Science in the Soul, Page 2

  Starting with the romance of science and the ‘outward urge’, then, I have moved on to the values of science and the scientific way of thinking. Some might think it strange to leave the practical usefulness of scientific knowledge till last, but that ordering does reflect my personal priorities. Certainly such medical boons as vaccination, antibiotics and anaesthetics are hugely important, and they are too well known to need rehearsing here. The same goes for climate change (dire warnings there may already be too late) and the Darwinian evolution of antibiotic resistance. But I will pick out for attention here one further warning, less immediate and less well known. It neatly joins the three themes of outward urge, scientific usefulness and the scientific way of thinking. I refer to the inevitable, though not necessarily imminent, danger of a catastrophic collision with a large extraterrestrial object, most likely displaced from the asteroid belt by the gravitational influence of Jupiter.

  The dinosaurs, with the notable exception of birds, were wiped out by a massive bolt from space, of a kind which, sooner or later, will strike again. The circumstantial evidence is now strong that a huge meteorite or comet struck the Yucatán peninsula some sixty-six million years ago. The mass of this object (as large as a substantial mountain) and its velocity (perhaps 40,000 miles per hour) would on impact have generated energy equivalent, according to plausible estimates, to several billion Hiroshima bombs exploding together. The scorching temperature and prodigious blast of that initial impact would have been followed by a prolonged ‘nuclear winter’, lasting perhaps a decade. Together these events killed all the non-bird dinosaurs, plus pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, ammonites, most fish and many other creatures. Fortunately for us a few mammals survived, perhaps protected because they were hibernating in their equivalent of underground bunkers.

  A catastrophe on the same scale will threaten again. Nobody knows when, for they strike at random. There is no sense in which they get more likely as the interval between them gets longer. It could happen in our lifetime, but that’s unlikely because the average interval between such mega-impacts is of the order of a hundred million years. Smaller – but still dangerous – asteroids, large enough to destroy a city like Hiroshima, hit the Earth about once every century or two. The reason we don’t fret about them is that most of our planet’s surface is uninhabited. And again, of course, they don’t strike regularly such that you can look at the calendar and say: ‘We’re about due for another one.’

  For advice and information on these matters I am indebted to the famous astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who has become the most high-profile advocate of taking the risk seriously and trying to do something about it. What can we do about it? What could the dinosaurs have done if they’d had telescopes, engineers and mathematicians?

  The first task is to detect an incoming projectile. ‘Incoming’ gives a misleading impression of the nature of the problem. These are not speeding bullets heading straight towards us and looming up as they approach. The Earth and the projectile are both in elliptical orbits around the sun. Having detected an asteroid, we need to measure its orbit – which we can do with increasing accuracy the more readings we take into account – and calculate whether at some date, perhaps decades ahead, a future cycle of the asteroid’s orbit will coincide with a future cycle of our own. Once an asteroid is detected and its orbit accurately plotted, the rest is mathematics.

  The moon’s pockmarked face presents a disquieting image of the ravages we are spared because of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. The statistical distribution of moon craters of various diameters gives us a reading of what’s out there, a baseline against which to compare our meagre success in spotting projectiles ahead of time.

  The larger the asteroid, the easier it is to detect. Since small ones – including city-destroying ‘small’ ones – are hard to detect in the first place, it is entirely possible that we might get very little warning, or none at all. We need to improve our ability to detect asteroids. And that means increasing the number of wide-field watchdog telescopes looking for them, including infra-red telescopes in orbit beyond the reach of distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Having identified a dangerous asteroid whose orbit threatens eventually to intersect with ours, what do we do then? We need to change its orbit, either by speeding it up so it goes into a larger orbit and therefore arrives at the rendezvous too late to collide, or slowing it down so its orbit contracts and it arrives too early. Surprisingly, a very small change in velocity will suffice, in either direction: as little as 0.025 miles per hour. Without even resorting to high explosives, this can be achieved using existing – though expensive – technologies, technologies not unrelated to the spectacular achievement of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to land a spacecraft on a comet, twelve years after its launch in 2004. You see what I meant when I spoke of uniting the ‘outward urge’ of the imagination with the sober practicalities of useful science and the rigour of the scientific way of thinking? And this detailed example illustrates another feature of the scientific way of thinking, another virtue of what we might call the soul of science. Who but a scientist would accurately predict the exact moment of a worldwide catastrophe a hundred thousand years in the future and formulate a high-precision plan to prevent it?

  Despite the timespan over which these essays were written, I find little that I would change today. I could have deleted all reference to the dates of original publication but I chose not to. A few of these pieces are speeches made on particular occasions, for example in opening an exhibition or eulogizing a dead person. I have left them untouched, as they were originally spoken. They retain their intrinsic immediacy, which would be lost were I to edit out all contemporary allusions. I have confined updatings to footnotes and afterwords – brief additions and reflections that could perhaps be read alongside the main texts as a dialogue between me today and the author of the original article. To facilitate such a reading, the footnotes have been set in larger type than is customary for academic footnotes or endnotes.

