To regard an organism as a replicator, even an asexual organism like a female stick insect, is tantamount to a violation of the ‘central dogma’ of the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics.
A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.
It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.
A stick insect looks like a replicator, in that we may lay out a sequence consisting of daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., in which each appears to be a replica of the preceding one in the series. But suppose a flaw or blemish appears somewhere in the chain, say a stick insect is unfortunate enough to lose a leg. The blemish may last for the whole of her lifetime, but it is not passed on to the next link in the chain.
In 1846, two mathematical astronomers, J. C. Adams in England and U. J. J. Leverrier in France, were independently puzzled by a discrepancy between the actual position of the planet Uranus and where it theoretically should have been. Both calculated that the perturbation could have been caused by the gravity of an invisible planet of a particular mass in a particular place. The German astronomer J. G. Galle duly pointed his telescope in the right direction and discovered Neptune.
In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share. Joshua’s action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it. In.
You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.
The wolfish horror of the worst scriptural verses is cloaked under various forms of sheep’s clothing: the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are ‘metaphorical’.
The flagellar motor of bacteria is a prodigy of human nature. It drives the only known example outside of human technology of a freely rotating axle.
Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.’ Hartung.
However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it.
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.