"
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
?
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
?
Richard-Dawkins-The-Devil-s-Chaplain
?
Author of Unweaving the Rainbow and The Ancestor's Tale
RI CHARD DAWKI NS
A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
FLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENcfNt4J D L0VE
- NEW YORK TIMES BOOK^fcEVIEW
A superb writer . . . Dawkins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. "
- NEW REPUBLIC
MARINER BOOKS
? Praise for Richard Dawkins and A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
"One of the best-known scientists and writers of our time . . . Daw- kins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. If anything is sacred to him it is the truth and the patient road to it. . . He is a superb writer, and a great advocate for sanity, and an endlessly informative resource. " -- New Republic
"Dawkins . . . is a man of firm opinions, which he expresses with clarity and punch. " -- Scientific American
"Outstandingly good . . . What unifies the essays is also what ani- mates them: a spirit of educated clarity, of intellectual probity, of truth and courage . . . He is a joy to read, not only for the beauty of his prose but for the elegance and power of his arguments. "
-- Literary Review "Science as a source of joy shines through these pages . . . The lucid-
ness of his vision is extraordinary. " -- Time Out
"This collection of essays penned by one of the world's preeminent evolutionary biologists plumbs the author's commitment to scien- tific truth pursued through solid evidence and reason. "
-- Science News "Dawkins's enthusiasm for the diversity of life on this planet should
prove contagious. " --Publishers Weekly "A pleasure-inducing voyage into scientific principles . . . brilliantly
presented and celebrated. " --Kirkus Reviews
"A fierce advocate of empirical science over superstition . . . Even at his most uncompromising, he evokes a sincere sense of wonder at the physical world. "
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
? Books by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype The Blind W atchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain
The Ancestor's Tale
T
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
REFLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENCE, AND LOVE
Richard Dawkins
A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company Boston - New York
? First Mariner Books edition 2004
Copyright (C) 2003 by Richard Dawkins
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. Visit our Web site: www. houghtonmifflinbooks. com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawkins, Richard, 1941-
A devil's chaplain : reflections on hope, lies, science,
and love / Richard Dawkins. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-618-33540-4
ISBN 0-618-48539-2 (pbk. )
1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Science--Philosophy.
3. Religion and science. I. Title. QH366. 2. D373 2003
500 -- dc21 2003050859 Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 98765432
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: "What Is True? ": published as "Hall of Mirrors" in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls": published in the Sunday Telegraph. Copyright (C) Richard Dawkins / Telegraph Group Ltd. 1998. ? "Postmodernism Disrobed": reprinted by permission from Nature 394, pp. 141-3 (1998). Copyright (C) 1998 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Darwin Triumphant": from Man and Beast Revisited, edited by Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C. Copyright (C) 1991 by Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the publisher. ? "The Information Challenge": originally published in December 1998 in the official journal of Australian skeptics, The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4. Reprinted by permission. ? "Son of Moore's Law": from The Next Fifty Years, edited by J. Brockman, Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books. ? "Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers": published as the foreword to The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. ? "Viruses of the Mind": published in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, edited by B. Dahlbom, Blackwell, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing. ? "The Great Convergence": published as "Snake Oil and Holy Water" in Forbes ASAP, October 4, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature": reprinted by permission from Nature 276, pp. 121-3 (1978). Copyright (C) 1978 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Human Chauvinism": reprinted by permission from Evolution 51, no. 3, pp. 1015-20 (1997). ? "The Lion Children": published as the foreword to The Lion Children, by Angus, Maisie, and Travers McNeice, Orion Publishing Group, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
? CONTENTS
Introduction to the American Edition 1
1 Science and Sensibility 5
1. 1 A Devil's Chaplain 8
1. 2 What is True? 14
1. 3 Gaps in the Mind 20
1. 4 Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair 27
1. 5 Trial By Jury 38
1. 6 Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls 42
1. 7 Postmodernism Disrobed 47
1. 8 The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle 54
2 Light Will Be Thrown 61
2. 1 Light Will Be Thrown 63
2. 2 Darwin Triumphant 78
2. 3 The 'Information Challenge' 91
2. 4 Genes Aren't Us 104
2. 5 Son of Moore's Law 107
3 The Infected Mind 117
3. 1 Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers 119
3. 2 Viruses of the Mind 128
3. 3 The Great Convergence 146
3. 4 Dolly and the Cloth Heads 152
3. 5 Time to Stand Up 156
? vi
4 They Told Me, Heraclitus 163
4. 1 Lament for Douglas 165 4. 2 Eulogy for Douglas Adams 168
4. 3 Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton 171
4. 4 Snake Oil 179
5 Even the Ranks of Tuscany 187
5. 1 Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature 190
5. 2 The Art of the Developable 194
5. 3 Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia and Friends 203
5. 4 Human Chauvinism and Evolutionary Progress 206
5. 5 Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight 218
6 There is All Africa and her Prodigies in Us 223
6. 1 Ecology of Genes 225
6. 2 Out of the Soul of Africa 228
6. 3 I Speak of Africa and Golden Joys 231
6. 4 Heroes and Ancestors 234
7 A Prayer for My Daughter 241
7. 1 Good and Bad Reasons for Believing 242
Endnotes 249 Index 256
? I
For Juliet on her Eighteenth Birthday
? INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
This book is a personal selection from among all the articles and lec- tures, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years. There are many themes here, some arising out of Darwinism or science in general, some concerned with morality, some with religion, education, justice, mourning, Africa, history of science, some just plain personal - or what the late Carl Sagan might have called love letters to science and rationality.
