Popular British evolutionist Richard Dawkins is in South Africa to promote a love of science. He spoke to Lesley Cowling
THERE are few things eminent scientist and Oxford don Richard Dawkins doesn’t know. One of them is that he’s an Aries.
Perhaps it would be more correct to say he doesn’t want to know. “Astronomy is the rightful proprietor of the stars and their wonder – astrology gets in the way, even subverts and debauches the wonder,” he argued during a speech at the Foundation for Research Development (FRD) in Pretoria recently, in which he attacked the current popularity of psychic phenomena and new age thinking, along with more traditional religious beliefs, as “drivel”.
Impatience with what he calls “anti- science” and an avowed atheism are among the hallmarks of this popular evolutionary biologist, current holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. But his stern admonishments against “false prophets” and those who “exploit credulous and naive people” notwithstanding, he’ll call a truce for a joke in his war against “anti-science”.
“As a matter of principle, I won’t answer that question,” he said, smiling, to guests at the FRD function who said there was a bet on about his star sign. “But I will tell you my date of birth and you can work it out.”
His sense of humour, which includes the ability to laugh at himself, is not the only attractive quality of a man who, on first impression, seems intimidatingly serious and unlikely to suffer fools gladly. There is also the passionate fervour with which he talks of the marvels of the world.
Passion seems so unscientific, after all, and mystery even more so, but for Dawkins these qualities are at the heart of scientific endeavour. “I think the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for what we don’t understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science.”
He quotes a saying by Einstein, a scientist so loved by the masses that he made it into Hollywood and on to T-shirts: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
But most persuasive to his argument of the wonders of science are examples he has culled from science itself, beautifully packaged into bite-sized analogies we can understand and which yet amaze us.
From evolution, he offers the intricate workings of DNA, describing it as a document, a dictionary of 64 words, a recipe to make a human being that goes back 35-million centuries. “The messages that have come down to us are the ones that have survived millions, in some cases hundreds of millions of generations. For every successful message that has reached the present, countless have fallen away like the chippings on a sculptor’s floor. We are the descendants of a tiny elite of successful ancestors. Our DNA has proved itself successful, because it is here.”
He offers this on the brain: “It’s a three- dimensional maze of a million million nerve cells, each one drawn out like a wire to carry pulsed messages. If you laid all your brain cells end to end, they’d stretch around the world 25 times.”
He also throws in some did-you-knows that would shame a Chappies bubblegum wrapping. “Every time you drink a glass of water, you are probably imbibing at least one atom that passed through the bladder of Aristotle.”
The appetite for wonder that Dawkins has in abundance and tries to feed in others is, in itself, a curious anomaly in the evolution of human creatures. It comes from consciousness, that indefinable thing we have that compels us to reflect on ourselves and others. Consciousness is not really useful, in the evolutionary sense. It can even be a hindrance to human happiness.
“It is a riddle that any evolutionist has to face – it’s another of these emergent properties that have come from large nervous systems, and it needs explaining. But I don’t even know what kind of explanation we’re looking for. It’s such an elusive phenomenon. Each one of us knows we have it … But it’s hard to know what you’re trying to explain if you can’t even define it.”
Another problem of evolution he would like to see explained is sex: why do we reproduce that way, rather than simply cloning ourselves? “Something like aphids, or stick insects – the females are perfectly capable of giving birth to exact copies of themselves, without the intervention of a male, and from a selfish gene point of view, that’s, on the face of it, twice as good, because the daughter has all your genes.”
The advantage of sex, he explains, has got to be a simply colossal one to overcome the advantage of asexual cloning. “That’s why it’s a big riddle – a lot of evolutionary theorists are working on it.”
It’s a short step from consciousness to belief systems, and from there to religion. Dawkins acknowledges that belief itself can be helpful, and can play a role in people curing themselves, as the placebo effect in medicine has proved.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if you could by psychological means get rid of ulcers, for example, and religion might well come into that. I don’t know whether it would be a faith healer or a psychiatrist talking to you or reading soothing poetry. There are all kinds of things that could happen, and certainly religion could be among those things.
“It doesn’t surprise me to learn there are certain kinds of stress-related diseases that religious people are less susceptible to than non-religious people. But of course that says nothing about the truth of those beliefs.”
Dawkins argues that just because a belief in God can cure you doesn’t necessarily mean that God or other supernatural forces exist. He doesn’t rule out the possibility, but requires scientific proof before he is prepared, himself, to believe.
It is a conundrum for a man who, on one hand, is charged with making science popular, and on the other, feels so strongly opposed to the religious, almost as if he has a duty to fight it. Science is in most danger of losing the sympathy of ordinary mortals when it attacks our most cherished beliefs, the values we live by and the dreams that give life meaning. When Dawkins goes on the attack, he is in that perilous territory.
But when he’s in full descriptive flight on the marvels of the world, he is in the theatre of awe, invoking the same wonder that our early ancestors felt when they looked up at the stars and felt the need to weave stories about them, creating myth. Then he’s on safe ground, because there he will never lose us.
Richard Dawkins is in South Africa for the Science and Technology Festival in Grahamstown, which he kicked off on Wednesday with his lecture Science and Values