1
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
The first essay in this volume, A Devils 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. Its 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
childhood when my first hero, Doctor Dolittle (he returned irresistibly to mind
when I read the Naturalists 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 todays
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 youll 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 Russells
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. Theres no law of nature that says boundaries have to be clear-cut.
In December 2000 I was among those invited by David Miliband
MP, then Head of the Prime Ministers 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Ethics (1.4) and I reproduce my (previously unpublished) contribution here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
disillusioning. 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 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 youll get is a nervous
titter and something like, Yes I agree, it is a terrible word isnt it, but you
know what I mean. Well no, actually, I dont.
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 schools 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 teachers 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.
Copyright © 2003 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.