Though I admit to occasional flames of (entirely justified) irritation in my writing, I like to think that the greater part of it is good-humoured, perhaps even humorous. Where there is passion, well, there is much to be passionate about. Where there is anger, I hope it is a controlled anger. Where there is sadness, I hope it never spills over into despair but still looks to the future. But mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy, and I hope it shows in these pages.
The book is divided into seven sections, chosen and arranged by the compiler Latha Menon in close collaboration with me. With all the polymathic, literate intelligence you would expect of the executive editor of Encarta Encyclopedia's World English Edition, Latha has proved to be an inspired anthologist. I have written preambles to each of the seven sections, in which I have reflected on the pieces Latha thought worthy of reprinting and the connections among them. Hers was the difficult task, and I am filled with admiration for her simultaneous grasp
of vastly more of my writings than are here reproduced, and for the skill with which she achieved a subtler balance of them than I thought they possessed. But as for what she had to choose from, the responsibility is, of course, mine.
It is not possible to list all the people who helped with the individual pieces, spread as they are over 25 years. Help with the book itself came from Yan Wong, Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt, Michael Dover, Laura van
l
? Dam, Catherine Bradley, Anthony Cheetham and, of course, Latha Menon herself. My gratitude to Charles Simonyi - so much more than a benefactor - is unabated. And my wife, Lalla Ward, continues to lend her encouragement, her advice and her fine-tuned ear for the music of language.
Richard Dawkins
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
? ? ill jstii
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1. 1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1. 2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards.
At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then? ' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters? ' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1. 3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
5
? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband MP, then Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit and now Minister for School Standards, to write a memo on a particular subject for Tony Blair to read over the Christmas holiday. My brief was Science, Genetics, Risk and Ethics (1. 4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here (eliminating Risk and some other passages to avoid overlap with other essays).
Any proposal to curtail, in the smallest degree, the right of trial by jury is greeted with wails of affront. On the three occasions when I have been called to serve on a jury, the experience proved disagreeable and dis- illusioning. Much later, two grotesquely over-publicized trials in the United States prompted me to think through a central reason for my distrust of the jury system, and to write it down as Trial By Jury (1. 5).
"
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
? Books by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype The Blind W atchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain
The Ancestor's Tale
T
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
REFLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENCE, AND LOVE
Richard Dawkins
A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company Boston - New York
? First Mariner Books edition 2004
Copyright (C) 2003 by Richard Dawkins
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. Visit our Web site: www. houghtonmifflinbooks. com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawkins, Richard, 1941-
A devil's chaplain : reflections on hope, lies, science,
and love / Richard Dawkins. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-618-33540-4
ISBN 0-618-48539-2 (pbk. )
1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Science--Philosophy.
