More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
The faithful are encouraged to profess belief, whether they are convinced by it or not. Maybe if you repeat something often enough, you will succeed in convincing yourself of its truth.
Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles.
If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder’, you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you’. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.
An ‘idea-meme’ might be defined as an entity that is capable of being transmitted from one brain to another.
Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work.
More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.
This talk of laughing all the way to the bank reminds me of a delightful line from Shakespeare: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. 2 Henry VI.
Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life’s complex design.
More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.
Male nightingales need to influence the behaviour of female nightingales, and of other males. Some ornithologists have thought of song as conveying information: ‘I am a male of the species Luscinia megarhynchos, in breeding condition, with a territory, hormonally primed to mate and build a nest.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.
Abraham was left in no doubt that the future lay with his seed, not his individuality. God knew his Darwinism.
As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
Atheists don’t have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you’ve heard the cynical witticism ‘Conscience is knowing that someone is watching’.
Desmond Morris informs me that John Lennon’s magnificent song is sometimes performed in America with the phrase ‘and no religion too’ expurgated. One version even has the effrontery to change it to ‘and one religion too’.
A brain that is good at simulating models in imagination is also, almost inevitably, in danger of self-delusion.
This genome was so well-preserved that it has provided DNA sequences as reliable as those from a living human. This certainly makes the Denisovans worthy of a tale.
The genes, then, are physically close to their extended phenotypic effects, as close as genes ordinarily are to their conventional phenotypes.
Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?
If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn’t the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years?