Fundamentalists know what they believe and they know that nothing will change their minds.
If the phenotypic change in the artefact had an influence on the success of replication of the new gene, natural selection would act, positively or negatively, to change the probability of similar artefacts existing in the future.
Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.
The gene’s extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the dam, affects its chances of survival in precisely the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the tail.
So did Bertrand Russell: ‘Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.
How dare they invite us – in our sitting rooms, watching television – to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?
The second point of this present chapter is that the genes that bear upon any given extended phenotypic trait may be in conflict rather than in concert with one another.
Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don’t misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership.
If two beavers working on the same dam have different genes for dam height, the resulting extended phenotype will reflect the interaction between the genes, in the same way as bodies reflect gene interactions.
During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.
Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than ‘environmental’ ones?
Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
Finally, at the end of the chapter, we saw that genes ‘sharing’ a given extended phenotypic trait might come from different species, even different phyla and different kingdoms.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.
One is that phenotypes that extend outside the body do not have to be inanimate artefacts: they can themselves be built of living tissue.
Even in apparently faithful monogamous species, the female may be wedded to a male’s territory rather than to him personally.
The other idea is that wherever there are ‘shared’ genetic influences on an extended phenotype, the shared influences may be in conflict with each other rather than cooperative.