3. Religion and science. I. Title. QH366. 2. D373 2003
500 -- dc21 2003050859 Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 98765432
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: "What Is True? ": published as "Hall of Mirrors" in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls": published in the Sunday Telegraph. Copyright (C) Richard Dawkins / Telegraph Group Ltd. 1998. ? "Postmodernism Disrobed": reprinted by permission from Nature 394, pp. 141-3 (1998). Copyright (C) 1998 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Darwin Triumphant": from Man and Beast Revisited, edited by Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C. Copyright (C) 1991 by Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the publisher. ? "The Information Challenge": originally published in December 1998 in the official journal of Australian skeptics, The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4. Reprinted by permission. ? "Son of Moore's Law": from The Next Fifty Years, edited by J. Brockman, Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books. ? "Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers": published as the foreword to The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. ? "Viruses of the Mind": published in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, edited by B. Dahlbom, Blackwell, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing. ? "The Great Convergence": published as "Snake Oil and Holy Water" in Forbes ASAP, October 4, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature": reprinted by permission from Nature 276, pp. 121-3 (1978). Copyright (C) 1978 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Human Chauvinism": reprinted by permission from Evolution 51, no. 3, pp. 1015-20 (1997). ? "The Lion Children": published as the foreword to The Lion Children, by Angus, Maisie, and Travers McNeice, Orion Publishing Group, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
? CONTENTS
Introduction to the American Edition 1
1 Science and Sensibility 5
1. 1 A Devil's Chaplain 8
1. 2 What is True? 14
1. 3 Gaps in the Mind 20
1. 4 Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair 27
1. 5 Trial By Jury 38
1. 6 Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls 42
1. 7 Postmodernism Disrobed 47
1. 8 The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle 54
2 Light Will Be Thrown 61
2. 1 Light Will Be Thrown 63
2. 2 Darwin Triumphant 78
2. 3 The 'Information Challenge' 91
2. 4 Genes Aren't Us 104
2. 5 Son of Moore's Law 107
3 The Infected Mind 117
3. 1 Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers 119
3. 2 Viruses of the Mind 128
3. 3 The Great Convergence 146
3. 4 Dolly and the Cloth Heads 152
3. 5 Time to Stand Up 156
? vi
4 They Told Me, Heraclitus 163
4. 1 Lament for Douglas 165 4. 2 Eulogy for Douglas Adams 168
4. 3 Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton 171
4. 4 Snake Oil 179
5 Even the Ranks of Tuscany 187
5. 1 Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature 190
5. 2 The Art of the Developable 194
5. 3 Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia and Friends 203
5. 4 Human Chauvinism and Evolutionary Progress 206
5. 5 Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight 218
6 There is All Africa and her Prodigies in Us 223
6. 1 Ecology of Genes 225
6. 2 Out of the Soul of Africa 228
6. 3 I Speak of Africa and Golden Joys 231
6. 4 Heroes and Ancestors 234
7 A Prayer for My Daughter 241
7. 1 Good and Bad Reasons for Believing 242
Endnotes 249 Index 256
? I
For Juliet on her Eighteenth Birthday
? INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
This book is a personal selection from among all the articles and lec- tures, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years. There are many themes here, some arising out of Darwinism or science in general, some concerned with morality, some with religion, education, justice, mourning, Africa, history of science, some just plain personal - or what the late Carl Sagan might have called love letters to science and rationality.
Though I admit to occasional flames of (entirely justified) irritation in my writing, I like to think that the greater part of it is good-humoured, perhaps even humorous. Where there is passion, well, there is much to be passionate about. Where there is anger, I hope it is a controlled anger. Where there is sadness, I hope it never spills over into despair but still looks to the future. But mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy, and I hope it shows in these pages.
The book is divided into seven sections, chosen and arranged by the compiler Latha Menon in close collaboration with me. With all the polymathic, literate intelligence you would expect of the executive editor of Encarta Encyclopedia's World English Edition, Latha has proved to be an inspired anthologist. I have written preambles to each of the seven sections, in which I have reflected on the pieces Latha thought worthy of reprinting and the connections among them. Hers was the difficult task, and I am filled with admiration for her simultaneous grasp
of vastly more of my writings than are here reproduced, and for the skill with which she achieved a subtler balance of them than I thought they possessed. But as for what she had to choose from, the responsibility is, of course, mine.
It is not possible to list all the people who helped with the individual pieces, spread as they are over 25 years. Help with the book itself came from Yan Wong, Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt, Michael Dover, Laura van
l
? Dam, Catherine Bradley, Anthony Cheetham and, of course, Latha Menon herself. My gratitude to Charles Simonyi - so much more than a benefactor - is unabated. And my wife, Lalla Ward, continues to lend her encouragement, her advice and her fine-tuned ear for the music of language.
Richard Dawkins
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
? ? ill jstii
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1. 1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1. 2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards.