  Gillian Somerscales and I have selected forty-one of my essays, speeches and journalistic writings and grouped them into eight sections. In addition to science itself, they include my reflections on the values of science, the history of science and the role of science in society; some polemics, a little gentle crystal-ball gazing, some satire and humour, and some personal sadnesses which I hope stop short of self-indulgence. Each section begins with Gillian’s own sensitive introduction. For me to add to these would be superfluous but I have, as explained above, added my own footnotes and afterwords.

  When we were debating various titles for this book, Science in (or for) the Soul was the front-runner, tentatively favoured by both Gillian and me over a large field of competitors. I’m not known for my faith in omens, but I have to admit that what finally swung me was the rediscovery, while cataloguing my library in August 2016, of a delightful little book by Michael Shermer. Called The Soul of Science, it was dedicated ‘To Richard Dawkins, for giving science its soul’. The serendipity was almost as great as the pleasure, and neither Gillian nor I had any further doubts as to what we should call this book.

  My gratitude to Gillian herself is unbounded. In addition I would like to thank Susanna Wadeson of Transworld and Hilary Redmon of Penguin Random House USA for their enthusiastic belief in the project and for their helpful suggestions. Miranda Hale’s internet expertise helped Gillian track down forgotten essays. It’s in the nature of an anthology whose entries span many years that debts of gratitude span the same years. They were acknowledged in the original articles. I hope it will be understood that I cannot repeat them all here. The same applies to bibliographic citations. Readers interested in following them can look them up in the original articles, full details of which are given in the list at the back of the book.

  Editor’s introduction

  RICHARD DAWKINS has always defied categorization. One eminent biologist of mathematical bent reviewing The Selfish Gene and The E
xtended Phenotype was startled to find scientific work apparently free of logical errors and yet containing not a single line of mathematics; he could come to no other conclusion than that, incomprehensible as it seemed to him, ‘Dawkins…apparently thinks in prose’.

  Thank goodness he does. For had he not thought in prose – taught in prose, reflected in prose, wondered in prose, argued in prose – we should not have the exhilarating range of work produced by this most versatile of scientist communicators. Not just his thirteen books, whose qualities I need not rehearse here, but the embarras de richesses of shorter writing on many different platforms – daily newspapers and scientific journals, lecture halls and online salons, periodicals and polemics, reviews and retrospectives – from which he and I have distilled this collection. It includes alongside much recent work some vintage earlier pieces, mining the rich seams laid down both before and after publication of his first anthology, A Devil’s Chaplain.

  Given his reputation as a controversialist, it seems to me all the more important to pay due attention to Richard Dawkins’ work as a maker of connections, tirelessly throwing word-bridges across the chasm between scientific discourse and the broadest range of public debates. I see him as an egalitarian elitist, dedicated to making complex science not just accessible but intelligible – and without ‘dumbing down’, with a constant insistence on clarity and accuracy, using language as a precision tool, a surgical instrument.

  If he also uses language as a rapier, and sometimes a bludgeon, it is to puncture obfuscation and pretension, sweep distraction and muddle out of the way. He has a horror of the fake, whether it be false belief, science, politics or emotion. As I read and reread the candidate pieces for inclusion in this volume, I conceived of a group I called the ‘darts’: short, pointed pieces, sometimes funny, sometimes blazingly angry, sometimes heartbreakingly poignant or breathtakingly impolite. I was tempted to present a selection of these as a group of their own, but on reflection chose instead to situate a few of them among the longer, more reflective and sustained essays, both better to convey the range of writing overall and to offer the reader immediate experience of the changes of pace and tone that epitomize the buzz of reading Dawkins.

  There are extremities here of delight and derision; anger, too – but never at what is said against himself, always at the harm done to others: especially children, non-human animals and people oppressed for contravening the dictates of authority. That anger, and the sadness that drifts behind it for all that is damaged and lost, are for me reminders – and I stress the perception is mine, not Richard’s – of the tragic aspect of his writing and speaking life since The Selfish Gene. If ‘tragic’ seems too strong a word, consider this. In that first explosive book he explained how evolution by natural selection proceeds through a logic that expresses itself in relentlessly self-seeking behaviour on the part of the tiny replicators by which living beings are constructed. He then pointed out that humans alone have the power to overcome the dictates of our selfish replicating molecules, to take ourselves and the world in hand, to conceive of the future and then influence it. We are the first species able to be unselfish. That’s some clarion call. And here’s the tragedy: instead of being able thereafter to devote his manifold talents to exhorting humanity to use the precious attribute of consciousness and the ever-increasing insights of science and reason to rise above the selfish drives of our evolutionary programming, he’s had to divert much of that energy and skill to persuading people to accept the truth of evolution at all. A grim job, perhaps, but someone’s got to do it: for, as he says, ‘nature can’t sue’. And, as he remarks in one of the pieces reproduced here, ‘I have…learned that rigorous commonsense is by no means obvious to much of the world. Indeed, commonsense sometimes requires ceaseless vigilance in its defence.’ Richard Dawkins is not only reason’s prophet; he is our ceaseless watchman.

