Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?
Particular interest attaches to one of the four, the active germ-line replicator, for it is, I suggest, the ‘optimon’, the unit for whose benefit adaptations exist.
The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.
Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine.
Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.
If replicators exist that are active, variants of them with certain phenotypic effects tend to out-replicate those with other phenotypic effects. If they are also germ-line replicators, these changes in relative frequency can have long-term, evolutionary impact.
Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?
By the way, it had to happen – a Great Schism has already occurred, resulting in the Reformed Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.35.
It is these phenotypic effects that we see as adaptations to survival. When we ask whose survival they are adapted to ensure, the fundamental answer has to be not the group, nor the individual organism, but the relevant replicators themselves.
We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.
He was a highly qualified and genuinely promising young scientist, well on his way to achieving his dream of teaching science and doing research at a proper university.
We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.
A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the bodies in which they sit, we may expect to see adaptations that can be interpreted as for bodily survival.
If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.
To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of bodies other than those in which they sit, we may expect to see ‘altruism’, parental care, etc.
I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.
The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do.