At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then? ' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters? ' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1. 3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
5
? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband MP, then Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit and now Minister for School Standards, to write a memo on a particular subject for Tony Blair to read over the Christmas holiday. My brief was Science, Genetics, Risk and Ethics (1. 4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here (eliminating Risk and some other passages to avoid overlap with other essays).
Any proposal to curtail, in the smallest degree, the right of trial by jury is greeted with wails of affront. On the three occasions when I have been called to serve on a jury, the experience proved disagreeable and dis- illusioning. Much later, two grotesquely over-publicized trials in the United States prompted me to think through a central reason for my distrust of the jury system, and to write it down as Trial By Jury (1. 5).
Crystals are first out of the box of tricks toted by psychics, mystics, mediums and other charlatans. My purpose in the next article was to explain the real magic of crystals to the readers of a London newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph. At one time it was only the low-grade tabloid newspapers that encouraged popular superstitions like crystal-gazing or astrology. Nowadays some up-market newspapers, including the Telegraph, have dumbed down to the extent of printing a regular astrology column, which is why I accepted their invitation to write Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls (1. 6).
A more intellectual species of charlatan is the target of the next essay, Postmodernism Disrobed (1. 7). Dawkins' Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to - and do - work hard to make their language as simple as possible ('but no simpler,' rightly insisted Einstein). Other academics - some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science - suffer from what Peter Medawar (I think) called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance. The physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a blissfully funny hoax on the Editorial 'Collective' (what else? ) of a particularly pretentious journal of social studies. Afterwards, together with his colleague Jean Bricmont, he published a book, Intellectual Impostures, ably documenting this epidemic of Fashionable Nonsense (as their book was retitled in the United States). 'Postmodernism Disrobed' is my review of this hilarious but disquieting book.
I must add, the fact that the word 'postmodernism' occurs in the title given me by the Editors of Nature does not imply that I (or they) know what it means. Indeed, it is my belief that it means nothing at all, except in the
6
? restricted context of architecture where it originated. I recommend the following practice, whenever anybody uses the word in some other context. Stop them instantly and ask, in a neutral spirit of friendly curiosity, what it means. Never once have I heard anything that even remotely approaches a usable, or even faintly coherent, definition. The best you'll get is a nervous titter and something like, 'Yes I agree, it is a terrible word isn't it, but you know what I mean. ' Well no, actually, I don't.
As a lifelong teacher, I fret about where we go wrong in education. I hear horror stories almost daily of ambitious parents or ambitious schools ruining the joy of childhood. And it starts wretchedly early. A six-year-old boy receives 'counselling' because he is 'worried' that his performance in mathematics is falling behind. A headmistress summons the parents of a little girl to suggest that she should be sent for external tuition. The parents expostulate that it is the school's job to teach the child. Why is she falling behind? She is falling behind, explains the headmistress patiently, because the parents of all the other children in the class are paying for them to go to external tutors.
It is not just the joy of childhood that is threatened. It is the joy of true education: of reading for the sake of a wonderful book rather than for an exam; of following up a subject because it is fascinating rather than because it is on a syllabus; of watching a great teacher's eyes light up for sheer love of the subject. The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle (1. 8) is an attempt to bring back from the past the spirit of just such a great teacher.
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
7
? 8 %: I
A Devil's Chaplain
Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil's Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.
What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.
A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste there is no doubt.
RI CHARD DAWKI NS
A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
FLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENcfNt4J D L0VE
- NEW YORK TIMES BOOK^fcEVIEW
A superb writer . . . Dawkins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. "
- NEW REPUBLIC
MARINER BOOKS
? Praise for Richard Dawkins and A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
"One of the best-known scientists and writers of our time . . . Daw- kins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. If anything is sacred to him it is the truth and the patient road to it. . . He is a superb writer, and a great advocate for sanity, and an endlessly informative resource. " -- New Republic
"Dawkins . . . is a man of firm opinions, which he expresses with clarity and punch. " -- Scientific American
"Outstandingly good . . . What unifies the essays is also what ani- mates them: a spirit of educated clarity, of intellectual probity, of truth and courage . . . He is a joy to read, not only for the beauty of his prose but for the elegance and power of his arguments. "
-- Literary Review "Science as a source of joy shines through these pages . . . The lucid-
ness of his vision is extraordinary. " -- Time Out
"This collection of essays penned by one of the world's preeminent evolutionary biologists plumbs the author's commitment to scien- tific truth pursued through solid evidence and reason. "
-- Science News "Dawkins's enthusiasm for the diversity of life on this planet should
prove contagious. " --Publishers Weekly "A pleasure-inducing voyage into scientific principles . . . brilliantly
presented and celebrated. " --Kirkus Reviews
"A fierce advocate of empirical science over superstition . . . Even at his most uncompromising, he evokes a sincere sense of wonder at the physical world. "
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
? Books by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype The Blind W atchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain
The Ancestor's Tale
T
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
REFLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENCE, AND LOVE
Richard Dawkins
A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company Boston - New York
? First Mariner Books edition 2004
Copyright (C) 2003 by Richard Dawkins
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. Visit our Web site: www. houghtonmifflinbooks. com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawkins, Richard, 1941-
A devil's chaplain : reflections on hope, lies, science,
and love / Richard Dawkins. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-618-33540-4
ISBN 0-618-48539-2 (pbk. )
1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Science--Philosophy.