  It’s a shame that so many of the adjectives associated with rigour and clarity – remorseless, ruthless, merciless – are so brutal, when Richard’s principles are shot through and through with compassion, generosity, kindness. Even his criticism, stringent in judgement, is also astringent in wit – as when he refers in a letter to the Prime Minister to ‘Baroness Warsi, your Minister without Portfolio (and without election)’, or ventriloquizes a Blair acolyte promoting his boss’s promotion of religious diversity: ‘We shall support the introduction of Sharia courts, but on a strictly voluntary basis – only for those whose husbands and fathers freely choose it.’

  I prefer to use images of clarity: incisiveness, forensic attention to logic and detail, piercing illumination. And I prefer to call his writing athletic rather than muscular – an instrument not just of force and strength but of flexibility, adaptable to pretty much any audience, reader or topic. There aren’t many writers, indeed, who manage to combine power and subtlety, impact and exactitude, with such elegance and humour.

  I first worked with Richard Dawkins on The God Delusion, over a decade ago. If readers of what follows here come to appreciate not only the writer’s clarity of thought and facility of expression, the fearlessness with which he confronts very large elephants in very small rooms, the energy with which he devotes himself to explication of the complex and the beautiful in science, but also some of the generosity, kindness and courtesy that have characterized all my dealings with Richard over the years since that first collaboration, then the present volume will have achieved one of its aims.

  It will have achieved another if it embodies a condition felicitously described in one of the essays reproduced here, where ‘harmonious parts flourish in the presence of each other, and the illusion of a harmonious whole emerges’. Indeed, it is my belief that the harmony resounding from this collection is no illusion, but the echo of one of the most vibrant, and vital, voices of our times.

  G.S.

  I

  THE VALUE(S) OF SCIENCE

  WE BEGIN AT THE HEART OF THE MATTER, with science: what it is, what it does, how it is (best) done. Richard’s 1997 Amnesty lecture, ‘The values of science and the science of values’, is a wonderful portmanteau piece, covering a huge amount of ground and trailing several themes developed elsewhere in this collection: the overriding respect of science for objective truth; the moral weight attached to the capacity to suffer, and the dangers of ‘speciesism’; a telling emphasis on key distinctions, as between ‘using rhetoric to bring out what you believe is really there, and using rhetoric knowingly to cover up what is really there’. This is the voice of the scientist communicator, the determined believer in marshalling language to convey truth, not to create an artificial ‘truth’. The very first paragraph makes a careful distinction: the values that underpin science are one thing, a proud and precious set of principles to be defended, for on them depends the perpetuation of our civilization; the attempt to derive values from scientific knowledge is an altogether different and more suspect enterprise. We must have the courage to admit that we start in an ethical vacuum; that we invent our own values.

  The writer of this lecture is no fact-bound Gradgrind, no dry bean (or bone) counter. The passages on the aesthetic value of science, the poetic vision of Carl Sagan, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s ‘shuddering before the beautiful’ – these epitomize passionate celebration of the glories, beauties and potentialities of science to bring joy to our lives and hope to our futures.

  We then make a change of pace and platform as the register shifts from the extended and reflective to the pithy and pointed: what I like to think of as the Dawkins Dart. Here, with steely courtesy, Richard pursues several points made in his Amnesty lecture in admonishing Britain’s next monarch on the perils of following the lead of ‘inner wisdom’ rather than evidence-based science. Typically, he does not absolve humans from using their judgement in respect of the possibilities offered by science and technology: ‘one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understo
od but largely ignored’.

  The third piece in this section, ‘Science and sensibility’, is another wide-ranging lecture, delivered with a characteristic combination of gravitas and sparkle. Here too we see the messianic enthusiasm for science – tempered by a sober reflection on how far we could have come by the millennium, and the distances we have not covered. Typically, this is conceived as a recipe not for despair but for redoubled effort.

  And where did all this unquenchable curiosity, this hunger for knowledge, this campaigning compassion come from? The section closes with ‘Dolittle and Darwin’, an affectionate look back at some of the influences that fed into a child’s education in the values of science – including a lesson in distinguishing core values from their temporary historical and cultural coloration.

  Through all these disparate pieces, the key messages reverberate clearly. It’s no good shooting the messenger, no good turning to illusory comforts, no good confusing is with ought or with what you might like to be the case. They are ultimately positive messages: a clear, sustained focus on how things work, coupled with the intelligent imagination of the incurably curious, will yield insights that inform, challenge and stimulate. And so science continues to develop, understanding to grow, knowledge to expand. Taken together, these pieces offer a manifesto for science and a call to arms in its cause.