of one of his most brilliant offspring (metaphorically speaking): Richard Dawkins.
The TV documentary described an excursion that consisted of moving back from our Homo sapiens blob, down into the heart of the cauliflower, in pursuit of encounters with the ancestors of our various cousins. This is the same fabulous journey imagined by Dawkins in his book The Ancestor's Tale, mentioned in my article of August 13, 2008 entitled Exotic pilgrimage[display].
If you click on the portrait of Dawkins, you can see a delightful talk on atheism... which is so closely associated with Darwinism and the DNA species "tree" that I tend to think of them as part and parcel of a unique philosophy of enlightenment. And here's another nice Dawkins video:
To end this birthday post, here are links to an imaginary interview with Darwin [access] and a Scientific American article on the legacy of Darwin [access].
This frightening photo shows my literary and intellectual hero, the Oxford professor and writer Richard Dawkins, standing alongside an old-fashioned London double-decker bus bearing an abominable message: There's probably no god.
Mindless souls who are sufficiently dauntless to ride on this red bus know full well the only possible destination for such a diabolical excursion. It ain't Piccadilly Circus and Buckingham Palace and all that old nonsense, if you see what I mean. The terminus is for all Eternity... no way whatsoever of getting off the bus and taking a taxi back to the departure point.
Now, those obscure shrouded theological threats should normally frighten shit out of every congregation. But the old tricks no longer work... except, for the moment, in my native Australia (as intellectually dull and intolerantly alert as usual), where the bus concept is banned.
I invite you to Google "atheist bus" to find out all you need to know, and more, about this devilish project. Meanwhile, use Amazon to meet up with the books of our favorite atheist. Reading the beautiful words of Dawkins brings about the same joy, in a sense, as winning the lottery, encountering one's true love, raising a splendid family and living happily ever after. The only difference is that, in the red bus view, there ain't any old white-bearded gentleman named God looking down on events. As a matter of fact, it's remarkably nice and easy, during our brief span on the planet Earth, to be an atheist.
For a long time, particularly since my discovery of the extraordinary books of Richard Dawkins, I've thought it would be a good idea for me to get acquainted with the technical details of genetics: that's to say, of molecular biology. My reading matter in this domain was starting to get a little antiquated. Above all, much of it was poorly written stuff, and this is no longer acceptable in a field where authors are expected to write almost as well as Dawkins. What I wanted was simple: a good textbook about genetics, DNA, etc... Well, in this morning's mail, Amazon supplied me with exactly what I was looking for.
This huge book looks fabulous. The bible! Just what I need. Didactic with superb graphics. The only problem is that I won't be able to read it in bed of a late evening. It weighs a ton, and the paper product doesn't even include the latest chapters, supplied on a DVD. Great stuff as a substitute for evening TV.
Like countless Darwinists, I was shocked that distinguished academics would dare to write such stuff today. I was aware, though, that their arguments were technically complex, and would require some serious unraveling. Fodor (professor of philosophy at Rutgers) and Piattelli-Palmarini (professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona) are far removed from the arena of crackpot creationists. One had the impression that they were thoughtless renegades rather than declared enemies. In any case, it was clear that it would take a talented heavyweight scholar to bring these deserters to their senses.
Fortunately, Jerry Coyne (professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago) has set himself the task of cleaning up the mess. Click the banner to read his excellent article in The Nation entitled The Improbability Pump. Before his rebuttal of the groundless ideas put forward by the philosopher and the cognitive scientist, there's a bonus: a beautiful review of The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Please allow me to quote Coyne quoting Dawkins quoting the DNA of a tiger:
Tiger building! What a splendidly imaginative way to produce new stocks of a chemical product known as deoxyribonucleic acid...