3. Religion and science. I. Title. QH366. 2. D373 2003
500 -- dc21 2003050859 Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 98765432
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: "What Is True? ": published as "Hall of Mirrors" in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls": published in the Sunday Telegraph. Copyright (C) Richard Dawkins / Telegraph Group Ltd. 1998. ? "Postmodernism Disrobed": reprinted by permission from Nature 394, pp. 141-3 (1998). Copyright (C) 1998 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Darwin Triumphant": from Man and Beast Revisited, edited by Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C. Copyright (C) 1991 by Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the publisher. ? "The Information Challenge": originally published in December 1998 in the official journal of Australian skeptics, The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4. Reprinted by permission. ? "Son of Moore's Law": from The Next Fifty Years, edited by J. Brockman, Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books. ? "Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers": published as the foreword to The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. ? "Viruses of the Mind": published in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, edited by B. Dahlbom, Blackwell, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing. ? "The Great Convergence": published as "Snake Oil and Holy Water" in Forbes ASAP, October 4, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature": reprinted by permission from Nature 276, pp. 121-3 (1978). Copyright (C) 1978 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Human Chauvinism": reprinted by permission from Evolution 51, no. 3, pp. 1015-20 (1997). ? "The Lion Children": published as the foreword to The Lion Children, by Angus, Maisie, and Travers McNeice, Orion Publishing Group, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
? CONTENTS
Introduction to the American Edition 1
1 Science and Sensibility 5
1. 1 A Devil's Chaplain 8
1. 2 What is True? 14
1. 3 Gaps in the Mind 20
1. 4 Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair 27
1. 5 Trial By Jury 38
1. 6 Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls 42
1. 7 Postmodernism Disrobed 47
1. 8 The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle 54
2 Light Will Be Thrown 61
2. 1 Light Will Be Thrown 63
2. 2 Darwin Triumphant 78
2. 3 The 'Information Challenge' 91
2. 4 Genes Aren't Us 104
2. 5 Son of Moore's Law 107
3 The Infected Mind 117
3. 1 Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers 119
3. 2 Viruses of the Mind 128
3. 3 The Great Convergence 146
3. 4 Dolly and the Cloth Heads 152
3. 5 Time to Stand Up 156
? vi
4 They Told Me, Heraclitus 163
4. 1 Lament for Douglas 165 4. 2 Eulogy for Douglas Adams 168
4. 3 Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton 171
4. 4 Snake Oil 179
5 Even the Ranks of Tuscany 187
5. 1 Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature 190
5. 2 The Art of the Developable 194
5. 3 Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia and Friends 203
5. 4 Human Chauvinism and Evolutionary Progress 206
5. 5 Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight 218
6 There is All Africa and her Prodigies in Us 223
6. 1 Ecology of Genes 225
6. 2 Out of the Soul of Africa 228
6. 3 I Speak of Africa and Golden Joys 231
6. 4 Heroes and Ancestors 234
7 A Prayer for My Daughter 241
7. 1 Good and Bad Reasons for Believing 242
Endnotes 249 Index 256
? I
For Juliet on her Eighteenth Birthday
? INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
This book is a personal selection from among all the articles and lec- tures, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years. There are many themes here, some arising out of Darwinism or science in general, some concerned with morality, some with religion, education, justice, mourning, Africa, history of science, some just plain personal - or what the late Carl Sagan might have called love letters to science and rationality.
