By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Sat, 26 May 2007 23:00:00 UTC

A shortened version of this article, with garbled chronology, was published in The Observer on 27th May 2007:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,2089308,00.html



It's been a time of nonstop travel. I had a long-standing engagement to lecture on a Galapagos cruise ship, but the trip grew and grew. Time Magazine invited me to New York for a posh celebration, and I built the diversion into my route to Galapagos. Then I was offered an unexpected lift to New York in the private jet of the entrepreneur Elon Musk, en route to Los Angeles.

Greatly looking forward to my trip with him and his wife Justine, I discovered a snag. British citizens can enter USA without a visa, but not if they arrive on a private plane. The prospect of queuing for a visa at the Grosvenor Square Embassy drove me to desperate lateral thinking. Canada, of course! Mr Musk might even prefer Toronto to New York as his refuelling stop, it being closer to the Great Circle from England to California. And I could please my Canadian publisher with a day of interviews. Everything fell into place. I could kill at least three birds with one stone.

Elon Musk and his wife Justine turned out to be delightful. One of the most remarkable men I have ever met, he had made his first fortune by devising Paypal. Then he invested it in two other enterprises, both of which made inspired use of his genius as a design engineer. His SpaceX company builds wholly re-usable spacecraft (the NASA Space Shuttle is only partially re-usable). And, coming down to earth, his Tesla company (Teslamotors.com) is about to market affordable electric cars with a running cost of one penny per mile and the potential (I devoutly hope, though Elon is more cautious) to kill the internal combustion engine stone dead. If only he could kill the oil trade too, and hence the undeserved power of infamous countries like Saudi Arabia! The first production model Teslas will be high performance sports cars with an acceleration of 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds, assembled by Lotus in Britain but available, alas, only in America at first. Later models now in the development stage will broaden the range and the market. I'm putting my name down for one as soon as they appear over here.

My Toronto visit was strenuous: five television interviews and one radio, all in one day beginning before breakfast. I had never really believed in authors' publicity tours, and was astounded to be told that this one day of jetlagged freneticism boosted my book from Number 20 to Number 3 on Canadian Amazon's bestseller list. Next day before breakfast, off again to New York, this time on a commercial plane — no visa.

Time's Gala Dinner was to celebrate their '100 Most Influential People of the Year'. I don't know why I was chosen, because the other 99 were apparently celebs (to judge from the son-et-lumière of flashbulbs that greeted us wherever we turned during the evening). But I'm glad I went, and I met some interesting people including the inventor of Wikipedia, the democratically assembled on-line encyclopedia which, by any reasonable standards, ought to be a total failure but somehow, unaccountably, comes through with flying colours whenever you look up something you know about. The dinner tables were arranged on raked indoor terraces overlooking a gigantic picture window. Amplified music precluded conversation, but the view down Broadway was stunning. I left early, still jetlagged and facing yet another before-breakfast start for the airport.


* * * *

Whenever I suffer through an airport these days, I hear the mocking laughter of Osama bin Laden. Murdering three thousand innocent men and women with loved ones to weep for them (Allah be praised) was only the start (swamped by road accidents and domestic murders, 9/11 made no noticeable blip in the USA's violent death statistics for a typical September). No, bin Laden's lasting achievement, the one that has him sniggering daily into his beard, is to have created the Office of Homeland Security, risible monument to belated stable-door closure.

The payoff for bin Laden has been mayhem and chaos, costly delays and maddening inconvenience to millions of travellers, in every hour of every day, in every airport of every country (except some third world ones with the good sense to ignore the whole charade). Those useless plastic knives and forks were nothing but a signal to the home electorate: We're gonna kick some ass, and these plastic knives show it, you better believe it. And did some bearded loon once pack explosives into his shoes? Right then, we'll show those folks we mean business. We'll smoke 'em out and teach those terrists who rules this town, yessirree. From now on nobody — and ah mean nobody — boards a plane without first removing their shoes, whenever they board a plane anywhere — and ah mean anywhere — in God's own country.

And all we like sheep refuse to go astray. We follow the flock because we know that, if we so much as joke about exploding brassieres being the next scare, we risk being summarily locked up until rescued by a harassed British Consul. Better bite our tongue and endure the joke that Osama bin Laden is playing on all of us, through his Keystone-cops-like agents in the Office of Homeland Security.

Not that we here have anything to be proud of. In the Britain presided over by Bush's loyal friend and co-religionist, our security services were surfing the web when they spotted what looked to their fevered imaginations like a plot to make a 'binary' explosion on a plane by mixing two otherwise harmless liquids. For a hilarious explanation that this is, and always was, totally unrealistic (you need large quantities of ingredients and buckets and buckets of ice) see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/. Yet, as a direct consequence of what seems to have been an elementary misunderstanding of chemistry, we all have to dump even the tiniest bottles of liquid on our way through security.

Gateway to Galapagos is the infamous airport of Miami, and I had to pass through it going both ways. You might think a passenger in transit from Ecuador to Britain would be allowed to stay on the airside of the barrier and not formally enter the United States. But no, that would be much too simple and convenient: insufficient chest-beating by Homeland Security. Since 9/11 — universal American pretext for inconveniencing the public (over here, Health and Safety does the job) — the rules have changed. By decree of Homeland Security, the British passenger from Ecuador (me, in this case) has to pick up his luggage along with everybody else, queue to clear it through the Miami Customs, queue to enter the United States (fingerprints, photograph, passport stamp, green form and all), then immediately queue to leave the United States again, queue to remove shoes and laptop . . . and consequently (it happened to me last time I made the journey) miss the connection to London. This time I made it — only just, despite the two and a half hour changeover time.

But enough of moaning. No traveller should moan who has just visited the Galapagos archipelago. This week it was good to be alive as I swam among the marine iguanas and the breathtakingly tame Galapagos sealions, or walked among the flightless cormorants (also unique to Galapagos) hanging their useless stubby wings out to dry. This week I came within touching distance (I did not touch) of nesting Wave Albatrosses, and of Boobies, high-stepping their powder-blue feet in the slow-motion ballet of their surreal courtship. I have watched, spellbound, as the Boobies and Pelicans rained down from on high like arrows into the water, in a feeding frenzy that must strike the fish below with the fishy equivalent of shock and awe.

I went to Galapagos as guest lecturer of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), an admirable American charity devoted to Secular Humanism and critical thinking, whose members paid handsomely to enable the CFI to book a whole ship, the Santa Cruz, and explore Galapagos in Darwin's footsteps. As you'd expect, this was an intelligent crowd, who gave me a lively time in the questions after my three lectures. American atheists today walk with a spring in their step, a new confidence that they have not known since the lights went out on their Enlightened secular foundation. They are coming out of the closet in droves, and I like to credit the series of recent bestselling books, by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and others.

For a zoologist, Galapagos is an enchanted, near-sacred place. Partly because Darwin so momentously walked those lava fields in the springtime of his genius. But, too, because we all can see, as if through Darwin's deep-set eyes, life's difference-engine at its simplest. Then there is the ingenuous tameness of the animals, pursuing their evolved business in pre-Fall innocence of the gawping, camera-snapping human traffic in their midst. Mortally threatened by commerce and cheap aviation fuel, how long will it last in its pristine fragility, this Eden of the scientific real world?




Richard Dawkins FRS is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. His latest book, The God Delusion, came out in paperback this week.

TAGGED: GALAPAGOS, RICHARD DAWKINS