The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
In the original fertilized egg, for instance, certain chemicals congregate at one end of the cell, others at the other end. When such a polarized cell divides, the two daughter cells receive different chemical allocations. This means that different genes will be read in the two daughter cells, and a kind of self-reinforcing divergence gets going.
Politicians who invent external threats from foreign powers, in order to scare up economic or voter support for themselves, might find that a potentially colliding meteor answers their ignoble purpose just as well as an Evil Empire, an Axis of Evil, or the more nebulous abstraction ‘Terror’, with the added benefit of encouraging international co-operation rather than divisiveness.
In that case there must have been genes controlling variation in caddis houses, for selection cannot produce adaptations unless there are hereditary differences among which to select.
Many will remember with affection the day Basil Fawlty’s car broke down during his vital mission to save Gourmet Night from disaster. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, then got out of the car, seized a tree branch and thrashed it to within an inch of its life.
It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe. Because we can only understand it at a level of artificial instrumentation, and mathematical calculations on paper, we find it hard to imagine a little animal doing it in its head.
To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation. If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock-designer, you might as well magic an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman.
Yet the mathematical calculations that would be necessary to explain the principles of vision are just as complex and difficult, and nobody has ever had any difficulty in believing.
The reason for this double standard in our scepticism is, quite simply, that we can see and we can’t echolocate.
Evolution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners through geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them.
The right to be Christian’ seems in this case to mean ’the right to poke your nose into other people’s private lives.
Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, ‘for the good of the mammals’? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?
All that happens is that individuals who are accustomed to winning become even more likely to win, while individuals who are accustomed to losing become steadily more likely to lose.
Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives.
Kamikaze behaviour and other forms of altruism and cooperation by workers are not astonishing once we accept the fact that they are sterile. The body of a normal animal is manipulated to ensure the survival of its genes both through bearing offspring and through caring for other individuals containing the same genes.
What makes a gene good? As a first approximation I said that what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival machines – bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool that cannot be invaded by any new gene.
The universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn’t do things in order to either hurt or please you. Bad things happen because things happen.
He may have agreed with Napoleon, who said, ‘Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,’ and with Seneca the Younger: ‘Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed out on all that!