Though I admit to occasional flames of (entirely justified) irritation in my writing, I like to think that the greater part of it is good-humoured, perhaps even humorous. Where there is passion, well, there is much to be passionate about. Where there is anger, I hope it is a controlled anger. Where there is sadness, I hope it never spills over into despair but still looks to the future. But mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy, and I hope it shows in these pages.
The book is divided into seven sections, chosen and arranged by the compiler Latha Menon in close collaboration with me. With all the polymathic, literate intelligence you would expect of the executive editor of Encarta Encyclopedia's World English Edition, Latha has proved to be an inspired anthologist. I have written preambles to each of the seven sections, in which I have reflected on the pieces Latha thought worthy of reprinting and the connections among them. Hers was the difficult task, and I am filled with admiration for her simultaneous grasp
of vastly more of my writings than are here reproduced, and for the skill with which she achieved a subtler balance of them than I thought they possessed. But as for what she had to choose from, the responsibility is, of course, mine.
It is not possible to list all the people who helped with the individual pieces, spread as they are over 25 years. Help with the book itself came from Yan Wong, Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt, Michael Dover, Laura van
l
? Dam, Catherine Bradley, Anthony Cheetham and, of course, Latha Menon herself. My gratitude to Charles Simonyi - so much more than a benefactor - is unabated. And my wife, Lalla Ward, continues to lend her encouragement, her advice and her fine-tuned ear for the music of language.
Richard Dawkins
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
? ? ill jstii
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1. 1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1. 2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards.
At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then? ' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters? ' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1. 3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
5
? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband MP, then Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit and now Minister for School Standards, to write a memo on a particular subject for Tony Blair to read over the Christmas holiday. My brief was Science, Genetics, Risk and Ethics (1. 4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here (eliminating Risk and some other passages to avoid overlap with other essays).
Any proposal to curtail, in the smallest degree, the right of trial by jury is greeted with wails of affront. On the three occasions when I have been called to serve on a jury, the experience proved disagreeable and dis- illusioning. Much later, two grotesquely over-publicized trials in the United States prompted me to think through a central reason for my distrust of the jury system, and to write it down as Trial By Jury (1. 5).
"
-- Library Journal, selected as a Best Sci-Tech Book of the Year
? Books by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene
The Extended Phenotype The Blind W atchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain
The Ancestor's Tale
T
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
REFLECTIONS ON HOPE, LIES, SCIENCE, AND LOVE
Richard Dawkins
A Mariner Book Houghton Mifflin Company Boston - New York
? First Mariner Books edition 2004
Copyright (C) 2003 by Richard Dawkins
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. Visit our Web site: www. houghtonmifflinbooks. com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dawkins, Richard, 1941-
A devil's chaplain : reflections on hope, lies, science,
and love / Richard Dawkins. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-618-33540-4
ISBN 0-618-48539-2 (pbk. )
1. Evolution (Biology) 2. Science--Philosophy.
3. Religion and science. I. Title. QH366. 2. D373 2003
500 -- dc21 2003050859 Printed in the United States of America
QUM 10 98765432
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following: "What Is True? ": published as "Hall of Mirrors" in Forbes ASAP, October 2, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls": published in the Sunday Telegraph. Copyright (C) Richard Dawkins / Telegraph Group Ltd. 1998. ? "Postmodernism Disrobed": reprinted by permission from Nature 394, pp. 141-3 (1998). Copyright (C) 1998 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Darwin Triumphant": from Man and Beast Revisited, edited by Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D. C. Copyright (C) 1991 by Smithsonian Institution. Used by permission of the publisher. ? "The Information Challenge": originally published in December 1998 in the official journal of Australian skeptics, The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4. Reprinted by permission. ? "Son of Moore's Law": from The Next Fifty Years, edited by J. Brockman, Vintage Books, Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books. ? "Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers": published as the foreword to The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press. ? "Viruses of the Mind": published in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, edited by B. Dahlbom, Blackwell, 1993. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing. ? "The Great Convergence": published as "Snake Oil and Holy Water" in Forbes ASAP, October 4, 1999. Reprinted by permission of Forbes ASAP, (C) 2003 Forbes Inc. ? "Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature": reprinted by permission from Nature 276, pp. 121-3 (1978). Copyright (C) 1978 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. ? "Human Chauvinism": reprinted by permission from Evolution 51, no. 3, pp. 1015-20 (1997). ? "The Lion Children": published as the foreword to The Lion Children, by Angus, Maisie, and Travers McNeice, Orion Publishing Group, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd.
