With his last book, The God Delusion, biologist Richard Dawkins became the frontman for the New Atheism. Now the man called “Darwin’s Pitbull” takes up the case of the great man himself, entertainingly and convincingly laying out the case for natural selection in The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. His Toronto appearance tonight at the Isabel Bader Theatre is sold out, but EYE WEEKLY Senior Editor Edward Keenan interviewed him by phone recently.
What prompted you to write a book on the evidence for evolution?
It’s one of the most important things anyone can possibly know — where they come from and how we know. So what could be a more important subject to write about?
It seems that a key problem in debating the “history deniers,” as you call them — those who still insist on creationism as the truth — don’t accept logic and evidence as reasonable forms of argument…
I think that’s probably right. I don’t actually often come across them face-to-face. I tend to move in university circles. But I think you’ve put it very well: they can’t deal with logic.
In the book, you say evolution is a theory in the way that heliocentrism is a theory — a point you make clear throughout the book. What I kept wondering about as I read on is that this is such an open-and-shut case when the evidence is arrayed like this, that I don’t know how you proceed from here in dealing with people who still won’t accept the evidence.
Well, this is a fascinating thing. Because when you see some of the people who clearly know the evidence and have seen it — the most striking one is a man called Kurt Wise, who is an American geologist who studied geology at Chicago, got a PhD at Harvard — absolutely top-class qualifications — and realized that his science conflicted with his fundamentalist religion and took a decision that where there was a conflict — which was almost everywhere — he was going to go with scripture. And he said, he actually said, he quoted Martin Luther: “Here I must stand,” and he said, “If all the evidence in the world points to an old earth” — he’s particularly a young-earth creationist — “I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a young earth creationist because that’s what holy scripture says.” So here’s a man who — unlike many of them who are pretty ignorant — is not ignorant, and he’s explicitly admitting that he throws out evidence when it conflicts with his beliefs. How do you deal with somebody like that?
Well, I don’t know. It does seem that people like that — particularly in the United States — are among the most vocal supporters of the death penalty. So they believe that “beyond a reasonable doubt” and the weighing of evidence is a valid means of determining the truth in those cases, and yet…
I see what you’re saying. You mean they’re capable of applying the standards of evidence in other cases. And presumably they lead normal lives where they might be in business or — in any sort of court of law, as you say — they would weigh up the evidence the same way you or I would weigh up the evidence. And yet, when it comes to this one matter, evidence goes straight out the window.
I am someone who never got further in my science studies than Grade 10 biology, largely because I was under the impression that the sciences just didn’t interest me. Yet when I read a book like yours, I was fascinated. And I think, if only I had had you as a teacher I might have pursued an entirely different career path.
What a nice thing to say.
Do you think the way science is taught tends to make a lot of people think that it’s boring, that it lacks wonder and ingenuity and creativity?
That’s really sad. I agree with you. My root is to stress the deep questions — why do we exist, why does the universe exist, how big is the universe, how old is the universe, how old is the world. These are the questions that inspire me, and I think they inspire children as well. They are the questions that I suppose historically have been answered by religion — or have attempted to be answered by religion. There are other science teachers who think that the way to make it exciting is to make it practical — you get out your Bunsen burner and you roast things on a crucible and you dissect a rat, things like that. Maybe that works for some people; it’s not so appealing to me, I must say. So I think there’s a bit of a ritual belief among science teachers that you have to make everything practical all the time, whereas I think you can make it exciting, almost poetic.
Well that — the questions that I was used to dealing with, at least as a young man, through poetry, literature, philosophy, the study of religion and theology — the sort of ultimate questions… it’s relatively new idea to me that those are addressed through science, and addressed in compelling and amazing ways. In your book, the examples you cite of experiments show that there is a real poetry in it. And in your concluding chapters you deal with that sense, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And that may address what many people — though it’s not the subject of this book — what many people feel is missing from atheism, some satisfying answer to the question of "why?"
I’m aware of that, and have written a book about that called Unweaving the Rainbow — the quote of the title comes from Keats, to the effect that Newton spoiled everything by explaining the rainbow and wiped out the poetry of the rainbow. And the whole of that book of mine is aimed at the exact reverse. To say that, when you understand something, you don’t lose the poetry — if anything, you gain it. Somebody like Keats, who just thought a rainbow, was beautiful was missing something. He could have actually gained some poetic insight if he had understood what a rainbow really is. For example, when you are looking at a rainbow, you are watching raindrops falling through a spectrum, so any one raindrop is passing through the red zone and the green zone and they yellow zone and etc. — the way the rainbow is formed, I think it’s a poetic experience to understand that, whereas Keats thought it spoiled it.
There’s language that gets you into tricky places, but it almost seems magical, or like a miracle that that is happening right in front of you.
Yes.
An interesting thing occurred to me while I was reading — a thing that may be a big part of the failure of many people on some level to really grasp natural selection — is that we’ve evolved to a point where artificial selection is our way of life: we don’t socially apply Darwnism in most cases. And so the moral sense is such an overwhelming part of our society.
It’s fascinating. I think you’ve put your finger on a very important, interesting point. Natural selection is horrible and ruthless and exactly the opposite of the way we would like our politics and our society to run. But it is what brought us into existence. It is that ruthless, selfish process that’s given us the brains that we have, brains that are so big that we can rebel against that selfish heritage and put into place a kind, welfare society where we look after the poor, the sick, the lunatic — these are completely non-Darwinian, anti-Darwinian ideals. And so natural selection has in a way sown the seeds of its own destruction, at least as far as humans are concerned. At a crude level, we do it every time we use a contraceptive. Contraceptives are highly anti-Darwinian things. You would never limit your reproduction.
I opened the book already pretty much accepting your conclusions. But have you had any success in convincing people who are new-earth creationists?
I think there are certain people who can never be swayed. Kurt Wise, the geologist I quoted to you earlier, he could never be swayed. We already know that he’s so familiar with all the evidence — he got a PhD from Harvard, he knows all about it. I’ve heard of other scientists who will write learned scientific papers on the age of the Earth, treating in hundreds of millions of years. And they write a perfectly respectable paper assuming the Earth is hundreds of millions of years old. But if you ask them what they believe, they believe it is less than 10,000 years old. That kind of split brain, that kind of person, I think I can never convince, because that kind of person already knows the evidence, and has managed to convince half of his brain to reject the evidence while the other half of his brain uses it.
But I think some of that 40 per cent [of new-earth creationists] are probably easily reachable because they just don’t know very much and if they just read the book, I think they would be convinced. I think the number that are totally blind and are just covering their ears and refusing to listen is probably fairly small. Let’s hope, anyway.