By THE TIMES LEADING ARTICLE - THE TIMES
Added: Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:01:01 UTC

The cruellest and most unreasonable charge levelled against evolution is that it posits a world without wonder. The creationist, the thinking goes, has design, holy purpose and ineffable mystery. His opponent, by contrast, has only a cold puddle of mud, sparked into action by accident and chemistry. Yet as any child could tell you, the charge is baseless. For the latter to have given rise, over millennia, to the tooth, the eye, the human race, the art of music, the aeroplane, the plot of Harry Potter — is that not cause for wonder enough?

But children, perhaps, see these things more clearly. In Eureka today, Richard Dawkins — possibly the most fervent evolutionist alive today — brings us extracts from his new book for children on science, The Magic of Reality. In his preamble, he notes that evolution should be a fairly simple thing to grasp, and yet many intelligent adults seem to struggle with it. Could it be, he suggests, that we become “weighted down by misleading familiarity?” He blames the philosophy of essentialism, that of Aristotle and Plato, which asserts that categories are distinct, with clear demarcation between them. The great magic of evolution, he notes, is the manner in which one thing, so very slowly, can become another. Given time, a cell can become an eye, or an elephant, or a man.

Professor Dawkins’ atheism is central to his fervency. This should not be a distraction. Pitting religion against science, at least in enlightened cultures, is to formalise a dichotomy that need not exist. While he himself may not agree, many would argue that religion has provided mankind with a moral framework possessed of a strength and clarity that, without God, thinkers since the time of Socrates have struggled to replicate. Yet in the technicalities of the glorious diversity of life itself, all but the most dogmatic theists must today accept that it has little to add.

The argument that creation requires a sentient creator — the teleological argument — had been ably sunk long before Professor Dawkins’ hero Charles Darwin began to fret whether a benevolent deity would have wilfully created a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs inside the body of a living caterpillar. David Hume perhaps scuttled it best, pointing out that if something as complex as the Universe required a creator, then that creator, being more complex, must have required one, too.

Losing our belief in a creator, though, should not entail we lose our wonder too. The most exciting science has a breathless quality to it, and Professor Dawkins’ own wonder is clearly intact. “Your 185-million-great-grandfather was a fish,” he tells his young readers, on evolution. “Eyes are pretty good things to have,” he says, on extraterrestrial life, “and that’s probably going to be true on most planets”. These are fairytales, with the added attraction of being true. Professor Dawkins argues that evolution should be taught in primary schools. He is, of course, right. Britain is fortunate in that the manufactured controversies stoked by the American Religious Right have little traction here, but we should be equally wary of regarding scientific truth as self-evident mundanity. As the successes of Brian Cox and Michael Mosley among others have shown, Britain has a huge thirst for scientific enlightenment. We are desperate to be amazed. How lucky we are to live in a world with so much to amaze us.

Moderators' note:
We have reproduced the leader in full above, but the original can also be found here (paywall). The Eureka article by Richard, referred to above, has been posted separately on this site - here

TAGGED: BOOKS, COMMENTARY, EVOLUTION, RICHARD DAWKINS, SCIENCE