? CONTENTS
Introduction to the American Edition 1
1 Science and Sensibility 5
1. 1 A Devil's Chaplain 8
1. 2 What is True? 14
1. 3 Gaps in the Mind 20
1. 4 Science, Genetics and Ethics: Memo for Tony Blair 27
1. 5 Trial By Jury 38
1. 6 Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls 42
1. 7 Postmodernism Disrobed 47
1. 8 The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle 54
2 Light Will Be Thrown 61
2. 1 Light Will Be Thrown 63
2. 2 Darwin Triumphant 78
2. 3 The 'Information Challenge' 91
2. 4 Genes Aren't Us 104
2. 5 Son of Moore's Law 107
3 The Infected Mind 117
3. 1 Chinese Junk and Chinese Whispers 119
3. 2 Viruses of the Mind 128
3. 3 The Great Convergence 146
3. 4 Dolly and the Cloth Heads 152
3. 5 Time to Stand Up 156
? vi
4 They Told Me, Heraclitus 163
4. 1 Lament for Douglas 165 4. 2 Eulogy for Douglas Adams 168
4. 3 Eulogy for W. D. Hamilton 171
4. 4 Snake Oil 179
5 Even the Ranks of Tuscany 187
5. 1 Rejoicing in Multifarious Nature 190
5. 2 The Art of the Developable 194
5. 3 Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia and Friends 203
5. 4 Human Chauvinism and Evolutionary Progress 206
5. 5 Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight 218
6 There is All Africa and her Prodigies in Us 223
6. 1 Ecology of Genes 225
6. 2 Out of the Soul of Africa 228
6. 3 I Speak of Africa and Golden Joys 231
6. 4 Heroes and Ancestors 234
7 A Prayer for My Daughter 241
7. 1 Good and Bad Reasons for Believing 242
Endnotes 249 Index 256
? I
For Juliet on her Eighteenth Birthday
? INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
This book is a personal selection from among all the articles and lec- tures, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years. There are many themes here, some arising out of Darwinism or science in general, some concerned with morality, some with religion, education, justice, mourning, Africa, history of science, some just plain personal - or what the late Carl Sagan might have called love letters to science and rationality.
Though I admit to occasional flames of (entirely justified) irritation in my writing, I like to think that the greater part of it is good-humoured, perhaps even humorous. Where there is passion, well, there is much to be passionate about. Where there is anger, I hope it is a controlled anger. Where there is sadness, I hope it never spills over into despair but still looks to the future. But mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy, and I hope it shows in these pages.
The book is divided into seven sections, chosen and arranged by the compiler Latha Menon in close collaboration with me. With all the polymathic, literate intelligence you would expect of the executive editor of Encarta Encyclopedia's World English Edition, Latha has proved to be an inspired anthologist. I have written preambles to each of the seven sections, in which I have reflected on the pieces Latha thought worthy of reprinting and the connections among them. Hers was the difficult task, and I am filled with admiration for her simultaneous grasp
of vastly more of my writings than are here reproduced, and for the skill with which she achieved a subtler balance of them than I thought they possessed. But as for what she had to choose from, the responsibility is, of course, mine.
It is not possible to list all the people who helped with the individual pieces, spread as they are over 25 years. Help with the book itself came from Yan Wong, Christine DeBlase-Ballstadt, Michael Dover, Laura van
l
? Dam, Catherine Bradley, Anthony Cheetham and, of course, Latha Menon herself. My gratitude to Charles Simonyi - so much more than a benefactor - is unabated. And my wife, Lalla Ward, continues to lend her encouragement, her advice and her fine-tuned ear for the music of language.
Richard Dawkins
? A DEVIL'S CHAPLAIN
? ? ill jstii
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
The first essay in this volume, A Devil's Chaplain (1. 1), has not previously been published. The title, borrowed by the book, is explained in the essay itself. The second essay, What is True? (1. 2), was my contribution to a symposium of that name, in Forbes ASAP magazine. Scientists tend to take a robust view of truth and are impatient of philosophical equivocation over its reality or importance. It's hard enough coaxing nature to give up her truths, without spectators and hangers-on strewing gratuitous obstacles in our way. My essay argues that we should at least be consistent. Truths about everyday life are just as much - or as little - open to philosophical doubt as scientific truths. Let us shun double standards.
At times I fear turning into a double standards bore. It started in child- hood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind when I read the Naturalist's Voyage of my adult hero, Charles Darwin), raised my consciousness, to borrow a useful piece of feminist jargon, about our treatment of animals. Non-human animals I should say, for, of course, we are animals. The moral philosopher most justly credited with raising today's consciousness in this direction is Peter Singer, lately moved from Australia to Princeton. His The Great Ape Project aims towards granting the other great apes, as near as is practically possible, civil rights equivalent to those enjoyed by the human great ape. When you stop and ask yourself why this seems so immediately ridiculous, the harder you think, the less ridiculous it seems. Cheap cracks like 'I suppose you'll need reinforced ballot-boxes for gorillas, then? ' are soon dispatched: we give rights, but not the vote, to children, lunatics and Members of the House of Lords. The biggest objection to the GAP is 'Where will it all end? Rights for oysters? ' (Bertrand Russell's quip, in a similar context). Where do you draw the line? Gaps in the Mind (1. 3), my own contribution to the GAP book, uses an evolutionary argument to show that we should not be in the business of drawing lines in the first place. There's no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
5
? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband MP, then Head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit and now Minister for School Standards, to write a memo on a particular subject for Tony Blair to read over the Christmas holiday. My brief was Science, Genetics, Risk and Ethics (1. 4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here (eliminating Risk and some other passages to avoid overlap with other essays).
Any proposal to curtail, in the smallest degree, the right of trial by jury is greeted with wails of affront. On the three occasions when I have been called to serve on a jury, the experience proved disagreeable and dis- illusioning. Much later, two grotesquely over-publicized trials in the United States prompted me to think through a central reason for my distrust of the jury system, and to write it down as Trial By Jury (1. 5).
Crystals are first out of the box of tricks toted by psychics, mystics, mediums and other charlatans. My purpose in the next article was to explain the real magic of crystals to the readers of a London newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph. At one time it was only the low-grade tabloid newspapers that encouraged popular superstitions like crystal-gazing or astrology. Nowadays some up-market newspapers, including the Telegraph, have dumbed down to the extent of printing a regular astrology column, which is why I accepted their invitation to write Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls (1. 6).
A more intellectual species of charlatan is the target of the next essay, Postmodernism Disrobed (1. 7). Dawkins' Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to - and do - work hard to make their language as simple as possible ('but no simpler,' rightly insisted Einstein). Other academics - some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science - suffer from what Peter Medawar (I think) called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance. The physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a blissfully funny hoax on the Editorial 'Collective' (what else? ) of a particularly pretentious journal of social studies. Afterwards, together with his colleague Jean Bricmont, he published a book, Intellectual Impostures, ably documenting this epidemic of Fashionable Nonsense (as their book was retitled in the United States). 'Postmodernism Disrobed' is my review of this hilarious but disquieting book.
I must add, the fact that the word 'postmodernism' occurs in the title given me by the Editors of Nature does not imply that I (or they) know what it means. Indeed, it is my belief that it means nothing at all, except in the
6
? restricted context of architecture where it originated. I recommend the following practice, whenever anybody uses the word in some other context. Stop them instantly and ask, in a neutral spirit of friendly curiosity, what it means. Never once have I heard anything that even remotely approaches a usable, or even faintly coherent, definition. The best you'll get is a nervous titter and something like, 'Yes I agree, it is a terrible word isn't it, but you know what I mean. ' Well no, actually, I don't.
As a lifelong teacher, I fret about where we go wrong in education. I hear horror stories almost daily of ambitious parents or ambitious schools ruining the joy of childhood. And it starts wretchedly early. A six-year-old boy receives 'counselling' because he is 'worried' that his performance in mathematics is falling behind. A headmistress summons the parents of a little girl to suggest that she should be sent for external tuition. The parents expostulate that it is the school's job to teach the child. Why is she falling behind? She is falling behind, explains the headmistress patiently, because the parents of all the other children in the class are paying for them to go to external tutors.
It is not just the joy of childhood that is threatened. It is the joy of true education: of reading for the sake of a wonderful book rather than for an exam; of following up a subject because it is fascinating rather than because it is on a syllabus; of watching a great teacher's eyes light up for sheer love of the subject. The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle (1. 8) is an attempt to bring back from the past the spirit of just such a great teacher.
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
7
? 8 %: I
A Devil's Chaplain
Darwin was less than half joking when he coined the phrase Devil's Chaplain in a letter to his friend Hooker in 1856.
What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.
A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. Of waste there is no doubt.
